The painting appropriates (or repudiates) the clarity (or obscurity) of the photograph, restages (or refuses) its fleeting engagement with the real, approaches (or blanks) its embrace of the instant. Whatever its take on the photograph, in other words, the painting is marked by it in ways that, thanks to our comtemporary nous regarding photographic conventions, we can articulate with relative ease.
I hope that makes it clearer for everyone. [nods slowly]
What's the remedy? It's not enough that art writers quit writing. I've tried that. It's not enough. They should start speaking. Art writing should be replaced by art talk, art dialogue. The perfect replacement for the turgid, static monograph is the recorded live symposium. Absolutely live, ers and ums included. Plato got that idea right. And Burroughs expanded on the possibilities of the dialogue as the generator of a dialectical "third mind." The technology exists to reproduce a lively exchange, should one miraculously occur. Perhaps this is how art criticism should have been working for the last twenty years. The solo review should be replaced by the dual. The defender and the prosecutor. Or the panel of experts. Tonight on our panel of experts we have Donald Kuspit, Jenny Holzer, Steven Wright, Stephanie Seymour, Tom McEvilley, Eileen Myles, and Andrew Dice Clay. Give them slide projectors and stun guns and let them work it out. But if they insist on writing about art then they should live up to the standards of art. Art writing should be art or shut the fuck up you're bringing me down. Artists themselves should write more. For one thing they'd be putting it on the line at a time when the norm is to dissemble and cultivate ambiguity. For another thing, they couldn't do it worse than the critics, and in many cases they would undoubtedly bring some creativity to an activity generally practiced by rote. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n1_v32/ai_14580155/pg_2
What's the remedy? It's not enough that art writers quit writing. I've tried that. It's not enough. They should start speaking. Art writing should be replaced by art talk, art dialogue. The perfect replacement for the turgid, static monograph is the recorded live symposium. Absolutely live, ers and ums included. Plato got that idea right. And Burroughs expanded on the possibilities of the dialogue as the generator of a dialectical "third mind." The technology exists to reproduce a lively exchange, should one miraculously occur. Perhaps this is how art criticism should have been working for the last twenty years.
The solo review should be replaced by the dual. The defender and the prosecutor. Or the panel of experts.
Tonight on our panel of experts we have Donald Kuspit, Jenny Holzer, Steven Wright, Stephanie Seymour, Tom McEvilley, Eileen Myles, and Andrew Dice Clay. Give them slide projectors and stun guns and let them work it out.
But if they insist on writing about art then they should live up to the standards of art. Art writing should be art or shut the fuck up you're bringing me down.
Artists themselves should write more. For one thing they'd be putting it on the line at a time when the norm is to dissemble and cultivate ambiguity. For another thing, they couldn't do it worse than the critics, and in many cases they would undoubtedly bring some creativity to an activity generally practiced by rote.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n1_v32/ai_14580155/pg_2
