Fascinating interrogation of Clemens' piece. I also read it with great interest and had a similar feeling of ... disappointment? by the end, at the 'everything is going on' and 'anything goes' pov so pervasive in contemporary art writing. I agree that Robert Hughes does a brilliant line in pithy, apt generalisation, and he also seems blind to most contemporary art unless it's in traditional modes like painting and sculpture. The two best works of art I've seen recently are 'Forgotten Songs', an installation of birdcages in a Sydney laneway with accompanying birdsong of the birds that once lived there; and a 10 minute video 'Rapture (silent anthem)', footage of ecstatic fans at the Big Day Out, which won the Blake Prize for religious art. They stick in my mind like Leonardo's 'The Last Supper' (to be obvious) and continue to speak to me. What is that? I'd love some judgement on what this art is doing. And on your allusion to art for art's sake vs art for career's sake - I've been thinking about that a lot lately, reading about the Italian artists of the 15thC who were all great careerists, had their own workshops, employees, contracts - even disorganised Leonardo - and from that commercial swill painted things like 'The Last Supper' and the Sistene Chapel. Assuming they are still work of art. I'm just wondering how valid - or how fruitful - the art vs career distinction is. I'd welcome judgement and certainty in contemporary art commentary, but 'what is art anyway?' lies at the heart of any judgement, and Hughes and his acolytes have certain answers to that question which perhaps no longer apply in 21C. Or perhaps they do. Therein lies the conundrum.

I read these posts with interest, as they both touch on real problems in ConArt (and not just problems with my article!): 1) A bit of empiricism, please. I begin my article with Storer's comment, precisely because anyone who doesn't realise the fact that contemporary art can now in principle be made out of anything, by anybody, and be presented anywhere, will simply have nothing worthwhile to say about it. You can disapprove of this fact, undoubtedly, but that's really a different question. It's still a fact, if a difficult one. It can't be wished away. 2) Not liking this fact, however, does force out some problems, because it's not just that the final injunction of contemporary art is 'do whatever!' (as Thierry de Duve shows in his 'Kant after Duchamp,' or as many other art-historians and theorists put it in their different ways), but, as I tried to say, this is itself an issue in and for contemporary art itself. As such, the very principle of 'judgement' (as a 'boo-hooray' phenomenon, even as a kind of nuanced descriptive evaluation) is now to some extent rendered otiose and irrelevant by ConArt (a nice phrase btw). I totally agree with Jane when she says 'Hughes and his acolytes have certain answers to that question which perhaps no longer apply in 21C. Or perhaps they do.' My position I think is pretty clear in the article: anyone who purports to offer a 'judgement' immediately exposes their own limitations vis-a-vis the field of art, and vitiates their own authority by the very gesture with which they try to assert it. Pierre Bourdieu: 'taste classifies, and first and foremost it classifies the classifier.' That's also why I cited Goethe: if Goethe realised that artists are at war with each other for aesthetic superiority, one cannot serve two masters simultaneously. To give a judgement is already to be in the grip of the One Master. ConArt radicalises this situation further, precisely because divergent multiplicity ('relational aesthetics,' 'difference,' 'otherness,' 'non-exclusivity,' and all the other quasi-synonymous terms) is at its heart: it often tries to force its audiences into contradicting their own taste, or placing them somewhere where, if they are tempted to judge, then they should first be tempted to judge their own temptation to do so.... 3) To answer some questions directly, or respond to implications: a) Yes I am partial to painting; if a confession is in order, my own taste is probably more like Robert Hughes', quite conservative. But, to come back to the point above, that's not enough anymore to be able to attend even minimally to ConArt. Ditto in a different sense for the Marr comment; I simply wanted to point out that to take up this ConArt in either a 'purely' aesthetic or 'purely' political way is to miss something essential about it, and to submit it to a process of representative 'tut-tutting.' b) This doesn't mean 'accept everything', but it does mean turning back one's disappointment on oneself a bit more, rather than taking it out on the art and the artists. The obscurity, difficulty and disappointment of the present is possibly a positive feature of the present - and not a deleterious diminution of achievement, possibility, etc. De te fabula narratur. c) Given the space and genre limitations of a survey essay which can't presume what's known by its putative audience, I gave some descriptions of singular works and their implications, i.e., energy directed towards the enigma of the works, trying to ask 'what's going on here?' Out of the gigantic slew of OzConArt stuff, I had to make decisions: don't those decisions de facto constitute a kind of non-boo-hooray judgement? Maybe not. d) No Angry Penguins here. But 'Australians' generally remain pretty obsessed with their 'nation', no? e) Art v. career/economics a question that could also be proposed on a case-by-case basis. DamWurst (another great compression) may be abhorrent in many ways, but it's pretty clear that he's also trying to show how art's economics can itself be fodder for art, and aside from anything else he proposes: what is it about 'art' that enables it to be given a price so radically in excess of the labour and already-excessive materials? Is it a religious phenomenon? A deathly phenomenon? etc. That some artists might eat well isn't in itself an argument against them or their work; that artists might just pose questions or construct annoying or irrelevant enigmas isn't either.

Any man that takes on the brief, 'please write an essay on the state of art in Australia today please, you have 5000 words max' deserves a medal as far as I'm concerned. An impossible brief from me - there are real limitations in the survey form, as necessary as that form sometimes is. I learned an enormous amount from Justin's article. Which doesn't mean, of course, that readers can't interrogate him - as they have been. The promotion of conversation is part of the point of these kind of essays.

Yes, I agree with all you say Justin - and with your observation of the impossibility of the brief Sophie! And yet its urgency and magnificence (quite literally). I particularly like your comment Justin that 'the obscurity, difficulty and disappointment of the present is possibly a positive feature of the present - and not a deleterious diminution of achievement, possibility, etc.' and do think this is a positive feature of the present - and it makes for all the uncertainty and confusion we might feel as viewers/consumers of art and critics (I belong in former camp). And I really enjoyed and found stimulating your original article, felt it was saying a lot about a vast range of conart - and so if I also felt some disappointment at the end it's probably wrong to attribute it to your piece, more to the very fact of the state of the art, which you express so well in the above quote. I guess I live in hope that someone might come up with the answer to the riddle of how to value/judge the multiplicity of contemporary art. (As I await a grand unifying theory in physics.) And I completely agree with your analysis of 'DamWurst', that he is genuinely interrogating the economics/value of art, which is I think of enormous relevance and interest. I find him and his work incredibly provocative conceptually and love some of it aesthetically, especially his paintings. (I too am partial to painting.) So thanks v much for some fascinating discussion, to Justin and Meanjin.