The Winter of Our Shit Content

On the Art World Agonies of Sam Kriss and Dean Kissick

Two major events occurred recently in the anti-establishment establishment writersphere that exists between New York and London: the publishing of art critic Dean Kissick’s essay The Painted Protest in Harper’s Magazine, and Sam Kriss’s catch-all review of contemporary “Alt Lit” autofiction.

Kissick’s essay provoked many responses. The loudest was perhaps the outcry in the comment section over Harper’s decision to allow Kissick to hold a panel with Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova of the Red Scare podcast to launch the piece. Essentially, this mainstream magazine allowed this kingpin of the edgy-curious Dimes Square downtown scene to “platform” socialist-turned-fascist Brooklynite women, the most hated but increasingly common breed of the Blue State zoo. This is a big no-no in the world of liberal arts majors, because it’s the equivalent of an NFL player doing the Trump dance: it’s helping to normalize the right-wing shift occurring in the broader culture, an act of treason, and that makes these heffalump libtard overgrown children who have been hogging these Old Timey WASP legacy publications for several decades really, really angry.

Anyway, this Kissick, he’s cool, he’s been invited to art shows around the world, he has worked for some of the biggest curators in Europe. That’s the picture we get in his article, which takes the form of a narrative about the last several years of his life. I happen to like this first-person form, and enjoyed the piece. But his central complaint, that the art world was just awesome in its wackadoo conceptualism phase during the late 2000s and has unfortunately been halted by the rise of decolonialist protest, doesn’t sit right with me. Not because I like the decolonialist moralizing—as Martin Herbert at ArtReview apparently does, who expresses how he is deeply worried about Kissick’s “documented proximity” to Dimes Square and how it may influence his “disinterest in art rooted in identity politics.” It’s rather that I sympathize with the source of the decolonialist crowd’s frustrations, who want to “rediscover other, older gods” and “heal” viewers in the “disenchanted West” whose God is dead, as Kissick put it.

For the record, I like the West and its history, and I think the attempts to overthrow it “from the outside” as it were, with campy soulless “tribal” LARPing, are inferior and doomed to fail. I want to rediscover different old gods, as I will go into below. This is not the opinion Kissick holds. He thinks the main problem is that the decolonialists are more concerned with political statements than the creation of imaginative art, which is also true. Whereas Kissick, nostalgic for U2-style globalization, wishes this “longing for the past” experienced by people of varied backgrounds would just go away, I think this yearning is here to stay because late “western” conceptual art intrinsically lacks something essential.

Then there’s Sam Kriss, a vagabond Londoner who operates like a trollish ne’er-do-well character from Massive Attack lyrics. Kriss’s articles snipe at everything going on, backing it up with fun, rich digressions into the worlds of history, philosophical history, and schizobabble. He’s therefore the perfect man for the job of surveying the New York literary scene. Not only is it in need of being eyed up by someone who has a historical reference point beyond 10 years ago, but that service needs to be done by a foreigner who won’t be puffing up his friends’ hackjob trash so that they will puff up his. And what he has found is that there is a lot of that going on.

But Kriss doesn’t necessarily think the establishment’s literature is any better. In fact, what he finds wrong with the Downtown Scene is precisely its similarity to what is being reviewed and sold at the highest levels. He opens the piece by listing five quotes and making the readers guess if they are from the devilishly fascist avant-garde or from Sally Rooney and Rupi Kaur, who are decidedly not fascist and not hip. The joke of course is that they are indistinguishable. Not only are they unoriginal, largely lifted from the first go of the Alt-Lit scene in the early 2010s (which itself was lifted from ‘90s Kmart Realism and Bret Easton Ellis), but some “made [him] feel crazy.” And while Kriss admits he found a few of the stories entertaining, he can’t help but feel that the vast majority of these attempts to surgically document the stream-of-consciousness of our boring smartphone scrolling—one author chose to exhaustively capture the process of using social media while sitting on the toilet—come off as “totally artificial and totally contrived.”

