Contemporary art is frequently discussed today through the language of crisis. This crisis is often framed as a loss of meaning: the claim that contemporary art has nothing new to say, that critique has become repetitive, and that form has grown stale. Yet such diagnoses miss the core of the problem. The crisis facing contemporary art today is not the exhaustion of meaning, but the collapse of the internal capacity and criteria required to judge, evaluate, and accumulate the meanings that have already been produced—and, with them, the will to distinguish what is genuinely new.
 
Contemporary art continues to speak at length. Social inequality, political conflict, technological transformation, and questions of identity and institutions are repeatedly invoked through exhibitions and artworks. Discourse has not disappeared. What has disappeared, however, is a sustained account of how these meanings are judged to be significant, what should be recorded as achievement, and what should be acknowledged as failure.
 
This essay begins from precisely this point. The crisis at hand is not a crisis of production but a crisis of judgment—one that has hardened into a structural condition rather than remaining a matter of individual attitude or choice.
 
 
 
The Weakening of Judgment and Its Consequences
 
For decades, contemporary art has been wary of judgment itself. Singular aesthetic standards, hierarchical ranking, and form-based exclusion were criticized as remnants of modernist power structures. In their place, the suspension of judgment emerged as an ethical and aesthetic stance.
 
This suspension initially served a clear purpose. It was a strategy designed to address complex realities without reducing them to a single evaluative framework, to keep interpretation open and prevent one criterion from suppressing others. Over time, however, as this suspension was repeatedly institutionalized within exhibitions and cultural systems, it gradually solidified into a persistent deferral of judgment itself.
 
Explicitly stating what an artwork has achieved, why that achievement is convincing, or where its limits lie came to be regarded as unnecessary, or even dangerous. At this point, a crucial fact must be acknowledged: the absence of judgment is never neutral. When judgment is no longer produced internally, it does not vanish; it simply takes another form. And more often than not, that form is determined not by essential criteria internal to art, but by external and non-essential logics.
 
 
 
The Logic of Selection That Fills the Vacuum
 
As internal structures of judgment weakened, the selection of artworks and exhibitions increasingly came to follow a different logic. This logic does not resemble a new aesthetic or theory. Rather, it revolves around questions such as: Can the work be quickly understood? Can it generate an immediate response? Can it circulate smoothly within existing exhibition and distribution systems?
 
Such a logic does not demand depth or completion. Instead, it privileges instant recognizability, clearly legible messages, easily explainable forms, and high compatibility with exhibition environments and circulation networks. Works that can be selected without sustained evaluation, and consumed without explanation, are repeatedly favored.
 
In this process, artworks are gradually adjusted to align with the operating mechanisms of the market. Here, “the market” should not be understood merely as a site of sale, but as an integrated system encompassing exhibition, distribution, promotion, and discourse. Works that fit this system are continuously selected, and the repetition of that selection begins to function as judgment itself.
 
 
 
Market-Adapted Works and the Distortion of the Essential
 
Market-adapted works are not necessarily commercial in appearance. They may adopt radical imagery or critical language. Yet their radicalism and criticality are themselves managed safely within institutional and economic frameworks.
 
Such works raise issues, but these issues are rarely subjected to rigorous testing through the internal logic of form and structure. Instead, they circulate frictionlessly through exhibitions, discourse, and distribution. Selection thus shifts away from judgment of essential achievement toward evaluation of select ability.
 
At this point, non-essential elements begin to speak in place of the essential. Completion, structural density, and depth of thought are left largely unexamined, while frequency of exposure and outcomes of selection stand in for value. The essential does not disappear; it is obscured by the absence of judgment. Results come to evaluate process, and surface replaces interiority as the criterion of value.
 
 
 
A Structure That Fails to Record Failure
 
The most serious consequence of this structure is the absence of recorded failure. When failure is not recorded, revision becomes impossible; when revision is impossible, accumulation cannot occur.
 
Exhibitions proliferate and new works constantly appear, yet explanations of why something failed—and in what sense—rarely remain. As a result, subsequent selections differ little from previous ones. Forms appear to change, but the logic governing selection repeats itself. Under these conditions, contemporary art can generate change, but not development.
 
 
 
The Specific Position of Korean Contemporary Art
 
Korean contemporary art has experienced this condition with particular intensity and speed. In rapidly adopting international exhibition formats and discursive languages, the value of artworks has often been determined less by internal evaluation than by external reception and selection.
 
Participation in international exhibitions and modes of consumption has frequently functioned as the basis of value. Yet structures capable of analyzing and reassessing these outcomes internally have remained underdeveloped. As a result, Korean contemporary art exists in a dual condition: judgment is suspended internally, while externally rendered judgments are accepted as fact. As this gap widens, the intrinsic achievements of works remain unexplained from within, replaced instead by the mere fact of selection.
 
 
 
What the Korean Contemporary Art Scene Is Missing
 
What is most conspicuously absent in the Korean contemporary art scene today is the question of judgment and responsibility. Under the assumption that judgment inevitably leads to exclusion or violence, the refusal to judge has come to appear ethically sound. Yet this refusal ultimately transfers responsibility for selection to the market, institutions, and external responses.
 
Equally neglected is the perspective of accumulation and record. Little attention is paid to what individual exhibitions and works leave behind, or how they relate to previous attempts. Consequently, contemporary art remains trapped in the present, lacking criteria by which to assess its own capacities.
 
 
 
How Judgment Might Be Recovered
 
What is needed is neither a new trend nor a more radical appearance. What is needed is the recovery of judgment. This judgment is not a return to hierarchical ranking, but an articulation—through language—of what a work has achieved, where it has persuaded, and where it has lacked density.
 
Exhibitions must not end with the mere presentation of problems. They must articulate what was proposed, how it was realized through form, structure, and experience, where it succeeded, and where it failed. Criticism must move beyond description toward analysis and evaluation.
 
Above all, there must be the courage to record failure. Only where failure can be articulated can revision occur, and only where revision occurs can accumulation take place.
 
 
 
Why Korean Contemporary Art Has Not Yet Become Central
 
The conditions described here are not unique to Korea. The suspension of judgment, market-adapted selection, and the replacement of the essential by the non-essential are widespread throughout the global art world. Korean contemporary art is not an exception, but rather a field in which these conditions appear in concentrated form.
 
The decisive difference, however, lies elsewhere. In the central zones of the global art world, judgment is not entirely abandoned. Debates persist over what constitutes achievement and failure, which forms and problematics can lead to further development. Judgments collide openly, failures are articulated critically, and these records of judgment become part of art history.
 
By contrast, Korean contemporary art has long focused on the question of how far it has arrived. Participation in international biennials, entry into global galleries, and exhibitions at overseas institutions have functioned as markers of success. Yet the question of what has been left behind—what judgments have been produced—has remained secondary.
As a result, Korean contemporary art is frequently cited as a case within the global art world, but rarely recognized as a source of criteria. This is its most fundamental limitation.
 
The center of the art world is not the place where the most exhibitions occur. It is the place from which one can say what matters, and what no longer does. Centrality is not produced through exposure or volume, but through the capacity to accumulate judgment.
 
To think the post-contemporary condition is not to declare a new era. It is to confront the conditions already in operation, and to reconstruct a structure capable of producing judgment within them.
 
The possibility for Korean contemporary art to move toward the center of the global art world does not lie in responding more quickly, but in judging more precisely—and in accumulating those judgments. When this condition is met, Korean contemporary art may no longer appear merely as one example among many, but as a reference point for the global art world itself.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects. In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.