How to Explain the Malaise of the Post-Internet Art Scene + Two Other Illuminating Reads From Around the Web. By Ben Davis In the Spring/Summer issue of the biannual Kaleidoscope mag, Caroline Busta has penned a fascinating and far-reaching essay on the waning influence of “art-world art” on the imagination. “Bringing together a large number of phenomena, she writes: “The dissolution of generational art movements and regional scenes over the last decade, along with the dwindling cohesion of biennial-scale exhibitions, the decline in quality and volume of art media, art fair exhaustion, the consolidation of the blue-chip market, and the value spike in gatekeeper-befuddling KAWS-style art, attest to the fact that art-world influence has been post-peak since at least the early ‘10s.” “In her essay, Busta puts her faith in the meme-osphere as the locus where a meaningful scene has migrated, with creative types abandoning an orientation on success within sclerotic and vacuous professional art structures. Instead, the temperament is one of “resilience and even relinquishment,” she says. “The art world would crash and burn, [and] they would still be artists, albeit ones self-funded via an array of odd jobs and investments, and would now be free of all parasitical relationships to an elitist industry.”

This is an excellent read, thank you for sharing! I agree with Davis and believe that the meme as a medium has become perhaps the most powerful means of communicating any message that is not aligned with platform capitalism (which is why, in turn, profit-oriented marketing initiatives have attempted to emulate memes forged by various counter-culture movements). Meme culture is able to transcend social boundaries ranging from class to language, offering individuals outside the elite an abundance of agency and clout in comparison to entities like major media outlets and boomer cultural institutions.