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On my travels outside of London, I’m often asked: What’s new on the art scene over there? After what happened in London in the 90s there are of course big expectations for the city, particularly now that it has become an international capital on the commercial gallery circuit. My usual response is that the scene has consolidated itself, that there are a lot of interesting artists based there, but if you want me to say that there’s something genuinely ‘New’, some momentous critical paradigm shift taking place at the moment, then the answer has to be no. Whether we can actually know, can punctually perceive something genuinely New while it’s happening is another rather large question, however. Nevertheless, the line-up of this year’s Turner Prize is indicative of this perceived hiatus. Normally an award intended to showcase the young and new, 2007’s shortlist of 4 contains 3 artists over 40, all well established ‘mid-career’ figures; what’s more, two of them have been shortlisted before; one over a decade ago. If we look further afield, at this year’s big ‘Grand Tour’ triumvirate of Venice, Kassel and Munster, again the general verdict is similar: a lot of quite interesting art, but little that one could describe as earth-shatteringly New. At a moment in which the commercial art machine is running in overdrive and is more liquid and voracious than ever, this is quite surprising: not even the market can seemingly hype anything new into existence. All this would seem to confirm the editorial theme of this issue, to which I’ve been invited to respond: that art institutions are currently for the most part either playing safe or looking back, and that what predominates on exhibition agendas are mostly ‘mid-career’ artists, usually with a healthy market profile – and this at the expense of taking risks on younger, ostensibly edgier practices. However, this may be not so much an exceptional hiatus as business as usual, albeit on a bigger and maybe transformed scale. The New occurs rarely, certainly too rarely for the market, but it will still take place. What the current situation proves is that you can’t simply bankroll or curate ‘Events’ into existence.Transformations in ‘business as usual’ are more quantitative than qualitative, though the latter certainly affect the former. Something that is symptomatic of this is our unthinking use of the very term ‘mid-career’. Not long ago the philosopher Maurice Blanchot would surely have blanched at its utterance. Blanchot was of course responsible for coining a classic modern term for artistic activity, desoeuvrement or ‘unworking’, a practice that he conceived as being radically antithetical to means/ends rationality. Today, of course, art is a viable career option, and in our privatised culture of art, ‘mid-career’ – referring not to the qualitative character of the art, but rather to the commercial status of the artist – has become part of our lingua franca. What it denotes is that an artist doesn’t just have a career, but a successful one – otherwise he or she would not be in the middle of it. ‘Mid-career’ means an artist therefore has an established market profile and is a safe commercial bet. A related development here is the use of the term by institutions and museums, and the ways it has enabled younger and younger artists to be given retrospective-scale ‘mid-career surveys’, with obvious benefits to the market value of the work accruing from its institutional validation.

Art Fair Academicism

In addition to ‘mid-career’, we also have today the category of the ‘emerging artist’, along with ‘emerging-art’ fairs designed specifically for them and their galleries. What, one might ask, is an emerging artist emerging into? In today’s fast-moving art world, however, emerging artists do not remain as such for very long; they either become successful and get a career – and thus become more or less ‘mid-career’ artists – or they disappear. And the pressure to establish a career as quickly as possible means that ‘mid-career’ should not at all be equated with having anything to do with an artist’s age. Most young artists, even students, are already making ‘mid-career’ art, or art that tries to look just as ‘serious’ and ‘professional’ as work that is curatorially and commercially successful. There is, of course, another option for the young artist, and that is to play ‘young’ – to embrace the brash and demotic kinds of attitudinizing that are usually every bit as clichéd as what they are ostensibly reacting against. Today, though, the ‘young’ option is temporarily out of fashion after the dominance of the cult of youth in the 90s. The turnover of the fashion cycle, however, means that it will soon inevitably be back. Maybe most art has always been like ‘mid-career’ art, though. I’m not contradicting myself here, but referring to how art that is not immediately amenable to the prevailing curatorial-critical criteria is very rare, and always has been. ‘Mid-career-type’ art today is art-fair art, what we’re inundated with every time we visit one, or every time we open an art magazine. This kind of art usually deploys variants upon a familiar set of strategies. First of all it is always quite knowing in the ways in which it partakes of a game of referentiality. This involves visually anticipating and name-checking all the ‘right’ curatorial and critical tropes. It is also a game of ‘positionality’, of establishing an optimum point of proximity to existing practices in order to create a market niche for your practice. This kind of art is often very sophisticated, but it ultimately amounts to a new kind of academicism. Some academic art can be very good art, but it can never be Great art.But maybe ‘Great’ is the wrong word for our post-Romantic epoch and we have to find something else to refer to art that is ‘Untimely’, that is New rather than merely novel – art that cannot be contained within ‘young’ or ‘mid-career’ categories. The Untimely still takes place, but today’s totally-curated culture of art has no space or time for it. Everything nowadays has to be curatorially underwritten, has to be accountable to some thematised curatorial rationale in what amounts to an enforced academicism. Anything that confounds, anything that verges on incommensurability is drowned out by this, or by what Jacques Ranciere has referred to as a ‘chorus of melancholy’. Here, the New has yet to recover from its Postmodern ‘crisis’, and we are condemned to perpetual repetition – the theme, coincidentally, of the last Tate Triennial of ‘New’ British art. Even attempts at a more affirmative ‘praxis’ in the current revival of concern with the ‘political’ in the plethora of shows with words like ‘Protest’, ‘Revolution’ or ‘Communism’ in their titles are consumed by a nostalgia for the lost spirit of the 70s. What is clear is that it is increasingly difficult for young artists these days to envisage anything beyond the prevailing context. In the fast-paced, demand-fuelled art world of today, young artists are picked up straight out of art school, put in group shows at public institutions and quickly given solo shows at commercial galleries. This enforces a professionalism that is just one short step from art-fair academicism. Here, the big problem is that there is less and less time available for distinct scenes to open up. New things have always emerged out of ‘collective scene’ Events, and these are usually the product of apparently unpropitious circumstances. An example of this is perhaps London’s YBA scene of the early 90s that in many ways was the product of an economic crisis, where career stakes were low. The best of this art was not made for any existing curatorial context but was made out of the ‘coming community’ that was the scene Event itself. Of course many of the artists went on to have successful careers but this doesn’t mean that they necessarily made or make ‘mid-career’ art.

Robert Garnett

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