In the earlier thread on whether Ron Mueck is really still a Muppeteer, Sally gave some examples of things we'd miss out on with a narrowly drawn definition of "artist." One is "guitar solos as art performance," referring to a certain Cory Arcangel piece. But the art wasn't really the guitar solo, it was a mock power point lecture about hyperspecialized internet communities, in this case electric guitar nerds who devote whole sites and chatboards to legendary guitarists and famous solos. Arcangel took many of the technical details in the lecture from such sites, and then surprised the audience, at the end of the performance, with his prowess in playing Van Halen's "Eruption" solo note for note. The event combined visuals, talk, and music. Is the art world big enough to embrace this? I'd say yes. But what if Whitney curator Larry Rinder went to Williamsburg, heard a guitarist he liked, and invited him to play his instrument at the museum, as art?
Rinder is actually one of the worst offenders in the "I have the power to make you an artist" game. The 2001 Biennial included Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, which applied cutting edge design and economizing principles to housing for the disadvantaged in rural Alabama. The designs (captured in photos and models) were nice, but wouldn't this have been more meaningful in an architectural context? Also, could the NY museum audience ever really "get" the work without directly experiencing it? Rinder also bestowed Chris Ware's comix with the magic art aura, mounting the individual pages on the walls, behind glass, as drawings. But who's going to read all those pages in a museum gallery? There's an ideal form for viewing that kind of material--it's called the "comic book." The inclusion of Ware and Mockbee meant two less slots for validating folks who have been working away as visual artists, and who are possibly even expert at projects meant to be experienced in a gallery-type space.
Sally also mentions Damien Hirst's cut-up cow as something that perhaps took a wrong turn on the way to the natural history museum (my phrasing). Should it be banned from the art arena? No, because it's very self-consciously aware of how it fits in the chain of postwar art movements, referencing Minimalist seriality, the (Robert) Smithsonian critique of 19th Century museological and taxonomic principles, even animal gore a la the Viennese actionists...much of which ground (round) had already been covered in the '60s with Paul Thek's "meat in a vitrine" pieces, only not so literally. That's Hirst. But again, if a curator had a fishtank shipped over from an aquarium because he thought the tank-designer was an artist...
UPDATE: Some may remember my "revised BitStreams" roster included all kinds of folks outside the art world, which may seem like a contradiction. My point there was that in the case of emerging "digital culture," which is so new and undefined, you have to look elsewhere to find a technical yardstick and context. Rinder did that a bit in "BitStreams," he just picked crappy examples. Does that mean people who make title sequences for movies are artists? No, just that you ought to take them into account when evaluating whether, say, Jeremy Blake is any good.
I think we are coming at these questions with pretty different agendas. I am living in a city (Toronto) with tons of good artists and hardly any art patrons. There used to be an explicit nationalist agenda in Canada (fraught of course, in many ways) to support the arts with public funding. The funding is still in place (although it is inadequate) but the general public is more inclined to complain about inappropriate use of taxpayers $$ than it is to feel proud of its cultural artifacts. In New York, there is a sense that art is part of what makes the city great. I am speculating that this might translate into a more empowered art audience. Here in Toronto there are tons of people who engage with books, film, theatre, dance and actively want to engage with visual art, but feel that it belongs in a different world, one they don't have access to.
For several years (primarily through the shotgun reviews section of our magazine) I've been actively engaged with trying to blur the hard edged boundary around the art world so as to make it easier for intelligent people to find themselves engaged. This is partly out of self interest as an artist - I don't want to work in a bubble! I want to participate in the world, and for that I need feedback from people outside the art cliques. It's also out of self interest as a citizen - I want capitvating values floating around in my city that are not about corporate growth.
So for me, an alarm goes off when someone starts talking about what is and isn't art. It sounds defensive, and I think the larger culture needs us engaged people to participate, not withdraw.
The amount of artists in NY without support or recognition is staggering. All the more reason we don't need the Chris Wares of the world sashaying in without paying dues.
