The symbolic painting craze gradually faded. What will you remember?

There is a reasonable story about the past half century Such artistic creations are like this: by around 1950, almost all serious art was abstract. Soon, pop art, neovilism, light realism, and other trends seem to have already predicted the return of images, but they do not: they predict the Duchampian’s ready-made return, sometimes in the form of image, although this is also an abstract form, one of your meta-molds, if you will be a meta-graph.

Then, the story goes on, and art begins to grop at this end: first of all new image paintings from the 1970s and their pictograms in the field of abstraction; then, there is a new expressionism, a craze of painting fanaticism that scals the broken forms of old painting patterns, puts them together casually, and then makes them more confused than finding them (think David Salle and Julian Schnabel). After that, for better or worse, things will get worse – everything will happen.

This history provides complete clarity of fun and practicality. The problem is that things are even more confusing. Jackson Pollock painted in 1952 Blue PoleEdward Hopper is painting Morning sunshinethe following year, Francis Bacon painted the first of his screaming pope. In 1966, Mel Bochner held his seminal concept art exhibition, but also wrote in praise of Alice Neel’s portrait. I can continue. But you get it. Anyone who thinks symbolic paintings are dead and makes a comeback should remember Dan Hicks and his hot licks with some great old songs: “How can I miss you when you won’t leave?”

Of course, symbolic paintings never go away, but sometimes cause more noise and attract more attention – in the market, sometimes in the world of critics and curators. As we all know, about 15 years ago, collectors (and speculators) were hot on the trail of young artists, a quasi-minimal painting with conceptual advantages, as critic Walter Robinson dismantled his own market almost unilaterally by creating an irresistible mockery label for them “Zombie Formalism.”

With the release of zombies in 2014, a vacuum was created. Need to fill it is a new group of popular young artists whose works can be purchased cheaply and resold at high prices. Well, you can always depend on the pendulum effect. If the abstraction suddenly starts to look cunning, what about the construction? Robinson withdrew a year and a half (same publication), Art spacethere is a story (by another writer) for “The characters are back, baby! According to the museum, the iteration of the Quinquennial “Greater New York” exhibition was “a heterogeneous aesthetic strategy that usually represents the city’s residents through bold image emphasis. ”

If the symbolic wave began around 2015, it’s swinging much longer than the brief deification of zombie formalism—at least, at least in part because recognizable images are more attractive to art novices. During the market boom, it created some auction stars that also showed real substance, but other successes obscured a fairly ordinary level of achievement and did not last long. Another title, this time it’s August 2024 New York Timesspelled out it: “Young artists ride a $712 million boom. Then there is bust.” The title does not list the illustrations clearly: all auction prices rise, and then rapidly fall are symbolic painters. When I read this article, my amazing thing about me is–even though I have made me know a good idea of new artists on the scene as an art critic and an editor of an art magazine, I have never seen or even read any of the works of artists. These are artists’ paintings that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars without benefiting, such as key profiles or museum performances. Their work has no discussion, only speculation.

This fact shows the reception of symbolic painting over the past decade: its indistinguishable nature. Collectors, dealers, and even curators (should be better understood) seem eager to lock in with new symbolic painters that they don’t seem to notice whether those they choose are those who actually explore paintings or are just exploring the changes that B students have made to imaging predecessors like Alice Neel or Kerry James Marshall. The symbolic painting boom fits with the market bubble, not just art: This is what financial commentator Mihir A. Desai describes when “magical thinking spreads across a wider class of investors” when “the era caused by mistakes and mediocrity and the decline of zero interest rates” while being easily translocated by speculative collection rates, which is “mistakes and medium things are obscured or tolerated, while at the same time there is easy translocation. Yes, we know that market success does not equal aesthetic quality, but how surprised people will be when weakness and derivative works quickly lower prices, when falls are equally rapid. One can sympathize with an artist’s work from selling for $100,000 to just $10,000, and still think they are lucky enough to sell it.

