CAREER SUICIDE: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Why do some artists spend their whole careers doing stupid stuff like mutilating mannequins or painting old bits of wood with baffling phrases? Why does everyone in the art world get paid, apart from the artists? Why do most students spend years doing their MA, closely followed by them doing sweet FA? Who are the HoWiAs, and what the hell do they think they’re doing? How and why did a bunch of paintings that looked like vandalised portraits of SpongeBob Squarepants get taken so seriously as an international art fair?

Tags: book, Career Suicide, contemporary art, myself, video art, writing

I LIKE YOUR WORK

(ART AND ETIQUETTE)

While going through my books and trying to find some background information for a looming proposal deadline, I naturally encountered numerous opportunities for displacement activities, dithering and procrastination. One of these distractions was a slim book called ‘I like your work: art and etiquette’, which was published in 2009 by New York’s Paper Monument, who seem like fairly decent coves. The book itself was given to me by somebody (thanks, Ruth!) who said it reminded her of my book.

Like pretty much anything that comes out of New York, it’s sometimes New York-centric to the point of absurdity, but both publications definitely have in common a distinct exasperation and frustration that arty people so often act like complete tools. And there’s no art world tool like a New York art world tool.

Anyway, it’s worth buying and checking out in full- support indie artists and small publishers, etc.- but I thought I’d pull a few gems out from it, if only as a way of putting off the actual work I’m supposed to be doing right now.

“If you’re a skinny artist, be clean and neat. If you’re a fat artist, be crazy looking and dishevelled. Not sure why, but this seems to work best. Negative comments about an artist’s work at their opening is the equivalent of taking a shit on someone’s birthday cake at their fortieth birthday party. The proper thing to do is to save your negative comments as an anonymous blog post!” Ryan Steadman.

Tags: APPROVED, artist statements, book, contemporary art, galleries, myself, New York, philosophy, status anxiety, USA

“OUTRIGHT BARBAROUS”

OR: WHY ARE YOU WRITING?

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”

George Orwell, Why I Write

Orwell was giving some background on the concepts and thinking behind his most famous works, most obviously the deployment of language by the ruling classes as a weapon to divide and exploit workers in Animal Farm, and the totalitarian Newspeak engineered by the Big Brother state of 1984. The application to literary and art criticism should also be obvious, however, especially if you’ve read some of my other demolitions of artbollocks on this site. For the especially dense, though- the writers of this press release, this curator’s gloss and this artist’s statement, for example- I’ll try rephrasing it: art world language is designed to make artists sound authentic and stupidity intelligent, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Tags: artist statements, book, doing it right, George Orwell, philosophy, press releases, status anxiety, writing

“CRITICAL POWER LOSS”: THE SAMSUNG ART+ PRIZE

18TH-29TH JANUARY 2012, BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE, LONDON

The exhibition space at the BFI on London’s south bank, like a Samsung TV showroom, is a black box full of streaming, uncredited content. I can’t remember when I last saw such shoddy, lazy staging of video work by a major institution. I often castigate superfluous, anxious over-explanation of art exhibitions that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Unfortunately at the BFI they’ve gone to the equally unproductive opposite extreme. Unless a credit or title is embedded in the work itself (which is rare), there is absolutely nothing to tell visitors what they’re looking at or who the artists are. The black box is the star here; Samsung gets all the credit, the artists get little or none.

Even the printed schedule taped to a wall outside was completely out of whack with what was actually being shown… and it was physically impossible to see the schedule and the exhibition at the same time. Both of the invigilators appeared to be asleep for the entire duration of my visit, which was about two hours long. One of the tablets used in Erika Tan’s installation was bleeping in a very annoying, disruptive manner and showing an error message about a “critical power loss” for about fifteen minutes before finally despairing of attention and switching itself off. Only by a lengthy, patient process of Holmesian analysis, deduction and elimination does one begin to understand what is being shown and by whom. The accompanying website is extremely basic as well, and I had to scour elsewhere on the internet for the names and authors of some films that were being shown but are not credited anywhere, not even on Samsung’s site and certainly not on the BFI’s. In short, the staging of this show is crap and there’s no excuse for it.

And again, what the hell is wrong with some video and new media curators? Have they ever actually tried watching video art in a gallery? Even experiencing two or three from the selection of videos available is a matter of perhaps half an hour or more and yet there are just two small, narrow benches to sit on. Again the scratchy, grimy carpet is the only alternative if you don’t want to (or physically can’t for reasons of age or disability, for example) be on your feet for long periods. Remember that we’re in the BFI, a complex full of cinema auditoria and dedicated to the cinematic arts, a place where one would imagine it would be blindingly obvious that people can’t watch long form moving image work properly when they have to squat on the floor. Come on, this is really basic stuff.

