[Jonnax]

So any critique now is cancel culture?

[Udik]

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.

[tsimionescu]

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?

[Udik]

> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.

Not explicitly, no. But it seems to me to follow the well known pattern of "hey, look, I've found something damning buried among X's old stuff".

Yes, art can be racist, it's just not the metre you use to judge it.

[yarcob]

> 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.

[Udik]

Please re-read:

"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?"

[yarcob]

How is this "cancelling" the artist?

It's just mocking people for paying millions for bad art.

People make fun of other people paying too much for art all the time.

[luckylion]

> It is not, in any way, calling for the artist to be canceled.

Please. "I'm not saying we should do something about it, but oh my gosh, look how offensive it is".

[rfw300]

I suppose all criticism is cancel culture if you just pretend the “cancel” part is there.

[luckylion]

Criticism != What this article does.

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.

[Jonnax]

What dirty work? Didn't this guy get $69 million dollars?

And you're using a word which from the wikipedia article is described as:

"The term "desk murderer" (German: Schreibtischtäter)[1] is attributed to Hannah Arendt and is used to describe state-employed mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, who planned and organised the Holocaust without taking part in killings personally."

I'm amazed.