Copyright The New York Times
In 2016, the artist Joshua Citarella began making a series of giant photographs imagining dystopian lifestyles. Each symbolized the near-future outlook of a certain niche ideology. The “cyber nihilist anarchoprimitivist” naps in an electric car packed with survival supplies; the “transhumanist” enjoys a blood cocktail in a high-rise apartment tended by machines. One 8-by-12-foot image is a self-portrait of the artist as an “anarchocapitalist.” It shows Citarella in a dormlike room stocked with solar panels, jars of food and a desktop computer. Out the window, a figure canoes through a flooded Manhattan alley. The scene also reflected the artist’s circumstances. “That work was shot in my Chinatown apartment, but it could not fit in the apartment,” Citarella, 38, said in an interview. At the time, his work wasn’t selling and he had given up his studio. The speculative bubble buoying post-internet artists like Citarella and Parker Ito had burst. Friends of his started working smaller. “I made the work bigger,” he said. “That meant that it had to be stored or it had to sell.” (It did eventually sell, at steep discounts.) Citarella’s painstaking, ambitious path speaks to the economic and political challenges that have shaped millennial artists. Instead of cold-water lofts and rolls of canvas, they had cramped apartments and cracked Adobe software. The internet, with its particular mix of irony and sincerity, crudeness and high culture, was their salon. Citarella sympathizes with survivalists on at least one point: When old structures fail, you must build new ones. He has become well known in the art industry for founding Do Not Research, a digital magazine and discussion board that analyzes politics and culture. He has helped run newsletters, classes and a gallery. He describes these projects as life rafts for the Titanic, meaning slow-moving institutions like museums and schools: “You’re hopeful that the mainstream legacy establishment can avert the crisis of the iceberg,” he said, “but you don’t know if it’s going to.”
