The Meanings of Dean Kissick

An Unfinished Invective, A Redemption, and finally an Ode (Fan Fiction)

‘As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fiction’

- Dean Kissick

Perfunctory

Protean

Passim

^>>

When asked about his opinion of the self-styled Nouveaux Philosophes, Gilles Deleuze rather curtly dismissed them as ‘television idiots.’ The Nouveaux Philosophes were a group of young thinkers who seemingly came from nowhere, bursting onto the scene with much fanfare, lighting up the gloomy atmosphere of post-May 68 France. They decried the barbaric corruption of Marxism, railed against French fascism – and conveniently championed the prevailing liberal centrist consensus. They were led by the young philosopher Bernhard Hénri-Levy, son of a timber billionaire, and had behind them a formidable publicity campaign aided by his father’s extensive business contacts. These included François Pinault, one of the wealthiest and most influential French industrialists of all time; Jean-Luc Lagardère, owner of Hachette - the biggest publisher of books and magazines in France; and family contacts in all of the major newspapers in the country. Furthermore, BHL had the qualifications required by the French educational bureaucracy to practise as an ‘intellectual’ in a country obsessed with the diplomas - an aggrégation from the École Normale Superieure, where he often bragged of being taught by Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. He did his best to look the part and was regularly and conveniently photographed at protests looking taciturn and determined, or at lectures, with one hand contemplatively stroking his chin while the other held a slow-burning cigarette.

…

“Bro I can’t publish this, the dude has awesome parties with loads of hot women and still wanna be invited.”

“Alright, whatever, no worries, it’s stupid anyway lol”

…

Dieter Kissick (b. Dejan Kisić, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918) Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft, Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung, extracted January 7th 1946, engaged to serve in at PC-EX78654, Oxfordshire, RE-EX: RAF Brize Norton. Discharge to civilian duties in 1978 (retirement), resides in Oxford.

These days people might claim to be more wary of PR campaigns masquerading as organic cultural phenomena. With the CIA’s known well-known funding of Encounter Magazine and the Abstract expressionist movement during the Cold War, and the recent revelations that there exists an extensive security state presence on social media and internet forums that seeks to influence online culture – one would hope that many people would be on their guard. Yet with the emergence of the so-called Dimes Square phenomenon – it appears that the spirit of the ‘television idiots’ has never really left us.

“Hello”

“About you’re mother…be careful”

“That’s not necessary. No need to threaten me. I will agree, but this must be the last time.”

“Take a look at the image”

“This is really too much…It’s too obvious…I’m trying to cultivate something beyond…beyond your extortion”

“This will be the last time, don’t fret.”

“This would require something on a grand scaler. Even still, it’s not likely to succeed.”

“How so?”

“The eyebrows, the eyes, it’s plain for all to see.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy and his niece Honor Levy

The intellectual champion of Dimes Square is the critic Dean Kissick; art world operative, sometime Guardian culture contributor, advertising copywriter, and until recently the New York Editor of Spike Art. Much like BHL, and specific to his contemporary moment, Kissick looks and sounds the part: a millennial PMC cultural commentator of tantalizingly ambiguous sexual orientation, indeterminate ethnic origins, with a degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute and the type of public school British accent ,disguised by a few strategic mockney inflexions, that still manages to convince Americans that something serious and intellectual is being said. Who is Dean Kissick, the man? He is a utopian phenomenon. Kissick is every man and no man. Despite the meme accounts and rap songs that (not at all suspiciously) pay homage to the man himself, the meaning of Dean Kissick transcends the person of Dean Kissick. There are only meanings of Dean Kissick.

Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.

• Dean Kissick, 2024

The meaning (s) of Dean Kissick are emphatically the most vital questions. In one reading Kissick is, in common with his contemporaries, a writer whose journalism is indistinguishable from public relations, whose editorial is to all intents and purposes advertorial. This Kissick type is common within what we have come to rather euphemistically come to call the ‘art world’; a legitimised money laundering operation dedicated to a highly malleable asset class. At base the Art world operates like a cartel, much like OPEC, since it controls entirely the level of commodity production, and thus has a large degree of control over demand and price. Art writers serve these interests, as artist reputations are inflated or diminished according to the desirability of price fluctuations, their ebb and flow modified according to a pre-determined logic. On the superstructural level there is the chattering of the managerial representatives of the kleptocrats, the gallerists and curators - quite often their wives, who are often in want of something to do, in a not dissimilar way of the petition writing, humane societies, and animal charities of a previous age. Kissick serves as pontifex between these two speres, and belongs equally to both. Most serious art investors care as little about the specific features of an artwork as they do about barrels of oil – they care only about the price and that it may potentially increase. (In this sense, the zombie-like poshos of the Stop Oil campaigns have some logic to their protests – since by attacking works of art, they might as well be attacking oil itself.) As long as there exists an international kleptocracy, there will be an ‘art world’ with publicist asset managers such as Kissick. In this regard, Kissick is merely a cynical agent of his particular moment; a hired gun for a system of financial speculation and legalised peculation. This is only one meaning to Kissick.

