Laughing at Bad Art, the Critical Introduction

When I posted my previous rant, a friend asked me why contemporary art was not on the list of irrelevant art forms. The reasons why visual are was not included in my original post and why it truly deserves its own post is that: visual art is still widely considered a powerful medium for communication, even by people who happen to not be artists (as opposed to say poetry, which no one besides other poets reads or cares about). But let's not confuse relevancy here with quality (because although, no one besides poets reads poetry, some of this writing is good, some astoundingly good, even). The gap between the amount of contemporary art being produced in the world and the quality of this art is quite large. Sometimes when you walk into a gallery, you have to get all Clement Greenberg on a bitch and ask, "Is this piece giving me any aesthetic pleasure?" Most of the time the answer will be "No, this piece is feebly attempting to incite some thought in me which its own maker doesn't even seem to grasp; this piece is brimming with historical references yet oddly ahistorical; this piece is collapsing under the weight of ideology; this piece is histrionic yet emotionally vacant." What's worse, the critical apparatus of art history and art criticism has been so absorbed and integrated into the art-making process that traditional critique is rendered moot. Today's bad art is like anti-biotic resistant staph infections–it knows the medicine you will level against it all too well. So what modes of criticism are left to de-fang this thing that passes for official visual culture in our galleries and museums? Laughter. Go forth and laugh at Bad Art. From your gut.