It’s specifically the “obsession with raw surging nowness” that bothers Kriss about these books. For example, his favorite story in Honor Levy’s My First Book was the one that was “most conventional and the least about the internet.” It wasn’t any of the stories concerning neopets and egirls and statue avi boyfriends, because why would we be interested in stories about the internet when we could just use the internet? Another way of saying it would be, how is it “raw and honest and genuine” to pretend to be anthropologists about the shit we do to distract ourselves from what is really bothering us?

He also liked Matthew Davis’s Let Me Try Again for having ironic distance between the author and the text—“Maybe it’s not great that I’m forced to praise a book simply for rediscovering one of the basic functions of writing, but here we are”—and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel, because it presents our times as being “shot through with something else,” fragments of “a more mythic past, or a crueler future” sprinkled over an otherwise realist depiction of Los Angeles.

He confesses he doesn’t know what to suggest these authors do instead (surprise, surprise). His two main recommendations are to stop writing about the internet and to write less about themselves. “There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being,” he says.

Both Kissick and Kriss are upset with the current art world, but for different reasons. Kriss would like to see writers engage more with literary history in their attempts to make sense of the present, while Kissick wishes we would stop focusing on the sensible past and plunge into the great beyond of senseless Theatrical Absurdity. But they converge on one point: they hate the never-ending blasé fest we have entered and want something else.

Kissick mentioned Arthur Danto in his piece, an art philosopher famous for re-popularizing G.W.F. Hegel’s “end of art” theory. Kriss just published a lengthy post on his Substack about Hegel and the Vibe of history. They should know better than to wallow in confusion: art is lifeless now because art has come to an end. This is Hegel’s big claim about art: art has come to an end because the metaphysical paradigm our artists operate in has come to completion.

Unfortunately, here I will have to ruin the mood and write about Hegel. And to make it even worse, Heidegger too. But they’re worth it, so swallow your medicine.

I do not speak here as an academic expert; I have not studied all their works for 70 years, and I pity anyone who has. Their thoughts, at once both searing and foggy, are not even collected neatly into one or several books: the aspiring Understander has to intrepidly ferret through reams of notes jotted down by Hegel’s students as he burped oracular puzzles from his cauldron-like mouth, or spelunk through Heidegger’s terrifying-sounding “GESAMTAUSGABE,” his complete works, whose innermost core is made up of ten or so fat books of scraps, impenetrable notes-to-self, in which he decided to tuck his most important concepts. Hegel and Heidegger were notoriously obscure, leaving some of their most committed scholars to question if they even understood what they were trying to say themselves. But every now and then these Black Forest toads croak out something extremely pertinent to our very immediate plight, making them utterly indispensable for advancing our species. It is a hilarious joke the universe has played on us by giving these reprehensibly incomprehensible men the keys to our prison. We must struggle with them to free ourselves from our current binds.

Hegel correctly predicted many things—the spread of Prussian-style “big government,” the rise of NGOs and philanthropic welfare, the barbarizing effects that humiliating wage labor (as opposed to skilled craft) would have on the uprooted masses. Perhaps the most impressive was his foresight to predict, back in the 1820s, that art would become evermore abstract, and that, because of this, it would die.

It would be considered dead, or at its end, because it would no longer be capable of going any further with its one, ultimate purpose: to express the Idea—human subjectivity, the freedom of Spirit—in sensuous form.

“For in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but with the liberation of the spirit from the content and forms of finitude, with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible, with an unfolding of the truth which is not exhausted in a natural history but revealed in world history.”¹

Hegel thought the Idea had been so successfully dug up and presented by art that art would be let off the hook, and the Idea would step out of the work and predominate over it: everything would become purely conceptual.

He thought this was already happening in his own time with the rise of the romantic Sublime. In its final stage, the Romantic form would dissolve: “art falls to pieces, on the one hand, into the imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent shapes; on the other hand, however, into the liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency, in humor.”²

Art has become so obsessed with concepts, in the case of the visual art Kissick deals with, and exponentially committed to capturing all the contours of free human action, in the case of the novels Kriss reviewed, because this is what art always was and what it was always trying to do. Now that it has reached its final destination, the presentation of the total freedom of the human subject, it has formed for itself the graveyard where it wishes to lie.

