Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art

One of the fundamental questions of our 21st Century Theory series is whether the “correlationist thinking dominant today may perhaps be an obstacle to understanding important trends in contemporary art.” Just how much the long-standing hegemony of the aesthetic stands in the way of discovering and understanding possible non-correlationist tendencies in contemporary art is shown quite clearly in Suhail Malik’s essay. Malik doesn’t so much argue against aesthetics as mobilize an emphatic understanding of “realism” against contemporary art and its central category of (aesthetic) experience. His thesis, briefly put, is that “contemporary art is a correlationism.” He sees his speculative approach as a polemical attack on an entire aesthetic paradigm. However, unlike Ray Brassier in his recent reflections on Noise, Quentin Meillassoux on Mallarmé’s poetry, or Graham Harman on Lovecraft’s fantastic or “weird realism,” Malik does not base his arguments on individual examples, and he is utterly uninterested in searching for something like a speculative-realistic art. Instead, he envisions art as a rational exercise, the “binding force of reason directed to the real, a destruction of contemporary art as an art of indeterminacy,” or as Brassier wrote in his essay Genre Is Obsolete, which Malik touches upon: “Since experience is a myth, what do we have to lose?” Armen Avanessian (guest-editor of this series)