Friend and artist (not photography) Jeffrey Beebe's answer to the question, "How do you see the art world now?" for his interview with the Chinese magazine, Vision:
I can’t see myself in the text based, critical theory-type stuff that I seems so prevalent here in the art world. It seems like there is a very tightly interlocking structure now between curators and a lot of conceptually-based artists. The artists speak a specialized language that the curator understands and the curator then—having formal training in this specialized language—the promotes the work artist in question because it justifies the labor put into the formal training. It find the whole thing a little boring because a bit of a closed loop, a kind of call-and-response song that I don’t have the sheet music for and I don’t really have any interest in learning the song by ear, you know?
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9 comments:
Very well put.
hahhhha (i just couldn't help laughing)
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Quote of the fucking decade! God am I glad to hear someone make that point!
Thanks.
it's the same thing as the "lingo" that keeps any group exclusive. Modern christian churches do the same thing.
But, Caleb - I don't mind being excluded from them :)
there was something rather scary about that last sentence and the context
Modernism, post-modernism, conceptualism, and post-irony are all long past their relevance. But curators, galleries, and most who look at this kind of art are too chicken-shit to say what a tired, ugly load of crap it really is.
flickr.com/blurrylens
otoh, if you think about the vast amount of visually competent material floating about, well, pretty much everywhere, then perhaps theories and concepts and whatnot are nice enough tools to keep the workload a little easier..?
and ron, why, or how are the isms you mentioned past their relevance?
as for ugliness, c'mon, if something is past its relevance it's beauty, vastness, glorification and the likes.
Nothing wrong with using tools, but this artwork floating about seems stuck in a rusty timewarp of hackneyed misreadings of what were once, maybe 50 years ago, fresh ideas.
They are past their relevance because they have been institutionalized by fine art academia and done to death by slavish, careerist MFA lemmings, er, students.
www.flickr.com/blurrylens
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