Let’s take a look now There era Articles about the collapse of the market for young artists. As the photographs, rather than texts, whose beneficiaries are transformed into metaphorical painters, the same image clearly shows that three of the four artists are black. The prosperity in metaphorical painting is simultaneously aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement with the more general interest in the work of black artists. But the influence in other areas of artistic activities is different: Black concept artists and abstract painters have also suddenly become more obvious than they have been for a long time. But in those areas, similar speculative markets for non-living talents never seemed to take off. Instead, older or intermediate artists with mature substances like Charles Gaines and Stanley Whitney have attracted long-term attention.

Of course, there are good reasons for the success of some new image painters. For example, Jennifer Packer’s painting wisdom is undeniable and poignant. Somaya Critchlow’s bare dirt power can be troubled. But they are exceptions. Many young painters attracted by the market have chosen obvious nuances. As critic Nkgopoleng Moloi recently pointed out, reviewing Zeitz Mocaa’s investigation of black symbolic painting, the magazine’s widespread trend is to imitate Kerry James Marshall to exaggerate the “risk” of black figures’ skin tone[s] Position the black body as the head. “Of course, the market loves a lot of young artists. Instead, blacks feel merchandise for most of their work.

Where zombie formalism is ridiculed, this new visualization tends to be sincere, driven by serious efforts to be correct in historical exclusion. This means that not only the paintings of black figures, but also the images that reflect marginal identities have received unprecedented market support. Especially the queer artists (for example, Louis Fratino and Salman Toor) stand out, whose works match the promise of art.

But what are government, academia and business, after the second Trump administration inauguration on January 20, and the slams against the DEI initiative and the Federal Office of Management and Budget seriously called “Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new affairs social engineering policies”? Calling up black and other marginalized artists. Collectors are eager to show their kindness by showing recognizable black lives on the walls, even among those who might want to send Teslas to a used car.

Therefore, although market trends are always brief in any case, for exogenous reasons, the end of the symbolic painting prosperity may seem to be in the economic and political atmosphere of the times.

But what is left to the artist? In art, unlike politics, a burning question “What to do?” may sometimes require ignoring the direct context and instead exercise in advance based on the intrinsic instructions rather than executing them. I should probably add here that I dismissed Dean Kissick’s view from handcraft that art awakening – not the term he used, but obviously what he meant – “destroyed contemporary art.” No art technology itself is conservative or progressive. In art, how always surpasses what. Just as abstract and conceptual artists continue to engage in the driving force of symbolic achievements, over the next decade we can expect that symbolic painters will likely cultivate their work in the shadows as some other crazes are influenced by. They may even find that there is a better return than making money from work. I hope it doesn’t sound old-fashioned and emotional. What Marcel Duchamp said so long ago is still true: Great artists of tomorrow can go underground. Underground may be exactly what is required in the next few years.

As for me I’ve seen multiple emerging painters use the character for exploratory work and do it with integrity and, more importantly, leave a mark in my memory, which doesn’t seem to go away. Here, I can point out a few examples: One is South Korean-born Eunnam Hong, based in Brooklyn, whose mysterious automatic engraving canvas painted incredible improvements that seem to contradict recent tides by highlighting reasonable tricks rather than assumed authenticity. “I want to fake the character of Asian Americans,” she said. Walter Price, by contrast, embeds his representative fragments in the context of lyrical abstract production. But Georgians now live in New York, and have something in common with Hong, because all their style differences are to complicate things, show the will to seemingly self-evident stories, and “make people feel uncomfortable more comfortable”, using “visual contradictions” to symbolize myself, but also symbolize my own thoughts, but also symbolize my own thoughts [to allow] The audience has their own stories with these objects. “I can go on: Bridget Mullen’s psychedelic quirky, Michelle Uckotter’s weird oil pastel, its “unenergized lonely time”;

These five artists hardly constitute a trend. Their work doesn’t look like the work of each other or anyone else. Although they represent different ethnic and gender expressions, their life experiences can be
Their themes are not packaged and for sale. Finally, all of us may be typical of our time, but some artists are typical in the way anyone else: these are those who have the chance
Be remembered.