Where we don't seem to be communicating very well is on the issue of the audience. Do people go to a museum because they want to have an exciting experience, different from what they get in, say, a movie theatre or a concert hall or a graphic novel, but still exciting? Or do they go because they hope that maybe they, too, could be showing there, or critiquing, or curating? You seem to be saying that by making the definition of art broader, avoiding specialized jargon, encouraging participation, the audience will increase for the latter reason. I'm saying art is a specialty like any other, and it needs standards, for want of a better term, in order to show the audience the best possible time. If an audience member wants to cross over and join the inmates, s/he ought to pay dues, just as s/he would in theatre, or film, or publishing.
There is an elitism of five people talking to each other without regard to a larger public, and there is an elitism of having years invested in the field and not being terribly patient with newbies, but still caring about the end audience. I'd say mine is the latter. Also, this is a semi-specialized weblog, and it should be understand that my comments are in the nature of family arguments, or airing the art world's dirty laundry.
"If an audience member wants to cross over and join the inmates, s/he ought to pay dues, just as s/he would in theatre, or film, or publishing." I think this where I have the most disagreement. Because there are many different types of qualification to offer something of value to 'the discourse', and if those criteria are only established from within, then we stagnate. I am in total agreement that there be standards, and rigour and high expectations, just that we recognise they may come from unexpected places, and open ourselves, as 'insiders', to the challenge of good thinking from 'outsiders'. It seems to me to be a bigger and more difficult task than protecting the cannon. But you know what? I see that you, Tom, have been engaged for a long time with doing pretty much exactly what I am asking for - both in this blog and also in your own work, so maybe this 'art/not art' sticking point is a red herring.
I'll get off this, but just to clarify: I'm not Clement Greenberg, I don't care about the canon (in fact, nowhere did I say anything about "protecting the canon"). I just don't want to be bored in a gallery. I'm open to Chris Ware's work, but I think he's already found his medium, and it's not gallery walls. If he did something that showed he'd thought about the space and people moving around it, I might be more open to it...as art.
uh yeah, sorry. that comment about the canon was a bit of hyperbole on my part.
Okay, okay. I'm obessed. But I actually have spent most of my adult life so far thinking about this art and audience stuff in one form or another, so it's no surprise I can't shut up. I know we are supposed to be winding up here...but I think you are right, Tom, that we aren't communicating well yet about audience. Part of the reason is that I have been jumping all over the place in terms of my own role. I am an artist, but I think most of my interest in this discussion comes from my role as writer/publisher. As such, I am part of an audience for art - a very demanding one. But, also in this role, I am talking about broadening the art audience by which I definitely mean people other than myself. In that respect, I must translate my own demands for art into an expression that communicates outside the art bubble. The end result may seem casual, but the process is rigorous. My goal in doing this is not to bring more potential artists into the fold (couldn't really care less about that), but to hone and deepen the discourse.
With the demise of Lola art magazine, there is now less coverage of young artists in Toronto. As a friend and member of the community I regret this, but as a publisher I am pretty cold-blooded about it. I find myself saying "promoting artist's careers has never really been my main motivation" and then I feel bad as a look of betrayal falls across the face of whomever I am talking to. I also don't want to be bored in galleries, nor in art magazines. And I really do believe that art is more interesting when it's very existence is challenged and revisited.
That's partly why Corey Arcangel is compelling - there's an element of risk in the fact that he puts an art lens on experiences that normally carry their content elsewhere. On the flip side, the application of a lens can go both ways. There was a horrid scandal here a couple years ago, when a pair of art school dorks tortured some kittens on video and it got shown as art in a gallery. They were taken to court and punished and why not? Our society abhors animal cruelty for a reason. But the public outcry was that the video was 'not art'. Torturing kittens is stupid and horrible (and one could make a case that it is also boring and derivative) and I have no interest in seeing this video in a gallery or anywhere else, but I still think it is art. It is insulting to the hypothetical audience, be they art educated or not, to suggest that regular powers of moral discernment might not suffice in an art gallery. And it is insulting to art that it (we) might require a unique set of moral criteria for our very existence. I know this is not your argument, Tom. But it is background that informs my position on definitions of art and audience. And it is exactly because I make demands on art that I want to see us test ourselves in the world, and not just amongst one another.
Now that you're wrapping this up I figure it's time to chime in. Hell I've got an ass, why not talk out of it?
Tom, your argument about Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio is bang on. I remember thinking something similar when I saw it, (only I was thinking how well _I_ could have used the space not some deserving artist (you're a better person than I)).
