The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism

The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism, Part 1: How an Unhinged Economy Spawned a New World of ‘Debt Aestheticsʼ 29/7/2018,
8, 11*50 AM
The Toxic Legacy of Zombie

Formalism, Part 1: How an
Unhinged Economy Spawned a
New World of ‘Debt Aesthetics’
Zombie Formalism may have been the most
important movement of the last decade. What did
it mean?
Chris Wiley, July 26, 2018
Just what is the relationship between "zombie formalism" and our contemporary economy? Performance artists
dressed to look like zombies walk trance-like through the city center on July 5, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany. as
part of a protest around the upcoming G20 summit. Photo courtesy Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
What was Zombie Formalism? If you’re not an avid follower of art-world
https://news.artnet.com/opinion/history-zombie-formalism-1318352 Page 1 of 16
The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism, Part 1: How an Unhinged Economy Spawned a New World of ‘Debt Aestheticsʼ 29/7/2018, 11*50 AM
trends, you may have no idea. Don’t worry: From an aesthetic standpoint,
you didn’t miss much. In an economic sense, though, zombie formalism
was perhaps the biggest story of the past decade, transforming the art
market and changing what it means to be a young artist. It’s a story about
art’s fraught relationship to finance, and also, I want to argue, about the
way debt has become subtly inextricable from discussions of contemporary
aesthetics.
But first: What was it? The artist and critic Walter Robinson coined the
phrase in a 2014 piece, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,”
addressing the vogue for a certain type of painting among collectors known
for their speculative investment in young artists. They’d snap up artworks
for relatively low prices and flip the works at auctions soon afterward. The
work they favored—by artists like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, and Jacob
Kassay—was ubiquitous three or four years ago. And, as the critic Jerry
Saltz noted with dismay in a widely circulated essay for New York, a lot of
it looked the same.
It was a brand of abstraction that wavered between two poles. On the one
hand were paintings whose slapdash creation lent them the look of a
painter’s drop cloth, or, as a writer for Bloomberg flippantly noted, a
“doodle.” On the other were paintings resembling degraded Minimalist
monochromes or Color Field paintings, as if someone had left, say, a
Barnett Newman out in the rain.
Unfailingly, these paintings came with alluring creation myths. They were
made with fire extinguishers (Smith), or electroplated as if they were
mirrors (Kassay), or rubbed with dirt from the studio floor (Murillo). The
artist Seth Price, in his excellent novel-cum-polemic Fuck Seth Price,
bitingly described these types of works as “tepid compositions, hesitant
and minimal in appearance, kind of pretty and kind of whatever, loaded
with back story.” They sold for upward of $400,000.
Lucien Smith, Two Sides of the Same Coin (2012), sold at Sothebyʼs London in February 2014
for $372,000 against an estimate of $66,000–99,000.
Image courtesy Courtesy of Sothebyʼs.
The polite, academic designation for them was “process-based abstract

painting,” which is still in occasional use—but it was Robinson’s “Zombie
Formalism” moniker, with its built-in critique, that really stuck.
Robinson intended the phrase as an aesthetic jab; it conjures mid-20th

century paintings of the sort promoted by Clement Greenberg, slumping
through the aisles of art fairs the world over. But others saw in the
designation a reflection of the viral nature of the phenomenon, which for a
handful of years boasted an alarming rate of infection among both newly
minted MFA graduates and the rapacious class of collectors that inevitably
trailed along behind them.
By early 2012, it seemed that Zombie Formalism, and the feeding frenzy
around it, had altered the fabric of the art world. The reins of aesthetic
power, which had for decades traded hands among critics, curators, and
various moneyed interests, now belonged solely to the global collector
class.
Installation view of Oscar Murilloʼs canvases at “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an
Atemporal World” in 2014. Photo courtesy of artnet News.
This shift brought no shortage of jeremiads, but the critic David Geers, in
his seminal essay “Neo-Modern,” wrote the most enduring takedown of the
Zombie Formalists. Comparing “the courtly properties of today’s art” to the
frothy Rococo style of 18th-century painters like Fragonard, Nattier, and
Boucher, Geers lamented that the work being snatched up by collectors
was similarly “limited largely to a propagandistic, affirmative, or
decorative role.”
I followed up with Geers via email recently, and he elaborated on this

