why do i love bad art?

I Love Dick - Chris Kraus
hey, it's a book, no it's art....it's a book....it's art..........

in the year 2100 art journalists will type in invisible ink

With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?
Coverage of the arts is migrating online but unless someone is prepared to pay for it, the outlook is uncertain By András Szántó///The Art Newspaper

excepts/quick summary of article (because i like to add to the copying of information and scaled down fluff of what art journalism has become, wink-wink):

Arts journalism as we used to know it is sinking with the ship.
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Specialised writers are giving way to generalists. Culture sections are being tossed overboard (standalone book review sections, in particular, are a dying breed). Article lengths and “news holes” (space for editorial content) are shrinking. All this has eviscerated newspapers’ ability to deliver quality arts coverage, which, as a result, must migrate elsewhere.
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More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.
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The problem is not the scarcity or the quality of arts journalism (the latter has always been mixed), but that no one is paying for it—at least not yet.
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One strategy is for individual blogs to scale up to a size where their writers become popular “personal brands”. This has happened in political punditry and may happen in entertainment writing. But it is unlikely in visual arts journalism, where audiences even for top writers are thin.
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A more realistic, already extant scenario links blogs to heavily trafficked journalism, entertainment, or aggregator sites, which attract large numbers of readers by providing access to a wide range of news content...Under such arrangements, bloggers get a cut of the advertising fees along with greater visibility...
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When it comes to fair and balanced reporting, the record is mixed. On the one hand, bloggers are breaking stories, with arts organisations (or their disgruntled employees) obliging them with excellent scoops.
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Philanthropy can help to build a new arts journalism infrastructure to offset the collapse of local coverage.
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This brings us to the third, and arguably most controversial, cure for the ills of arts journalism—cultural organisations.
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Writers will struggle to reclaim the access and influence they achieved with the backing of prestigious journalism brands.
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Our notion of what a “news organisation” or an “art magazine” is supposed to do will be upended as new relationships crystallise between the arts, the media and the public.

death and decoration

"...No one (we assume, although actually it's questionable -- it might really be everyone) wants paintings just to be commodity objects. We want them to have significance and meaning. We have got ourselves into a wrong mindset where we think if there aren't obvious meanings then there isn't any meaning at all. Or if there is, it's not for us. We ask for all sorts of additions and backups. We can't accept visual meaning or formal meaning as enough. We believe it's decoration only -- we're right to think "decorative" is somehow wrong. It can be supremely right but in the ordinary usage of the word it's wrong. The decorative meaning of Rothko, for example, is powerful: he really could decorate a room...
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But death is not really a runner nowadays for art.
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The market works out what will sell. Out of an initially earnest bubbling up of contents from the artistic cutting edge of the 1970s emerges popular content obsessions like death and madness, which hark back to romanticism -- not because we're getting more sincere and poetic but because being so unhinged from anything meaningful or important we'll sample anything temporarily for fun.
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If we stop and reflect for a moment, we're still a bit baffled: we can't see clearly what the connection was between art-world interest in deconstruction and the rise of fair ground meaning or lurid or fake meaning. One minute we were busy learning that we are constructs and then in the blink of an eye it turned out any old unthinking lunges at identity would do. The lesson the art market drew was that you could make money from identity and diversity..." /// PUT DOWNS AND SUCK UPS: MATTHEW COLLINGS' WEEKLY VENTINGS ABOUT THE ART WORLD NO 23: PAINTING AND MEANING, saatchi-blog

just read it, OK

Eight Fallacies About Contemporary Art /// The L Magazine

gone to san diego for the weekend

I'm headed south for the weekend. So, here are some review tactics to chew on:

"Does anyone like Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition at David Zwirner? Past endless Facebook debate, and slams from major publications, the only positive reviews I’ve read (if you can call them that) are descriptive....
As a general rule of thumb I tend not to respond to this kind of art – having the shit scared out of me due to an empathetic response isn’t what I look for from an artist..." Paddy Johnson/AFC

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"...Either way, the artist failed to make a successful painting...Similarly, the awkward handling seems more forgivable, if for no other reason than the pubescent subjects suffer from corresponding problems." Paddy Johnson/The L Magazine