“I know him, he’s cool. Did he offend you somehow?’

“Absolutely not I admire the man.”

The publicist critic of considerable skill and vision is perhaps capable of becoming the greatest artist of the moment, and any discussion that does not include Kissick as a serious contender for such an accolade is unserious. When asked to elaborate on his antipathy towards the Nouveaux Philosophes, Deleuze said that although they hadn’t initiated a ‘new’ school of philosophical thought - there was something horribly new about them nonetheless. They were, first and foremost, a journalistic phenomenon:

Talking about a book and getting people to talk about it are more important than what the book itself says or does not say. Taken to the limit, the multitude of newspaper articles, interviews, colloquia, radio or television broadcasts must replace the book, which might as well not exist at all.

[…] journalism discovered within itself a self-sufficient and autonomous thought. That's why, at the limit, a book is less valuable than a newspaper article on it or the interview it occasions. Intellectuals, writers, even artists, are thus invited to become journalists if they want to conform to the norms. It's a new type of thinking, the interview-thought, the instant-thought (La penseé minuit). One can even imagine a book about a newspaper article, and no longer the reverse. The relations of force have totally changed between journalists and intellectuals. Everything started with television, and the training routines that interviewers have forced on willing intellectuals. Newspapers no longer need books.

That Deleuze is speaking about philosophy, and quite specifically about philosophical books, shouldn’t give us too much pause, because his analysis applies universally across different spheres of cultural production. Indeed, it’s clear enough these days that a great deal of contemporary cultural phenomena are merely clumsy journalistic inventions. As a counterpoint, one could argue that the Futurist Manifesto’s publication in Le Figaro in 1909 was integral to its impact, that figures such as Diaghilev, Marinetti and Breton were themselves publicists first and foremost. Such an argument falters, however, when we consider that it is possible to attach to each figure a palpable and distinct aesthetic vision, a body of remarkable work associated with their movements, and – crucially – works that radically departed from those that had come before it.

As a result, a certain nostalgia towards those avant-garde movements has loomed large within the bourgeois imagination. It is a rather tortured nostalgia since the transgressions of those movements were directed primarily against the values of the bourgeoisie, and their representative, the bourgeois journalist - who at heart is a desperate masochist. The latter no doubt dreamt of being part of such an avant-garde in his salad days, perhaps even dabbled unsuccessfully – but now wants nothing more than to write about it.

Ideally, it would be an avant-garde where the entry requirements aren’t particularly onerous (their patron saint is the Sunday painter Come Good, Paul Gaugin) and can for example be satisfied by something as simple as geographical proximity. These days people want to move to ‘cool’ cities, or neighbourhoods because they believe that by simply drinking coffee in their proximity – some inspirational stardust might rub off on them and save them from their banal lives, or at the very least make them marginally less banal. When one reads the private diaries of Andrew Carnegie during his early career, we’re confronted with one of the richest men to have ever lived constantly moaning about how he wants to pack it all in to become a writer; after the next deal, the next merger, after he’s made enough money to live off etc. The concert halls, museums and galleries that bear his name are perhaps less a testament to his generosity, than bitter monuments to his thwarted bohemian ambitions. A desire to be part of La bohéme has been a motivation in many times and in many places, and perhaps it was propelled by over-zealous and masochistic journalists in most cases.

The Dimes Square of Dean Kissick is just such a place and more so, since it places no particular emphasis on one form of art (nor produces any, as he concedes) but rather focuses upon the personas that inhabit the area. I contend that Dimes Square, even if such a place ‘exists’, must solely be the invention of Dean Kissick – or of the utopian phenomenon of Dean Kissick, the meaning of whom we are at present attempting to ascertain.

