The Problem of Irrelevance in Contemporary Art

Christian Caliandro argues that the equivalence of styles, emerging between the late 1970s and early 1980s with postmodernism, has led to art's irrelevance. This equivalence renders all styles, movements, and intentions equally insignificant. Neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s had already emptied utopian visions, leaving only formal shells. Style became conservative, not transformative. The key battle was between those pursuing the fusion of ethics and aesthetics (Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Living Theatre, New American Cinema) and those reducing art to decorative or provocative neo-Dadaist form. Andy Warhol's case is contradictory: his 1960s work straddles critique and acquiescence, underground and mainstream, dream and business art. He was both a chic artist and an anti-chic one, an ex-poor seeking elite acceptance while knowing its impossibility. The article references Eugenio Montale's poem "La caduta dei valori" and a Pitchfork review of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden to illustrate the indistinction between work and non-work, subject and object, author and spectator. The new art form is characterized by smallness, invisibility, and unrecognizability.