Every week I read reviews of contemporary art shows and more often than not I cry out “ Look Kathy, the emperor has no clothes on!”
“You tell’m, baby!” she says. And that’s all the encouragement I need.
Of course it’s nobody’s fault. It’s society’s. (which gets me off the hook). I blame our steroid-fuelled, industrialised, media driven, consumerist society. Weeds are thriving in this hothouse environment and the contemporary art scene is one of the most annoying of them. Visual art “culture” is really just the visual art “industry”. Artists creating product, dealers trading, curators doing their thing, institutions teaching, academics and reviewers writing. There are lots of people interested in keeping this thing going.
Artists have to jump about and shout and think of some way to be different and new. A lot of vested interests rely on newness. How else can the wheels of the art machine keep turning? Consumerist materialism needs constant input and reinvention. New products. New trends. New people. New celebrities.
Optimists might say, “But the good stuff will triumph”. The problem is, though, how can anything be better than anything else when the rules keep changing? It’s like trying to umpire a tennis match when the lines are constantly being redrawn (there’s a conceptual work right there). The winner is the one who receives the loudest applause I guess. Very democratic (and we know how well democracy works).
At least I know what is good art, and this isn’t.
It’s from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about an artist duo who have made life-size Lego models of animals penetrated by IKEA furniture.
Here’s a couple of grabs from the article:
“It’s an investigation into the way nature infiltrates our very being, and how we are forever manipulating our environment; so much so that we have lost sight of its origins.”
“Both artists say they were intrigued by attempts to capture images of ghosts and spirits in Victorian times. We liked the concept of ectoplasm: something that just manifested into a space and the mottled colouring of the Lego animals references that kind of apparition. In particular we were interested in the work of a medium called Eva C. Her medium work was quite voyeuristic, with ectoplasm emerging from parts of her body that you’d rather keep spirits out of.”
No more newness.