In a culture of saturation, speed, and contradiction, contemporary art seems to be eluding definition at its own expense, while apparently revelling in the fragmentation of its own identity. I don’t make this statement lightly. The title ‘Oh Brother, Where’s The Art? borrows the folksy urgency of displacement to question not only art’s location but also its existential condition. What does it mean to make—or even recognize—art in the wake of Duchamp, amidst digital capitalism, climate collapse, and institutional/colonial critique? I would argue that we are at some kind of crossroads; after all, what significance can art purport to carry greater than the televised currency of psychotic clamor of whining military drones or catastrophic human suffering? These are truly pure signifiers of the utmost intentionality at the level of the cognoscenti.

The antidote, if there is one, lies not in finding a fixed location for artistic practice or decrying its ineffectuality in the face of militarism but in tracing its migrations—conceptual, material, and political—at a time where facts have become malleable and truth negotiable. I have tried, in good faith, to lay out a minimal, less convoluted series of stepping-off points for those in the jaws of their own practice, perhaps searching for an intellectual location, or for those who might count themselves as innocent bystanders (there is no such thing, of course) to moral and cultural implosion. This is in the hope of salvaging some sense from the current torrent of stuff that threatens simultaneously to overwhelm our sentience and undermine our belief in all things critical and creative, consumed as we might be by the seductively efficient aesthetics of death machinery. Below, I offer some strategies for navigating the perils of the gigantism of mainstream, social, and factional media.

I. Moving from Object to Idea: If we are to continue as devotees of the arts with any sense of hope and creative optimism, we should be encouraged by art history’s conscientious narrative documenting and indeed in some instances prompting the repeated collapse and resurrection of art and its movements. Any conversation about contemporary art must pass through the accelerating existential crises initiated by Marcel Duchamp, whose seminal work Fountain (1917)—the notorious urinal signed “R. Mutt”—redefined art by apparently prioritizing concept over form. Duchamp’s readymades suggested that the artist’s choice could suffice as artistic creation, initiating a lineage that would eventually define the major crisis in modernism, aka conceptualism.1 Jump ahead into the 1960s, and Sol LeWitt advanced this ethos, stating, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”2

His Wall Drawing #146A (1972)—executed by teams following his instructions—removes the artist’s hand, emphasizing the primacy of instruction, not execution.3 Robert Morris, too, redirected attention from object to experience in his Untitled (Tangle) (1967), a cascade of industrial felt that reacts to gravity rather than sculptural fixity.4 These works collectively emphasize not what art is, but how it behaves. I would argue that to combat the apparent fragmentation of art, often driven by the fragmentation of the narratives, the behavior of the art and the artist—creative, moral, iconoclastic, and critical—should count as testimony to support the divination of ideas and/or a test bed for invaluable, unreconciled, and unconcluded thought.

II. Mobilizing the Metaphysics of Material: Contemporary artists often explore material not for its inherent beauty, but for its associative power. For example, Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), a concrete cast of a Victorian home’s interior, preserves absence as presence.5 It is at once monument and tombstone, evoking both domesticity and the violence of urban erasure. Cornelia Parker, likewise, renders destruction poetic in ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ (1991), a garden shed blown up by the British Army and reassembled as a suspended constellation.6 The work transforms obliteration into beauty and stasis into narrative. In contrast, Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures (begun 1997) are temporary and participatory.7

They require viewers to pose with banal objects—cucumbers, chairs, sweaters—creating absurd, short-lived forms. In Wurm’s practice, sculpture becomes an event, a bodily performance of instability and humor that continues the Duchampian subversion with playful absurdity. These three examples remind us that art can simultaneously and impossibly be serious and playful, a profession and a pastime.

III. Not bowing to language and institutions: Marcel Broodthaers, once a poet, injected language and institutional critique into visual art. His ‘Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles’ (1968–72) was a fictive museum populated by crates and taxonomies, parodying museological authority.8 The work anticipated much of today’s skepticism toward institutions and their narratives, and as such, I would consider it to be a constructively healthy approach to the corporate cultures that now seem to pervade all aspects of our daily and not-so-daily lives. One leaping-off point from Broodthaers's absurdity found innovative voice in the work of Tony Cragg. Cragg’s ‘Britain Seen from the North’ (1981), composed of found plastic objects, maps both the artist’s form and the cultural clutter of late capitalism.9

His work reconfigures the readymade—plastic detritus becomes form and commentary, not merely provocation. Cragg also anticipates the lack of biodegradability, designating the plastic components as the ‘finds’ of future archaeologists, perhaps in a post-post-apocalyptic society. The use of non-traditional material for social critique also resonates in the works of Yayoi Kusama. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms (e.g., ‘Phalli’s Field,’ 1965) expand visual obsession into immersive environments.10 Her repetition and reflection, drawn from hallucinations and trauma, simultaneously obliterate and center the self—a psychedelic testament to the dissolution of form and ego. We should be reassured, therefore, that humanity, a healthy suspicion of institutionalised culture, and establishment values absolutely need to be critically challenged by the artist as commentator, consumer/victim, and visionary outsider.

