Brad Troemel

THE CONTEMPORARY ART REPORT is an hour-long exploration of the defining shifts in art from 2015-2025. The report features 20 distinct chapters, each one consisting of a complete analysis paired with an exhibition, main character, or event that illustrates the change.

A definitive guide to millennial aesthetics

A video essay examining the effect of Artificial Intelligence on art and culture.

There was a time when “healing” was something people did as their physical wounds were nursed back to health. Today the word healing is applied to seemingly every esoteric ailment; people are healing from epigenetic trauma, healing from internalized whiteness, healing from their chronic deficits in attention and energy. Everyone you know is now healing from something. There’s a pervasive belief that everyone was born sick and must “do the work” to heal ourselves for the rest of our lives, even though we’re told a full recovery may never be possible. How did we come to view ourselves so antagonistically? Why does everyone now look in the mirror and see a person who’s inherently and irreparably disordered? How exactly does the healing process work? And to what degree do these disorders come from within us as we’ve been told, or are they the result of influences outside our control?

Video essay examining the cultural effects of hyperliteralism from the Satanic Panic of the 80s to the identity politics of today.

American artist Brad Troemel in The Exit Report implores: QUIT THE ART WORLD BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! Don’t do that MFA programme, don’t move to New York and certainly don’t do cocaine with that curator whose Dad owns a successful tech company. Detailing the failures and unsustainable economics of the art world and its inevitable crash, The Exit Report asks: Do artists have to appeal to galleries? Do artists have to go to art school? Do we need middlemen such as curators and collectors? What would art look like if it was completely severed from galleries, institutions and art fairs? What are the alternatives to ‘hustling’?

Video essay examining the contemporary cultural phenomenon of Cloutbombing.

This report tries to pinpoint what the slippery word hipster means by untangling each of the four eras of hipsterdom and how they changed over time. To do so requires looking back at the origins of hipsters in the 90s when Americans were granted digital access to culture just as the service economy encouraged us to commodify our lifestyles. We recount the rise and fall of the companies that defined this lifestyle –from Pitchfork to Vice Magazine to American Apparel– to understand the relationship between hipsters and their corporate representatives. With the onset of social media, hipsters found it necessary to represent themselves and were heavily influenced by the Hipster Runoff and Party Photographers. From here, we look at the public’s hatred of hipsters for real and imagined reasons. Finally, a description of the mid-2010s transition from The Hipster of yesterday into The Activist of today and what the Indie Sleaze revival says about both.

The ZIRPSLOP Report examines how monetary policy created tech’s dominance, how tech’s incentives now dictate culture, and how the slop-filled visual language of our time reflects that merger.