![]() ![]() The rise of post-critical art-and the perception of Koons, Hirst, and Murakami as models of art-world success-informs the general conditions under which artists now make art, setting new terms of reference, new expectations. ![]() One of the unexpected consequences of contemporary art’s popularity is that the nature of art has changed. On the other hand, the overinflated contemporary-art market, also newly global, has brought supportive collectors and huge prices, making Koons and Hirst, in particular, fabulously wealthy. On the one hand, art audiences have increased due to the popularising of contemporary art (through tourist-attraction art museums such as London’s Tate Modern) and its global expansion (with biennales appearing in every backwater imaginable). Post-critical art has been enabled by major changes in the art world’s infrastructure. 3 Their works address an immediate audience, rather than one in the future. They are helping to erode the once-presumed divide between high-minded art and entertainment, as art is sucked into what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer dismissed as ‘the culture industry’. Immersed in the business of art, they court the press and embrace the idea of the artist as brand. All three are, in various ways, pop artists. Koons, Hirst, and Murakami operate out of the legacy of Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol (who both transformed the model of the abrasive avantgarde artist into the complicit tabloid showman). Indeed, Murakami is better known for his collaborations with Louis Vuitton than for his gallery work. But they don’t just produce expensive art, they also create cheaper, supplementary ‘product lines’-multiples and merchandise. Their works, which involve high production values and require teams of fabricators, are only possible because they have access to budgets, methods, and platforms typically associated with the entertainment industry rather than the art world. They produce spectacular, crowd-pleasing, high-concept works: a giant floral puppy, a diamond-studded skull, a cowboy twirling a lasso of his jism. 2 They are affirmative they want to wow and entertain the public. 1Īrtists Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami exemplify the post-critical moment. When Rex Butler describes today’s art as ‘post-critical’, he points to a new regime of art production, distribution, and reception. It tends to be deliberately likable, appealing, entertaining. This avantgarde ideal continues to inform the way we talk about art-every art-school student learns to cast their work as a critique of this or that-and yet some recent art seems to steer away from this notion. Indeed, their work should be addressed to the future, to an audience that has yet to exist. Great artists, we assume, produce their work out of inner compulsion, disregarding public taste. We believe that they should create something new, that they should be experimental and progressive, that they should reject received ideas and buck the system. From modernism, we have inherited the idea that artists should be ‘critical’. ![]()
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