IV. Understanding Sculpture as a Vehicle for Gesture and Trace: Here I offer some handy collisions that might just remind one of the fecundities of the artistic imagination as opposed to any preoccupation with notions of post-colonial redress, gender politics, or political correctness (not that there is anything bad about any of these per se, of course; I personally just find them slightly worthy and dull). Richard Long’s ‘A Line Made by Walking’ (1967) redefined sculpture as a gesture, a mark upon the earth.11 His walks—documented by photos, maps, or arranged stones—merge landscape, time, and action.

The work exists as a trace, inviting viewers to contemplate presence through absence and, by implication, the fleeting nature of experience. Louise Bourgeois, by contrast, internalizes her sculptures. Her massive spider ‘Maman’ (1999) draws from personal memory, symbolizing protection and motherhood, yet also evokes fear and unease.12 Bourgeois connects emotional states to architectural form—abstract yet deeply autobiographical. These artists find language in space: Long through the landscape, Bourgeois through the psychic body. In both, sculpture transcends objecthood and enters the terrain of metaphor and memory.

V. Working Toward the Contemporary Plural: If this is a bit of a list, then I apologize, but I wanted to cite some examples that offer both hope and stimulation. Specifically, I wanted to highlight three artists—artists who scrounge, scatter, and reassemble the pieces left by their 20th-century forebears. Kara Walker’s ‘A Subtlety’ (2014), a monumental sugar-coated sphinx installed in a former refinery, excavates histories of slavery and labor embedded in space. Tino Sehgal’s “constructed situations”—live encounters enacted by performers—eliminate the object entirely, existing only in interaction. El Anatsui’s woven tapestries of liquor bottle caps (‘Dusasa I,’ 2007) turn consumer waste into a shimmering historical narrative. These practices reflect a pluralist condition: global, discursive, and intersectional. They question the colonial, capitalist, and institutional frameworks still shaping art’s production and display.

VI. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Well, where do all these apparently disjointed paragraphs get us to? Perhaps it is not in any one thing, but between things: between concept and form, space and memory, and politics and poetics. To ask of art where it is is to seek to locate a fixed place, sensibility, and entity that simply doesn’t exist. Seeking to ‘discover’ or recreate some new modernist Substack just isn’t going to work or help. Searching for the certainty of a new modernist ‘movement’ is as doomed to failure as it would be to ask where meaning resides in an era of data saturation and cultural exhaustion.

Today, art is as likely to be an ephemeral act as a permanent object. It is processual, participatory, and often critical. It is in Broodthaers’ crates, Whiteread’s voids, Wurm’s awkward poses, and Kusama’s mirrored infinities. But it is also in what Sol LeWitt described as the movement of an idea through material, space, or thought. Art’s power now lies in its flexibility and doubt—its ability to refuse finality. In this landscape, the artist becomes not merely a maker but a facilitator, a cartographer for the unsettled movement of cultural tectonic plates. I would offer that the function of art today has never been more at odds with power politics, global capitalism, and corporate culture. Art today does not need to resolve; it needs to provoke, question, and haunt. In that, it continues Duchamp’s legacy—not by mocking meaning, but by demanding we keep looking for it.

References

1 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, porcelain urinal, lost original, replicas exist in major collections.
2 Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1, no. 1 (1969).
3 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #146A, 1972, ink on wall, executed by assistants.
4 Robert Morris,’ Untitled (Tangle)’, 1967, industrial felt, variable dimensions.
5 Rachel Whiteread, ‘House’, 1993, concrete cast of a house’s interior, destroyed in 1994.
6 Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, garden shed, explosion, wires, light.
7 Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculptures, ongoing series since 1997, performed with props.
8 Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles’, 1968–72, installation and fictional museum.
9 Tony Cragg, ‘Britain Seen from the North’, 1981, found plastics, collage.
10 Yayoi Kusama, ‘Phalli’s Field’, 1965, stuffed fabric forms in mirrored room.
11 Richard Long, ‘A Line Made by Walking’, 1967, photograph and text.
12 Louise Bourgeois, ‘Maman’, 1999, bronze, stainless steel, and marble.