175

With two wars raging, a shaky economy, and the all-consuming and pervasive nature of this year’s election drama, complements of a much divided 24-hour news cycle, most of us are simply exhausted. I believe that the art world has internalized much of this, the result being that 2024 has been a dismal year for our fragile ecosystem. Artists are hurting, galleries are hurting, and all of us, collectively, just want to move on. It might be a quantum of solace, but in my now numerous trips around the sun, I have found that these periods have a way of working themselves out. I look forward to 2025 and wish everyone a happy and successful year on every level.

We had the extraordinary pleasure to work once again with Jerry Saltz on Issue #175 of New American Paintings. Needless to say, Jerry is one of the only people in the art world who has become known to a wider public. (It is difficult to call anyone in the art world a “celebrity,” but Jerry is, perhaps, the closest person we have who has attained such a status.) On a personal level, Jerry was extremely important to me when I began my nervous and awkward journey into the art world three decades ago; it was through his writing that I began to understand not only how to think about contemporary art, but how to put the complicated pieces of the art world together. I have always thought that one of the…

Much of the art in this issue looks a lot like the art that has already been made. This, however, is neither bad nor shocking. Instead, maybe this act of referencing previous works is itself a coping mechanism or, perhaps, a way to take back history, to make art of one’s own time on one’s own terms. It represents a turning of historical precedent in art, one with the potential of promise. History is not repeating itself so much as it is being reset to some other time standard.

The idea of progress, which was lord and master throughout Modernism, is now seen as psychotic. The tradition of one, presumably, white male artist pronouncing the preceding white male artist obsolete is obsolete—it’s even seen as ridiculous and beside the point now, much as it probably always has been. Progress—the notion of change, originality, history and mediums, slippages of time, and consciousness—is now taking place in the deeply strange but magic filled recesses of artists’ studios.

Gone is the “anxiety of influence.” We have an ecstasy of influence now: investigations of influence, critiques of influence, a desire for influence. Of course, there’s also a certain cluelessness of influence, the mindset of “I am not aware that this may have been made before and I don’t care about influence.”

Think back to your earliest times in art. You didn’t yet know about art history or the wider canon. History was you. You were less restrained by what you didn’t know you didn’t…