There is a dissipation to the time.
The Necessary Lightning The Terrible Beauty in the Art of Thierry W. Despont
by Mark Daniel Cohen
There is a dissipation to the time. The clock of the pulse of happenstance slows, events grow dense and stick to the walls of the temporal corridors, drag perilously to a halt, and the fluidity of the suspension by which they are floated and roll to the future coagulates and thickens to a syrupy lethargy. Things die down, and New York seems an evaporating steam, a quiet shrug of letting something go. To search for art now is to press against gauzes, to push at crepe hanging like snags to the power of alertness and the focus of concentration, like netting dropped to entangle the sheer joy of living, the enthusiasm of care. One feels encumbered by the very air.
It may be late September, when this is being written, or it may be the nature of the time. Things have slowed detectably in the New York Art world. There are fewer galleries in the city than there were last year, and fewer of those are open at the end of the month. A number of the exhibitions are scheduled to be up longer than has been usual, suggesting the likelihood that there will be fewer exhibitions over the course of the season. And there appear to be no big-name exhibitions coming soon, no exhibitions of marquee artists to open the season. Perhaps it is nothing more than an art season beginning later than usual, or perhaps it is something more. It may be the month, or it may be the moment.
And so, the tone may be alleviated shortly, or it may not. But either way, the tone is clear. There is a feeling for the moment of remaining after the party. The contagion of excitation has diminished, the buzz of the new has relapsed, the sense of the scene has evaporated. If you wanted to go to where everyone is rushing, you could make no guess as to where that will be. The entire art community feels like a held breath, or a breath let out, and the wreckage of the night before promises to be found around every corner, waiting for someone to come and clean it up.
Looking for art at this time becomes a keenly conscious act of seeking out art worth seeing, and one begins automatically to consider just what that means, just what one values. In the absence of an unforced excitement, in the vacancy of the breathlessness that has propelled us for years, in the vacuum lack of anything that enlivens, one naturally looks for what one misses. One seeks what is gone only with regret. And it must come unbidden; it is a spontaneity one requests, for regret, like respect, is spontaneous. If it is thought through, it is meaningless, for it is false. What one seeks is the lightning bolt. One wants to find what is necessary. One wants to find the moment of implicit aesthetic authenticity, the moment in which one feels, as one of my students, Eliana Moreira, has put it: "that there is something here you can surrender to"–a moment in which "you become vulnerable to all your sensibilities."