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"...The tape freaked me out, turned me off, and even outraged me...I looked, I shuddered, I passed on to the next disappointing work, not giving the moral dimensions of Usine too much thought...Still, I did come away from the Abdessemed piece knowing more than ever that I don’t believe in certainty, that even though the work wasn’t good, I was snagged by the paradox it raised about what kills what..." Jerry Saltz/NYMag

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"Someday the Museum of Modern Art will be filled with nothing but flat screen televisions projecting slow moving, high definition video paintings for the delectation of future generations who never heard of Picasso...If artists like Mik truly believed the grimness of their production, they would all rot in their beds." Charlie Finch/artnet

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"Later this month, the artist [Kate Gilmore] will decamp to Miami, where she plans to hurl herself to the bottom of a very deep ditch, then try to get out. 'I’m nervous about that one,' says Gilmore, who’s been lifting weights and bulking up in preparation. 'I’ll get out. It may not be the way I want to get out, it may not be pretty, but I’ll get out. Hopefully.'" Amy Laroc/NYMag

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"MATTHEW COLLINGS: How deep should art be?
SATAN: It should be deep Matt, very deep indeed.
You say it so glibly as if you don't take the question seriously.
I don't.
Well where do you get your reputation for knowledge, your evil wisdom -- the ability to see within everyone?
I live in a place of ice, freezing, really unpleasant, and in there I'm eating the bodies of the great betrayers, Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar, and Judas, who betrayed Jesus. I'm eating them forever. For eternity -- it's Hell - the worse place. I'm always thinking while eating. And over the centuries people have realised I have certain insights. But I don't think about the art world much.
What shows have you seen recently?
I hardly ever go any more..." Matthew Collings/Saatchi Online

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PUT DOWNS AND SUCK UPS: MATTHEW COLLINGS' WEEKLY VENTINGS ABOUT THE ART WORLD NO 20: ART WRITING
"Should art writing be high-minded and refined, with a lot of honing, corrections and rethinks, or should it be spontaneous like a blog? Should it be self-indulgent or earnestly careful and considered? If it's the latter does it run the risk of being sterile and boring? And is the problem of the former that while venting can be entertaining it kind of lowers the tone of the whole thing generally, the whole thing being this great enterprise, art, with all its philosophical, aesthetical, moral and ethical meanings? Who does it anyway? Art writing I mean. Are they failures and losers? What would they be if they were winners? Artists, yes, of course, but what are artists, what on earth do they do? What is art now that the olden-days stuff is over? Contemporary art: this ragbag of hustling bullshit -- steady on! ..." Matthew Collings/Saatchi Online

Headline of the Day: What's the point of art criticism?

What is the point of art criticism?
It's easy to dismiss it as trivial entertainment, but today's culture of gallery obsession and mediocre art being talked up by fools makes art criticism more crucial than ever
–jonathan jones blog/guardian

nice flashy title but fluffy, obvious information (read the headline, skim to the bottom and then think for yourself.) what really gets me going is when "critics" act only as press agents: insert gallery name here, describe show here and make one vague statement about the overall direction here. with the old breed of ink-stained pseudo-scholars in the hole (papers/mags lay off art writers first, obviously) and a vast world of bloggers, i have yet to find a trustworthy, reliable batch of emerging critics. even the (in)famous jerry saltz posed the same question on his facebook page, asking who you read for art criticism, getting a number of results, all of whom i believe to still be hit or miss. maybe blame it on too much information/art/news out there to really focus, or is it just tepid reviewing? i think there is uncharted territory for criticism coming - if art can grow so too can the way we write about it.

really, don't put yourself out on a limb or anything - critical quote of the day

"...At least from my perspective, it would have been very helpful if it was a bit more description, a little clearer, and a bit less discursive and dense. But, of course, this is not the only perspective..." Daniel Miller, Psychometry (II) Frieze Magazine

how many times have i said the same....

it had to be said

"In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their esthetic heads up the esthetic 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. Before the schadenfreud-aholics concur, I am not talking about artists like Wade Guyton, Kelly Walker or Josh Smith, all of whom deploy the above artists in optically original and intellectually complex ways, but hordes of wannabe followers who do so in safely imitative unoriginal ways. These second-stringers have spawned 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...

'Younger' should be much more exciting than it is. For long stretches it is just the same old rote conceptualism and latest iterations on retreaded ideas (curators everywhere love this kind of art). The show is filled with frustrating moments, most of which occur when the curators conform too completely to biennial habit, choosing art that follows standard conventions of late-late-late conceptualism...

