*It's mighty gloomy and doomy, but the situation is truly extreme, without parallel even in wartime.
*It sounds like it favors the kind of art I myself like most, which is no-budget tech art and scrappy garage tech-art and device art, but the cultural loss could be severe. Galleries, museums, schools, biennials and magazines all bankrupted all at once, means a cultural dark age.
The Last Days of the Art World … and Perhaps the First Days of a New One Life after the coronavirus will be very different.
By Jerry Saltz
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I’ve watched the art world go through episodes like this before — not pandemics, of course, but contractions and crises of various kinds, which each have shaped, not destroyed, the community I love. I thought, “Don’t be a disasterist; we’ll see what happens.” In particular, I’m a true believer from one particular former bygone world. I came of age during the last years of the smaller, nonprofessional, non-moneyed 1970s art world, where there were no such things as stable careers, sales, art fairs, big audiences, and auctions. This world ran on the desire and passion of semi-outlaws, vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, creeps, geniuses, hangers-on, exiles, gypsies, and aristocratic bohemians. It was a world before the one we know now that has grown so large, hyperactive, circuslike, top-heavy, and professional — all seasoned with obscene amounts of money, however concentrated it is in the hands of a lucky, mostly white 1,500 people.
I’ve always chosen to see the art world — even after it went corporate — in that spirit, frustrated by the strange compromises we all made with money but still sure that artists were, at heart, still semi-outlaws and ne’er-do-wells. Mine was a world before we lost “the underground”; before “greed became form,” as curator Francesco Bonami puts it....
