Quote of the Week

This relates to a post last week over on Brian Ulrich's Not if But When blog titled, "Where is the Crisis" in which he asks why more photographers aren't making work about the current crisis (that's what they call it in Spain and it seems pretty fitting to me). After seeing the current Art of Two Germanys show at LACMA a couple of times, I was taken aback by how incredibly political art was in postwar Germany, as artists and the country tried to come to grips with Nazism. It does seem to me at times that we have become a bit complacent. Maybe it's in part due to the optimism of the Obama election but I'm also wondering why the horrors of the Bush years weren't tackled more by artists (of course, there was excellent photojournalism going on during this period abroad).

From an article titled Tough Times Call for Shrewd Artists by Dorothy Spears in the NYT:

Anne Tucker, the curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, said it will be interesting to see whether, in an era when documentary photography is no longer embraced by the art world, the current hard times will prompt artist-photographers to document human suffering — and endurance. “When the chips are down, she said, “there’s much more receptivity to it.”