Tags: APPROVED, art speak, artbollocks, artist statements, baffling, BFI, contemporary art, Curator Error, DISAPPROVED, doing it right, doing it wrong, galleries, group exhibition, GTFO, lazy, London, new media, nonsense, prize, repeat offender, Samsung, science, video art

LONDON ART FAIR: OH WELL, AT LEAST I DIDN’T PAY FOR THE TICKET

“Felix, darling, try not to whine when we get inside because this is daddy’s work, OK?” [Islingtonista dragging her son against his will into the London Art Fair. Daddy, grim faced, trails behind.]

I can certainly sympathise with Felix’s determination to have a little tantrum at the London Art Fair. Perhaps Felix already knew he’d be compelled to commit a homicide if he saw another frigging art work with skulls, butterflies and/or cut-outs from old books, maps and prints. Seriously, everybody knock that shit off. I wish I was exaggerating when I say that every third or fourth gallery was showing something involving butterflies. I think we could also usefully impose a ten year moratorium on white box frames, anything involving birds or feathers, and figurative painting with a few token smears, runs or drips to denote that it’s “contemporary” or “gestural” or whatever because being able to paint without making drips or smudging somebody’s face is boring and square, apparently.

Tags: contemporary art, DISAPPROVED, doing it wrong, galleries, GTFO, lazy, London, London Art Fair, painting, selling, status anxiety, YBAs

NON SEQUITUR RHETORICAL QUESTION

Is Ryan Gander the mature, adult form of Ryan Gosling?

Tags: Ryan Gander, Ryan Gosling, stupid questions

ARTBOLLOCKSONATE

Some lovely artbollockry by Zuzana Pacáková has come my way, promoting a solo exhibition in Slovakia of work by an artist called Viktor Frešo. Obviously we’ll give them some slack for writing in a language other than their own. Unfortunately most of that slack is immediately stretched taut again by Pacáková’s surgical mastery of that esoteric, malignant art: writing hundreds of words that are grammatically correct and yet mean absolutely nothing. Indeed, she (I’m pretty certain the writer is female, correct me if I’m wrong) writes like somebody born and bred in the land of Artbollocks…

“The Connection [NOTE: the exhibition's name] interconnects different media, approaches and forms that seem to be mutually independent. They represent a kind of an absurd parallel to “3 in 1″ (CD, DVD, T-shirt and sticker as a bonus) musical production packages. The connection, however, is not definitive, as individual forms continue to develop and react in interconnection with intelligence, poetry and humour. This is a sort of Schwittersian accumulation of material and void that subsequently creates different spatial architectures – connections. Pure, at first sight simple, spontaneous and rough interventions – gestures (situate, bend down, put, attach, move, cut off) create plasticity of surfaces and visual poetry. Individual juxtapositions of objects redefine reality just to change it later.”

For a start, if you’re getting a CD, a DVD, a T-shirt and a sticker, then surely that’s four things, not three? Do packages like this even exist, anyway?

I’ve seen this oxymoronic “interconnects things that are independent” gambit before when the curator or writer has apparently just thrown up their hands in despair at gaining any kind of intellectual traction with the material in front of them. Translated into plain English it usually means something like: “This exhibition is a total dog’s dinner and I can’t see any meaningful connection between the different things that are in it. Seriously, I’ve got nothing.” Another false notion commonly put forth in artbollocks apologias for lazy work is that simply putting unrelated objects in physical proximity to each other is sufficient to elevate them to the realm of art.

Tags: art speak, artbollocks, artist statements, baffling, Curator Error, doing it wrong, Eastern Europe, galleries, Kurt Schwitters, nonsense, press releases, status anxiety

(UN)COMMERCIAL GALLERIES

OR: THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

Note: Updated 10/01/2012 with a fine example of a morally dubious rich lady playing galleries!

Some of my fellow artists from Market Project and I were talking about Britain’s commercial art galleries this weekend. I’m not represented by a commercial gallery and I’m not really in that world, but I know artists who are. And since one of the aims of Market Project is researching the realpolitik of the art world, we pay particular attention to developments such as the closure of Sorcha Dallas’ gallery in Glasgow, which was announced last September. Her stated reason for the closure was that Creative Scotland had withdrawn their public funding from her private gallery. As I suggested in the original report, in my view there’s some severe cognitive dissonance going on if anybody thinks that their organisation was ever a viable business when it has to immediately fold without subsidy from state funds. Mind you, judging by her press releases she can’t even spell cognitive dissonance.

This discussion provoked the thoughts set out below, but since this is more of a polemic than actual research I decided to publish it here instead of at the Market Project site. Because I’m all about the polemic here.

