If you don’t know already, Jeff Koons’s high-polished aluminum (or is it chrome?) “Rabbit” sold for over $90,000,000 at a Christie’s auction. One of the reasons I have nothing to say is that this sale says nothing about the art, and I’m not interested in money, nor qualified to talk about finance, economy, investment strategies,…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
Read MoreA few days ago MoMA uploaded a video of their “salon” on the topic of “White Male”. It could have been called “White Male: The Enemy” and the content would not have needed to change. I find this sort of thing in 2019 not to be the more enlightened, open-minded, generous, just, and progressive…
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I just wanted to get out one thought here, folks, which is percolating in my mind over my morning coffee. In general, morality is defined by others, and art makes its own definitions, hence they work at cross purposes. How much are we, as individuals, self-defined, and how much defined by everything outside of ourselves?…
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The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
Read More
The art world is filled with bad ideas that are repeated like scripture, and accepted as truisms. Most of them presume to make sweeping statements about all art, and establish a hierarchy with their chosen art at the pinnacle. I’ve dismantled a bunch of the worst of these ideas in lengthy articles, but here I’ll…
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. … Excerpt…
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Painting is no longer a window on an imaginary world. or Painting is no longer allowed to be a window on an imaginary world. There are some ideas that are so ingrained, repeated so often, and are impressed on us so early, that we accept them before we even have the chance or ability to…
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This work by me appears in the video: The Case for Copying, by The Art Assignment / PBS Digital Studios, at @7:00. The purpose of the video is to defend the sometimes maligned contemporary art practice of appropriation, and when giving historical context it returns to Duchamp’s “Fountain”, and then quickly segues to my appropriation…
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When I say things that I like to think are to some degree hyperbolic, such as that the art world is a sea of toxic, relativistic, bullshit, this is the art world I’m talking about, and I fear my colorful exaggeration is a woefully inadequate understatement. This film is about the blue chip art world,…
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Just going to share this without comment, which doesn’t mean I’m endorsing it or taking any side for or against. I think I’m afraid to formulate an opinion. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve slipped into some parallel dimensions where, well, everything seems backwards or like a parody. I am perhaps softening up to the idea…
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“I must confess that the other mods and I find ourselves strongly disagreeing with you in almost all cases…” ~ Head Moderator of the Art-History subreddit. I received the above message some months ago after the Art History subreddit censored an article of mine I shared which was critical of Banksy’s stunt in which one…
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At Eternity’s Gate is to the painter, Vincent Van Gogh, what the paintings in the movie are to his own: an atrocity. I’ve been excited to see this movie for a long time, mostly because it stars Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh. The only actor that might have been more fun to cast in the…
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[Note before I get started. I’m not a tortured artist, and have no mental illnesses or addictions. I’m not even prone to depression. If there are no extenuating circumstances, I’m told I can be annoyingly chipper, especially in the mornings. The way I usually choose to deal with things is with light humor.] I was…
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The question has come up a lot recently about whether or not we can separate the artist from the art, and it’s usually in the bad sense. The conclusion comes first, and it’s that a bad person can’t be a good artist. We then work on our arguments, which have to be correct, because we’ve…
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What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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Sometimes I say or do something that’s so obvious to me that I can’t believe nobody else has done it or said it. Apparently the above is an original quote by me [I also made the graphic.]. You can even take out the “for mental masturbation” part, and “art is not a conversation piece” is…
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Righteous political posturing is not synonymous with significant artistic achievement. The art world is so afraid of the political moralists that it is compelled to make any trivial political protest into front-page art news, and refuses to criticize it, even as art. Allow me to put a little perspective on this boring-ass, preachy, completely unoriginal…
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According to an article in artnetnews, the key is merely to be picked up by a big name venue early in your career. Sorry everyone else, your actual art is irrelevant, and THAT is F’ing pathetic. This is super depressing shit, and stupid. News flash: terminal myopia is not the right metaphor for visual art…
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My last article was an attempt (I like to think a successful one) at disentangling the verbose “theory” of Roland Barthes that “The Author is Dead”. I shared my article in a couple Reddit forums, one being “philosophy” and the other “art theory”. There were a lot of responses, most the initial ones fairly reasonable,…
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The belief that “the author is dead” is one of the unquestioned bad ideas that has become gospel in the art world. It’s usually just asserted — along with its companion notions that originality is impossible, and the artist’s intent is irrelevant — as if to deny it is as hopelessly naive as denying evolution.…
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WARNING: I wrote this in the course of a day, when I was in a particularly dark mood, and not worried about hyperbolic excess. I then shelved it as too negative. later I reconsidered it, and saw it had some good, honest bits, and a few passages with rhetorical flair. Now I share it as…
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This is an easy one. Generally, a manifesto is a declaration of what art should be and that everyone, or anyone relevant, should somehow follow. It is by nature prescriptive. It is also constitutionally against my nature. I rather believe that art should be idiosyncratic, and each individual should have his/her own approach, style, content,…
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“Digital painting isn’t painting.” ~ Charles Thomson, co-founder of Stuckism. “I can appreciate digital art, I just don’t want it on my wall.” ~ Bill Schafer, gallery owner of the Hyaena Gallery in LA. “I just don’t like digital, computer generated art. All of it I’ve seen comes across as kitschy and more for a…
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Sometimes I wake up and it just seems like everything is stacked against me, though not me in particular. As people like to say, “it’s not personal”. No, it isn’t. It’s an affront to the personal and the individual. It’s calculatedly indifferent. It’s clinical. It’s commercial. It’s about power and money, money and power. It’s…
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QUOTAS FOR ART MUSEUMS Are quotas a good idea for art museums? Should museum collections be based on race, gender, and sexual orientation/identification? The Baltimore Museum of Art is doing something very similar to that: selling off works in the permanent collection by white males, and replacing them with new art by marginalized persons. Some…
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