Also via NEWSgrist, I was reminded that John Kelsey of the conceptualist art outfit Bernadette Corporation picked for his December 2005 Artforum top ten list...Hurricane Katrina! Please feel free to lambast me in the comments if I ever write anything this insensitive and pretentious: HURRICANE KATRINA Ask Stockhausen. As if timed for the opening of the Whitney's Robert Smithson retrospective, this was arguably less a natural disaster than a case of Land art gone horribly wrong. An environmental and political tragedy of Spielbergian proportions, Katrina produced images of the sort of "naked life" we'd previously only identified with non-sites like Iraq. The drowned ghetto, the shooting of homeless looters, the police suicides, the forced evacuations, the superdomes filled with refugees—these are visions we can only try to erase. For some reason it was impossible not to imagine the hurricane as a terrorist act. And I guess it was—Made in USA. Yes, Artforum's an art magazine, but that doesn't make every damn thing you mention in it art. Curator Thelma Golden went down the same road a while back, discussing the 2003 blackout as some kind of art event. Oh, and by the way, bloggers, it's Artforum, not ArtForum. Sick of seeing that mistake.
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Also via NEWSgrist, I was reminded that John Kelsey of the conceptualist art outfit Bernadette Corporation picked for his December 2005 Artforum top ten list...Hurricane Katrina! Please feel free to lambast me in the comments if I ever write anything this insensitive and pretentious: Yes, Artforum's an art magazine, but that doesn't make every damn thing you mention in it art. Curator Thelma Golden went down the same road a while back, discussing the 2003 blackout as some kind of art event. Oh, and by the way, bloggers, it's Artforum, not ArtForum. Sick of seeing that mistake.
- tom moody 1-03-2006 4:31 am