Hegel’s philosophy of history is powered by man’s need for the outside world to recognize how he feels in his ideal: totally free, and conscious of himself. Ancient man found himself in a world at odds with himself. His ideal was Spirit; outside were unthinking rocks and trees and big, silly civilizations run by brutes. “In every contest between dumb grasping empires the little ember of freedom gets just a little bit brighter,” Kriss explains.

But Kriss is wrong about how this happens. The process by which Man becomes free is not through haphazardly chasing Vibe around like Spongebob catching jellyfish (not his example, but the spirit of it). Rather, man teaches himself his own freedom, a freedom which he already knows, but had forgotten when Matter and its mechanical rules teamed up with his rational mind to smother its inkling in his soul. All of history is one big Platonic dialogue, and we are the arrogant Athenian pupil who serves up answers to the Socratic Tribunal of Reason, who, uglyfaced, repeatedly swats them down, but each swat brings us closer to recollecting the Truth: the knowledge of the Transcendent we have from our “past life” as pure collective Spirit.

But Hegel is also an Aristotelian (he has the tendency to jerkedly combine things), so for him the Transcendent is not a distant and magical One but the wonderfully logical movement of self-conscious Thought thinking about itself, like the Prime Mover of the Physics who thinks and thereby moves everything in the universe like a pinball machine. And Hegel is also a Christian-Jacobin: it wouldn’t have been enough to write all this in cute little medieval theological tracts, we had to realize it in the world through revolution, changing our political institutions and the world economy so all involuntary conditioned-ness, slavery, could be removed and replaced with voluntary conditions that allow us to be as unconditional as Spirit, or at least as unconditional as we can possibly be in the real world. Spirit has been brought down to earth in the form of the transnational welfare state.

For Hegel, the battles and revolutions of history weren’t really where Man taught himself his own freedom. They were the aftershocks of what was going on in Art, Religion, and Philosophy. He called these three realms “Absolute,” because they combined the subjective and the objective. In art, we see a combination of the sensuous and the Idea—the Idea of human freedom. This is seen in the lifelike quality of the figures depicted in artistic works, or the expansiveness and expressiveness of imageless arts like music. Gradually, the depicted material passes from unnatural to lifelike, from stiff to fluid, from monological to dialogical, from one-sided to dynamic, from uncaring Pharoah god kings to loving Madonnas and then to the interrelations of secular common subjects in modern realism. But then, that not being enough to capture the full range of Spirit’s arbitrary whim, art begins to embrace the comic and the absurd, with works like Tristram Shandy and Mozart’s Musical Joke foretelling the arrival of our absurdist cartoons and the avant-garde.

Hegel didn’t exactly say art is dead or that it is at an end. He said art “no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truths obtains existence for itself”; and while we may hope “art will continue to advance and perfect itself,” it has nevertheless ceased to be the highest need of Spirit, and so art “on the side of its highest vocation” is and remains for us “something past.”³

While art is the sensual dimension of the Absolute, religion operates in the crucible of the soul and philosophy in the purity of the mind. The three are intimately related: they all study the same thing and differ only in their modes of apprehension. “Philosophy has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology and, as the servant of truth, a continual divine service.”⁴ All three were merely didactic vehicles; all three had as their highest vocation the teaching of our freedom to ourselves, as so all three have come to an end, in so far as we have allegedly fully rendered the Absolute Idea or “Ideal” sensible for human understanding. As a final demonstration of this claim, Hegel notes the relegated place we “assign” to art in contemporary life: “No matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer.”⁵ The reverence gone and the seduction cooled, art becomes merely Art History on the one side and technical, conceptual play on the other, neither of which hold a candle to art’s previous supernatural, Revelatory importance.

Contemporary art in its conceptuality seems only to confirm the claim; as Danto famously said about Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, “it is theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is.”⁶ Not much has changed—see Kissick in his piece talking about an exhibit where lobster traps were supposed to symbolize slavery in ancient Greece:

“it was hard to glean any of these alleged meanings from the works themselves. Rather, they could be discovered only from the descriptions on the wall, which read like the everything-is-connected code-breaking ravings of an overeducated cabal convinced that a hidden semiotic language of resistance lies below everyday objects, camera angles, orientations, and gestures made so very many times before.”

