20090209

20090129

shit pickle

Art in America

Dave Hickey on the mediocrity of criticism in the artworld...both written and curated:

"During this period, "fairness" proliferated. Dealers diversified their offerings to disguise their personal taste, thus eroding their better judgment. Art magazines printed interviews, advance blurbs and diversity centerfolds. They followed works of art to Bali and Cairo as if they were supermodels to be photographed biennially in exotic settings. At the same time, scholarly typing began passing for exhibition reviews. American academics pretended to believe that the traditional financial disinterest of academic inquiry meant that they should not be interested in contemporary finance or inquire about it too closely. This epidemic of fatal lunacy allowed predatory sociologists to submerge the adult practice of visual art in the doggy puddle of "visual culture" wherein students might evade the mysteries of Blinky Palermo by wondering in prose whether Wolverine is the most angst-ridden of the X-Men. By the late '80s, any PhD in art history could identify the iconography of mercantile capitalism in Titian's paintings. One in 50 could tell a Titian from a Tintoretto, and auction houses snapped up those odd ducks to co-opt their expertise...the inability to tell good art from bad is a terminal condition. It's no joke. Some works of art are demonstrably better than others, and, ultimately, it matters, because bad art disappears before our eyes. If you look and can't see anything, there's nothing there."

20081015

PC

The other night I hiked up the hill to SFAI so that I could see what I knew would be a crude documentary on the life of Vanessa Beecroft and her desire to adopt Sudanese twins. I'm referring to Pietra Brettkelly's The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. I was surprised to find that Beecroft's eating disorder was not the main topic of this highly contrasted (the colors were totally off, and I don't think it could be entirely attributed to the bright colors found in Sudan) film. Glen Helfand introduced the film with a painful expression on his face, then sat down and it started to play. Painful it was, to watch a prim Vanessa Beecroft with her limp-wristed photographer Mathu (matthew?....the way he said it made it sound as though you could spell his name more exotically). Mathu (let's just call him that for now), came equipped with fans and lights and cameras and water bottles and martin margiela boots...and all Vanessa could talk about while breast-feeding two "starving" Sudanese twins, was her silk martin margiela boobless dress. Yes, she refers to all of the typical "other" conversations such as the white Madonna coming in with her pendulous breasts, bearing food for...etc. etc. The entire documentary seemed to catalog each and every topic that Edward Said, Marcus Garvey, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have ever written about. Yet, Beecroft continued to prance about in front of the camera, carefree. Is this a performance? I kept asking myself. Is it an extension of her already narcissistic bodies (literally) of work? I guess it was not ironic that SFAI chose to screen the film on Columbus Day.


Other works that I've seen recently (at the Whitney Biennial) that seem to relate:

Olaf Breuning's video work Home


Sherrie Levine's Makonde Body Masks