Cullbergbaletten’s autumnal offering, “Ekman’s Triptych”, under the creative wand of choreographer Alexander Ekman is one brainy, luminous, sizzling piece of work. Rather than proceed onto the obvious route of contemporary artists and gun for either shock value or political correctness, Ekman utilizes the gifted members of the dance company to visually challenge his audience with the question: “What is entertainment?”.

As it happens, the answer, aided by Ekman’s aesthetics, conceptualization, choreography – and overall piece execution is as near flawless as the acutely postulated riddle.

However, this is not a review of Ekman’s work. Rather, it is a review of his reviews. Yes. The reviews that are best unread. Yet, should you read them – you might, if you are adept at interpreting art, find that they are lackluster, half-hearted – or just rushing the subject (doubtlessly on their way to the journalist’s favorite pastime – the coffee break, or after work beer – which ever is closer). I’ve written on the subject of backsliding art critics before, and not much seems to improve in the way of performance review or analysis since. Not that I envisioned it changing for the better.

Still. What is art and media critique? In the end – it is a conduit between audience and apprehension. The role of a critic is to interpret whether your money will be well spent on this, or that, art show, film, or other performance (in the piece, Ekman keeps returning to this very subject – the fact that the exchange of money facilitates entertainment – a not so subtle hint obviously lost on the analytical faculty of his critics).

There are a number of ways a critic will try to achieve the relay of information. What method will the critic use to convey the general lie of the land to the (potential) spectator? Well, some might bid at constructing an impossibly sly insult, or string insults together as to form a near-coherent text. This kind of critic is usually young, inexperienced, and has not learned (or refuses to learn) to separate the role of critic-conduit, his ego, from the work that’s being reviewed.

Others, will inadvertently struggle to circumvent the task by more or less relevant name-dropping. A third category will be either rushed, uninterested or just plain and simple – rude. Most critics belong to this latter league of lazy journalists.

But on occasion, however seldom, a critic will in fact do the job. Job being; a careful, considerate and analytical argument that politely will suggest to the reader what he, or she is getting into. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is with a deep sigh of regret that I read the reviews of Ekman in the two largest Swedish daily newspapers. Both have over the years been bled dry of quality and talent, and whatever has remained is certainly not up to decent standard. While giving Alexander Ekman some encouraging words, and furnishing the rest of the text with the standard issue chewy tittle tattle – none of them actually seem have been awake during the performance. The texts are superficial and devoid of insight.

This is disheartening indeed, especially given the context. During these last two or three years, social media has all but destroyed analytical thought. It has put reason way in the back of the proverbial school bus. The omnipresent “Like”-button of Facebook parturition has in the eyes of the audience substituted thought for a simple press, or non-press of a thumbs up button. The critics, follow suit with the sheep herd of the digital population. People seem to be furnishing their minds with “Like”-buttons where there are none. The immediate, unmitigated response of “liking” something, whatever it may be, is like a knee-jerk reflex. As empty and complacent as the broadcaster needs the audience to be in order to tube feed them with the following piece of prêt-a-porter culture.

“Ekman’s Triptych” is, or at least should theoretically be, the perfect starting point for a discourse on popular culture. Countless are the times and hints, where Ekman almost seems to be chastising the audience with the effects of entertainment – and their relation to it. The three-piece-show, where each part carefully examines modern attitudes towards entertainment is as balanced as it is nominal in setting the stage in the mind of the audience, never for a second letting go of vision or excellence of performance. The minimalistic, deconstructivist portrayal of near-Lynchian ruination in the third act, offsetting the unadulterated ecstasy of the first, should be studied in detail. It is as much a foreboding as it is a factual warning.

In essence, art and culture is one tough mistress. Once you get past the universal lie society tells the limited of mind: that everything is relative (nothing is relative, there are only badly stated premises) and that they may safely rest upon their taste as the sole judge of “good”, “mediocre” or “bad” – we’re left with the fact that the more you know, the more diverse your disciplines, the better your tools for understanding the world will be. To the educated, the world speaks in a different, more fulfilling way. As it does to those who are brave enough to un-zone themselves from the everyday necessity of tunnel vision.

Even if the fundamental function of a critic is flawed, and on top of that we’re left with critics who seem to lack tools with which to do the actual critique, the truth about art is brutally simple: You need to learn about it yourself, and you will need to take a long, winding and wonderful journey to be able to catch its signals and subtleties.

