Utopia vs. the Apocalypse in a Post-Market Art Economy
In today’s global artscape, two dominant narratives persist: one of nostalgic utopian hope and another of hedonistic existential collapse. These aesthetics and their implications, though distinct, sometimes overlap and are broadly felt. As artists confront escalating eco-political terror, they can either imagine radical futures of autonomy, sustainability, and communal care or expose the unconscionable dystopia unfolding. This trend isn’t new. Art has always oscillated between beauty and war, heaven and hell, fetish and critique, sublimity and despondency, melancholia and jubilation. However, the urgency of the present moment translated through post-internet and other contemporary aesthetics feels more spiritually vacant than ever, and this age-old duality has recently piqued my interest as a timely paradox. Artist and author James Bridle calls the current era of art the “new Dark Age,” defined by a nostalgic longing for devirtualization and a return to traditional mediums.
In Buffalo, the city where I grew up and have worked as an artist for the past decade (after spending an intervening decade in Berlin), these questions have their own parameters. Buffalo is not driven by the global art market. There’s little looming pressure of institutional prestige or the promise of “making it.” This void creates space for something else: art that is made for and with the immediate community; art that is not mediated by aninstitution; art as a way of living; art as a conversational process rather than a petrified artifact. Art unhooked—at least partially—from the machinery of manufactured value, strategic high-stakes networking, and the prestige economy.
However, as the global art market becomes increasingly flooded with product and a billionaire tech takeover pushes ephemeral process further into the margins, I wonder if the gap between Buffalo’s non-market and conditions in the rest of the world is narrowing. As the ubiquity of product extinguishes its own value and the loneliness epidemic roars, the value of process and community— things Buffalo heartily sustains—rises.
Infinity drawing during Kindergarten Church at Agatha’s. Photo: Kyla Kegler.
The Ecology of Art: From Fresco to NFT
With the ecological crisis and the industrial and digital revolutions, humans are more separated from natural beauty than ever before—and this too has reshaped the ecosystem of art. A thousand years ago, a monarch commissioning a fresco lived closer to the earth: walking through forests, smelling the decomposition of leaves as snow melted in spring, communicating with their horses, using an outhouse, beholden to weather, season, sunset, and decay. Their sense of beauty, and their desire to possess it, was rooted in a physical intimacy with and reverence for the natural world.
Today’s tech billionaires, conditioned by the blue glow of basement screens, disconnected from place, and wired through crypto-abstraction, seek comfort and decadence in an entirely different, dissociative register. For these patrons, a ravenous pursuit of power, solitary ecstasy, and a hoarding of resources at the expense of ecological prosperity and those already living in precarity supplants all else. The art market has followed suit, pivoting away from spiritual and aesthetic awe toward adolescent spectacle, provocation, and conceptual capital—art that signals status or ideology but rarely invites anyone to transcend the literal transaction and actually feel poetry.
This shift further amplifies the speculative value of art, cynically reducing any artistic aura or impact until works are no more than tokens in a market driven by speculation rather than substance. Compounding this extinction of an art-loving economy is the death of consumerism’s own aura. Online shopping has transformed what was once a titillating social indulgence in lush material pleasure into a dissociative addiction, its thrill abruptly ending with the contactless tap of “complete transaction.”
And so, as the global art market teeters, its bottom hollowed out by almost two decades of speculation, artistic motivation remains in Buffalo, where the market was never the impetus. But the promise of Buffalo as a utopian platform for experimental, artist-led community-building feels caught between nostalgia and exhaustion. People return to Buffalo to build something: a school, a residency, a shared studio, a commercial gallery, a collaborative practice. But how does the work of community-building affect artistic production? How do we balance cultivating our context with cultivating an introspective, rigorous, spiritual relationship to praxis? And what happens when the utopian ideal of communal care begins to feel like another path to burnout?
A frustration shared by some of the few commercial galleries in Buffalo that engage with the global art scene is the tension and contradiction of operating in a city with few collectors and a strong grassroots art ethos. When a gallery’s survival depends on relationships and capital beyond Buffalo—and the local scene is small and personal—everyone wants a show, but space is limited, and egos are fragile.
