[ Home | Comment | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: chris
Date: 18 Jul 2010
Time: 10:14:14 -0500
Why do you see it as urgent and why did it get to be urgent and not attended to earlier ? If the art world as a whole was a single individual, an accurate psychological diagnosis of this individual would be that he/she is manic depressive. This condition has evolved over a lifetime ( that is, a century or so of modernism) of repressed anxiety about notions around production, sociability, and narcissism. This individual is severely repressed, suicidal, self-absorbed, unable to see himself/herself ironically but also unable to see the world without irony, and lacking the ability to communicate with others. The condition is self-consuming and addictive, which only makes it worse. The fact that this is a self-reinforcing condition has made the problem hard to attend to and has created the urgency of creating an avenue for this individual to open up about its innermost anxieties and conflicts. Do you think that the answer(s) to that question has something to do with a fundamental problem with the art world and its very nature of institutions and curators, if so allude to what that might be ? the condition described above applies in to all artists, curators and any other individuals, and by extension, the institutions that they conform. Also (and related to the above) now that education has a very high price and those graduates of art will either be from a very wealthy upbringing or leave university in great debt do you see only a certain class of people being involved and most others by necessity move on. What would that mean for the art that is made and given value by institutions that you work and have worked for ? One of the self-created problems of the art world is that the business of the professionalization of art, as you rightly pointed out, by being turned into a profitable enterprise, has mostly attracted wealthy individuals that don't necessarily have the talent. Similarly, it has retained as professors mostly the mediocre artists who cannot have a successful career, and thus turn to teaching. As a result, the art school as it stands today is one of the least creative institutions in the larger scope of cultural activity today. Where is the visual innovation in our world coming from? it is coming from digital media, communications, design, but not from art schools. and if you play close attention, most successful artists are good artists usually not because, but rather in spite of, having attended art school. Creative individuals are coming from other areas of human activity. The art world, and the institutions that i work and have worked for, is fascinated by outsiders- artists who are scientists, psychologists, educators, biologists, etc. but few care for those who got the best grades in their MFA. Sincerely, The Estheticist anybody wish to make a comment ? My own view is that value has been bleached out by money - cold hard money. And the art world now has more to do with a ponzi scheme feudal hierarchy and uses the best form of affinity fraud. In fact its so good the financial people - hedge funds and banks think they can use it too, as it were morally launder themselves - and hence to step up socially. I see no way out of this being as those involved dont even know they are part of a ponzi or affinity fraud and dont even begin to think in these terms. The art people need the money so take it from Goldman and JP Morgan (spankmelon does) and clearly dont concern themselves with association and consequence. Its difficult to see past that to any value.