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Thursday, July 12th, 2007
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:
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE VERY BAD
THEORY OF THE MARKET
Jerry Saltz
WELCOME TO THE DISCONNECT OF 2007 SAME AS THE DISCONNECT OF 2006
Painter Charline von Heyl recently described American’s disconnect between the personal and the political this way: “While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up, our inner lives aren’t altogether messed-up.” The current art world, awash in money and success, is shot through with a similar disconnect. To some, the art market is a self-help movement, a private consumer vortex of dreams, a cash-addled image-addicted drug that makes consumers prowl art capitals for the next paradigm shift. This set seeks out art that looks like things it already knows: anything resembling Warhol, Richter, Koons, Tuymans, Prince and Wool could be good; any male painter in his 30s could be great. To others, the market is just a happy popularity contest, or as New York Times reporter David Carr put it about having his own blog, it’s like “a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention.”
For many, the art market is a communal version of the Primal Scene — a sexed-up site that offers a peek into the bedroom of the creative act. Art advisors and collectors now treat art fairs and auctions like Warhol’s Factory: Places to flaunt junkielike behavior while hoping one’s creative potential might bloom. In this global circus, mega-collectors like Charles Saatchi and François Pinault are the art world’s P.T. Barnums: showmen who have become part of the show — moguls who understand that the market is a medium that can be manipulated. Once upon a time, the market and the scene (clubiness, chicanery and profligacy notwithstanding) were joined and reflected social, political and sexual change. Now the market is only in service of itself. The market is a perfect storm of hocus-pocus, spin and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater and brothel where an insular ever-growing caste enacts structured rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. (cont.)
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