The architecture world has it's own separate system and criticism which means it looks pretty out of place in the museum. Especially when you consider that it's intension is never to appeal to a mass audience until the final stage of creating a building. I'm a reasonably clever guy, but technical drawings don’t do anything for me because I don't have the background knowledge to understand them.
But hasn't there always been an uneasy relationship between art and craft? Does an outsider artist have to be poor in order to make the transition to insider artist? And while I share a certain queasiness about Ron Mueck being turned into an artist by the curator, he's hardly the first curator to "discover" talent that the artists themselves didn't know they had.
-- I'm saying art is a specialty like any other, and it needs standards, for want of a better term, in order to show the audience the best possible time.--
I think this is a true statement except the last rule in our list of standards has to be "the rules are there to be broken". Look at Fred Wilson's curatorial/art work. His work is exciting because he is messing with the same taboos that Rinder is messing with about what belongs in a museum. I'll put up with the proverbial Rinder if it allows me the proverbial Wilson.
JOE
This discussion started with that rare admission from someone in the art arena (Mueck) that he wasn't actually an artist. Since I don't like his "work," I essentially said "fine, get out." Ever since then, I've been debating the proposition "One shouldn't say someone is not an artist." By my earlier analysis, if those kitten guys say they're artists, they're artists. The morality of their project is a different issue.
Joe, in my ideal world Fred Wilson would get to do what he does without opening the door for institutional curators to do similar "recontextualizing." Another example of the latter is MOMA's rehanging of its collection a couple of years back: an arty game of "let's mix up the categories" that resulted in Duchamp's stool/bicycle wheel next to a de Stijl (Gerrit Rietveld) chair. ("Hey, yeah, they're both chairs, man!") If an artist did that I'd hate it but say it was his or her right. If I were the museum director, I'd suggest that the curator resign and reapply as a visiting artist. Someone employed by an institution like MOMA has a duty, dull as it is, to maintain some kind of coherent record of artists' activities. I realize there's give and take, the boundaries are porous, etc. but I would be a "hard-liner" on this point. Ultimately that installation tames, domesticates, and misrepresents Duchamp (and makes poor Rietveld look silly).
Sally, on the issue of building an audience, I see that as a problem for educators. The fact that we, as artists, feel we have to do it points to the miserable failure of the system. I've done my share of "taking up the slack" through writing for a general circulation newspaper, doing press releases, organizing parties at galleries, making fun of over-refined insiders, etc. I don't feel the compulsion to edify a mass audience with everything I write on this weblog, though. If I say so-and-so isn't an artist, it's aimed at a specialized readership. If that diminishes the cause of art because someone reads me and misunderstands, so be it. Hopefully someone will read such comments in the context of a blog that also posts Pokemon bead designs, models of Zerg mounds, and photos of Victoria's Secret models (not as art).
how about that dumb fucking motorcycle show at the Gug. and to make it worse they let Gehry trash up the place with his decorative panels. Ho Buoy !
hmmm. did they drive on the ramp? If yes, I'm in favour. bring on the spectacle!
"Art of the Motorcycle" was a canned spectacle and a big box office payoff bringing in a huge crossover non-art crowd that will (lets face it) never go back. It killed in Vegas too.
"Mueck, 43, began his career as a model-maker for children's TV in his native Australia (his parents were both toy makers), before moving to London some 20 years ago and working in the advertising and Þlm industries. He turned to art full time in 1996 at the instigation of his mother-in-law Paula Rego."
The official version, straight from the Saatchi publicity desk.
i suppose the question is why people go to galleries? when i started my dissertation i thought maybe it was because people wanted to see something interesting. Something they couldn't do. I suppose a lot of art goers visit for inspiration - but maybe they go for consolidation, for comfort. Sure, Mueck never intended to be an artist, but is this important? As a modelmaker i am aware how awesome his work is technically, but the reason i like it is that it isnt a 3d photo. When studies closely the figures anatomy is distorted, the postures impossible. Perhaps muecks past makes him more able to communicate with the general public and ask the same questions we do. To envoke the same emotions. Feelings of separation, isolation, of being stared at - as an outsider. Think about the social implications of voyeurism, nudity, seeing the most sacred moment when i child is born, laid open
i guess i'm interested because i am currently trying to write about both mueck and damien hirst and was interested here as i have found few other sites which was questioning muecks validity as an artist. i am interested in why we seem to connect the artists so regularly. as you have done earlier. why are they so comparable when they are so different in background and style? i think maybe they both ask the same questions. or at least we project the same questions on to the work. but which artist is a true artist. it could be said hirst is the direct opposite - but interestingly still backed by that bizarre Kaiser Jose character mr saatchi. may be its all about money. but i don't think so - not to the artists.
