In partnership with

“The most invited man in Britain”

When did modern art become so predictable?

Earlier this year, at the Barbican, I went to one of the most miserable exhibitions I can remember, says Dean Kissick in Harper’s Magazine. It was called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, and consisted of tapestries, quilts and needlework made by modern artists from historically marginalised communities. There were sculptures of cacti stitched from US Border Patrol uniforms, and small realist embroideries of “drag and dyke marches” in New York. The curators clearly thought they were being terribly radical, but really it was just “feel-good ambient diversity”. And it struck me afterwards that every major art fair I’ve been to in recent years has been a similar experience. They all have the same two themes – “the deep richness of identity and the rejection of the West” – and they’re all totally unoriginal.

Just a decade or so ago, the art world was completely different. It was about spectacle, innovation and radical ideas. The Italian artist Paola Pivi “filled a Swiss Kunsthalle with 3,000 cups of cappuccino and a leopard”. France’s Philippe Parreno “journeyed to Patagonia to tell two hours of rambling philosophical stories to a colony of penguins on the beach, taking only a single photograph as documentation”. Mad? Perhaps. But that was part of the joy. Contemporary art back then was “fundamentally optimistic” – there was a feeling that “making art was a good in itself, that pushing its boundaries was a worthwhile endeavour”. Yet around 2016, when “faith in the liberal order began to fall apart”, this approach came to be seen as “frivolous and decadent”. Desperate to stay relevant, artists developed an obsession with identity politics at the cost of anything “inventive or interesting”. I hate it. I want art that “tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious”. Not something that propagates some “polite, liberal American sensibility”.

In an age when everyone is desperate to appear interesting online, there’s a certain relief in choosing to be bland, says Katy Schneider in New York Magazine. I recently stumbled upon the Dull Men’s Club: an online group for self-professed bores to gather and “wantonly discuss the unsexy details of their lives”. An astonishing 1.3 million members – referred to as “dullsters” rather than “dullards”, as “they’re boring, not stupid” – share photos of everyday things from lentil soup to mowed lawns, and report crushingly mundane observations such as: “I have a loose-leaf tea that I absolutely love, but I’m so bad at making it”. The club has existed online since the 1990s, but numbers really boomed during Covid. “The pandemic wasn’t much of a change for the Dull Men,” says founder Lee Carlson. “We just spent more time in our sheds.”

“Earth’s least-deserving nepo-baby”

There is no beta like the beta son of an alpha father, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. And Donald Trump Jr “embodies the form”. It’s impossible to watch any of his “public honkings” without imagining the 46-year-old bleating: “Did you see it, Dad? Did you see what I said on TV? Dad? Dad? No, OK you’re busy…” We could probably grit our way through these “turbo-obnoxious inanities” if they were limited to Don Jr’s specialist subjects, such as “ripped guys who talk to me at UFC because of my dad”. But some of his political interventions are beyond the pale. He recently captioned a video of Volodymyr Zelensky: “POV: you’re 38 days from losing your allowance.” The Ukrainian people, of course, are 1,000 days into a devastating war they didn’t start. “Don’s personal struggles have amounted to not getting a wedgie at private school.”

To be fair, life is getting tougher for “Earth’s least-deserving nepo-baby”, what with being “cuckooed in the family nest by recent foster billionaire” Elon Musk. Just look at the picture of him sitting with his father, Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr on a private jet. Don Jr is trying to “act super cool about it”, but you can tell he’s conflicted: super chuffed to be at the big boys’ table; super bummed that he has a new “big brother” who dad involves in absolutely everything. It’s presumably only a matter of time before these egomaniacs fall out. In the meantime Don Jr will continue firing out his “shitposts”, in the desperate hope that it impresses dad as much as “being the world’s richest man and catching a falling space rocket with some chopsticks”. Good luck with that.