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Courbet's Crime

This submission arose from a commission by Etc, a Canadian contemporary art magazine. The editors read some of my other writings and invited me to contribute an essay on Lame Art. Lame Art may or may not actually exist. The term Lame Art is a speculative neologism. My task was thus to survey recent international art practices to see whether any ‘trend’ might be identifiable as deserving of the epithet. This task entailed a variety of intellectual and methodological challenges. What critical/theoretical model should one employ to ensure that what one may discover is a genuinely new phenomenon, rather than a variation of the already-existent? How does one know whether one has placed new medicine in old bottles, old medicine in new bottles, or new medicine in new bottles (or even old medicine in old bottles)? One faces other methodological challenges. If the phenomenon of Lame Art exists, and if it is radically new, how might one construct an appropriate historical context for it? If Lame Art constitutes a paradigm shift within artistic practice, does it demand a corresponding shift in critical methodology? I conclude that certain characteristics within recent art practices may merit the designation Lame Art, and that such characteristics are identifiable in a new mode of complicity between artistic practices and youth oriented popular culture. To argue this case I present a short history of modern art, beginning with Courbet, in which the products of popular culture are taken by artists as a licence to indulge in apparent forms of ineptitude. I also suggest that the regressive return to adolescence typical of much Lame Art attempts to reintroduce a sense of temporal otherness into cultural production in a society that has replaced history with vague notions of ‘pastness’, nostalgia, and so on (pace Frederic Jameson, Baudrillard, et al).