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Thursday, July 24, 2008

A nice comment by Anonymous on Edward Winkleman's Art Blog

You find this comment between other interesting comments here:

http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/2008/07/things-still-being-only-whispered.html

"I am an artist and I am tired of spectacle.

I am fed up with 2 million plus dollars sculpture 'made' (by assistants, engineers, young artists) by persons with ex-modeling careers.

I am vaguely amused but oh so bored with pretty-boy nightingales with wide-open end-eyes and all that homosexual fucking into artstardom.

I am an artist with an MA and I am fed up of MAs and MFAs. I am bloody hell tired of meeting artists who have summarized their so-called statements to sound like cultural theorists.

I am absolutely horrified with artists with full time jobs who like secretaries know the language of how to write a good proposal that a critic-jury will approve.

I am most fed up with the utilitarian mindset that plagues us even deeper today it seems than ever.

I am tired of curators and their fingering masturbatory hand in all these...oh how they finger and finger the thing so that it may speak --and only speak-- precisely the distortions eminent in their own fastidious rhetoric.

I am no anti-intellectual but oh, how weary am I of artists who, listening incestous to curators rush about pretending art was some matter for sociology and the artist therefore, the sociologist-cultural-theorist.

I make art one may called visual but I know too visual art is and will never be near the power of poetry, the art of music nor even that of the novel. I know visual art is an industry brewed from a mesh of moneyed conceit being peddled by anxious-for-fame conceits.


Having said all these, I hereby DECLARE WAR ON ART.

I ask artists to say no to empty spectacle and sheer materialism;
I urge a move towards the romantic;
I urge a REFUSAL of our life as it is: GIVE UP your banal worries, your high-end rents apartments, your shallow living and expenses!
BE BOLD and have the courage to live by the spirit of art and ideas!


Make art, make it, make it towards great, meet with like-minds, stay up all night with madness and with the fever, drink wine, read voraciously, live simple!

LIVE AS ONE WITH THE BOLDNESS AND COURAGE TO BE A HUMAN BEING "

anything to add ?

3 comments:

  1. Great this one! Thank you for this great article!

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  2. Yes, I've often thought a great many curators and 'contemporary' artists
    (am I dead?!) need to 'get out more'.
    I loathe street drugs, but some that I've met could do well to experiment once or twice just to loosen up. Their neurosis is of a different order; of staying in on a Saturday night to read Heideger with a small lead pencil in one hand to underline the important bits; the bits that will translate into meaningful, robust and sanguine art! ;-) (I have actually seen this).

    But the spectacle probably serves its purpose as marketing and promotion. When you see Madonna announcing the Turner Prize short list, you know that art has met MTV, that contemporary art needs spin to seem relevant. When I was in the UK recently, I saw some kind of competition you could enter to win *drawing lessons* from Tracey Emin! I laughed my head off!

    The problem is many people become artists, not because they have some innate sense of design or natural draftsmanship but because they feel that they don't 'fit in' in society and see art as a refuge. You can see this if you read the Saatchi Online forum posts which are chock full of folk with serious issues. I don't think Anonymous has much to worry about, some of the best art around is still being dug out of caves and pyramids. Nothing much changes.

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