The Future of Art

Some of the most novel, vibrant, and radically transgressive contemporary art is not being shown in galleries, museums, or prestigious art fairs. Even mainstream social media platforms—ostensibly a democratizing force for art and culture—are either censoring, overlooking, or shadow-banning the most unorthodox developments in the art world today. If you want to find provocative imagery nowadays, you need to be keeping an eye on last niche where the spirit of the avant-garde is still alive and well: fetish art.

The claim that internet forums littered with technically incompetent smutty representations of video game characters are producing something of cultural value is a bold one; I am going to need some space to defend myself. To that end, I need to talk about the mainstream contemporary art world and it’s utter failure to innovate…

A Bad Banana

In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan displayed an unusual piece of art at the prestigious Art Basel fair: a banana duct-taped to a wall. Cheekily titled Comedian, the work soon became a lightning rod for controversy. For many critics, Comedian represents too radical a departure from conventional artistic norms. The piece didn’t require any technical skill to create, nor is it pleasing to look at. Absent the pretentious setting in which the work was displayed, almost nobody would even recognize Comedian as art.

For defenders of Cattelan, the duct-taped banana’s apparent lack of artistic merit is very much the point. The piece is called Comedian, after all—it’s clearly meant to satirize a contemporary art world over-filled with simplistic artworks bolstered by pretentious ideas. Taking a step back, we could even use Comedian as a launching pad for a deep meditation on the boundaries of art itself. After all, any painting in a museum is little more than a clever arrangement of generic store-bought items. Why is it that one painting might be worth millions while another, nearly identical, might be worthless? Who gets to decide what is or is not “legitimate” art? Should we consider something as simple as a banana to be “art” simply because it's admired by connoisseurs and exhibited in the Guggenheim?

In my view, both the above arguments miss the point. I certainly agree that Comedian is bad art; however, it’s not because the work is too radical. Quite the opposite: the problem with Comedian is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough…

Hypocrisy

First, the obvious: Cattelan’s critique of the contemporary art market falls flat when you realize that his stunt served no real purpose beyond the acquisition of currency (both literal and cultural). The work was released at Art Basel in a limited edition of three. By the end of the show, Cattelan had sold two editions of Comedian for $120,000 each. Just a few years later, both pieces would be resold at a Sotheby’s auction for roughly $6 million each, netting a handsome profit for those early investors.

Cattelan is not some rebellious outsider poking fun at the art establishment. Quite the opposite: Cattelan very much is the establishment. Nor is he subverting the art market in any meaningful way. Comedian’s “critique” has no teeth because its high price tag reinforces the very system that is ostensibly being criticized.

Taking the Piss

My main critique of Comedian is not its hypocrisy. I’m considerably more interested in how profoundly derivative the work is. No doubt, some readers will have already noticed the obvious similarities between Cattelan’s Comedian and the most famous avant-garde art stunt of all time: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

For the uninitiated, Fountain was a so-called “readymade” sculpture consisting of nothing more than an ordinary urinal, tipped on its side, signed “R Mutt,” and dated to 1917. Like Comedian, the object itself isn’t particularly interesting; rather, its value comes from the stunt of exhibition and from the inevitable controversy surrounding whether or not this work constitutes “real” art. In the context of its time, Fountain was radical and thought-provoking. But the piece is already more than a century old! Fountain made its debut before the first World War, during a time when jazz music was still culturally relevant and bras were only just starting to become popular.

Aspiring art-world provocateurs around the world had already staged pranks similar to Duchamp’s Fountain hundreds of times before Cattelan duct-taped that banana to a wall in 2019. There is simply nothing original or shocking or transgressive or avant-garde about Comedian’s underlying concept anymore. That wouldn’t be a deal-breaker if we were talking about a landscape or still life painting, of course. Art doesn’t need to be transgressive to be powerful. But Comedian is nothing like a landscape or a still life, is it? It’s not a beautiful painting—it’s just banana duct-taped to the wall. Conceptual novelty is the entire point! Comedian fails not because it’s too weird, but because it pretends to be avant-garde and then fails to live up to that name.

In Search of a New Avant-Garde

So where can we find art which genuinely pushes the envelope nowadays? Where can we find art which succeeds where Comedian failed? Where can we find art which feels as strange and provocative and unexpected as Fountain once did?

