Archive 2010
Lib Con

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Re: Goldsmiths, But is it Art?, BBC4

 

From: CAP
Date: 14 Jul 2010
Time: 00:04:44 -0500
 

Review

If the students are so poor or untalented, how do they get accepted into an art school in the first place, much less hold a place there until graduation year? MCM is right about the fantasy of the student who suddenly and magically 'finds themself' in the course of the course. At best any such development coincides with the student's attendance at a college, at worst they simply learn to conform to the authority's vague and shifting tastes. But of course it's not really about nurturing talent or accepted practices so much as filling attendances and banking the fees, qualifying for the government's allocations. Art schools get bigger and bigger, charge more and more, offer less and less. It's all about the money. When I look back on my (long gone) days at art school, the main advantage seemed to be meeting like-minded peers. Could I have taken another route to achieve this? I came from a small rural community with little in the way of artistic resources or interests. Even now, I think I would still opt for the art school route, but I would have no illusions about the kind of 'help' available there

Richard Billingham at Anthony Reynolds Gallery London

 

From: ellen artfunkcle
Date: 05 May 2010
Time: 09:50:57 -0500
 

Review

Billingham is somehow good. Tiny landscapes, pictures of his baby boy, a mix of formats , black and white or colour, a bit of a wolfgang tillmans vibe, animals in the zoo. It's hard to work out what's good about them, but a nagging suspicion is that you are looking at something untrumped up, a way of seeing the world that tells you something you want to see/hear. As dennis hopper says about andy warhol, on a recent tv show, an artist is a person who points his finger and says this is art. I cant find this quote anywhere. But it seems right, and I think Billingham points his finger at the right spot.

Modern Masters: andy Warhol

 

From: tv art shows review
Date: 03 May 2010
Time: 05:52:17 -0500
 

Review

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sbj4w/Modern_Masters_Andy_Warhol/ It was pitched at just above Tony Hart level. The BBC's patronising panjandrums seem to think all we plebs can understand is celebrity and controver..si...al. So these words are repeated endlessly by our usual faux naive breathless boyish presenter Alastair Sooke, who surely must be a little more clued up then he is forced to pretend so that we can identify with him in our blessed ignorance. All arts shows have to explore questions, we need to watch the host go on a journey, meet people, shake their hands, have a coffee with them. No information or interview is allowed to be unframed by this gonzo crap. We can't just be told a fact by an expert or watch someone who knew Warhol speak. No no no, that would be too hard for us, and the people on tv must be as stupid as the people on tv think we are. Especially with arts, which no one likes anyway.

Ten years of tate moderns

 

From: art reviews
Date: 25 Apr 2010
Time: 08:45:02 -0500
 

Review

the london art boom is a good thing of course and the tate modern and freeze and all the little galleries are all great to have better than to have not. But but but why does one feel there is no real great art of our time. The closest we have come is early hirst and some ofeely. But this time has filled massive spaces with mediocre art that looks like art . The draw is the spectacle and the buzz and the crowd in or out. We wish there was more to like and that the tate was filed with great art.

Goldsmiths, But is it Art? ep.2, BBC4

 

From: Martin Craig Michael
Date: 22 Apr 2010
Time: 06:49:00 -0500
 

Review

The deliciously degrading spectacle continues, this time with added delectable awfulness. The students have finished their MAs and been unleashed onto the London art scene to torment us all with Facebook invitations to shows called things like 'The Devil's Necktie' and 'So!' The most consistent thing about them is that they have no ideas. Not that they have no ideas and sit around doing nothing and saying, 'Damn, I have no ideas', but that they make work despite having no ideas. Best emblem of the tendency is Blue Curry, a young American or Canadian who has his sensitive, thoughtful conceptual guy voice and persona down to a tee, and uses it only to patronise us with bland fatuities about what art is, which are really just weak justifications for his weak, idea-devoid work. Discussing a piece of his consisting of a basketball with two swordfish noses sticking out of it, he says that if someone showed him a work like this and said it was about a time in his life when he used to play a lot of basketball and his uncle was out deep-sea fishing and caught two swordfish, he would lose all respect for the artist. He thinks art should be 'harder' than that, he says, making the elementary error of mistaking impossibility for difficulty. It's easy to set up conundrums that have no answers: why did the hermaphrodite eat the icecream; why did the houseboat sink on dry land; what's the difference between a basketball and a swordfish. Meanwhile, conceptual artist Roisin, whose work consists in stealing objects and ideas from more established artists to trying to get a rise out of them and who seems obsessed with how 'valuable' these things are is disappointed that Ryan Gander didn't get back to her about the idea of his she copied and wonders snidely how that reflects on him as a person. Pretty well, I'd say. Tutor David Mabb, after admitting somewhat endearingly, and perhaps a little disingenuously, to being a 'failure', tells us that a heck of a lot of success is about hustling and networking and that the people who succeed therefore aren't necessarily the best people. Curry tells us that galleries aren't interested in you sending DVDs and such of your work, they'll just throw them in the bin and Roisin caps it all with the sub-sub-sub Duchampian blagger's charter: 'Art is whatever you say it is... but you've gotta say it like you mean it.' So contemporary art really is what people at their most prejudiced think: a bunch of chancers out there fronting for emptiness? Way too often, yes, though I still think that who dares to actually offer something of substance can win. Meanwhile, I refer all these people and you to 'Coke as objet petit a', chapter 3 of Zizek's 'The Fragile Absolute', with this quick precis: the Duchampian readymade is not a justification for any old shit, it's a way of pointing out the auratic, crypto-religosity of the gallery space and of the idea of art – a monster that will not die.
 

Correction: Tate Modern is GREAT

 

From: Nned Thisom
Date: 09 Apr 2010
Time: 14:04:35 -0500
 

Review

What the hell is wrong with your brain? Have you never been a tourist, or wanted to use photography as a tool to remember a specific thing or occasion? The Tate gallery is home to some of the greatest contemporary art in the world. And it's free to see. What is all this talk of 'signs telling us non existent meanings so the art doesnt bear any strain of function'? Since when was art supposed to have a function. Art has been up it's own ass for at least the last 100 years (Where have you been, in a cave?). Contemporary art is self reflexive, that is it's function. And how could you consider the Tate 'much worse' than an art fair? In what way? In the way that it's only really interested in the opinions of the very rich? In the way that it presents only art which is for sale? or in the way that it is free to show huge installations? In the way it offers independent artists opportunities that the commercial gallery system won't? The Tate's aim is primarily to educate it's audience and expand that audience as far and wide as it can into society. How can this be a bad thing? We all know that the gallery itself is often over crowded and that every viewer is not as well educated in the arts and culture as you obviously are but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be allowed in. Does it?