'Younger than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free. Even the New Museum itself, founded in 1977, is 'younger than Jesus.' Since it reopened in December 2007, it’s become, despite its clinical spaces and a couple of misfires, the most consistently challenging, polemical art institution in the city. It, like the art in this show and everywhere, is being reborn." Jerry Saltz
"JESUS" SAVES

how did I let this one slip by me...let's take a look at the new work...

A little bit of the old...


and a little bit of experimentation...


leads to some new developments.
Knowing Schutz's works up close (usually containing a splattering of thick, bright globes of paint) I can't even begin to judge the successfulness of the recent batch, and will leave it up to Roberta. PS: someone tell Zach Feuer that less is more.

Dana Schutz: Missing Pictures
Zach Feuer Gallery, through April 25
Roberta Smith:
"Dana Schutz’s new paintings look a tad better on the gallery’s Web site than in person. Compression helps, which suggests the larger, more complicated canvases might be better at two-thirds size and that the bright colors could be intensified. Or maybe their complexity of palette and composition is not mutually enhancing; these canvases need to get away from one another. Still, Ms. Schutz deserves credit for not repeating herself. She continues her ambitious exploration of color, technique and history, both political and painterly..."
pics: zach feuer

let's all fly to NY

By Jerry Saltz

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don't worry LA...we still have the Hammer. wink.

AIDS-3D, ''OMG Obelisk,'' 2007. MDF, electroluminescent wire, steel, hot glue, acrylic paint and fire. Courtesy the New Museum.

snippets from jerry

"...A well-known museum curator sidled up and swooned, 'Lisa’s paintings are as rich as Vermeer’s and Boucher’s. They’re as sumptuous as the background of the Mona Lisa.' I blinked silently until she mentioned Courbet. Then I bitchily snipped, 'If you think these paintings have that kind of mojo, you’ve either never looked at those paintings or you know nothing about painting—which I’ve written about you.' We smiled at each other and parted. I love the art world.
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Josh Smith’s densely hung painting show, which was at Luhring Augustine until last week, comes at you with an intense optical force that accurately replicates the psychic energy of our topsy-turvy world. Smith’s paintings look like swirling, multicolored wallpaper patterns with green leaves or jumping fish in the middle. His surfaces shift from handmade to printed to Xeroxed and entice, confuse, and zap the eye. His sense of design, abstraction, and figuration all come forward at once. The paintings are well-made and smart but not about being 'important.' This releases all sorts of fresh air into the space around his painting, painting in general, and exhibitions. Two years ago a show like this might have seemed like a marketing ploy; now it feels like life. Whatever it was, it gave me a rush..."
Jerry Saltz: After the Orgy, New York Mag

jerry, you still make the art world fun and exploratory, kudos!

What’s Selling (or Not) at the Armory Show /// Jerry Saltz

Best Saltz line: "...don't leave a brother hanging..." and with a high-five! totally lovely!

would you like this art based on the statement

"...Like the artist himself, his work is unpretentious, thoughtful and sincere. Created using materials normally associated with construction, such as 2 x 4s, metal brackets, plywood, particleboard and florescent paint, they self-consciously refer to their own status as constructed objects.
XXX doesn’t see abstraction as rigid or conceptual, but rather as an organic and free-flowing force. He strives to create work that is full of life, and builds each piece by responding to what already exists within it. Allowing the process to dictate the direction and evolution of the work, he accepts and “goes with what is there to make something happen.”

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What brought me to this point was seeing this artist's works in a tiny pic exhibited at Pulse. I thought, based on the kind review and interesting forms/display, (helped by sparse booth and sticking with a one person show) to investigate further. So it brought me HERE. Then I got some close-up action like the kind in the morning without beer goggles. Yikes. OK, but there must be more. Always research the art beyond first impressions.
So then I went to the statement/press. Boy, that didn't help me. Just wondering how many artists are out there using stuff like "metal brackets, plywood, particleboard and florescent paint, they self-consciously refer to their own status as constructed objects..." to back their work up. Then that brought me to thinking about the swarms of applying mfa'ers due to the economy and felt like half the art world should just self-destruct.

just read this one paragraph, I promise it won't hurt

"...Asher took Duchamp one step further. Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other 'institutional' site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination. Asher took Duchamp one step further. Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other 'institutional' site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational,
everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination..."
Andrea Fraser: From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Art Forum Sept. 05
OK, now read one more time.

ticket booth

"...Several Fridays ago, I spent an hour reading the 875 years between A.D. 38,658 and A.D. 39,533. It was one of the odder hours I’ve ever spent in a gallery..." Saltz from:
Reeling In the Years: On Kawara’s latest show calls for participants to read long lists of dates. Sounds easy, right?

