I recently ordered this book because a friend of mine recommends things like this to me, and the first pages in have been excruciating! The narrator tries hard to seem different, amused at the hubbub surrounding an auction and a visit by an artist in a gallery, but she just ends up sounding delusional. Twice she mentions how different she is because she smiles - as if no gallery receptionist ever smiles. This is not true, because I work in one, and I also frequent them. People are generally nice, and I do add people to the mailing list if they sign up.
I hate the air of exclusivity books like these try to promulgate about the art world. It makes a lot of noise, alienates already alienated viewers from pursuing an interest in the arts, and affirms the superiority of the author - the author is one of those cultured few who has exclusif access to the most exclusif of exclusif areas: collectors’ homes, gallery dinners, museum openings, art fair shenanigans. These books all miss the point while casting a derisive blanket over the heart of what an art world circles around: the art, the fucking art, you morons!!
If you care about art, do not under any circumstances read:
- Lulu meets God and doubts him by Danielle Ganek
- Seven days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton
- An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
“Duchamp mused whether there could be a work “not of art,” but can there also be an art without work? The readymade is something that immediately comes to mind, yet I feel that using existing objects produced by the labor of others does not solve this particular problem, because it is not about simply delegating, outsourcing, or appropriating. In other words, if the labor of art production is outsourced to others, while the artist and the market benefit by the surplus value it produces, it is merely a perpetuation of the exploitation that creates conditions of alienation in our society.”
“Generally speaking, art is part of an uneven global system, one that underdevelops some parts of the world, while overdeveloping others—and the boundaries between both areas interlock and overlap.” ….
“Artistic autonomy was meant to separate art from the zone of daily routine—from mundane life, intentionality, utility, production, and instrumental reason—in order to distance it from rules of efficiency and social coercion. But this incompletely segregated area then incorporated all that it broke from in the first place, recasting the old order within its own aesthetic paradigms.”
Linda L, Mountain View, CA: “I try to teach art…. How am I to demand originality from students when this kind of theft is commonplace? Many students come to the art classroom because they want to be creative, and then they proceed to copy if they can get away with it. Appropriation is a quick solution for them, but it does not nurture creative thought, which is hard work.”
...“What were Mr. Prince’s intentions in re-using the Rastafarian pictures taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou and why did he choose them? For the sake of parody? For criticism? Or did he just pick something that inspired him, for reasons as difficult to plumb as any those of many postmodern artists?”...
“At another point in the transcript of the deposition, a lawyer asked, “What is the message?”
Mr. Prince replied, “The message is to make great art that makes people feel good.” He also made it clear that he was not making art that commented on Mr. Cariou’s work itself. (Judge Batts ruled that for a work to be transformative it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works” it borrows from, a test she said Mr. Prince’s work failed.) “It can’t just be random, that he ‘liked it,’ because there’s no practical boundary to that,” he said.”
justin-wolf: “This paper examines the conditions of contemporary artistic production, specifically for the artists working within the capitalistic economic system whether their engagement is direct or indirect. One of the conditions that will be discussed at length is the role of the market and public in today’s artistic production. As Boris Groys puts it in his essay Introduction: Poetics vs. Aesthetics if, in the past, the religious and political authorities determined the content of work through the patronage system, today, artists, have gained a sense of autonomy from these authorities, but are as much as obliged to address the interests of the public.[1] Artists no longerhave to depict the scenes from the Bible anymore, but much artistic production today takes place with the understanding (and the projection) of its own marketability in the art market and desirability from the public as preliminary conditions. This is especially true for career artists, whose artistic production equals their livelihood and preferred source of income (as opposed to taking a ‘day job’). For them, the question of how to acquire marketability and desirability of their artistic products becomes a serious existential consideration. However, even if capitalism is not the artists’ immediate economic system, since capitalism is the de facto economic system of the global economy—and necessarily, the global art market—even artistic production in non-capitalistic systems eventually becomes measured in capitalistic principles. This forces us to reevaluate why we make things that we make, when the success of artistic products does not exclusively stem from the work within, but becomes quantifiable in terms of its market success and institutional acceptance. In such cases, the artistic products lose its ability to assert values of its own to itself but rather become a recipient of it. In other words, conditions of contemporary artistic production encourage subordination of the artist’s autonomy to his or her audience. Though it seems like artists are free to make whatever they wish, the scope of the their freedom is not themselves but, rather, the aesthetic sensibility of the viewers who assigns value to the artistic products.”
““Their desperate voluntarism says something about the generally exploitative conditions of the art world such that people are willing to become victims of a celebrity artist in the hopes of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves. And at sub-minimal wages for the performers, the event verges on economic exploitation and criminality.”