So long as we are still making “points” in our art, advancing theses on society, or holding to free expression as the major goal of art, we are under the paradigm of Hegel. Hegelian aesthetics might even be called “Thetic Art.” It is thetic because it exists to advance theses on why society is currently not liberal enough until it has become maximally liberal: this is what representing the self-conscious Idea in sensuous form means in practice.

Thetic art is at an end. How do we break out of that paradigm?

This is where Heidegger, a lifelong professional Hegel underminer, comes in. Heidegger in his Origin of the Work of Art (1935) noted that the word “aesthetics,” deriving from the Greek “aisthesis” meaning perception through the senses, etymologically implies the taking of a work of art as an object for sensuous apprehension, which we now term “experience.” Experience, Heidegger says, is also what we cite as the source for artistic creation in modern times: “everything” becomes experience in this era—“yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.” If “everything” is just about personal experience, and if “the beautiful” now exists “merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object,” then how could art ever again be a mode of making Truth “happen” in a way that is “decisive for our historical existence,”⁷ as it was in the eras of the Pyramids, the Hindu temples, and Dante’s Commedia? Rather than being an ecstatic revelation, art in our time has been relegated to being a hobby or an interest, compartmentalized into mere tourist attractions in our world cities, unable to call on us and send us into a new way of being. If we want art to become important and good again, it needs to be assigned a new truth to teach, a truth fundamental to Being.

While Kissick’s description of the 2013 art world may sound like fun—when “Artists could do whatever they pleased; they were famous, respected, and sexually desirable; they could turn anything into art and create their own reasons for doing so; they made huge amounts of money for not doing very much”—it was only a matter of time until people saw through it. At the end of history, where “everything is made into a supply of resources, available on demand for whatever option we might wish to pursue at the moment,” we instead only reap a vast sameness in all products.

These “godless” artists, who embrace this ultrasubjectivity “in the name of the freedom this brings for self-assertion,”⁸ step on a rake that hits them in the face. For all their individuality, they can create nothing original, because the origin of the work of art is not the “originality” of the artist but the origin-ary experience of Being that first gave birth to art. The rake is the philosophical essence that underlies the end of history: Gestell [enframing].

Gestell “undermines all acts of creativity by turning them into options to be made available for consumption.”⁹ After achieving this regime where we are free to do anything we please, we find that we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Our products are as empty as our interior monologue. Nihilism reigns. We want, and we get, and are not satisfied. Taṇhā abounds; our sick desires keep us locked on the wheel of endless willing. Liberating ourselves from the conditions of dumb Nature has made us listless, which is dangerous, because technology’s transformation of natural entities into resources also gave us godlike powers to manipulate the external world in any way we want—and we don’t know what we want.

Even worse, we are fed stuff we think we want by an assemblage of tastemakers, influencers, social engineers, creepy Bernaysian advertisers, NFT goblins, vampiric billionaire pedophiles, and other unsavories who themselves are blindly following the “vibes” of Capitalism, Communism, or Nazism—whichever flavor happens to be popular that month—all of which reduce into the same meme-spouting, reign-of-quantity insignificant slopification. For Heidegger, rational theology, science, and liberal political economy all culminate in the same thing, which is the transformation of man into a “forty-something loser [who] wears a blazer over their tshirt” and writes bad fiction.

Heidegger said his 1957 lecture The Principle of Identity “tried to show, in a few steps, just how far a thoughtful experience of what is most proper to modern technology can go.”¹⁰ In that lecture, Heidegger reasons that the relationship between Man and Being under the regime of World Technology, where both sides antagonistically “challenge” one another in a struggle for Lordship, will have to be supplanted by one of mutual “Er-eignis,” translated as “con-cern” by one scholar.¹¹ Heidegger thinks this act of concern is properly done through poetry: “For, speech is the most delicate, but also the most fitful all-suppressive vibration in the floating structure of concern. In so far as our being has alienated itself in speech [i.e. the indelicate use of language in our regular blabbing], concern will be our dwelling place.” Man can express concern for Being by treating language (which he elsewhere called the “House of Being” because it is through man’s words that the topic of Being can even be raised) with more care, letting language speak rather than “using” it, expressing ourselves in less menacing and more caring ways. We don’t even know what things are anymore because we don’t know how to patiently love.