at the risk of sounding inconsistent, I must say that I think Muek is a lightweight compared to Hirst. Muek's debatable strengths are embedded in his craft. Hirst may aggravate and offend, but (and) he's thinking hard and smart.
I always like the question "What is Art?" and to be quite frank I don't think there is a possible answer, the closest I can get is that surely Art is something that should create or provoke a reaction. It doesnt really matter what that reaction is, you could think yes, I like that or 'Oh my god what a pile of shit, that's not art' and at the end of the day it is. It provoked a reaction, created a feeling and you can't deny that. I think Charles Saatchi helps to realise this, his choice of Art is somewhat strange, but it does provoke a reaction, and that is all that matters. In relation to galleries, I don't really agree with them, they undercut artists, overprice the work and over-saturate the marketplace with something that is already a dying fad. I have no agent, I don't use any galleries and much prefer to do all of my own research, sales and PR for my work. I may not earn thousands of pounds for my paintings but I sell 1 or 2 every single week without the need for the self righteous critics to get involved and destroy me.
Excuse me, were we talking about you?
|
In the earlier thread on whether Ron Mueck is really still a Muppeteer, Sally gave some examples of things we'd miss out on with a narrowly drawn definition of "artist." One is "guitar solos as art performance," referring to a certain Cory Arcangel piece. But the art wasn't really the guitar solo, it was a mock power point lecture about hyperspecialized internet communities, in this case electric guitar nerds who devote whole sites and chatboards to legendary guitarists and famous solos. Arcangel took many of the technical details in the lecture from such sites, and then surprised the audience, at the end of the performance, with his prowess in playing Van Halen's "Eruption" solo note for note. The event combined visuals, talk, and music. Is the art world big enough to embrace this? I'd say yes. But what if Whitney curator Larry Rinder went to Williamsburg, heard a guitarist he liked, and invited him to play his instrument at the museum, as art?
Rinder is actually one of the worst offenders in the "I have the power to make you an artist" game. The 2001 Biennial included Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, which applied cutting edge design and economizing principles to housing for the disadvantaged in rural Alabama. The designs (captured in photos and models) were nice, but wouldn't this have been more meaningful in an architectural context? Also, could the NY museum audience ever really "get" the work without directly experiencing it? Rinder also bestowed Chris Ware's comix with the magic art aura, mounting the individual pages on the walls, behind glass, as drawings. But who's going to read all those pages in a museum gallery? There's an ideal form for viewing that kind of material--it's called the "comic book." The inclusion of Ware and Mockbee meant two less slots for validating folks who have been working away as visual artists, and who are possibly even expert at projects meant to be experienced in a gallery-type space.
Sally also mentions Damien Hirst's cut-up cow as something that perhaps took a wrong turn on the way to the natural history museum (my phrasing). Should it be banned from the art arena? No, because it's very self-consciously aware of how it fits in the chain of postwar art movements, referencing Minimalist seriality, the (Robert) Smithsonian critique of 19th Century museological and taxonomic principles, even animal gore a la the Viennese actionists...much of which ground (round) had already been covered in the '60s with Paul Thek's "meat in a vitrine" pieces, only not so literally. That's Hirst. But again, if a curator had a fishtank shipped over from an aquarium because he thought the tank-designer was an artist...
UPDATE: Some may remember my "revised BitStreams" roster included all kinds of folks outside the art world, which may seem like a contradiction. My point there was that in the case of emerging "digital culture," which is so new and undefined, you have to look elsewhere to find a technical yardstick and context. Rinder did that a bit in "BitStreams," he just picked crappy examples. Does that mean people who make title sequences for movies are artists? No, just that you ought to take them into account when evaluating whether, say, Jeremy Blake is any good.