assertion. “My sense of this moment,” he said,
is that [the] splitting of social strata—between the haves and have

nots, an alienated and ‘enlightened’ cognoscenti and the ‘rabble’
gathering in the streets—now echoes the social divisions (and art) of
the 18th century. Likewise, the model of the artist who can no longer
envision or model a future but can only appease the dominant power
of the present by aggrandizing a mythical past, seems very
reminiscent of epochs that precede the modern era.
Zombie Formalism, in other words, was in this view a new kind of court
painting, produced solely to flatter and enrich the titans of the new gilded
age. The tail of the market, the critics feared, had begun to wag the dog of
art.
***
This is hardly the first time that critics have bemoaned the influence of
wealth on aesthetics. If you unspooled the column inches decrying Jeff
Koons for pandering to the world’s billionaires, it would stretch, if not from
here to the moon, then at least from here to Versailles.
Still, the Zombie Formalism moment was unique: Not only were modern-
day courtiers muscling in on an empty aesthetic, they were smuggling truly
new levels of astronomical wealth into the market for very, very recent art,
too. The money from young collectors flooded in from the fetid financial
morass of hedge funds, derivatives trading, deregulation, and corruption.
They brought a penchant for speculation and fast profit—and a lack of
concern for the potential collateral damage to artists and art.
The pattern began around 2003, when the art market came roaring back
from what had been a relatively fallow period. Not coincidentally, this was
also a lucrative moment for Wall Street, whose 2003 profits accounted for
a whopping 40 percent of US corporate profits overall, up from only 10
percent three decades before. Money appeared to be littered everywhere,
giving the search for new financial instruments—and new methods to
exploit old ones—a sense of urgency.
Jeff Koonsʼs Diamond (Blue) is displayed and photographed by onlookers in the plaza,
October13, 2007, outside Christieʼs in New York. Photo courtesy Don Emmert/AFP/Getty
Images.
A flood of capital rushed through galleries, auction houses, and artists’

studios, with an almost exclusive focus on contemporary—and even
emerging—art. The money dwarfed that even of the 1980s, when
contemporary art became both an investment and a status symbol, and
artists like Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel achieved
megastar status. Now, gallery shows of young artists sold out before their
openings, and students at prestigious MFA programs, like Columbia
University’s, saw collectors snatching up their work right off the studio
walls. Speculation ran rampant. Auction house records were shattered with
startling regularity. Everyone—artists and collectors alike—seemed eager
to get in on the action.
Finance was turning toward various forms of derivatives—collateralized

debt obligations, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, etc.—
which had the benefit of being loosely regulated, complex to the point of
opacity, and hugely profitable. To those weaned in this environment, the
art market must have looked quite attractive: It, too, is largely unregulated,
with chandelier bidding and price fixing at the major auction houses, plus
tax evasion and money laundering among collectors. Its opacity is
sacrosanct: The surest sign that a gallery is not serious is that it openly
posts its prices. And the potential for profit is nearly limitless, since art is a
commodity untethered from objective measures of value.
On the ground at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2010. Photo credit Juan Castro Olivera/AFP/Getty
Images.
So it was hardly surprising that art got swept up in the financialization

whirlwind in the middle of the 2000s. But the real surprise came a few
years later, in the wake of the 2008 crash, when the art market managed a
rapid recovery that the Financial Times described as “gravity defying.” As
investors lost faith in traditional markets, alternative assets like art were
increasingly appealing. Aspiring artists, meanwhile, could believe that art
had become a viable career option.
***
And so the character of the art flipper emerged onto the scene. Where once
collectors had been invested in the long-term maintenance of artists’
careers, flippers were more concerned with near-term profit. Their
strategies mirrored the profiteering practices of Wall Street traders, which
left taxpayers, mortgage holders, and hopeful retirees holding the bag. But
art flippers had an added advantage: the pump-and-dump, a form of stock
fraud that’s long been illegal on Wall Street but continues to thrive
elsewhere.
If you lived through the 1980s (or saw Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall
Street), you might know the scam: An investor purchases a large amount of
low-priced stock and then aggressively promotes it to other buyers,
pumping up the stock’s value. When the initial investor calculates that the
market has been saturated, he dumps the stock for a tidy profit, crashing it
and leaving the other investors in the lurch.
Similarly, certain art flippers have been known to buy up large quantities
of a particular artist’s work. They bolster the artist’s reputation through
various channels of influence—a popular Instagram account, say, or a
network of friends and collectors they advise—only to dump the works at
auction after their price inflates.
Unlike stock fraud, such activity in the art market could not possibly be
regulated. And anyway, these speculative shenanigans occasionally
produce a win-win situation for buyers and artists alike: The rising tide
raises all boats. But it doesn’t always work this way.
Hugh Scott-Douglas, Untitled (2013). Image courtesy of Phillips.
Last year, Bloomberg published a gem-perfect story about the dealer and
collector Niels Kantor, who’d made a desperate attempt to unload a
Zombie Formalist-style work by Hugh Scott-Douglas. He bought the work

