October 1, 2006
Two articles on art in Sunday magazines
In this weekend's Observer, 2006 Turner Prize juror Lynn Barber recounts her yearlong experience with horror:
At first, my friends were keen to accompany me, but they all tried it once and never again. The general reaction was incredulity that we'd driven through traffic jams for two hours in order to see a show consisting of three slabs of concrete and a tyre. 'Is this all?' was the usual plaint. Or we'd be told that the video/DVD/sound installation/whatever was under repair but should be working again next week. Galleries are incredibly resistant to the idea that they might in any sense welcome the public.[ . . . ]
The effect of looking at an awful lot of art in a short space of time, and with an increasingly bad temper, as I did, is that your judgment goes haywire. So much passes in a blur that if you find anything at all different or memorable, you are prepared to hail it as the next Picasso.
[ . . . ]
Art dinners are odd affairs, usually held in private rooms of fashionable restaurants, for 30 or 40 people. It is never clear who is paying (though somebody is) or why you are there. Nobody is ever properly introduced, so you spend half the evening trying to work out who everyone is. I probably insulted people left and right by asking if they ran a gallery when they were, say, head of Italy's national museums, but how are you supposed to know that stuff when nobody tells you?
[ . . . ]
I was also making the big mistake, I now realise, of sticking to the Turner rules. I thought, because I'd been told, that the artists had to be nominated for a particular show, which meant, I would have thought, that one had to have seen the show. Only when we met to draw up the shortlist did I realise that none of the judges had seen all the shows, and that my fears about having to fly to Sao Paolo were groundless. One of the judges said you could often see the shows better online. Why didn't I think of that?
The article is quite long, and alternates philistinism (something she accuses others of) with truth-telling about the absurdities of the art world. It's an entertaining—if not altogether insightful—read.
Elsewhere, Bruce Hainley publishes a paean to the Los Angeles art scene in the New York Times Magazine. It begins:
I am amused by fancy art-world types who breeze into Los Angeles planning to “get” the scene in a few days. They would have better luck reading “In Search of Lost Time” over a long weekend. America’s second-largest city sprawls—physically, aesthetically, socially—over nearly 500 square miles, so any attempt to nutshell the burg and its cultural bazaar takes on comic aspects. Note that the Pompidou Center’s recent survey of Los Angeles art was called “The Birth of an Artistic Capital” and that Michael Govan, the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has declared Los Angeles the new New York, forgetting perhaps that Angelenos have never wished to be New Yorkers and that long before the 1955 birth date pronounced by the Pompidou, Hollywood was producing things as provocative, philosophical and influential as anything given the name of, well, art.
Be sure to look at the online slideshow of Ari Marcopolous photographs.