Lana Newstorm
Invisible Art

If there is one thing I hate about common thought, it’s that phrase shot blankly at much of contemporary art. That "I could have done that too," which straddles ignorance and snobbish conceit, often uttered by regular attendees of the art circuits because "going to see an exhibition gives an air of sophistication." Like everything, art is also destined to evolve. It’s been clear for eras now that art is not limited to just painting. Great contemporary artists - like Piero Manzoni and Marcel Duchamp - have further explored the concept, arguing that even more fundamental than the work itself is the action and the artistic process.

Authors like Claes Oldenburg (in addition to the aforementioned Manzoni) have pondered the concept of art’s marketability: with self-irony, they have demonstrated that anything, if defined as art, can be sold.

This concept is also the basis of Lana Newstorm's invisible art (though inadvertently). Inadvertently because there is no true artistic act, of any kind, not even theoretical. The artist tries to demonstrate that within that void there is substance, coming off as crazy or simply a skillful manipulator (the exhibition presentation is unmissable, where the creator of this nothingness sparked panic by claiming that one of her works was stolen). These are invisible artworks, therefore: they are there, but cannot be seen or touched. Yet they can be bought, for astronomical sums.

Let’s get to the point: no matter how much one may rack their brain, I find it impossible to defend Newstorm’s work. We are faced with unintentional plagiarism: Yves Klein with "Le Vide" has already shown that man cannot rationally face the unknown, the invisible: it is shocking to see an empty museum. One could also reference the Fluxus movement, with John Cage's "4'33"" or, again, the works of Yoko Ono. One could, and it is no coincidence that all these historically important artistic interventions belong to a distant past.

In the first paragraph, I stated how art needs to evolve, and that stopping at just painting makes no sense. And what is innovative in Lana Newstorm’s invisible art? Absolutely nothing. Neither at the conceptual level nor as food for thought. It all sounds like a con, an unforgivable pretext to hide behind the ease of "Now anything can be sold."

It was a concept that could have worked in the first half of the twentieth century, not now. In the twenty-first century, there is room for Jeff Koons' kitsch art, the study of American culture in Matthew Barney's hybrid cinema/video art, and much more, certainly not this little thing. A little thing in bad taste, if I may say: it’s the first time I encounter a work that truly seems derived from a ten-second reflection just upon waking, like "oh! I'll do this!"

Useless, sad, insignificant.

But there's always someone who falls for it.