Art: March 2009 Archives

"In late August 2008, McAllen Arts Council member and Voices of Art publisher David Freeman contacted Blue Star Director and sculptor Bill FitzGibbons to congratulate the artist on his 'public art commission in McAllen.' FitzGibbons was perplexed. Unbeknownst to him, an artwork with nearly identical qualities to FitzGibbons’s local 'Light Channels' had been installed in an Expressway 83 underpass in the South Texas boomtown. [...] Strangely, nobody in McAllen seems to know when exactly McAllen’s lights were installed. Stranger still, the project has never been given a formal unveiling, the idea never credited to any person, and the work never titled." - story (via)

Reporting on Two Recessionary Shifts in Attitude, Ed Winkleman notes: "The other trend I've noticed (and had confirmed by other dealers) recently is a much more aggressive and, seemingly out of nowhere, clueless approach among unrepresented artists seeking gallery representation lately. Whereas we had been getting about 1-3 artists a month who clearly had no idea how best to approach a gallery either send us a package or email, now we're getting 1-3 a day calling us up and insisting we give them a show. And we're not the only gallery reporting this."

There's a wonderful conversation with (in alphabetical order) author, blogger, and gallerist Ed Winkleman here.

You can blame modern art for many things, but certainly not for our mass culture, right? Actually, you can. "Oh boy," I thought, when I saw that article this morning, linked to by Ed Winkleman (who seems to be putting the final touches on his book - congrats, Ed!). Usually I find it extremely silly to blame art for things. But of course, it's tough to ignore statements like "All the shallowness of modern mass culture began in avant-garde art 40 years ago".

Despite its whiff of People magazine style reporting ("In the midst of the scariest art downturn in more than a decade, Mr. Gagosian is sticking with his Hermès suits and jetting around on a private plane. Sporting a helmet of silvery hair and looking like a cross between an aging bon vivant and a secret agent, he still radiates total confidence - which, these days, not everyone is buying."), this piece about art dealer Larry Gagosian is quite interesting.

"Over the past decade – until, at least, global credit began to crunch our fun – the art world has developed into a high-turnover, high-visibility international activity that everyone wants a slice of. It’s an exponentially expanded system of artists, audiences, art markets, dealers, galleries, curators, critics, collectors, museums, institutes, foundations, biennials, triennials, quadrennials, fairs, auction houses, art schools, prizes, books, magazines, journals and consultancies. [...] In recent months, though, this expansion has been tempered by anxiety. The tighter the credit crunch grips us, the louder you can hear the gloating of those who think a drop in auction prices and a swathe of galleries going under will somehow result in the disappearance of the present art system and the resurgence of some kind of prelapsarian art paradise unfettered by the evils of capitalism and what they perceive to be cultural con-artistry." - story

"We are afloat in a world in which the endless invocation of theoreticians, philosophers and political theorists serves very little purpose other than to bolster the cultural capital pretensions of an artworld detached from anything other than its communicative connectivity and its obscure economic value in an economy of fleeting and faddish desires." - source

The Empire in the form of Ben Street is unhappy about the state of curating (or more precisely what is taken as curating) and strikes back: "Nowadays it’s not uncommon for a curator’s name to be foregrounded in exhibition literature and sometimes announced in forty-point Letraset at an exhibition’s starting point [...] It’s a great example of a profession’s lack of clear definition in the public eye being inversely proportional to the amount of flatulent endorsement it acquires from those who should know better." Regardless of whether you agree with Ben Street or not, this indeed seems to be a topic worthwhile debating (especially since it would be a welcome diversion from the currently so ubiquitous chants of "The end of the art market is near! Repent! Repent!").