CONCEPTUAL ART IS THE EX WHOSE CALLS YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE

I remember when Bruno Latour's "We Were Never Modern" got either translated to Finnish or started to do the rounds in Theater Academy in Helsinki, where I studied in 2000's. Maybe it was that book, or mostly its title (because we mostly read titles) that made us sceptical of modernism. (btw u don't need to know the book to continue reading)

me and my fellow chain-smoking students, disillusioned yet eager to please and be accepted, were already aware of how to dismiss, and also how to really be into things most people are not and to do this in a way that both insulates you from the world and makes you paranoid of your standings.

ok why am i writing we, let's just say i, but ok still i do feel like this was a shared sentiment. anyways so we needed something to blame and we chose modernism. we didn't choose (all of) our professors, nor the great white men who came before us because we couldnt bear the idea of breaking up with our first loves. i still wanted to love carl andre because i didnt yet know who ana mendieta was.

hating modernism was the rebounce, the hookup, that simply made my horrible lover look more appealing, because he also hated him. that lover is called Conceptual Art. my friend put it well today when they said "conceptual art made it impossible to have stuff in the exhibition space without it becoming art". i dont know if it's true but that's exactly what bugs me. like people can't just come together and do stuff that's creative, fun, and subversive and potentially meaningless and very useful at the same time. art that is functional isn't necessary socialist realism.

although i would love some socialist real-ism in my life.

this is not a manifesto from which some hack can create a snub video piece with tilda swinton for museums who dont know any better but recognise production value when they see it. this is a soft break-up, the kind that makes both parties realise there's more to life than...ok i dont think conceptual art will never realise anything. it will count the visitors and call it a counting piece, after which it moves to count its money and not call you anymore because he's too busy hanging out with influencers.

maybe you get this maybe u dont. maybe u wana do art where you have an idea which you present in a way that makes sense to anyone who knows either the basics of modern art or then the very latest and rarest undercurrents of late-capitalist philosophical concepts spoken in rapidfire succession in some cafe in a capital city of your choosing.

i dont know. i am not living a life where i have the emotional space or the time to think too long about this. i dont have the regime that lends itself to deconstruction or deep critique. but it's ok or even if it wouldn't be, this is still real. these words are energy regardless and the way this line draws to it end resembles a diving board.

so what is wrong with conceptual art god i'm tired sorry. i am made tired by the demands of contemporary art to always be critical, to compare a to b, to think of the form but also of the context, to demand more from the technical execution, to remind my friends this was already shown earlier in Wien, to rush through an art fair giving snap judgements and feeling a sense of connection from our matching adjectives*. seriously, your project is not better than mine, there are no good and bad artists, there are just people at different stages in varying conditions.

i want an insurance that covers the emotional violence inflicted upon us by the institutions we work with. if you show art that requires animals to be killed because the artists wants to "question and examine the way we think about animals and the aesthetic governing these representations", you are not an animal lover, you know? If a conceptual artists demands you get ten tons worth of blood oranges to a square and you say yes even though you dont have the money and dont understand why the city you live in would need that, you create future depression that people below you will pay for with their burnouts and voiced but unheard resentments and morose blog posts.
please dont respect artists and their ludicrous blood orange ideas, or then let other people working in the building do what the fuck they like, too. the person in the lowest pay grade such have the same rights as the artist, if not then your institution is violent, and if you do shows that mention anything close to ethics, then it's also a hoax.

rly, i cant write art criticism anymore, unless someone starts to do something more than clever representations of discourses and questions without showing any intent to deal with those issues in any meaningful way in the space which they show these representations. i mean i know there are ppl doing that.

id like to set all my art world meetings at mcdonald's, because if you can't deal with that, you shouldn't be dealing anything in the first place. sounds petty i know, but i am way pettier in person.

*i really felt that connection it was real, regardless of all