A eager viewer, a traveler of art, will transcend taste. He will leave it at the door in favor of experience.

Ekman’s Triptych is a wonderful place to discover upon that journey. Regardless of where the traveler might be in his personal odyssey of the discovery of art.

Following the auction, voices were raised either in artful indignation at the street artist Mr. Brainwash, who’s work not only met the estimate price, but so surpassed it that some even speculated that well known scandalous media personality and former street artist, popularly known by the moniker “Banksy”, was the one to raise the prices in anticipation of his own contribution to coming auctions.

And while that perhaps might well be true,  it is dangerous, however, to speculate in advance of facts. In reality, even if he did, it is of no real importance.

For a discussion about art is best not intermingled with that of its value. Value, as such, has no real consequence in the art world. The art market follows much the same rules as the stock market does, even if the arenas of exchange are quite different: One speculates, one invests and one usually has rather poor taste. And since taste has always been for either the relatively poor middle classes (back in the days where individuality still hadn’t destroyed the concept of social classes) – or the ridiculously wealthy – again, it is of no consequence for the investment that art can be.

No. This will not be a discourse price of art or its monetary value. Something else entirely is the objective.

The dangerous threshold that street art has long been on the verge of passing – the complete and total loss of integrity – has been crossed. Street art has been quite the phenomenon in the past ten to five years. And in the last two, it has exploded to the point of near annihilation. Street art suffers from over exposure from blogs, digital documentation and media time. Its innate vale has been drained in a massive onslaught of zealous, ever-present, real-time coverage. Street art has been crushed under the weight of too much reality, shattering its double standard of illusory intent, sending it back to the fine art galleries, where canvas and rebellion hang, neatly lighted, side by side.

Conventional art has, as always, lurked in the shadows, playing the symbiotic part of the hidden accomplice, waiting for its baby sister to come of age, the corner of its mouth presumably suspended in mockery. No art truly comes from no where, no matter what credo or manifest street artists have desperately clung to. The parasitic relationship between conventional (contemporary, even if contemporary is only that with it self) and street art has evolved into an auto immune disease where the one vessel has thoroughly, and beyond recall, poisoned the other.

Curiously, on the Phillips de Pury & Company auction of October 14th, two other works were sold. A tapestry and a screen print by Andy Warhol.

In many ways, it is a fitting eulogy to the defiant spirit of street art. Andy Warhol was the perfect post modern artist. He perfected the principle of Illusion, making it the most egalitarian and democratic principle there is: Everyone could be an artist, and as walk-ons in his studio, often were. It was the complete effacing of the artist, everyone being the perfect accomplice to art – the work being instantly successful by way of the walk-on. If you were there, you counted, you did art. Whatever fame arose from it was not from the work of a genius but from the mechanics of transfer, the media that helped the “artist” channel an image. The media that today is perpetual, enough for everyone that cares to be a part of it. Indeed, it is so plentiful that it is best described as a joyous, hysterical, rampant machine.

When the work of Mr B sells for a speculative amount, street art has come full circle where illusion and machinery are concerned. It has copied the democratic principle of anyone, the walk-on, as deterministic artist – and rendered the actual art work obsolete. The light is once more centered on the artist. No one cares for the actual work – the value lies in its transfer – that machine that has made it possible. The artists.

It is by way of this mechanism that street art is legitimized, and as such, obliterated. Street art cannot exist outside the streets. Its value lies in anonymity of the artist and aesthetic transfer of the work. When attention limelights the author, the work dies, and the movement loses its integral, street, value.

In this death, street art shares much with the cultural fad of urban exploration. Both cultural inclinations are best practiced out of the eye of the public. Both rely on the transmission of media. Both degenerate and retrograde when illuminated from within, displaying appalling lack of integrity, vision, consistency, ingenuity.

Art has, and has always had, an involuntary pact with value. And while conventional art has learned to co-exist with value, some would claim in spite of value, street art, that particular brand of creativity – imprinted and burdened with the whiff of urban sewer – is still but a unprepared sibling, caught unaware in an excess of real time exposure – at the mercy and feet of art dealers and audience alike.

For all intents and purposes, Street art is, in fact and deed – dead.

Art isn’t a product of reality. Art is not above or beyond life. Art is simply life, perfected. If we refer to anything as a “normal”, it is usually only because that state occurs more often than its opposite.