The Buzz Around Painting
A reproduction of my "Cloud Hunter" appeared in "Szum" as illustration to Wiktoria Kozioł's text on the conservative turn in Polish art.
Issue 34 of "Szum" magazine carried a reproduction of my painting "Cloud Hunter" as illustration to Wiktoria Kozioł's text "Lobsters, Hawks, Doves. The Conservative Turn in Polish Art". Ha — only recently Sarzyński in "Polityka" was indignant at the commercial successes of contemporary magical realism, and now Kozioł in "Szum" devotes nearly thirty A4 pages (!) to "settling accounts" with the return to tradition in contemporary Polish art.
Kozioł's text deserves a detailed polemic; for now I will only say that it sits somewhere between a diligent pupil's essay and the report of an investigating officer. Beneath its appearance of conscientiousness, Kozioł omits many crucial facts, institutions and names; beneath its appearance of objective theoretical analysis, she offers a misleading description of the field, full of half-said things, silences and insinuations.
The conservative milieu is here defined very broadly — practically everything that is not an enthusiastic promotion of neo-Marxism and critical art is, in Kozioł's view, conservative and right-wing. Her opponents she describes with animal metaphors — Hawks and Doves borrowed from economic poetics, and Lobsters inspired by the lectures of Jordan Peterson. Such bestialising of one's adversary is rather primitive, all the more so because Kozioł misses the point of Peterson's lobsters: for her they are creatures helpless, lost and uncertain, awaiting a better fate, while for Peterson the lobsters served to support the rightness and usefulness of hierarchy.
I will soon offer a more detailed polemic with Kozioł's theses; for the moment I can only voice satisfaction that the auction successes of solid, craftsmanlike art now sting the leftist critic so sharply that she has abandoned the tactic of silence and begun to bite.