I disagree with much of the author. It is not that he is wrong in the lineage that he tracks, but it's a very US oriented and very much based into the museum. Also his reading of Dada is slightly embarrassing compared to what they did and how important they are. The change of art to a nominal gesture can be seen as one of the largest shifts of modern art. The fact that art is no longer a toll of power, but a claim that reality is fucked up and so should art be is not mentioned.

It is true that the museum is a very old fashioned institute. They have become an old guard a while ago. Museums are also a lot more expensive to create and maintain to actually take a chance. There is the question - What is contemporary about contemporary art museum? And most of the time the answer is not much. They are still oriented at the same logic and method that they were a hundred years ago - objects that someone in power deems valuable explained to the unwashed masses. Burden's performance did not require explanations. It has them by the bushel. It is a seminal work, but it doesn't require them.

Museums in most cases have become a safe place in the worst way possible. There can be no controversy when everything is well groomed. If you want to find art that people get pissed off by, maybe not look into the biggest thing around. And people get pissed off. From 2000 onwards I can think of: Andrea Fraser, Wafaa Bilal, Paul McCarthy , and Richard Prince. Basically, the problem is that the author looks into traditional art making instead of the large odd things that are happening. Social practice and bio-art are not in his scope. He is right that art needs human experience to enrich it, but that means that art should sometimes leave the museum.

I have read this essay before, but not this specific one.

We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making “cathedrals” out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.

I am in agreement with the author. Except for the finality of it. Death is not the end. We have to kill this navel-gazing before something new can grow from it. There was good reason for the navel-gazing and the asshole-gazing of the last century. We never had the freedom for it, and we needed it. It helped us grow. But our planet is shaking, and it's going to shake us off, because that is the business that our planet is in, and we abide.

Fragile will be what majestic was. We are going to look up. We are going to look forward. We are going to look out. Our crisis isn't going to be destruction. It's going to be transformation.