The Glory of Stupidity

Since the end of the 1980s, artistic practices have flourished which choose deliberate stupidity, regression or superficiality. The triad of modern otherness, represented by the madman, the child and the primitive, is then supplanted by the figure of the stupid adolescent. Sometimes critical, sometimes complicit, this art has made its way into galleries, magazines, biennials and even in the most important private collections have become museums, including those of Dakis Joannou, François Pinault and Eli Broad. Martin Kippenberger, Wim Delvoye, the YBA, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Gelitin… or even Dumb & Dumber at the cinema or Beavis & Butt-Head and Jackass at the television: the success of compulsive stupidity is resounding. Cultures specific to adolescence become the place of a fixation, of a refusal to access to the standardized world of “adult” culture by creating spaces of respite out of the world of social responsibilities. At the height of the wave neoliberal, the future is for many a source of anxiety – and regression, a refuge. In an approach rooted in both (cultural) history and theory (aesthetics), Morgan Labar tries here to understand what founded these practices artistic and imposed their new legitimacy. Navigating by sight between Jeff Koons and Presence Panchounette, Baywatch and Adorno, the Ramones and Walt Disney, this work analyzes a historical phenomenon that is unprecedented in its magnitude – the movement from the margins to the spotlight, by which stupidity has sometimes lost its critical dimension and its subversive character to become one of the cultural logics of the time.