Childhood Utopias, Adult Realities
A few years ago, I realized (decided) that my entire artistic practice was driven by a desire to return to the egoless, all-consuming feelings of early childhood. Not necessarily feelings of pleasure, but colossal feelings that reminded me I was alive—feelings of unimaginable potential, yet to be deciphered, caught, tamed, or ruined.
As a kid, my favorite game to play with my sister was “Orphans Lost in the Woods.” I remember one winter, huddled inside an igloo we (our dad) carved from snow, passing around a thermos of hot Postum (our mom made). Noses red and dripping salty snot, breath clouding the small icy dome barely big enough to contain all eight of our little limbs, we were absolutely present. From the privileged position of having two loving parents in real life, we fantasized that the world stopped at the walls of our snow home—that the parameters of our reality were comprehensible because we held their strings; that we were self-contained and in control of our destinies like the parentless heroes of The Boxcar Children; Little House on the Prairie; A Little Princess; Little Women; Matilda. We weren’t waiting on the adults to make things better, and so there was no risk they’d disappoint. We were alone but in it together—to the end. We were colonizers of our own wilderness, utopian through proximity to the precarity of survival. We had impact, with each other as witnesses.
Maybe this is the root of my adult attraction to Buffalo: it feels like an unclaimed wilderness. A place to build the hut, close the door, and imagine the edges of the world stopping at its walls. And that’s appealing when the world outside is crumbling far beyond our control. But survival mode can’t sustain utopia, and it doesn’t leave much room for artmaking.
There’s a part in The Little Prince, where he talks about how his love for the rose is shadowed by the knowledge of her vulnerability:
“My flower is ephemeral," the little prince said to himself, "and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world. And I have left her on my planet, all alone!" That was his first moment of regret. But he took courage once more.
The rose is the utopia—fragile, beautiful, and defenseless except for a few thorns. You can build the igloo, start the residency, and gather your people around the steaming thermos. But the world awaits beyond your walls. The snow melts, and eventually, you must choose: Stay and tend the growing puddle at your feet or move on and build a spring house from the young willow shoots across the yard. The trick, maybe, is in that last line: to feel the regret and move forward with courage anyway.
And in Buffalo—where winters are long and prone to either productive hibernation or depressive detachment, where everyone knows everyone, and friction is rare— sometimes the feeling is less about survival and more about stasis. The pressure doesn’t quite build. The ignition chamber leaks.
Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes leading UB MFA students on a Garbage Tour in September 2023.
Photo: Kyla Kegler.
Buffalo, the Art World, and the Danger of Comfort
In trying to understand what feels "at stake" for artists here, I started talking to other artists. In a conversation with Paul—an artist with ties to the Buffalo community, the backend of artistic production became the center of conversation—business, positioning, and whether to engage the market at all. We returned to questions of relevance and urgency of work we’d seen, and work we wanted to make, and we shared an interest in practices that are dangerous. Not shocking, but transformative. Art that destabilizes and confuses moral frameworks beyond the usual echo chamber.
I later reflect on my own relationship to danger in art, which I approach through somatic-emotional resensitization: reclaiming bodily and emotional awareness as resistance against passive compliance. The kind of danger that inspires me advocates a reverence for the natural world, affirms that beauty is still worth protecting and that persistence is still worth choosing. If the alternatives are money-backed glorifications of misogynistic doom or didactic despair repackaging the news, I choose poetry and beauty-boosting.
While trying to name art that might feel dangerous, Anne Imhof’s performances came up as a contender. Paul hasn’t seen an Imhof in person and neither have I, but from the images, I question their subversiveness. Their dated dystopian aesthetic—the beautiful abject, the sexy, bored nihilism—feels more like the apotheosis rather than the critique of the patriarchy: a patriarchy that likes its women too despondent and malnourished to fight back, a patriarchy that has derailed the revolution again and again by fetishizing these infertile, death-edging aesthetics. Paul sees potential in the operatic scale of her work: the sublimity of layered live bodies and mythology as medium, the imminent potential of failure specific to performance, a high-stakes, post-disciplinary collision. But is danger even possible once a work is tamed by the stamp of the industry? Does it register as relatable enough to destabilize anything when the production value is Marvel-scale?
