Tom, I'm largely in agreement regarding your thoughts on the AFC review, so I'll offer instead a thought on that "strangely defensive" burn-in review on MTAA's site. What twhid misses when he describes the piece as punk or incendiary is the ambiguity of putting a formal, self-referential work on an uber-expensive plasma screen in an art gallery. Isn't this what happened in the 90s when video art became widely commercially viable? The technology became advanced, portable, and expensive enough to warrant the high-market prices (on infinitely reproducible media) demanded by dealers of contemporary art; the rise of the limited edition video happened in conjunction with this, and so on. So what is it about Arcangel's work here that makes him think it so unequivocally "fucks with consumer dreams"? The work might just as easily be interpreted as a retrograde 90s throwback, a cynical and slightly irrelevant gesture symptomatic of an inflated art market preoccupied with itself.
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- bxk 6-07-2007 6:42 am