sexta-feira, 6 de julho de 2007

mais jerry saltz


BIENNIAL CULTURE
by Jerry Saltz
7-2-07

Whether you think of it as a harmonic convergence, a cattle call or a clusterfuck, every ten years the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, Documenta and Sculpture Project Münster open one after the other over the course of a week. This is one of those years. Beginning on June 6, thousands of art-worlders from all over the globe flocked to the start of this season-long blitz, the usual combination of summer camp, convention, carnival and binge. And it has me thinking about biennial culture and who these wingdings are for, how they’re organized, whether they’re good for art and whether they’re outmoded.

Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world. As they say, everything changes but the avant-garde. Chelsea was a ghost town last week, but had you been with the crush in Europe you’d have observed, at each stop, the same cast of museum directors and trustees, art advisers and clients, curators and more curators, artists, dealers, journalists, PR people and who knows who else -- all talking one another up, all on the lookout for the next paradigm shift. It’s a bubble environment. Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

Biennials are free-for-alls, but they’re also autocratic throwbacks to the time of kings. Often, they’re selected by one czarlike curator with absolute dictatorial power. These curators, however earnest, can simultaneously be annoying and sanctimonious while foisting their own pious, profligate or shaky taste on everyone else. Yet you have to feel for them; whatever they do, almost everyone will have 55 reasons why their shows stink. A common but almost never uttered one is, "It’s a bad show if I’m not in it."

There are currently more than 60 biennials and triennials around the world. Biennial culture is so prevalent that curator Dan Cameron and I have joked about publishing a monthly magazine called Biennial, dealing with nothing but these shows. The glossy back cover would permanently advertise Jorge Pardo, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, all of whom seem perpetually to be on view. There would be a column called "This Month in Relational Aesthetics," top-ten lists like "Messy Installations in Huge Spaces," artists discussing how they had "intervened with the local culture" and writers asserting that their work is a "subversion of biennials." (cont.)

fonte:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz7-2-07.asp