Maybe my skepticism is personal, generational, Waldorf-education-related. I grew up understanding art as a spiritual practice, one inseparable from daily life, embedded in the rhythms of a multigenerational artist family. But with no clear path to financial stability through art, the whole question of danger—of stakes—feels blurry. What’s really possible? What really matters? What/who is at risk? Two days after writing this, ARTnews and The New York Times released articles calling out Imhof’s latest work Doom as “vapid . . . with nothing to say.” Maybe it’s not so personal, the emperor is naked—again.
Lucas Cook, Balancing Act, 2024. Concrete barrier reflector, pinhole film negatives, amazon fire stick hdmi attachment, rhinestones, battery terminal, utility knife casing, wire, string, plastic debris ornaments, 10 x 6 ½ x 1 ½ inches.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lucas Cook.
The Colonizer
Buffalo is conducive to colonizer fantasy. There’s a constant sense of wild, latent potential—both the problem and the possibility. Utopian promise is baked in, but it’s always just around the corner. Everyone is making work (to varying degrees), but everyone has a job.
Artists return after living and learning elsewhere, convinced they hold the key to what’s missing. But the door they seek to open has been sealed under layers of lead paint since the mid-twentieth century when steel production moved overseas, the Erie Canal lost relevance with the rise of railroads and highways, and the Queen City of Light emptied out. And through tireless efforts we learn that it takes more than a key to open the door. It takes slow, dedicated, persistent chipping away while wearing a HEPA ventilator mask to avoid lead poisoning.
Buffalo-based artist collaborators Natalie Hayes and Lucas Cook spoke about their project, Garbage Tour. This site-specific work frames Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park—a remediated Superfund site—as a mythic, liminal space where industrial ruin meets illicit activity: drugs, guns, drag racing, sex, dumping, off-leash dogs, fireworks, etc.
By appointment, Hayes and Cook don high-vis vests and offer free, unauthorized tours, blending personal memories with the site’s industrial past and present. The park is an accumulation of accidental monuments and discarded relics, and participants are encouraged to take debris home—both as an act of inadvertent environmental cleanup and a meditation on detritus as medium and message.
Once a hub for pig iron production by Hanna Furnace, a supplier for Bethlehem Steel, the facility closed in 1982, contributing to Buffalo’s industrial decline, and all structures were demolished in 2003. The heavily polluted site, now split into four parcels, has been under Department of Environmental Conservation investigation since 2006, with remediation efforts of questionable effectiveness. The park’s odd landscape features artificial grassy mounds—likely concealing industrial waste—next to a canal lined with geotextile fabric to filter pollutants. Trash accumulates from visitors and the nearby highway and lingers due to minimal maintenance and foot traffic.
Hayes and Cook explain how Garbage Tour emerged from their fascination with this site’s spooky serenity. It is both an ongoing research practice and a cheeky public engagement project. The artists’ relationship with the park is Rust Belt psychogeography: agenda-less extended observation, collection, recording, and a premise that, if you look at something long enough, something strange always appears.
Buffalo’s slower pace allows places like the Lakeside Commerce Park to exist in ways they wouldn’t in larger, wealthier cities. The park’s misguided creep toward remediation and commercialization mirrors Buffalo’s broader post-industrial narrative. Hayes and Cook both work part-time jobs unrelated to their art practice, and they experience the city’s art scene as driven by passion rather than economics. Garbage Tour embodies this ethos: a practice of paying attention to a place, its history, its strangeness and tending to what’s been discarded.
Spirit animal clay building during Kindergarten Church at Agatha’s.
Photo: Kyla Kegler.
Buffalo, New York City, Berlin and Los Angeles
Max Pitegoff is an artist and curator who grew up in Buffalo and left for The Cooper Union in New York City after high school. At twenty-one, he moved to Berlin with his collaborator Calla Henkel, where they founded two artist bars in Neukölln—Times Bar (2011) and TV Bar (2019), and an experimental theater, New Theater in (2013).
In 2022, they relocated to Los Angeles to open New Theater Hollywood, funding the project with money raised from sales of their work along with a significant fee from showing their film Paradise—shot on 16mm at TV Bar and featuring its guests—at Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Droite location. Now, they are navigating the cultural, financial, and community differences between Berlin and LA: making theater in a city that recognizes film and TV (but not theater) on an industrial scale. At the same time, they are grappling with the perilously shifting economic landscape of the art world and the evolving priorities of artists moving into their thirties.
