Editors’ letter
The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans was sent to review the Paris Salon—the predecessor to contemporary art fairs—in 1879. A jobbing art critic, he reported from the Palais de l’Industrie (a few years later replaced by the Grand Palais that now hosts Art Basel) that “I hate, with all my might, the majority of paintings exhibited.” So they sent him back the next year, where he discovered that “mediocrity is in operation this year, even more furiously than ever.” In 1881 the majority of the exhibition was “even more laughable than those of previous years”; in 1882 he promised to “restrict myself to citing a few works that can’t be confused with the worm-eaten fruits of this bargain basement.”
Out of the worm-eaten fruits—Orientalist fantasies and picturesque peasants—he selected for praise the fresher paintings of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, illustrating the still-relevant point that even the most dispiriting presentations on this scale can contain great works (for those with the eyes to see and the stamina to find them). And if it seems obvious now that these Impressionist pioneers would be remembered while their peers were forgotten, then it needed someone from outside the academic and commercial establishment to recognize as much. Having done his duty inside the salon, Huysmans then counseled “people sickened by this cheap and insulting display of prints and paintings to cleanse their eyes by directing them outdoors” where they might find, on a billboard, a poster by Jules Chéret advertising the cabaret. There is, he wrote, “a thousand times more talent in the least of these posters than in the majority of the paintings I’ve had the sad privilege of reviewing.”
There’s much to be written about those Chéret posters—how they link back to pre-revolutionary painting, are indebted to the Japanese prints then causing a sensation in Paris, anticipate the work of artists as diverse as Sigmar Polke, Emory Douglas, and Jenny Holzer—but the point is that the images most influential on the history of art were not to be found in the salon, but in the surrounding city. And this begs the question, after Art Basel Paris was curtailed by an uprising spreading across Europe, of what is to be found on the streets outside the Grand Palais? What images are being pasted to lampposts, painted on signs, or attached to barricades that will last beyond the work in the fair? Here is a reminder, firstly, that the most enduring works are rarely incubated by the established institutions, only reclaimed later. And secondly that, however frustrating it can be, you might have to study what is in those institutions in order to be able to see clearly what will come next.
This tension between inside and outside ran through October’s program. Conducted on the roof of the Korean Pavilion at Venice, closed in solidarity with protests by Italian trades unions and ANGA, our interview with curator Binna Choi was soundtracked by police helicopters. As the march moved up Via Garibaldi, she talked about how her vision for the exhibition was shaped by popular resistance to the attempted coup of 2024, and how art is defined by the traffic between the center and margins, “internal” and “external.”
At an exhibition structured around Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, Natasha Marie Llorens was moved to reflect on how the rise of the far-right across the west has prompted internal soul-searching, and how (and whether) this might lead to the creation of new networks of resistance. Under increasing political pressure from the right, the latest edition of Austria’s storied performance festival Steirischer Herbst called for open discourse conducted in good faith, Francesca Wade wrote, in order both to address a fascist past and to avert an increasingly ominous future.
Ewa Borysiewicz found in the latest edition of Survival Kit a model for art that, by disregarding disciplinary boundaries, embracing heterogeneity, and rejecting any claims founded on utility, might slip the categories that constrain it. Histories of migration—specifically journeys with a trucker across the US interstate system—inspired Michael Assiff’s literally toxic paintings of the weeds and flowers encountered on the road. In these idiosyncratic documents of life flourishing against all odds, Barrett White encountered a portrait of the United States today that is convincing because it is refreshingly impure. A restaging of Alfredo Jaar’s celebrated 1987 work A Logo for America at Galerie Lelong, meanwhile, only serves to foreground the increasingly distracting question of what is or is not “American,” argued R.H. Lossin.
All of this called for some perspective. In Liz Larner’s cosmic sculptures, Jonathan Griffin found an expression of beauty that is not predicated on changing tastes but is rather a “natural occurrence that will inevitably outlast the Anthropocene.” Picking her way around London in the week prior to Frieze, Orit Gat noted a tendency among artists to zoom in on the effects of global crises—from migration to climate change—at the scale of the domestic and interpersonal. In Cici Wu’s cinematic installation at 47 Canal, Maddie Hampton observed a similar attention to the way that folk songs and other forms of popular culture are modified by their movement across borders and generations.
Which returned us to whether and how it is possible for artists to operate “outside” the systems shaping the present. Travis Diehl questioned whether Libby Rothfeld’s clever, appropriative satire on the entanglement of art, taste, and power depended on the same values of connoisseurship and exclusivity that it claimed to undermine. At the Guggenheim, a vast installation by Taryn Simon reproduced the overwhelming abundance of information in contemporary society in order, ostensibly, to critique the erosion of truth standards. Yet by doing so, wrote Saul Ostrow, it risked seeming to foreclose any alternative. These are issues with which the novelist Tom McCarthy has long been wrestling. His conspiratorial novel, reviewed by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, figures that same abundance of information as a contemporary sublime: a phenomenon that, like Nature, is so vast as to overwhelm the individual and induce awe and terror. Could art, the book tentatively suggests, offer one way out of this paralysis? The theme of Counterpublic in St. Louis, “Coyote Time,” makes a more modest proposal. Art in this mode, wrote Re’al Christian, might alert us to the reality of our situation in the moment before its effects are fully felt, offering a last chance to change course before the disaster arrives. Here’s hoping.
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