Read it! Jerry makes you feel that you are living the piece through him.

I wonder if they will solve this caper?

6pm Critiquing the Critic: Is Criticism Still Relevant
Panel Discussion, Sponsored by THE Magazine

I hope the conversation turns into what is art. But be sure to sneak in, (wear your smart glasses) otherwise pay 15 bucks to see the Los Angeles Art Show, not to be confused with ART LA.

SUPERSONIC is also at the Los Angeles Convention Center and am waiting to see if you have to pay or not.....?

HOW WILL WE SURVIVE?

Pace Wildenstein (Sentry, Gallery Desks in Chelsea Series)
photography/ Andy Freeberg

Here are two ideas from Charlie:

"How would a new gallery system work? The first step would be to require written contracts between a gallery and its artists. A gallery would commit to a stable of, say, ten artists for a contractual period of five years. Each artist would receive a monthly stipend to cover the basics such as rent, food and materials. In return, any monies received from the sale of works by gallery artists would go into a collective pool to pay these stipends and the expenses of running the gallery. Part of the stipend arrangement would require the artists to commit a small amount of time weekly to working in the gallery to cut down on labor costs...

Collectors can do their part, too, as they deaccession their unwanted art holdings, by spreading the secondary market around with a collectors' register that would provide a list of works available for resale to participating galleries, similar to the multiple listings in the real estate industry. Rich collectors might also consider donating a prized Koons or Dumas to a small, struggling gallery to be raffled or auctioned off for the benefit of said gallery. Collector-curated shows, such as the ones Beth Rudin DeWoody has produced recently, could also be a financial boon to prevent struggling galleries from closing, with such collectors generously leavening their hordes in order to keep struggling galleries afloat..."

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES by Charlie Finch

Andrea Rosen (Sentry, Gallery Desks in Chelsea Series)
photography/ Andy Freeberg

PS: If anyone knows of any art related positions in the LA area please drop me a line. The LA scene is feelin' the burn, me included, and this blog ain't paying the bills.

Survival of the Fittest...Artist

Left: Michael Shermer (The Skeptic Society), Right: Denis Dutton
Tonight's lecture: Denis Dutton /// The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
Arts + Anthropology.
Dutton, boasting a background in sociology and anthropology, related Darwin's principals to art practice and it's evolution while Shermer, the man behind The Skeptic Society/magazine, insightfully proposed inquiries to Dutton about progression in art, like how and why the landscape is desirable, exploration versus asthetical urge, and many other points that hit buttons with me (like when Shermer couldn't get off the notion that Koons' vacuum cleaners in plexi could be art, or interesting, for that matter). It was seriously an interesting sight to see two very skilled, intelligent academic/pseudo-scientists talk about the constraints of art and say "I'd like some answers" or "[Koons] isn't surprising" or [Koons) won't be remembered 500 years from now and "shouldn't be". I actually would like to have seen Koons and Hirst perform a lecture on Darwin's principals so as to have an accurate rebuttal! The staged conversation went on to discuss how humans domesticated themselves and then a bit in the end about how monkeys who are given paint don't look at their artwork once the tools are taken away from them, so therefore they haven't created art, or something like that. Oh, sorta-scientists!
All in all, a great lecture - I would love to see more outside fields talk about art within the confines of their own language. Very insightful and thought provoking, although I am not sure I will be reading the book.

photos: tryharder

ALOUD lecture tonight: Denis Dutton

Don't miss tonight, 7pm at the Central Library downtown LA:

Denis Dutton
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution
In conversation with Michael Shermer, The Skeptic Society
"Combining two fascinating and contentious disciplines -- art and evolutionary science -- a philosopher, professor and founder/editor of the popular Arts & Letter Daily, argues that human tastes in art are shaped by Darwinian selection."