I wanted to speak with Max as a Buffalo native who left young to seek his fortune and whose collaborations with Henkel engage deeply with notions of utopia. Pitegoff recalled taking classes at Squeaky Wheel as a teenager. Only after leaving the country did he recognize Tony Conrad’s influence—both on himself artistically and in the broader art world—as people in Berlin primarily knew Buffalo from Conrad’s legacy.
Now, from afar, Pitegoff is intrigued by Buffalo’s grassroots art scene and the gargantuan overhaul of the new AKG. After years of chasing the art world from New York to Berlin to LA—during which time he caught the final decade in Berlin when one could still reasonably make a living selling art in Europe (which he did)—he now feels that cultivating local movements is more essential than ever.
I asked Max to compare LA’s art scene to Buffalo’s, which I described as almost entirely artist-run. He posited that LA’s most compelling art also lives in the artist-run milieu, but the key difference is that in LA, that is just a layer—one that still basks in the peripheral aura of Frieze Art Fair buzz, fed by a steady stream of artists fresh onto the market from one of the many MFA programs in the vicinity. He noted that there is often a lot of overlap between underground spaces and blue-chip galleries/ museums in LA—people employed by those galleries or museums running their own project spaces, showing lesser-known artists, and blurring the distinction between underground and establishment. The crisis of the fires made clear the interconnectedness of the entire art world, despite these different layers sometimes feeling so separate. We deduced that this distinction is significant for artistic morale and particularly how the lack of proximity to monied recognition has resulted in Buffalo’s deepseated underdog complex. In LA, there’s an inferiority complex among the underground, but because the bluechip world is proximate, there is also a sense of rebellion against it, a reaction to it, a conversation with it, and the ever-dangling carrot that just maybe you might one day grasp. That, along with endless sunshine, breeds a different kind of hope, possibility, and sass. Whereas Buffalo’s sense of possibility has to do with taming the wilderness, in Los Angeles, possibility is about conquering the beast.
Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Paradise (still), 2020–2022. 6mm film transferred to HD video, 81:42.
Courtesy of the artists.
Across all my conversations with artists and curators, this question lingered: what role does art play in these extremist, exhausted times? In Buffalo, no one wants to rock the boat because we are each other's life vests. There’s little friction, little rivalry, and the stakes feel diffuse.
As Paul noted, there is an absence of debate and urgency—the kind of urgency born of the possibility to transcend into a more prestigious, just out of reach echelon. How can Buffalo’s artists generate these stakes in the absence of an industry? Paul suggested we should stop looking outward—toward New York, Berlin, Los Angeles—and build something insularly specific and self-referential of our time. Get over Buffalo’s historical, self-dismissing inferiority complex and speak only to and about each other; riff publicly and critically on each other's work until real pressure builds—this could generate the stakes we lack. If something becomes more precise, it also becomes more dangerous. More targeted. More personal. Maybe that’s what Buffalo needs. Not another utopian initiative but sharper edges. More mirrors. More arguments. Less looking over our shoulders, wondering what the outside market thinks.
As I write this, I keep a candle burning next to my laptop screen, trying to offset the blue light. A small flame against the machine; a little warmth in the igloo; another winter in the forest, waiting to see which new comrades show up.
New Theater Hollywood, Los Angeles, 2024.
Photo: Calla Henkel.
by Kyla Kegler
Kyla Kegler is an artist whose practice explores themes of longing, relationship, pleasure, and purpose, often engaging groups in experimental collaboration. Kegler is the founder and director of Agatha’s, a performance space in Buffalo.
Her work is influenced by past collaborations with Bread and Puppet Theater (Vermont) and co-founding the underground Berlin theater “Zuhause” (2010). She holds an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship from the Art University of Berlin and an MFA in Studio Art from the University at Buffalo.
Her current project, Care-Core (All Parts Sold Separately), supported by the UB Humanities Communities of Care Grant and a Squeaky Wheel workspace residency, explores utopian models and fantasies of care through world-building. It draws on childhood notions of utopia, referencing the way toys were marketed to kids in 1990s television commercials—where care, joy, and ideal worlds were promised in miniature individual components, sold separately.
“Across all my conversations with artists and curators, this question lingered: what role does art play in these extremist, exhausted times? In Buffalo, no one wants to rock the boat because we are each other's life vests. There’s little friction, little rivalry, and the stakes feel diffuse.”
