If the frame of art is culturally determined, then what is our culture like right now?

Working in the park has been an incredible art appreciation lesson for me. It's a weird intersection. On one hand, shows are curated to fit the Chelsea (okay...Williamsburg) template. On the other, the primary users of the park are neighborhood folks who size up the art and react with a mixture of curiosity, *very* occasional wonder, head scratching and contempt. I do not want to write a brief treatise on the elitism of the NY art market. That's shooting fish in a barrel.

But really--if the frame of art is culturally determined, and yet our culture (not just the Socrates Sculpture Park regulars, but everyone) finds visual art that is made for the galleries right now strikingly irrelevant, then what is going on?

Are the young artists flowing out of ColumbiaUCLAYaleCalArts and into the galleries onto something so "avant garde" that the general public is just too behind to notice what's going on?

Are these artists of their time and showing us something we don't want to see?

Or are they saying what very young people whose families can afford a very expensive education with no sure future prospects would say?

Is this not a valid question because it is obvious that the Emperor has no clothes and visual art is completely irrelevant?

Back at that intersection of Socrates Viewer and Socrates Curator, I find it hard to discount either side. Socrates choses what everyone else chooses--they are dipping from the same overflowing well that Sculpture Center, DAC, the AIM program, LMCC, and all the other nonprofit spaces are drawing from. These relationships and repetitions alone are a strong cultural determination, right? So these choices must be relevant--curators must actually be working as arbiters of what is visually important right now, right?

On the other hand, I am at a loss to explain the cynical, janky formalism (and its little brother, illustrative conceptualism) that currently reigns the scene. Sure. After seven years of art education, paired with a few more years of leading undergraduate critques, I can talk about the formal elements of Roy Stanfield's Untitled pieces of plexiglass currently stowed in the basement of Sculpture Center. But why should I have to?

To get it over with: this work is the logical end of Donald Judd's Specific Objects line. But without any sense of planning or composition, the hand of the artist, a sense of manipulated material, or for that matter even a title, what is the point of trudging across the Pulaski bridge on a Sunday to look at it in person? It's not that it's formally bad--it's interesting formally. And it's not that it's irrelevant. It fits tidily into the last interesting sculpture debate (sad to say, we haven't really had a good thought since Michael Fried and Donald Judd duked it out), and definitely chooses the popular side. It is a set of theatrical objects that sit there and refuse to become something else. They don't transcend. Even though the material is transparent, the work just sits there and defies your every attempt to make something of it.

So what is Stanfield doing, apart from doing it right? Not much. The work itself is mean, meager. It has no entry point beyond Judd. It has no sense of urgency. It communicates nothing other than its art-historically determined right to exist. Does it share a secret? Heal a wound? Ask a question? Make a connection? Does it kiss, fuck, caress, wink at or slap a viewer?

If one of my college students made a Stanfield, I would be impressed because it would mean that this student was listening during my slide shows. But it does nothing but point to the page where its existence is the next logical step in a devolution of art's relevance to the general public that I am sure would sadden even Donald Judd.

Like most of the people I talk to at Socrates while they throw the ball for their dog, I want more from art. Is this the way it is? Did Donald Judd finally put the last nail in the coffin for sculpture? Is it true that we cannot have a new discussion about sculpture that moves past or through the Fried/Judd Rumble In The Jungle?

Or am I asking the wrong questions to the wrong people? Maybe there are lots of people out there having the discussion, but nobody gets to see the discussion because curators tend toward the safest, most academic iterations possible?