Project Willow wrote:It all must be done I suppose.
The cursive script lends such a nice feel to the presentation. Neatness counts!
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Project Willow wrote:It all must be done I suppose.
Debating the art market as the best judge of quality
By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
May 16, 2013, 11:15 a.m.
On May 24 at China's Hong Kong Convention Center an outfit called Intelligence Squared will host a formal debate during the debut of the newest spinoff of the Art Basel franchise of international art fairs. The motion under consideration will be: "The Market Is the Best Judge of Art's Quality."
Honest. That's the topic for debate. I figure the program harbors two, maybe three minutes of chat -- tops.
The panel is a retread of a 2011 program held at London's Saatchi Gallery. (You can watch that one on YouTube.)
But the short retort to the market-based judgment is: Nope. The longer answer is: Bernard Buffet.
You've never heard of him? In the 1950s the savior of the School of Paris rocketed to fame and fortune and became the Next Big Thing -- until he wasn't. Since then plenty of superstar market-darlings were once hot, then not -- and vice versa. Make your own list. The cultural landscape is littered with painters and sculptors seduced, abandoned or just plain ignored by the profit-driven markets, regardless of artistic depth.
Never mind the ordinary vagaries of supply and demand, which transform market prices -- whether for Picasso, pork bellies or Cabbage Patch dolls -- into the distorted reflections of a fun-house mirror. The market is just a shopping mall; it judges what's best for the market -- what sells. Which is fine by me.
A cynic might even wonder why decisions on cultural values would be entrusted to the faceless financial elites responsible for the recent crashing of the economy, throwing millions into turmoil. And then there's the matter of young artists coming out of burgeoning art schools with massive debt, just like their non-artist peers: They need to pay back loans somehow, which creates enormous pressure on their work, which feeds into the market maw, which ... you get the idea.
So the art market is a judge of quality, just like Mom and cousin Fred are, but hardly the best judge.
There's a simpler explanation as to why collectors and dealers aren't the ones deciding who, finally, are the important artists. (Nor, for that matter, do curators, critics or the general public.) It's because artists do. Artists decide who is worth paying attention to among their cohorts.
They do it by picking up indirectly from modern culture's unconscious -- or flat-out stealing from the best. What we call quality is largely a factor of the breadth, depth and longevity of excitement artists harbor for other artists' work. Art comes from art. It doesn't come from Goldman Sachs.
Scheduled to speak in favor of the debate's market motion at the new Hong Kong art fair are Amy Cappellazzo of Christie's auction house and longtime art investment advisor and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Speaking against the market as arbiter of the best are Matthew Collings and Rirkrit Tiravanija -- both artists.
Pick your vested interests. Debate over.
MaryAnnaPomonis at 3:04 PM May 18, 2013
Well it should be an interesting debate because all around the table are insiders who directly benefit from their social and market connections. The main issue I have is the idea of quality itself. I have an uncomfortable relationship with the idea that social organizations determine quality. There are so many class struggles going on constantly that determine official notions of quality. Really what the debate is about is the narrative didactic that stands next to art and qualifies is cost and existence. That didactic includes things like the school the artist went to and their friendships and familial connections. Very few artists today emerge full faced outside of these systems. Artists themselves invest heavily in art schools and we (artists) qualify that investment by supporting the alumni of our schools. I don't think artists determine quality or the market, I think the only valid qualifier is time and a kind of social forgetting that allows the objects to emerge as beings in an of themselves that either resonate with us or not.
Traditionalist at 6:25 AM May 18, 2013
I agree with your assessment that the market is only useful as a measure of marketability, and that marketability--i.e. popularity--is not a measure of quality. Otherwise, Disneyland and sporting events would have to be considered higher quality than opera, etc.
I disagree with you, however, that artists are necessarily the best judges. I think the best judges of quality are informed connoisseurs, which today are few and far between. The hegemony of unilluminating deconstructivist art "scholarship" over the past 40 years has greatly impoverished the supply of people capable of enjoying works of art from the standpoint of quality, unfortunately.
"Trendiness" is never a measure of quality, for works of art, or for scholarship.
poomakmak at 8:16 PM May 16, 2013
"Art comes from art" you say and "Artists decide who is worth paying attention to among their cohorts" To the first point, would you say, e.g. "money comes from money," "the law comes from law," "mommy comes from mommy," etc? To the second statement, how do artists decide? And can their decisions ever matter by comparison to the enormous social protection rackets that are part and parcel of art--the reviewing processes, the institutional collecting processes, the use of discourse to substantiate--and delegitimize--art? Is the career of, say, Tracy Emins anything but a useful media function--to "open" art to new audiences ("nasty girls"), including art for the excluded, the previously unrecognized, etc? Your lack of social understanding is breathtaking.
The Bermuda Triangle of Art
by Carolina Miranda on May 21, 2013
A general view of Wiliam Powhida’s new exhibition at the Charlie James Gallery in LA. (via cjamesgallery.com)
LOS ANGELES — When Marcel Duchamp submitted his signed urinal to a group exhibition in 1917, he certainly couldn’t have predicted that his decontextualized toilet would represent the dawn of an era in which everything and anything could be “art.” Take some mundane object or action, add word salad — et voilà, you have art. Manipulated photographs aren’t simply manipulated photographs. They are “visual statements that are at once documentary and fictional.”
