Mostly Riskless

You can also sense the apparent vacuum of animated discourse about aesthetics – what you could call a lack of an avant-garde, although metaphors of conquest feel inappropriate here. Nuanced conversations are happening, of course – but “underground,” offline, or in private forums like Discords and group chats. (To paraphrase critic Caroline Busta, you won’t find counterculture on Instagram.) These nonpublic networks are what tech blogger Venkatesh Rao calls the “cozyweb.” It’s a refuge from the “dark forest” of the open internet, a corporate superfund site stalked by bots, trolls, censors, hackers, scammers, aggregators, and advertisers. Why is the forest silent at night? Not because it’s empty – but because there are predators. The platform still known as Twitter used to fuel a kind of discourse, but lately, it’s gotten risky to really spill your guts where your hot-headed or empty-headed bons mots get stamped into the public record for eternity (much like Holzer’s laughable series of Trump tweets stamped into chunks of lead) and can lead to physical threats

Is art going in circles? Is it looking backwards? Definitely. These maneuvers are tactical. This is contemporary art as refuge. Tapped to entertain in art’s castles, artists and curators find it more strategic to retell old stories, reprise old work, rehash old battles, and pine for old peace. Contemporary art is cozy art in a dark forest. The fire is in the hearth.