This critique is clearly singling out a few of the 5000 images for lack of adherence to the current standard of PC. The headline is in line with this- who does seriously think that art should be "pretty"? What "is not so pretty" is supposed to mean, other than that there's some stuff in it we should disapprove?
Asking art- good or bad- to be politically correct is ridiculous; and anyway the "artwork" is a composition, not the sum of the individual images.
The critique is calling the art bad and sometimes mysoginistic. It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.
And yes, art can be racist or misogynistic or problematic in other ways. There's nothing wrong with calling it that. Or do you think it's cancel culture to call "Birth of a Nation" racist?
> look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff
Since this is specifically an auction of "old stuff" looking through it makes sense. And while the author is very critical of the work, the most significant criticism isn't that it's not PC. The article mostly complains that most of the art is shallow and won't age well.
"We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is… innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars… at this?
These are the questions that go through my head. But that’s probably just “fancy-dancy elite art homo” thinking, right?"
Tone and style makes the difference between criticism and the works of the Schreibtischtäter. It's a great German compound word from Schreibtisch (=desk) and Täter (=perpetrator). It's the person sitting at a desk, keeping their hands clean, writing to make others do the dirty work.
> Trump-is-a-Poopy-Head/Cheeto Mussolini genre of art
This and other comments would seem to blow past the fact that the critique also pans the “pc” political commentary (see also the comment on the George Floyd piece).
Ironically it is people in this thread decrying cancel culture that are refusing to engage with anything that might possibly contradict their politics.