A painter’s brush strokes don’t come together to form a picture, are textures that “function as proof of past operations.” And a piece of taxidermy isn’t just a stuffed animal. It’s “a state of apparent life premised on actual death.” In the Bermuda Triangle of Art, an object is never an object. It’s a physical vessel with which to deliver heaps of impenetrable prose — prose intended to convince some aspiring patron that the mound of detritus before him is pregnant with meaning (in addition to looking great over the couch).
Navigating this universe of intellectual gymnastics and 200,000 square-foot art fairs requires a good deal of studiousness and an excellent bullshit detector — traits that New York artist William Powhida possesses in spades. Powhida has spent his short career (he is only 37) deconstructing the power and money mechanics of the art world in intensely-detailed drawings and paintings that are part political cartoon, part stream-of consciousness rant. In an infamous 2009 collaboration with artist Jade Townsend, he portrayed the habitués of Art Basel Miami Beach in a steamy, stinking Hooverville.
That same year, an illustration he did for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail displayed the uncomfortably chummy connections between some New York galleries and Manhattan’s New Museum (and helped stir up a media shit storm). In 2011, in a solo show at Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, he diagrammed the social and professional links shared by the architects of the financial collapse. Now, in his latest solo show, on view at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, he pulls back the veil on the art-making process and its attendant verbiage.
The notes for “A (really bad, bad) Neo-Expressionist Painting,” a type of work that is a staple in all commercial art spaces. This piece best channels Powhida’s acid humor: “Friday at 3:30 it was blank. At 5:30 it was on the floor while we drank beers.”
For this exhibit, Powhida enlisted the assistance of other artists and fabricators to produce works that embody the worst art market tropes, such as the shiny object, the cool minimalist tower, and the incredibly bad painting of a skull. Alongside each piece he has added his signature touch: a trompe l’oeil painting of a hand-written note that details the process, budget and reasoning behind each work, with plenty of smart aleck-y remarks stuffed in between.
The following rumination accompanies a single strip of pink neon affixed to the gallery wall:
“Art might value an invention (singular) but the market demands product (plural) and will accept endless minor variations on a single idea. We can pretty much do anything over and over again. This may be why art history is long, but not terribly deep, and why there is SO MUCH FUCKING NEON.”
In “Some Asset Class (Digital) Paintings – Color Field,” Powhida plays with the thinking and methodology behind so much glossy digital work.
A trio of digitally-produced color-field, we learn, was crafted by running pieces of currency through some fancy filters on Photoshop — literally, money on the wall. A taxidermy of a coyote in a wooden crate draws comparisons to Damien Hirst and Joseph Beuys, and the observation that coyotes are like artists because “they are extremely territorial … and like to fight each other.” The tendency toward unpolished geometric abstraction — which Powhida refers to as “D.I.Y. Informalism” — is represented by three white, silver and pink canvases hammered together in bulky, asymmetrical shapes. The idea: “To play around with some studio junk and stuff from the hardware store to make a few awkward objects without thinking intuitively with feeling!”
http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/01-Minimalism.jpg
Eviscerating content-less work: a detail of Powhida’s notes from “A Post Minimalism,” in which he proposes creating a pleasing sculpture out of bar graphs documenting inequity. (click to enlarge)
This may sound like the world’s most overwrought art gag. And, certainly, there is no small irony in critiquing the creative numbness of the art market with pieces that will be sold on that very same market. But Powhida’s artistic spoofs are so spot on, and his critiques so incisive, it’s hard not to get sucked in by the whole exercise. The anonymous minimalist sculpture might as well be the anonymous minimalist sculpture found in countless corporate lobbies. The expressionistic painting of a skull seems destined for a one-night warehouse art party with DJs and Red Bull. It’s like every commercial gallery/art fair/Bushwick basement I’ve ever been to — with the benefit that the accompanying texts couldn’t be more engrossing or hilarious: “You realize people are going to like these,” it reads in the notes for the skull painting. “Fuck.”
Certainly, this taxonomy of clichés overlooks the breakthroughs that artists can and do have. Powhida has chosen to train his laser vision on a part of the art world that is more preoccupied with product than it is with ideas. Yet he hits on an essential truth about a culture that treats art like a financial commodity. Spend an afternoon wandering around the gleaming white-box spaces in Culver City, and you’ll find all of these clichés being served up for five, six, and seven figures. In Powhida’s hands, art world platitudes are mordantly funny. In Culver City, not so much.
John Steppling wrote:[...] Sometimes I think, well, if it’s for sale, it is somehow infected. The fact that commodities reproduce these relations of exploitation can't be denied. The answer isn’t to abandon culture. The answer is to stop paying for it. Every year children of the rich or merely affluent trek to New York to find a career in some form of cultural activity. As curatorial assistants, magazine editorial assistants, or just as artists. They plug into the vast apparatus of cultural reproduction. And they play assigned roles as curators of institutional product.
So when the children of the underclass, in far fewer numbers, look to engage with the societal machine, they do so from another direction. Fewer are chosen. But if chosen even fewer refuse the anointed blessing of the corporate suits. I certainly blame nobody suffering under financial duress. Every one of us accepts money. There is no such thing as blood money. Its a tautology. All money is blood money. We are all caught.
[...]
http://john-steppling.com/cop-stories/
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