two years ago for $100,000 in the hopes of flipping it for a quick profit.
Instead, Kantor was forced to sell it at auction for less than a quarter of
what he’d paid for it.
“I feel like we were a little bit drunk and didn’t think of the consequences,”
Kantor admitted in the article. “Then the bottom fell out. Everyone got
caught with their pants down.”
It’s hard to feel bad for wealthy speculators who take a loss gambling on a
risky investment. For most of them, a misstep like Kantor’s means a small
percentage drop in their annual art-buying budget. But if you’re an artist, a
calamitous drop in prices brought on by speculative noodling can mean an
end of your ability to sell art—an end, to some degree, to your career.
Though some artists who experience a surge in speculative interest can

ride the wave to something resembling financial comfort, the vast majority
of money spent on their work merely flows around them, as if the creators
themselves were stones in a stream. Artists, after all, see no money from
secondary market sales—those profits go to auction houses and sellers.
And an artist jettisoned by the market today will land in a world where the
cost of urban living is increasingly prohibitive, and the teaching jobs that
once afforded artists a modicum of stability have devolved almost
exclusively into poorly paid adjunct positions.
It is also—crucially—a world that has likely saddled them with an

exorbitant amount of debt, often in the form of student loans. To enjoy the
brief privilege of making other people money, the price is high.
***
For on the other side of the speculative economy is an indebted populace,

forced to work increasingly insecure jobs to make ends meet—what some
economists call the precariat. They serve as both laborers and instruments,
since in addition to whatever valuable work they do, their debt obligations
create investment vehicles.
French demonstrators hold a banner reading “For the equality of rights, against a generalized
precariat” during a demonstration on May 8, 2017. Photo courtesy Lionel
Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images.
For its part, the contemporary art market is built on artists, the epitome of
evanescent, precarious work. Their labor produces investable artworks, but
their education is its own kind of locus of speculation and investment:
Many artists have accrued substantial debts attending the high-priced
MFA programs that are seen as a requirement to secure teaching jobs and
launch successful art careers. Debt, particularly student loan debt, plays a
vital structural role in the system here.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of

students who received an MFA in the visual and performing arts increased
more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2014. In that same period, the
cost of tuition at universities nationwide skyrocketed, with the average
tuition at private universities increasing by nearly 50 percent as well.
Factoring in room and board, students graduating a two-year MFA

program in the last six years will have paid approximately $100,000.
And the exorbitant cost of an MFA doesn’t stand alone—it’s layered on top
of an undergraduate degree. Unsurprisingly, the costs on that end are high
as well. In 2013 the Wall Street Journal concluded that students who
graduate from arts-oriented colleges incurred the highest amount of
student-loan debt of any undergraduate degree, to the tune of about
$21,000 on average. (All this is to say nothing about exorbitant interest
rates attached to these loans.)
For all but the wealthiest students, this is a considerable load to take on,
especially considering that the earning potential for an MFA graduate isn’t
stellar. Payscale, the online salary and compensation information
company, ranks the career earning potential for students receiving a
masters in studio art 182nd on a list of 189 top master’s degrees. None of
these facts are lost on the press, which has produced a stream of articles
dissecting the relative costs of high-priced arts training. From artnet News:
“Is Getting an MFA Worth the Price?” New York: “An MFA Degree Is Too
Expensive, and That’s Only the Start of the Problem.” The Atlantic: “MFAs:
An Increasingly Popular, Increasingly Bad Financial Decision.”
One of the most outspoken voices in this ongoing discussion has been the
artist, theorist, and educator Coco Fusco, who in recent years has
published indictments of the art school system in Modern Painters and the
Brooklyn Rail, and organized a daylong conference at the Cooper Union
alongside the artist Noah Fischer called “The Artist as Debtor.”
Fusco taught at the MFA program at Columbia University during the art
boom of the mid-2000s, when the program had a reputation as a white-hot
incubator for future market stars. Over the phone, she told me that art-
school students, flush with the optimism bred by an overheated market,
had been led to believe that an MFA was a ticket to fame and riches, and
many schools are not in the business of disabusing them of that notion.
“You have high-powered schools that charge a lot of money,” Fusco