- tom moody 12-28-2003 12:18 am
I think we are coming at these questions with pretty different agendas. I am living in a city (Toronto) with tons of good artists and hardly any art patrons. There used to be an explicit nationalist agenda in Canada (fraught of course, in many ways) to support the arts with public funding. The funding is still in place (although it is inadequate) but the general public is more inclined to complain about inappropriate use of taxpayers $$ than it is to feel proud of its cultural artifacts. In New York, there is a sense that art is part of what makes the city great. I am speculating that this might translate into a more empowered art audience. Here in Toronto there are tons of people who engage with books, film, theatre, dance and actively want to engage with visual art, but feel that it belongs in a different world, one they don't have access to.
For several years (primarily through the shotgun reviews section of our magazine) I've been actively engaged with trying to blur the hard edged boundary around the art world so as to make it easier for intelligent people to find themselves engaged. This is partly out of self interest as an artist - I don't want to work in a bubble! I want to participate in the world, and for that I need feedback from people outside the art cliques. It's also out of self interest as a citizen - I want capitvating values floating around in my city that are not about corporate growth.
So for me, an alarm goes off when someone starts talking about what is and isn't art. It sounds defensive, and I think the larger culture needs us engaged people to participate, not withdraw.
- sally mckay 12-28-2003 8:39 pm
The amount of artists in NY without support or recognition is staggering. All the more reason we don't need the Chris Wares of the world sashaying in without paying dues.
Where we don't seem to be communicating very well is on the issue of the audience. Do people go to a museum because they want to have an exciting experience, different from what they get in, say, a movie theatre or a concert hall or a graphic novel, but still exciting? Or do they go because they hope that maybe they, too, could be showing there, or critiquing, or curating? You seem to be saying that by making the definition of art broader, avoiding specialized jargon, encouraging participation, the audience will increase for the latter reason. I'm saying art is a specialty like any other, and it needs standards, for want of a better term, in order to show the audience the best possible time. If an audience member wants to cross over and join the inmates, s/he ought to pay dues, just as s/he would in theatre, or film, or publishing.
There is an elitism of five people talking to each other without regard to a larger public, and there is an elitism of having years invested in the field and not being terribly patient with newbies, but still caring about the end audience. I'd say mine is the latter. Also, this is a semi-specialized weblog, and it should be understand that my comments are in the nature of family arguments, or airing the art world's dirty laundry.
- tom moody 12-28-2003 9:25 pm
"If an audience member wants to cross over and join the inmates, s/he ought to pay dues, just as s/he would in theatre, or film, or publishing." I think this where I have the most disagreement. Because there are many different types of qualification to offer something of value to 'the discourse', and if those criteria are only established from within, then we stagnate. I am in total agreement that there be standards, and rigour and high expectations, just that we recognise they may come from unexpected places, and open ourselves, as 'insiders', to the challenge of good thinking from 'outsiders'. It seems to me to be a bigger and more difficult task than protecting the cannon. But you know what? I see that you, Tom, have been engaged for a long time with doing pretty much exactly what I am asking for - both in this blog and also in your own work, so maybe this 'art/not art' sticking point is a red herring.
- sally mckay 12-28-2003 9:50 pm
I'll get off this, but just to clarify: I'm not Clement Greenberg, I don't care about the canon (in fact, nowhere did I say anything about "protecting the canon"). I just don't want to be bored in a gallery. I'm open to Chris Ware's work, but I think he's already found his medium, and it's not gallery walls. If he did something that showed he'd thought about the space and people moving around it, I might be more open to it...as art.
- tom moody 12-28-2003 10:03 pm
uh yeah, sorry. that comment about the canon was a bit of hyperbole on my part.
- sally mckay 12-29-2003 12:41 am
Okay, okay. I'm obessed. But I actually have spent most of my adult life so far thinking about this art and audience stuff in one form or another, so it's no surprise I can't shut up. I know we are supposed to be winding up here...but I think you are right, Tom, that we aren't communicating well yet about audience. Part of the reason is that I have been jumping all over the place in terms of my own role. I am an artist, but I think most of my interest in this discussion comes from my role as writer/publisher. As such, I am part of an audience for art - a very demanding one. But, also in this role, I am talking about broadening the art audience by which I definitely mean people other than myself. In that respect, I must translate my own demands for art into an expression that communicates outside the art bubble. The end result may seem casual, but the process is rigorous. My goal in doing this is not to bring more potential artists into the fold (couldn't really care less about that), but to hone and deepen the discourse.