I propose that the popular archetype of the successful contemporary artist is indistinguishable from the contemporary journalist in word, appearance and deed. Decked in dark-toned smart-casual athleisure, his aesthetic vision is seamless and minimalist (the default mode of the uninspired fraud) his work is aspirational (you can do it too?!), his ‘process’ easy to follow (take notes and ask questions). His art is a tabula rasa on which he indolently asks us to fill in the gaps – when not, at this point, simply changing his clear-framed plastic glasses for steel-framed ones, and removing his ever-present artful baseball cap (with its nods to proletarian affectation) to reveal a journalistically bald head – so that he may tell us exactly what we should think.

“Honestly he’s super nice”

“What have I said that contradicts that?”

The art world embraced the magical spiritualities of the elders, but it has also returned to an old view that artworks can possess a mysterious, world-changing power; according to the texts issued by art institutions around the world, society’s ills might be healed through inclusivity, symbolic representations, and arcane, coded gestures. Reparations can be paid in images, guilt sloughed away with incomprehensible signifiers of accountability. - Dean Kissck 2024

For all you have pillaged you must erect in the shadows of their irreplaceable absence some paltry monuments to the demi-urge(s)

In this sense, Dean Kissick himself is undoubtedly the most important artist in Dimes Square – and Dimes Square his most significant work. Referencing Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, Kissick attempts to recall a similarly consequent ‘new spirit’ emanating from the theatrical intrigue-filled Paris of the 1950s. But the spirit of Dimes Square is merely an old spirit, under a new guise. Artistic movements are no longer required when one can simply invent stories about artistic movements; the work of art is less important than the artist, or more specifically the story about the ‘artist’, who along with his artistic movement and his community of artists, ‘might as well not exist at all.’ Yet in Kissick’s view, such conditions are not only inevitable, but immutable:

“…it has recently felt like your identity, which is now seen as residing elsewhere, in your race, your gender, your sexuality, your personal history, your trauma, has become a key part of what gives value to your self-expression; and this contemporary obsession with the identity of the artist is not that different from the overblown fascination with the narcissistic Downtown personality. Not so different at all. In both instances the person making the work is allowed to eclipse the work itself, likely as a consequence of how social media has changed our understanding of culture. The most powerful cultural forms in the attention economy are your personality, your identity, and your image, which combine in the stories you tell about yourself, and these have become an increasingly large part of what makes an artist a star.”

The journalism/art of Kissick seemingly strives to disavow any relation to journalism proper, whilst remaining in the final analysis indistinguishable from it. It simultaneously applies the Louis Theroux defence (the wry English smile towards silly American excess) whilst compelling us to accept, without objection, a highly tendentious and contestable view of cultural production:

The persona is the message; which is, as many have observed, very Warholian. There’s plenty of great art coming out of Downtown New York if you ask me, but I also believe it’s about more (or less) than making art: it’s making a name for yourself and a place for yourself in the story.

Evident in this generally innocuous and anodyne thought, then, is the second and far more insidious meaning of Dean Kissick. This meaning relates to a worldview which embraces the supremacy of what I have termed the ideological aesthetic, the back-sliding and regression of two terms previously distinct which, through the intervention of technology, have become mutually interchangeable. Kissick’s artwork Dimes Square, he claims, is outside of the realm of ideology:

I don’t think it represents an opposition to progressive values but rather a wish to retreat from a culture in which everything is supposed to be political. It’s a reflection of what’s also happening elsewhere. Culture is changing, rolling on as it always does.

Of course, any idiot knows that a purported retreat from ideology is in itself an intensified ideological position. That idiot was originally Louis Althusser, but many idiots since have attempted to reframe (steal) this basic proposition. One such idiot, Jacques Derrida, is tangentially beloved by the fictional characters of Dean Kissick’s Dimes Square through their special fondness for one of his alleged disciples - the greatest northern, middle-aged, purveyor of nonce-word philosophy since Roy Chubby Brown: Angelicism 01.

According to Derrida:

‘The less politics there is, the more there is; the less enemies there are, the more there are.’

He was writing in reference to the thought of Carl Schmitt (Nazi), who noted that liberal democratic states produce conditions of de-politicisation which inevitably (and paradoxically) lead to the subjects within such states becoming both hyperpoliticised and de-subjectified. They are no longer political in any meaningful way, but nonetheless gravitate towards gestures of subjective hyper-political defiance, where they use pre-determined practises to define themselves as distinct from others – or in nominal rebellion against representatives of authority.

