Dear comrades it has come to our attention – via imbedded code, in an otherwise innocuous New York Times review, of Gerhard Richter, that all is lost. Art critic Holland Cotter’s cryptographically studded text as follows -
Cotter, Holland, New York Times -11, September 2010 –
“One reality seems fairly clear. At present, the fashion for work that is ideologically over determined in meaning, political or otherwise, has passed. We are now in a phase of retreat from easily readable content.
Of course no art, abstract or otherwise, is devoid of content (which doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of hollow work around). All art has meaning, intended or not, and part of the meaning of Mr. Richter’s is precisely to keep meaning on the move, to hide it, change it, multiply it, undermine it, all the while couching these feints and thrusts in visually ingratiating forms.”
PCHC (Post-Conceptual High-Command) directive follows -
Attention. Soldiers of Pretender Emperor Duchamp - still loyally engaged in guerrilla anti-aestheticism and resistant formal neutrality - come out your bunkers and onto the contested and cratered field of visual art. Those of you who have, for untold years, valiantly and selflessly demonstrated fealty to post-conceptual and post-object theology, in place of your own selfish (capitalist-roader-market-driven) individual subjectivity….lay down your closely-read Continental Philosophy, Art & Language, and Linguistic-Conceptualism texts & surrender immediately to the nearest dealer gallery command-post.
Terms of surrender, as negotiated by Generals Kosuth and Weiner, will, as a matter of course, be published as manifesto – however, as a binding condition of surrender, none of the Emperor’s troops are to consider this forthcoming manifesto as a freshly imposed post-philosophical schematic for the manufacture of IEDs (improvised esthetic devices) designed to disrupt the orderly aesthetic resettlement of decommissioned post-conceptual brigades into the general ranks of artists.
Those of you who’ve been steadfastly subsisting on protestant-like diet of dogmatic and ideologically restricting texts will immediately be issued rich catholic morphological fare (rations) derived from the handed-down, and unrestricted, traditions of art. High Command medical advisors have issued an advice - that long-time post-conceptualists prudently limit intake of high caloric art-history until their shrunken imaginations become accustomed to the rich fare of the history of visually based art.
Standby for further text-based directives.
Dog Save Emperor Duchamp.