With the demise of Lola art magazine, there is now less coverage of young artists in Toronto. As a friend and member of the community I regret this, but as a publisher I am pretty cold-blooded about it. I find myself saying "promoting artist's careers has never really been my main motivation" and then I feel bad as a look of betrayal falls across the face of whomever I am talking to. I also don't want to be bored in galleries, nor in art magazines. And I really do believe that art is more interesting when it's very existence is challenged and revisited.
That's partly why Corey Arcangel is compelling - there's an element of risk in the fact that he puts an art lens on experiences that normally carry their content elsewhere. On the flip side, the application of a lens can go both ways. There was a horrid scandal here a couple years ago, when a pair of art school dorks tortured some kittens on video and it got shown as art in a gallery. They were taken to court and punished and why not? Our society abhors animal cruelty for a reason. But the public outcry was that the video was 'not art'. Torturing kittens is stupid and horrible (and one could make a case that it is also boring and derivative) and I have no interest in seeing this video in a gallery or anywhere else, but I still think it is art. It is insulting to the hypothetical audience, be they art educated or not, to suggest that regular powers of moral discernment might not suffice in an art gallery. And it is insulting to art that it (we) might require a unique set of moral criteria for our very existence. I know this is not your argument, Tom. But it is background that informs my position on definitions of art and audience. And it is exactly because I make demands on art that I want to see us test ourselves in the world, and not just amongst one another.
- sally mckay 12-29-2003 10:00 pm
Now that you're wrapping this up I figure it's time to chime in. Hell I've got an ass, why not talk out of it?
Tom, your argument about Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio is bang on. I remember thinking something similar when I saw it, (only I was thinking how well _I_ could have used the space not some deserving artist (you're a better person than I)).
The architecture world has it's own separate system and criticism which means it looks pretty out of place in the museum. Especially when you consider that it's intension is never to appeal to a mass audience until the final stage of creating a building. I'm a reasonably clever guy, but technical drawings don’t do anything for me because I don't have the background knowledge to understand them.
But hasn't there always been an uneasy relationship between art and craft? Does an outsider artist have to be poor in order to make the transition to insider artist? And while I share a certain queasiness about Ron Mueck being turned into an artist by the curator, he's hardly the first curator to "discover" talent that the artists themselves didn't know they had.
-- I'm saying art is a specialty like any other, and it needs standards, for want of a better term, in order to show the audience the best possible time.--
I think this is a true statement except the last rule in our list of standards has to be "the rules are there to be broken". Look at Fred Wilson's curatorial/art work. His work is exciting because he is messing with the same taboos that Rinder is messing with about what belongs in a museum. I'll put up with the proverbial Rinder if it allows me the proverbial Wilson.
JOE
- joester (guest) 12-29-2003 10:04 pm
This discussion started with that rare admission from someone in the art arena (Mueck) that he wasn't actually an artist. Since I don't like his "work," I essentially said "fine, get out." Ever since then, I've been debating the proposition "One shouldn't say someone is not an artist." By my earlier analysis, if those kitten guys say they're artists, they're artists. The morality of their project is a different issue.
Joe, in my ideal world Fred Wilson would get to do what he does without opening the door for institutional curators to do similar "recontextualizing." Another example of the latter is MOMA's rehanging of its collection a couple of years back: an arty game of "let's mix up the categories" that resulted in Duchamp's stool/bicycle wheel next to a de Stijl (Gerrit Rietveld) chair. ("Hey, yeah, they're both chairs, man!") If an artist did that I'd hate it but say it was his or her right. If I were the museum director, I'd suggest that the curator resign and reapply as a visiting artist. Someone employed by an institution like MOMA has a duty, dull as it is, to maintain some kind of coherent record of artists' activities. I realize there's give and take, the boundaries are porous, etc. but I would be a "hard-liner" on this point. Ultimately that installation tames, domesticates, and misrepresents Duchamp (and makes poor Rietveld look silly).
