- Jerry Saltz, Via
(Emphasis mine)
Pictures Generation, anyone?
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Quote of the Week - Jerry Saltz
"I went to Venice, and I came back worried. Every two years, the central attraction of the Biennale is a kind of State of the Art World show. This year’s, called “Illuminations,” has its share of high points and artistic intensity. (Frances Stark’s animated video of her online masturbatory tryst with a younger man hooked me; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which captivated New York earlier this year, rightly won the Gold Lion Prize for Best Artist.) Yet many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements."
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2 comments:
At this point it's not even the Pictures Generation that people are mimicking, it's what they saw yesterday on the Internet (Roe Etheridge, ELad Lassry, et al) , making it doubly diluted.
Please, for a while, could we see a moratorium on "double exposures", sailors hats on women, still life with fruit and books with sticker still left on the fruit, Geometric cutout shapes crisscrossed with spray paint, use of prisms, and finally please no more still lifes on checked gingham.
Amen - Oh, and you forgot selective color filters and rainbows, though to be fair, you mentioned prisms.
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