It should go without saying that nothing genuinely avant-garde or punk or transgressive is happening within the walls of Art Basel or at a Sotheby’s auction. Nobody paid millions of dollars for Comedian because they genuinely wanted to display a rotting banana in their home; Comedian’s value is based entirely on the expectation that it might be resold for profit. All that matters in such a context is hype. We might as well be talking about a shady NFT project. If we want to find art with some hope of challenging the status quo, we will have to look outside of this cynical profit-hungry corner of the art world…

The Surprising Depth of Fetish Art

I am not the first person to notice the oddly captivating quality of the art on display in online spaces devoted to certain niche fetishes. It is very easy to marvel at the spectacular strangeness of fetish art, from image galleries devoted exclusively to cartoon characters “tornado spinning” or being inflated like a balloon, to videos where someone smokes a cigarette in silence or wades slowly into a creek while wearing loose jeans.

Often, those commenters who’ve taken an interest in such niche fetish content have done so from a place of disgust, mockery, or morbid curiosity. Here, I want to come at the subject from a place of genuine artistic admiration. I will certainly concede that much of the aforementioned content is technically flawed or even ugly to look at; however, much the same could be said about a lot of punk, noise music, Dada, or conceptual art. The purpose of art isn’t always to be visually pleasing or technically impressive. Sometimes, it is enough to express a raw emotion and/or to entrance the viewer. And it would be difficult to argue that those onlookers who making fun of these peculiar fetishes have not been entranced and captivated by the raw authenticity of human sexuality on display.

“So You Want to Fuck a Wet Floor Sign?”

I want to draw attention to one particular community which provides a useful example of how fetish art can succeed where Cattelan’s Comedian has failed. The wet floor signs subreddit is a place where users share snapshots of wet floor signs—nothing more. The contents of this subreddit are so utterly commonplace that, at first glance, many viewers will not realize they are looking at pornography. But make no mistake: those snapshots of wet floor signs are, in fact, smut.

One of the moderators of this subreddit—a redditor called GettnRandy—has been open about his sexual interest in wet floor signs. “I found myself wanting to fuck one after drawing porn including them,” he once explained in a comment. “I bought my own sign a few months after and the rest is history!” GettnRandy even published an illustrated guide called “So you want to fuck a wet floor sign?” to assist new converts to the fetish.

With this context, the contents of r/WetFloorSigns acquire a strange and even avant-garde character. Like Duchamp’s Fountain, we are looking at quotidian objects which have been displayed in such a way as to provoke interesting philosophical questions about the boundaries of pornography. What makes these pictures of wet floor signs erotica, when the very same imagery would be considered non-pornographic if it appeared in a ULINE catalogue? And once we’ve accepted that people can be sexually aroused by something as banal as a wet floor sign, how can we conclusively say that any image is non-pornographic? Can still life be porn? For an objectum sexual, perhaps…

Taking this this argument a step further: I have argued previously that the distinction between pornography and art is illusory. If one accepts this claim, then one must also accept that the contents of r/WetFloorSigns raise many of the same questions as Duchamp’s Fountain. Moreover, to my mind at least, this subreddit explores the boundaries of art in a way that is infinitely more interesting than Cattelan’s Comedian. After all, r/WetFloorSigns is a sincere celebration of the complexity and absurdity of human sexuality. Cattelan’s stunt, by contrast, was nothing but greed and cynical market manipulation. Isn’t the former infinitely more interesting?

Some readers might question whether redditors like GettnRandy are joking when they claim to be sexually aroused by wet floor signs. Personally, I don’t think so; however, sincerity is utterly irrelevant to the case I am making. After all, both Fountain and Comedian are, to some degree, exercises in trolling. Nevertheless, both works are highly valued by the art community. The fact that the anonymous denizens of r/WetFloorSigns are not broadly considered to be avant-garde art provocateurs is nothing but snobbery and elitism.

The Future of Avant-Garde Art

This newsletter is already getting way too long, so I will end things here, with the conclusion that fetish art is one of the last visual mediums where the spirit of the avant-garde is still alive and well. In my next newsletter, I will demonstrate my commitment to this claim by choosing one particular niche of fetish art and subjecting it to good-faith critical analysis. In fact, I will even go farther than critique, by offering up my own artistic interpretation of that particular sub-genre, paying homage to an obscure DeviantArt pervert who seems to have been inactive for the better part of a decade. Stay tuned…