MAYBE it doesn't indicate the arrival of a significant arts movement and perhaps it is simply a symptom of another consumer-driven microtrend, but it would seem that something is afoot in the modern art world and it concerns what you could call, for lack of more comprehensive terminology, a burgeoning of gay male art.
You can place it at making a splash in the sales booths at any of the virally replicating art fairs, or at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, or galleries such as Daniel Reich or John Connelly Presents in Chelsea.
Although there are some artists such as Jack Pierson on view at the gallery in Brooklyn, most belong to a generation born in the'80s and too young to have experienced AIDS' brunt or the identity politics of the era firsthand. Gayness has been, experienced by many, as was noted by others earlier as a threatened condition. Thus they appear to have skipped past self-acceptance and the hoary dramas of the cupboard, and moved directly to forms of expression which are disgusting, exuberant, celebratory, bawdy and not infrequently marked by the spirit of juvenilia the (heterosexual) photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark has been mining for years.
"The art we're showing," said Nicholas Weist, the curator of"The Male Gaze," a meeting of over 20 largely young gay artists, among them such collectors' darlings as Christian Holstad, Scott Hug and Michael Magnan,"argues for a new kind of alternativism that reacts against the mainstream of their culture." Not that includes.
No art show is a Stonewall, naturally, and this scene is equivalent to a struggle for its cultural ramparts. Yet there are indications that something livelier is at play than some arbitrary shows in a select group of galleries.
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The evidence of this may be the crop of art publications that line the shelves at venerable outposts of culture like the Printed Matter artists' bookstore on 10th Avenue.
; a spray-painted, and Daddy, limited edition production that comes vacuum-packed and using a customized T-shirt that was tattered attached.
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A NEW TAKE"Ilya (Gucci)," an art by Slava Mogutin. CreditCourtesy powerHouse Arena
There are others, from Poland, Sweden and Germany and also hipster outposts throughout Canada and the United States. If some titles were not too outright raunchy to be printed 17, An individual would list them all.
Although the images they present are often sexually candid this is not to say the magazines are pornographic. They, like much of the art and so much art and culture and music of all types -- seem to hybridize a generalized fetish for youth culture, for the romantic and the small and apolitical, for self-exposure. They are as whimsical as among those Devendra Banhart's songs. They've a do-it-yourself setting that is proudly, but what does not?
All of the magazines are brand new, which is to say that their issues were produced within the past year. And, just as significant, said Mr. Bronson, many are among the top sellers among the tens of thousands of titles Printed Matter displays.
"I'm not sure if I'd say what is happening is a movement or a moment," said Vince Aletti, an independent curator and photography critic for The New Yorker, referring to the latest iteration of homosexual culture. No one does.
Yet, as David Rimanelli, an art critic and longtime contributor to Artforum, stated,"There's this massive efflorescence of artists right now doing this sort of work." There are an awful lot of people, gay or otherwise, he added,"making intimate, slightly vague narratives," of exactly the sort that artists like Mr. Hug and Mr. Magnan have turned into a minor industry with K48, their print magazine cooperation with other musicians along this loosely federated circuit. Their publication is polished in its chic that each issue includes an accompanying CD and, lately, a back cover ad for Dior.
The Christening Of Homosexual (2017)
It is most likely an exaggeration to say that it all began with Butt, yet it seems obvious that this Dutch zine using its trademark pink pages and its air of 1970s outsider culture provided a template homosexual paintings for a passel of imitators.
"I love Butt," stated Bruce Hainley, a critic and curator who is the associate director of criticism and theory from the graduate program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif..
Still, nostalgia remains a powerful current running through the gay male art scene, manifest as a longing for what, from a distance, resembles the utopian days of pre-AIDS and radical politics and unfettered sex.