Art in the Age of Creative Exhaustion

Performance art is again pushing the proverbial envelope into new and exciting places with a live birth on stage. Artist Marni Kotak, who previously reenacted her grandfather's funeral, the night she lost her virginity and teenage masturbation on stage has decided to bring the magic of childbirth to a Brooklyn gallery that may or may not be near you. While some will decry the bad taste of the event or invoke the tired ole "this ain't art" argument, what's more interesting to me is how emblematic this is of the rather limited vision of art these days and the ways reality television and social networking culture have influenced the entire cultural landscape. 

Interestingly, Kotak argues that she doesn't like social networking sites because they take time away from authentic experiences with family and friends. I agree with the thought, but have to wonder how having a baby in public in any way challenges the social networking logic of sharing the intimate details of our lives with anyone and everyone we know (or at least kind of remember from that night at the bar three years ago or that random meeting in the elevator on a rainy Thursday afternoon in November 2007). Does rendering an event in public really give it more authenticity, or is it merely a new way of mediating our experiences and creating a world where the only thing that seems to legitimate experience is sharing it with others. 

At the deeper level of deconstructing art itself, it does continue the rather tired postmodern penchant for calling anything and everything art. When the dadaists argued that "only stupid people see beauty only in beautiful things" and started the anti-art movement, they were making a profound statement about the elitism of avant-garde art and our rather limited aesthetic tastes. But one wonders if pop art wasn't really sufficient to make the point complete. Do we really need to create a world where every experience is called art if it is placed in the confines of a context that can be labeled artistic? Has creativity completely devolved into various incarnations of appropriation? And what does this augur for our collective future? I believe that art is answerable to no one but the artist themselves, but do sometimes pine for those days of modernist yore when artists were actually trying to say something profound and maybe even change society.