The coney island art fair

The art world has no mouth and it must scream. I go to the galleries. I go to the Frieze Fair. I go to the Whitney Biennial, and even write about it. They all feel powerless. In their effort to forecast (or, God forbid, enact) some practical transformation in the world, the artworks they present emulate moral sentiments. Most importantly, these fairs don't feel as good as my last visit to the worst place in New York City: Coney Island.

Attracting masses of international tourists in the first half of the twentieth century, when it was "the playground of the world," Coney Island is now something between a William Wyler VHS that's peeling on the sides and a booming crack distribution business. Things change, you see: they don't sleep anymore on the beach. The Reddit dads of Park Slope, the MCM playwrights of Downtown, and the techno-junkies of Bushwick fled to Far Rockaway for a wave. As the rougher waterfront rollercoasters turned into death machines, Coney Island was not a place for respectable, life-affirming people.

Yet, compared to Frieze and the Whitney, Coney Island is an event. First, it is a better trip, short and balmy on the Q train. I cross clouds of contiguous foliage as if on a tropical railway. Pigeons nest comfortably in the terminal's columns, in the line's last station. Someone is going through the trash. A man listens to Fito Paez on a fake JBL speaker, loud enough that you can hear it from the streets two stores down. A woman screams on her phone while holding a baby in each arm. I can't recall how she managed to hold the gadget without having my mind evoke the multiple arms of an anime character. All these pretty little scenic signs of social disintegration float around on your way to the sand. Russians and Ukrainians live peacefully among each other here because, in Coney Island, they are treated the same: as scum.

Ethnographizing the luxury of elite museums is not as attractive as ethnographizing outer-borough decadence. The rich are boring, and they know it. The art world, encircled by academia, has been trying hard to find the exotic in decoloniality, as we know. Extracting peripheral cultures and weird epistemologies to showcase them to their metropolitan friends in a jar. It's cute – poverty becomes a cabaret show inside some rich kid's aquarium. They shout: "Look what my parents got me!"

For my part, I liked to walk around Coney Island and feel the weight of insolvency, how everything there is authentically decrepit, authentically marginal, authentically bare. There is a thickness to the whole ordeal. In this attempt to get by, people thrive existentially, glimmering with an eerie aura. While major art shows make low-stakes compromises and risk nothing in their efforts to monumentalize the oppressed, a place like Coney Island offers you that investment on a plate, as slice-of-life—the realism and terror at the borders of the machine. Capital shows you some cleavage: homeless guys and their instability. Suddenly, someone has a knife; you hear the frisson, a collective grasp. Beautiful. I don't think you should get mugged to experience present-day America, but you should feel threatened by it.

This takes us to my second point. Coney Island was a better thrill. Aesthetically, I mean. The beauty of art mustn't be subjective, nor is its emotion stagnant. Catharsis is not a mystical state you induce yourself into if you stare long enough at the dullest possible painting. Your heartbeat must go up a notch; your guts tremble, and your lungs tighten. It would help if you felt threatened. Art should make you shit yourself. Stendhal fainted from joy while contemplating the Basilica of Santa Croce. But that was before pornography, you say. Now, we only suffer a physiological entrancement with art if it is violent enough to explode our crude carcasses. Yes, I say, a desensitized audience requires a supernormal stimulus. I'm certain Ballard and DeLillo would testify to the beautiful aesthetic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hyper-concrete, head-banging, bodily entertainment for the masses: make art hurt again.

Amusement parks offer, in this respect, a more robust aesthetic experience than most museums. And even if circus and folk art were never integrated into the domain of high arts, there is still some back-and-forth blurring their limits. There is a genealogical trail going from the cabinet of curiosities to the Six Flags, for instance, as there is one from pre-cinematic devices to modern VR rides. Zglinicki mentions the nickelodeons, individual kinetoscopes invented by Edison around the same time as the magnetic tape, as the precursor to video arcades. When new media is explored for aesthetic effect, it's rarely high-art pioneering. Mareoramas were shown in the 1900 Paris Exhibition before any art installation recycled the same effects. To this day, amusement parks do a better job of providing corporeal engagement to their audience. Universal's Shrek 4-D was better than Alfredo Jaar's last work for the Whitney. The panoramas of Robert Barker are closer to a Coney Island house of mirrors (or to The Summit, even) than to most artworks we can witness in these famous fairs.

The best artistic experiences we currently have are just engineering accomplishments. James Turrell's immensities, for example. Robert Irwin at Kraftwerk Berlin. The most popular artistic experiences also are technological features. Please think of the Immersive Van Gogh (and what it means for the art world). Art writer Mohammad Salemy has called these "tech formalism" to explain how contemporary curators have favored site-exclusive, anti-virtual forms of spectatorship after the pandemic. Taken to its extreme, this sort of work is the invention fair as the art fair again, with works acting like giant toys of physical impact and display of a miraculous science.

If we rethink the museum through the amusement park, it may look like the former derives from the latter more and more. An open fair like the Documenta or an open museum like the Inhotim is not much different from a visit to Coney Island. We go from one trinket to another, seeking yet another original experience. We plan for some intensity and anticipate the rush. We form lines to enter each attraction. We wait. But while Coney Island may satisfy our hunger once in a while, tampering with the death drive with adrenaline boosts, most artworks are lackluster and disappointing from the point of view of bodily violence. As the reader may know, most art is terrible, and there is not much else. But at least at Coney Island, if your ride sucks, you just got a good shake of the legs. Now, you can sit at the dock and watch the tide coming and going while you enjoy the post-cochlear dizziness.

Finally, my third point is that Coney Island has a better vibe overall. Art fairs are too pretentious, too full of petit bourgeoisie types trying to expiate their class sins. They give off a strange mixture of resentment and guilt. And they are trying to hand-feed you Takes while at it, to which they employ a rather condescending tone. Contemporary art is humorless. When it's comical, it's calculated. I have no good memories with friends at contemporary art fairs because the sociability of art fairs is systematic. I have never heard a good joke in a New York City gallery because jokes require looseness of relation. Instead, the artworks are always the punchline there. A tight-minded aristocracy keeps its level around them. They smell of expensive shampoo. Coney Island smells like sweat, salt, and foam. In a time when alt-lit revival accounts seek the Angelic Singularity in a race for the ultimate avant-garde, broken spaces such as that relinquished little segue of amusement parks on the beach emerge as glossy gems in the holy grail of the apocalypse.

Thinking of Coney Island, I understand why Baudrillard was obsessed with Disneyland. The fantasy landscape of something else offers itself in lieu of any predictability against the backdrop of capitalistic unevenness. At worst, it's very curious; at best, revolutionary—the crystallizing membrane of a liminal space folding American society like a bouquet. The Coney Island Art Fair, as I should call it, is well worth a visit. I can't say anything about those other ones, for sure. They will undoubtedly leave a worse taste in your mouth. When you are back home, reclining in your chair, exhausted from the day out, the after-memory of the beach won't be as hollow as the reminiscences of the dreary art you're forced to witness in those places. You won't have such a lousy consciousness either and won't feel the need to confess your sins. The art world wants to take you on the Alterity Safari, where they'll immediately direct you to the Booth of Transcendental Shame. Coney Island, its antidote, is a banquet for the body.