MX

COVID laid bare existential issues of contemporary art at every tier. Nobody was safe, neither artists, gallerists, and organizers with extremely developed projects nor the scrappy younger cohort. In a rose-colored retrospect, we are trying to make sense of the confusion. Relationships are skewed, out of step with the rhythm of art history, and history at large. What is the incentive to resume ‘business as usual' when it is not useful? We have abruptly landed in a Gretchen Bender video work — subtitles are out of sync with images of an alienated past.

Why can't an episode of The Sopranos or a game like Minecraft be collected by The Whitney? Why can't MIT press publish a Discord? Narrative media has always been a forbidden boundary separating conceptual art, understood to be the truest form of pure-play, from fandom, fetish, and fiction.