The tedious result is in an over-saturated public sphere filled with small, meaningless political gestures, lacking in impact – which cannot, and indeed were never meant to – effect any change whatsoever. This state of affairs is no doubt familiar to anyone who’s ever spent any amount of time on social media. For what all they willingly give away on these sites, the subject is afforded one hollow and bitter consolation, what Jean Baudrillard wryly designated the ‘liberating claim of subjecthood.’ The latter is the primary motivation of the characters in Dean Kissick’s Dimes Square, whose stories

are written by themselves and by others, often by people who aren’t in New York, who’ve never been to New York, as popular commentary and frantic obsession. You’re performing yourself and you’re reading your reviews as you do. It’s a very unusual way to live. And these new modes of performance and self-expression are more avant-garde than the rest of what their performers make.

Dimes Square then, as is confirmed by the above, is merely a journalistic invention (by the artist ‘Dean Kissick’) that captures a more disturbing universal reality. Kissick, in a few moments of candour, admits as much:

[…] Dimes Square is a real place mapped onto the internet – but “Dimes Square” as a concept might also be understood as a mapping of online performances and aesthetics back onto the real world.

Yet, Kissick claims – at the same time, and rather oddly– that it is ‘more avant-garde.’ But in truth, it is only the arrière-garde of an already extant, ubiquitous, and much advanced cultural and social phenomenon – as ‘avant-garde’ perhaps as the musical Rent, with which it shares some of the same cultural ambience. So what is Kissick’s purpose in making such a claim for his Dimes Square?

His purpose is to compel us to succumb to and indulge in the seemingly compulsory narcissism that has become a blight in regard to all art, and much else besides. It is a narcissism that is the principal cause of a near-universal spiritual crisis, but one which is far from inevitable despite the conditions which produce it. Social media has not only ‘changed our understanding of culture’, it has physically changed our cognitive processes - an unforeseen (though not unwelcome) consequence of deliberate design and engineering decisions.

One symptom is the excess of time devoted to contemplation of the self. I’m far from being the first to recognise the dramatic difference between online and ‘irl’ personas. It is a truism that the vast majority of people are much less funny, interesting, or good-looking in person than they tend to be online. The formation of the ego is a perilous enterprise rife with misrecognition and self-deception, and before social media, one rarely challenged by external evidence. I don’t believe there was ever a time when we were compelled to so regularly defend idealised projections of the self against charges of inauthenticity, either explicit or implicit, from ourselves or others. The fundamental difference between ‘virtuality’ and ‘actuality’, and the ability to distinguish between those two states, lies at the heart of maintaining psychological equilibrium. Conversely, I believe an inability to do so is one of the principal causes of collective psychosis.

A quotidian loop of recognition/misrecognition where virtuality and actuality become ever more indistinct plays in the background whilst we scroll on devices and interfaces designed to instil addiction and dependence, and which we use as a means of communication, self-actualisation, self-promotion, self-abjection, political mobilisation and consumption (in ways which coalesce). We have all become heteronomous subjects of technological domination, a collection of ‘unique’ individuals, with an infinite multitude of subjective perceptions and delusional conceptions of ourselves, existing individually within a technological total state dominated by Semiocorporations that subjugate us equally - unique only as individual collections of ‘data.’ That Kissick is resigned to, and indeed welcomes, the proliferation of such diabolical conditions for artistic production should inform us of the malign nature of his agenda, and of the journalistic art world Ponzi-scheme he serves. There is an alternative that would provide instant relief, but its mere mention tends to fill most with desperate and acute anxiety…smash all of the phones, all of the screens, and disconnect completely - 2022

“Well? Did they notice? I told you to change their names, as if the eyebrows weren’t enough of a giveaway!”

“No, no one noticed, of course, no need to change names, there’s no sense in wielding such power if it isn’t known to the initiated to be arbitrary, but they didn’t seem to care too much, time to re-assess and re-deploy.”

“I followed the brief”

“Yet you have failed”

“The brief cannot change or serve as a post-hoc justification for failure, absurd, absurd.”

“I’m only your handler, not your overseer.”

“Well?”

“What?”

“Will she be safe?”

“I can’t guarantee it. But since your family has been in service of the Department for such a long time, I don’t see why it should be a problem.”

Only ten years ago, the art world was something very different: a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities. It was a space of spectacle and innovation, where artists tried out wildly different mediums and entertained radical ideas about what art could do and why. They were workshopping new cultural forms for a new millennium. Art was where experimentation happened, where people worked out what it felt like to be alive in this strange new century and how to give that feeling a form. Artists were researchers who were never expected to come to any conclusions. They had the freedom of absolute purposelessness.

“Hello Dean, darling, I’m in a lot of pain…but I’m in very good hands.”

“I’m coming! Don’t speak to anyone!”

…

“Was it worth it?”

“No.”

(But it will be, fear not)