Yes, you see, he was a big softie after all. His obsession with “Being” did not stem from a covert theologian’s wish for the Pope to fuse with Goebbels, put all critical theorists in concentration camps and force everyone else to stare at Van Gogh’s boots all day (unlike Adorno), as Richard Wolin has essentially claimed. It actually came out of a wish to see us slow down and care about our surroundings more, and to let the world present itself to us in a poetic way once again, as Kriss effectively called for with his line about “expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit” and taking “a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being.”

The way Heidegger thought this would happen is not logical. He famously told an interviewer “only a god can save us now,” shrugged, and died.¹²

This god, which Heidegger in his private notes mysteriously called “The Last God,” would push back on us, on our endless options and optimized bougie existences, and force us to shut up and serve Being, which amounted to silently listening to its presentation.¹³ This fidelity to an externality that is bigger than us is the root of all beauty for Heidegger. And for Wallace Stevens too:

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires.

It’s why traditional religious artists were good, and contemporary religious people, who have swapped out ignorant fearful piety of their peasant forebears with the Personal Jesus of a McDonald’s touch screen soda dispenser, exclusively make shit. It is why a postmodernist art curator treating all past tribes and myths as a smorgasbord for their own personal tastes cannot make anything beautiful.

They will not be released from the clutches of Cringe until the Last God passes by. But Heidegger, fundamentally a cranky French atheist underneath all his German Romantic brashness, did not mean an entity out there, waiting for us to detect him. It cannot be the monotheist god of theology because we are too good at blabbing about him, which defeats the whole point. We annoying 2020ers need something that’s more elusive to shut ourselves up.

All this is not as pleasant and dopey as it seems. Heidegger thought Being could only be understood phenomenologically through Dasein, the intense first-person human reception of the world that occurs when we open ourselves up to our ignorance by asking the question of Being. Dasein experiences Being through the horizon of Time, and Time for Dasein is finite. In other words, we are going to die. Being is Time and Time means Death. When we realize this, we become authentic [eigentlich, also “real”]—a term which sounds arbitrary and new agey but isn’t at all. It means “something of its own [eigen].”¹⁴ Under the aspect of death, life becomes crisper and grander, like in the pages of the Bible and the Iliad. And we learn how to love better when we become familiar with our brevity and frailty.

The passing by of the Last God is like a realization that pulls us toward the voluptuous sensuality that life takes on when viewed through the fact that we will die. Religion now becomes the worship of beauty under the reign of freedom, and we can only hope to know what is beautiful if we are pushed back by something external—which for us atheists today can only be Death, the brute facticity of our finitude, our failures and our fundamental ignorance. We don’t really know what this is all for; none of us have the answers. Metaphysicians and libertines alike are just afraid to die.

Kriss and Kissick blame the fish for being bad when it’s really the fishtank itself. The artists are not the cause of our shit content—it is the metaphysical background of Subjectivity itself, which needs to be switched out.

Only a god can save us. But this “god” is nothing we can invent or create. He won’t be like any deity of the past. He can only start to be felt by destroying the aesthetic doctrines that have tarnished the work of art. And so, while we can keep trying to make art in traditional genres about our failure to make art, the real task of saving art will be done in the hard conversations we must have with ourselves.

1. Aesthetics 1236.

2. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (Aesthetics), 608.

3. Quoted by Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 78. Source can be found in Hegel, Aesthetics, Knox, 103.

4. Aesthetics 101.

5. Aesthetics 103.

6. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld” in The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964), 581.

7. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 77-79.

8. Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God,” 178.

9. Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, 178.

10. The Der Spiegel interview, 281.

11. Heidegger, Essays in Metaphysics – Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker. New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1960.

12. It didn’t exactly happen this way, but it sounds better.

13. Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, 177.

14. Heidegger, Being and Time, 68.