Tag: Jerry Saltz

Artist's Notebook

Zombie Formalism vs. Paul Brown’s abundant abstraction

Contributed by Becky Brown / Living through a changing zeitgeist is a trip. Now into my forties, I see that conditions, styles and ideas that loomed as colossal in one moment can fade into obscurity in the next. My parents are octogenarians in the art world, and they’ve told me artistic and theoretical trends are always cycling; now I’m seeing it happen. When the essays on “Provisional Painting,” “New Casualism,” and “Zombie Formalism” emerged, I was in the throes and early aftermath of a graduate degree in painting from Hunter College. Like many, I thought they articulated something I was seeing and feeling but hadn’t yet named. I did not imagine that within a few years, abstraction would be on the margins of contemporary painting, with figuration taking center stage. Was this backlash related to those critiques or just part of a natural cycle?

Ideas about Painting

How the term “zombie formalism” killed the next generation

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In 2014, a single phrase reshaped the trajectory of contemporary abstract painting. When the late Walter Robinson – painter, critic, and veteran of the Pictures Generation – coined the derogatory term “zombie formalism” in an essay for Artspace, he set off a chain reaction that would stigmatize a generation of young abstract artists and cast a long shadow over abstraction in general. More than a decade later, the story of zombie formalism reads as a pungent example of aesthetic cynicism and jadedness – a case study in how criticism, commerce, and cultural anxiety can converge to distort and ultimately damage an entire movement.

Group Shows Interviews

palladium/Athena Project: Democratizing art

Contributed by Mary Shah / Greg Lindquist and Theresa Dadezzio, co-founders of palladium/Athena Project, just opened their inaugural show, “Works on Paper,” featuring an impressive 175+ artists at their new curatorial space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I sat down and talked with Theresa and Greg about the project.

Opinion

Who’s afraid of the big bad idiot?

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Good Art,” Anna Gregor describes a cultural hospice. The caretakers are a set of bad actors. They’re online critics who have replaced the labor of criticism with the catharsis of complaint, trading in “likes and clicks” for a smooth, sugary candy that requires only passivity and attention from its audience while it rots their teeth. This feedback loop, she argues, drowns true engagement and criticism in a “deluge of mediocre art.” It is a compelling diagnosis, but one delivered from the one place a critic cannot afford to be: behind a veil. Gregor deals exclusively in archetypes and generalizations while allowing the reader to “fill in the picture.” The playboi, the intellectualist, the yelper, and so on. She’s built a perfect haunted house and populated it with ghosts of her own making.