Wednesday, May 6, 2009

ART'S LAST GASP?



“In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played.”

Seems I've been having this thought myself, ever more frequently since abandoning the DC art scene in a hail of sinking financials. Now, several months into my exile, I have created a phlegmatic video short to explain that defection. Glad I've gotten off that whirligig. Still, weaning oneself off ambition and the need to express oneself is difficult.

Indeed, who are the experts, and who are the fakirs?

Read it all.

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