Sally, on the issue of building an audience, I see that as a problem for educators. The fact that we, as artists, feel we have to do it points to the miserable failure of the system. I've done my share of "taking up the slack" through writing for a general circulation newspaper, doing press releases, organizing parties at galleries, making fun of over-refined insiders, etc. I don't feel the compulsion to edify a mass audience with everything I write on this weblog, though. If I say so-and-so isn't an artist, it's aimed at a specialized readership. If that diminishes the cause of art because someone reads me and misunderstands, so be it. Hopefully someone will read such comments in the context of a blog that also posts Pokemon bead designs, models of Zerg mounds, and photos of Victoria's Secret models (not as art).
- tom moody 12-30-2003 8:58 pm
how about that dumb fucking motorcycle show at the Gug. and to make it worse they let Gehry trash up the place with his decorative panels. Ho Buoy !
- bill 12-30-2003 10:45 pm
hmmm. did they drive on the ramp? If yes, I'm in favour. bring on the spectacle!
- sally mckay 12-30-2003 10:49 pm
"Art of the Motorcycle" was a canned spectacle and a big box office payoff bringing in a huge crossover non-art crowd that will (lets face it) never go back. It killed in Vegas too.
- bill 12-30-2003 10:55 pm
"Mueck, 43, began his career as a model-maker for children's TV in his native Australia (his parents were both toy makers), before moving to London some 20 years ago and working in the advertising and Þlm industries. He turned to art full time in 1996 at the instigation of his mother-in-law Paula Rego."
- bill 1-04-2004 1:37 am
The official version, straight from the Saatchi publicity desk.
- tom moody 1-04-2004 2:20 am
i suppose the question is why people go to galleries? when i started my dissertation i thought maybe it was because people wanted to see something interesting. Something they couldn't do. I suppose a lot of art goers visit for inspiration - but maybe they go for consolidation, for comfort. Sure, Mueck never intended to be an artist, but is this important? As a modelmaker i am aware how awesome his work is technically, but the reason i like it is that it isnt a 3d photo. When studies closely the figures anatomy is distorted, the postures impossible. Perhaps muecks past makes him more able to communicate with the general public and ask the same questions we do. To envoke the same emotions. Feelings of separation, isolation, of being stared at - as an outsider. Think about the social implications of voyeurism, nudity, seeing the most sacred moment when i child is born, laid open
- harriet (guest) 1-04-2004 6:47 pm
i guess i'm interested because i am currently trying to write about both mueck and damien hirst and was interested here as i have found few other sites which was questioning muecks validity as an artist. i am interested in why we seem to connect the artists so regularly. as you have done earlier. why are they so comparable when they are so different in background and style? i think maybe they both ask the same questions. or at least we project the same questions on to the work. but which artist is a true artist. it could be said hirst is the direct opposite - but interestingly still backed by that bizarre Kaiser Jose character mr saatchi. may be its all about money. but i don't think so - not to the artists.
- harriet (guest) 1-04-2004 6:47 pm
at the risk of sounding inconsistent, I must say that I think Muek is a lightweight compared to Hirst. Muek's debatable strengths are embedded in his craft. Hirst may aggravate and offend, but (and) he's thinking hard and smart.
- sally mckay 1-05-2004 9:28 pm
I always like the question "What is Art?" and to be quite frank I don't think there is a possible answer, the closest I can get is that surely Art is something that should create or provoke a reaction. It doesnt really matter what that reaction is, you could think yes, I like that or 'Oh my god what a pile of shit, that's not art' and at the end of the day it is. It provoked a reaction, created a feeling and you can't deny that. I think Charles Saatchi helps to realise this, his choice of Art is somewhat strange, but it does provoke a reaction, and that is all that matters. In relation to galleries, I don't really agree with them, they undercut artists, overprice the work and over-saturate the marketplace with something that is already a dying fad. I have no agent, I don't use any galleries and much prefer to do all of my own research, sales and PR for my work. I may not earn thousands of pounds for my paintings but I sell 1 or 2 every single week without the need for the self righteous critics to get involved and destroy me.
- Louise Lench (guest) 1-29-2005 5:55 am
Excuse me, were we talking about you?
- tom moody 1-29-2005 6:24 am