Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
My nominee for Best Picture of the year – maybe the best picture ever because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies – is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.'
I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history that he redefined the idea of beauty that he combined painting sculpture photography and everyday life with such gall and that he was interested in as he put it 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'
Abstraction brings the world into more complex variable relations it can extract beauty alternative topographies ugliness and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest best or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful wicked lovable and annoying creatures known as art dealers).
I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week and no matter what kind of mood I'm in no matter how bad the art is I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.
Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.
I love art dealers. In some ways they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is create their own aesthetic universes support artists employ people and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.
When museums are built these days architects directors and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties eat dinner wine-and-dine donors. Sure these are important these days – museums have to bring in money – but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.
We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.