explained, “and the way that they justify charging a lot of money is by
offering programs that are supposed to guarantee entry into the
marketplace… and that’s supposed to rationalize the debt.” While she was
part of the faculty at Columbia, Fusco said, she felt “our job was not to
teach, our job was to get [the students] into the marketplace.”
Even at a school with a reputation like Columbia’s, this was a ludicrous

proposition. “There are too many MFA programs,” Fusco said. “There are
too many students enrolled in MFA programs, and the market will never
be able to absorb them.”
Students pull a mock “ball and chain” representing the $1.4 trilling outstanding student debt
outside the second US presidential debate in 2016. Image courtesy Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty
Images.
This is the disappointing truth about dreams: They can’t come true for
everyone. And the weight of this truth is measured not just in
disappointment, but in debt. “If you are saddled with debt,” Fusco
concludes, “then that is going to inhibit your ability to invest time and
money in your work. And that means that you may make choices that are
market driven. In other words, if you have an opportunity to sell, you’ll

direct your production to whatever does sell; it means that you are looking
at the market.”
If one half of the Zombie Formalism moment is pure speculation, this is

the other. This situation Fusco outlines cannot help but color the entire
environment of art and its reception, and thus affect what artists make or
dream of making. It is not merely that, as the now-timeworn complaint
goes, bohemian or countercultural values have been replaced by a new
form of MFA-enabled academicism; it is that the figure of the artist-
professional has been further displaced by that of the artist-debtor. Under
the sign of debt, the future must meet the needs of a series of predictable,
regularized payments. This reality thus favors art that is itself predictable,
regularized, and produced in series.
And so, the crystallization of a zombie zeitgeist in the first years of the 21st
century’s second decade begins to make sense. It is the result of the
feedback loop created between the twin influences of speculation, on the
one hand, and debt, on the other. This balance of forces gives the moment
its characteristic tone: both knowingly flashy and studiously workmanlike,
“kind of pretty and kind of whatever.”
With a nod to the way in which a speculative market has recently had debt
as its bedrock, we might think of Zombie Formalism as symptom of this
larger and deeper condition: “debt aesthetics.”
What the further implications of this diagnosis are, and what new kinds of
engagement it suggests for artists, we will take up in Part II.
Chris Wiley is an artist and art critic living in New York.
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The Toxic Legacy of Zombie Formalism, Part 1: How an Unhinged Economy Spawned a New World of ‘Debt Aestheticsʼ 29/7/2018,

The Toxic Legacy of Zombie

What was Zombie Formalism? If you’re not an avid follower of art-world

The polite, academic designation for them was “process-based abstract

Robinson intended the phrase as an aesthetic jab; it conjures mid-20th

I followed up with Geers via email recently, and he elaborated on this

is that [the] splitting of social strata—between the haves and have

A flood of capital rushed through galleries, auction houses, and artists’

Finance was turning toward various forms of derivatives—collateralized

So it was hardly surprising that art got swept up in the financialization

Hugh Scott-Douglas, Untitled (2013). Image courtesy of Phillips.

Zombie Formalist-style work by Hugh Scott-Douglas. He bought the work

Though some artists who experience a surge in speculative interest can

It is also—crucially—a world that has likely saddled them with an

For on the other side of the speculative economy is an indebted populace,

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of

Factoring in room and board, students graduating a two-year MFA

“You have high-powered schools that charge a lot of money,” Fusco

Even at a school with a reputation like Columbia’s, this was a ludicrous

market driven. In other words, if you have an opportunity to sell, you’ll

If one half of the Zombie Formalism moment is pure speculation, this is

Chris Wiley is an artist and art critic living in New York.

Follow artnet News on Facebook:

the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes

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