CartWhat Now? Contemporary Art & the Post-Pandemic Conditions Instructor: Mohammad Salemy Date & Time: Jan 8, 15, 22, 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, 26 14 to 16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: The Covid-19 pandemic is altering many aspects of not only our lives but also our perception of the world, reshaping the individual and collective minds in still unmapped ways. Hard isolation during the lockdowns gave us a taste for schizophrenia: the modulation of routine in an infinite loop normalized silence, exhaustion, insomnia, and even subtle hallucinations. If “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”, as Pascal once wrote, Covid-19 demanded that humanity struggles with the center of this supposed existential disquiet. At the same time that the pandemic abolished public spaces, providing only enclosed bubbles and transmission cables between them, private spaces were invaded by the public consciousness that crossed the membrane of our digital screens and speakers. Overall, home turned into a bunker inside of which we needed to act upon the world, with radical repercussions for our mental state. Habits and cores became rituals, contemplation was mandatory, and drugs (prescribed or recreational) provided synthetic enhancements or suspensions of experience. Dared to exist in a state of complete atomization, we learned to become tech-gnostics and self-hypnotists, applying whatever form of technology at our disposal to gain traction on our cognition and experience of our body in time.
In the smaller but no less consequential world of contemporary art, not only were value grids and the networks of production and distribution impacted by the pandemic, but new conceptual challenges were pressed against a fragile ecosystem, already under economic, ideological and philosophical pressures for meaningful transformation. The material costs of a rushed transition to online environments and the political barriers implied by the new normal are just some of the conflicts with which the art world has been forced to grapple. And while blockchain is a promising technology to help artists in the near future, the NFT market is already drying up, and the main questions still remain: how will art and aesthetics adapt to the profound shifts in political economy & perception brought on by the pandemic? And how will the art world keep pace with these shifts? This Survey Seminar will bring together artists, curators, academics, gallerists, cultural agents and technology experts to debate the future of the art world in light of the sweeping changes brought on by the pandemic. We will map the future conditions and expectations and figure out what the contemporary art of the future requires from us in the post-pandemic global landscape.
IMAGE: Shutterstock, Guggenheim Museum, October 2020
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