Ive been thinking about the conversations I have with many people about what is good art vs bad art. There is a lot of speculation and a lot of judgment being thrown around lately about what IS GOOD vs BAD. The idea is often tied to some ideological preference of the viewer/spectator/participant. There are those who know the cannon and follow the cannon. Those that follow the money. Those that follow the preference of their personal taste and all manner of combination of three. Two of the criteria fall sadly upon the reliance that most peoples knowledge of the cannon of art is sadly VERY LIMITED even amongst professionals in the business. I often come across RESPECTED gallerists who many of you know who have never heard of Cady Noland or Lee Bontecou and I come across many collectors who spend a fortune on art who think mustard gas yellow is a good color for their walls to hang art on and have trouble buying living room furniture that is in any way respectable from any perspective of good taste. The (relatively sophisticated) Horts Collection in NYC is a smorgasbord of bad taste when it comes to interiors of furniture and fittings. Then those that follow the money basically are as good as their hearing and the quality of their direct networks. So what do we do? 1. Study the cannon. 2. Follow the money. 3. Acquire good taste - through being open to more than just art. Study aesthetics!! // Good art is something you have to find and seek out, like a prospector in the old west you have to wade through the rivers and sift through the sands and every now and then you find a golden nugget of good art - something that is culturally relevant - you never know the shape of it or the size, you can not predict what you will find. You have to go through the mountains and the layers of rock before you find a vein of gold and then you have to struggle to retrieve it and remove it. Culture is something we find, we discover we enable it to be removed from the morass mass in which it is buried. We can not define it with our prejudice and our bias of what it should be, where it should be and how it should be. Sometimes, often it is not something we want it to be because it does not conform to our ideals, often biased by our belief systems - hence the fear of art in totalitarian structures of government - and we try and put it back in the river or bury it back in the rock. We cant put it back, it is out, all we can do is accept it and embrace it no matter how harsh its reality is to our world view. And if possible paint the G-d damn walls white and buy a decent sofa!
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 09:29:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015