by MICHAEL WORKMAN on December 8, 2010
Stylin' it in Miami Beach
It’s definitely different this year, isn’t it? Attendees of the turmoils of this year’s Miami events no doubt wonder what happened to the excess that defined this show’s scintillating past audience praises. No longer the Baselland of lore, Miami has successfully absorbed the titan of Art Basel into its cultural life. Previously incapable of advancing its reach any further, the Miami Beach of artistic advancement has faded with the affluence that gave it its potency. What now? It seems upon first glance the idea is to prop up the image with whatever still sparks commerce, and in some instances, the contortions of inefficacious press attention. Our view is admittedly somewhat limited, since we don’t personally prefer most of the work on the walls, traded in its currency as contemporary art, while easily accessible Modernist work has in fact come to supplant what you would expect from this contemporary show. Rather than a sense of responsibility to art and its furtherance, this year’s Miami Basel seems in many ways fixed in time against its own premise, a show that we’ve seen maybe ten years ago, with pampered ladies and big guys in suits grousing and grazing and wanting to sing the praises of finance to dictate taste, yet unable to muster sufficient clout to make it happen in the present moment. There’s something we like about this germinating state, more earnest, somehow less a contest of spending and sponsor luxe and loot, though the experimentation that used to find a host here seems largely absent, apologetic, and that’s truly a shame.
Where to go from here? It’s a seeming shift in the awareness of the practitioners of art and its adherents that new ideas are desperately needed. There is no guiding principle operant in the magic mind of the art community that leaps out at us now, beyond perhaps simple reflections on past accomplishments, a pause in the humbling experience of our own denuding that happened once the recognition settled in that social tastes had been manipulated by a gross superfluity. Art stands to profit from this psychological change in its audiences‘ stance towards the encounter with it.
Any exception of taste from the relationship as a binding definition of the merging of the art and its delivery system into the world at large has often been cited for harmful effects on its reception. Taste would otherwise seem insufficient to the task. It’s at this nexus that a great number of people are introduced to and come to understand art’s merit on a personal level. Assuaging this bent perspective is difficult, especially when the context as now is unclear. This current state of art’s delivery system is insufficiently reflective of art practices flourishing in the world that are filled with greater risk-taking than what’s seen here. In part galleries have been empowered beyond their previous position in Miami’s artistic version of a temporary socio-political and economic apparatus to have greater choice in why and what they present, and living artists have not seen appropriate benefit from this change. We are left to wonder what will become of this fractured image as the shadow of a swelling new tide of art cultural transformation sweeps the scene.
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by MICHAEL WORKMAN on November 12, 2010
I’m somewhat dubious of the new Art.sy project reported on Artinfo.com. It has a team of players that seems meant to imply a super-powered commercial enterprise that skips across industry boundaries: Larry Gagosian, “Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Russian heiress Dasha Zhukova, Wendi Murdoch (wife of Rupert),” but what confuses me is the paradigm they’re shifting from. Pandora and it’s Music Genome Project provides a way for music fans to listen to music tailored to their tastes, while Art.sy is organized more specifically as a way for users to find art that meets their taste for purchase. And, if I understand correctly, the works presented through Art.sy are sourced from high-end galleries hand-picked by the main players–precisely the kind of works that the people who can afford to buy them would normally hire consultants for. If it’s meant more as just another tool in the arsenal for disseminating art sales materials to potential buyers, fine, but that reads as contra the purpose of what you’d expect of an Art Genome Project on the Pandora model–that is, of delineating visual artistic taste into a tailored stream for broad end-consumer use through the site. I’m not sure I’d prefer this as a way of encountering art. And as a sales platform for reaching a more populist audience, it doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of anything different from what’s already available out there. I can’t imagine a populist audience finding anything more useful in Art.sy than online auction sites like Artnet Auctions, especially if it’s largely work offered at Gagosian prices, other than a little difference in the upmarket art-and-tech brand approach. But I guess that’s why God invented “Beta” launches.
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by MICHAEL WORKMAN on November 9, 2010
Kathryn Hixson, Courtesy SAIC
This is a shocking loss. I remember Kathryn fondly from my days working with her at The New Art Examiner, where I came to learn and respect the tenacity, passion and integrity for which she was known and loved. Disappointed by the world, but never by the creative imagination, her love of art and artists was a serious calling that she ran down daily in the humble, dark basement offices that NAE called home. I remember her facing with grace the final days of the magazine, as funding waned and board members turned on her, when all she wanted to do was keep writing. She knew the power of language in service to art, and I will always remember her sitting at her corner desk, dictionary mounted on a music stand, laboring over the language of the next issue’s material. She was my first editor, and instilled in me a sense of deep respect for the enterprise of art criticism, a lost art in an era of sound-bite opinions and gossip in the place of hard-wrought debate and dialogue. Her passing is a sad loss for Chicago’s art community.
Read the School of the Art Institute Statement Here
Read Hixson’s Biography at the Artists Pension Trust Here
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by MICHAEL WORKMAN on October 28, 2010
Image courtesy ledisko.com
For those of you visiting this page because you heard there was a blog going live, sorry to disappoint…we’re not quite ready yet. Honestly, give us about 10-15 days to get all the kinks worked out and we’ll have some great, juicy interesting reading for you. MEANWHILE…subscribe! Get on the email updater (on the right, scroll down) and you’ll get the good stuff delivered right to your inbox. Of course, there’s also a Facebook page.
Thanks for checking in, and please do stay tuned…
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