We all know very well that truly public galleries (and libraries, and social services, and so on, ad nauseum) are having to downsize or close because of budget cuts, but those places were never pretending to be businesses. In the UK anyway, nobody was creaming off profits from them for their own private gain. A public art gallery or a library is not a failed business on life support, it’s a completely different type of entity, one that can’t be and should not be subjected to market forces and market logic. Of course these places have to close if their funds are cut off.

Long story short: our subsequent research and private, off-the-record quizzing of various people who are involved in the commercial art sector has revealed that in Britain there are very few (conceivably even no) private galleries that are actually viable businesses in any meaningful sense. Usually they’re more or less just vanity façades disguising money pits that are fed with somebody’s private money; Potemkin businesses, the Wendy House of a rich woman who in many cases is spending her husband’s or father’s wealth, not even her own because she works in the arts and doesn’t make any money, duh.

Sometimes (and much more scandalously, in my view) we dig and we find a Sorcha Dallas, relying on grants from public money that should therefore be contributing to something with public benefit, not as leverage for a gallerist’s private profits… if they ever make any. Some of these supposed galleries and art foundations are- as my colleague Annabelle Shelton pointed out- simply tax dodges, a means of laundering and sequestering wealth.

Tags: art world elite, commercial, doing it wrong, selling, status anxiety

LAZY CAREER SUICIDE BLOG 2011 RETROSPECTIVE POST

It’s like the BBC when they just want to pack work in for the holidays and go skiing but they’re officially still at work so they do tons of lazy Top 10s and clip compilations, except mine doesn’t have a panda included as one of its “women of the year”. Here are the most read Career Suicide posts from 2011. These will differ a bit from the top posts in the right-hand menu, because those ones update dynamically every day and take into account things that have been published more recently. The top five below have been calculated over the whole year.

Sorry, I don’t know why I told you that. Even I got bored and started to glaze over.

• #1 THE DEADLY CURATOR  In which I use Peter Brook and William Shakespeare to castigate curators who seem intent on deliberately presenting exhibitions that nobody but a Ph.D. researcher would enjoy. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with Ph.D. researchers… but most people in the world are not in fact Ph.D. researchers.
• #2 ENGLISH, MOTHERF- -KER, DO YOU SPEAK IT? In which I mark one of Sorcha Dallas gallery’s press releases for content, grammar and comprehension like an English teacher. Spoiler: F- -, see me after the lesson.
• #3 FOR WANT OF A NAIL (IN PRAISE OF ARTSWAY) “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
• #4 BRITISH ART SHOW 7: IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET Although they mostly did it in secret for fear of being blackballed, a lot of people really hated this exhibition. I hated it in public.
• #5 TACITA DEAN: FILM This article was really popular. Obviously Tacita Dean is… not so popular.

Tags: British Art Show 7, Career Suicide, Curator Error, funding cuts, lazy, London, myself, press releases, Scotland, Tate

I’M A MORON

It’s taken me nearly two months to notice that most of the outgoing links on this site were broken due to reorganisation at the other sites. Sorry about that. Everyone knows how to use a search engine, but it’s still annoying when you click something and you get a NOT FOUND. All fixed now.

On the plus side, it’s now easier than ever to buy the book (if only by default, since I’d inadvertently been deterring people since October) in paperback or hardback, as a PDF or as an ebook. There’s also a new page summarising the contents on this site, should you need further persuasion.

Tags: Career Suicide, idiots, myself

THE MOST ADMIRABLE SKILL

“If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you can change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is that interesting?”

Ai Weiwei interviewed relatively briefly by Time. Time the magazine, not the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. Some interesting observations in it, including the one above in which he’s referring to the Chinese government although to my mind it could easily also apply to the art world’s elites and authorities, who play a similar game of movable goal posts and neutralising obfuscation with artists. There is a huge value in being challenged, but the art world rarely does anything but toy idly with the idea of being challenged. If the art world really embraced challenging ideas, art and people, then nobody in the art world would be terrified of speaking out of turn or getting a reputation for being critical.

On the contrary, most artists who live in the supposedly free and democratic world (and have much less to fear) wouldn’t say boo to a goose and don’t have a fraction of Ai’s bravery and honesty; bravery and honesty, moreover, that’s been genuinely put to the test and found to be strong enough to have a pretty good stab at defying the Chinese government. But his pusillanimous counterparts in the West don’t dare, because they know that talent and merit are not as important as just keeping your mouth zipped for fear of going on some neurotic, insecure gallerist’s or art world oligarch’s private blacklist.

Tags: Ai Weiwei, art world, China, contemporary art, doing it right, interview