Shortly after I moved to NY an artist/writer/gallerist told me "you do your thing here as as an artist but then you look around and there are 10 other people doing that thing because NY is crawling with artists. So you think hard about how to differentiate your thing from their things and in the process you think harder about what's important to you as an artist and eventually you become You, the artist. Whereas in less populous scenes there's only one person doing a thing and other artists give you lots of space to do that thing (while they do their things) and you're not in that pressure cooker evolution situation."
Passed along without comment (some might recognize it as a vernacular sped up version of how Modernist art works--your art is arrived at by working through and discarding the propositions of others.)
He was talking about art you have to physically see to judge. With VVork we're talking about art evaluated on the basis of jpegs and short summations, and the "pressure cooker" is the internet and the language of international globalist festival-style conceptualism. I have not yet drawn any conclusions--I'm just laying out some poles for discussion.
I'd rather not hear about how snobby you think New Yorkers are--the question here is whether VVork represents some kind of evolution in artmaking and discourse or whether it's just a simulacrum of art.
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Passed along without comment (some might recognize it as a vernacular sped up version of how Modernist art works--your art is arrived at by working through and discarding the propositions of others.)
He was talking about art you have to physically see to judge. With VVork we're talking about art evaluated on the basis of jpegs and short summations, and the "pressure cooker" is the internet and the language of international globalist festival-style conceptualism. I have not yet drawn any conclusions--I'm just laying out some poles for discussion.
I'd rather not hear about how snobby you think New Yorkers are--the question here is whether VVork represents some kind of evolution in artmaking and discourse or whether it's just a simulacrum of art.
- tom moody 4-12-2007 9:52 pm