For a long time I’ve thought that journalists were running the show, having created the fiction of the popularity of the visual arts, only to be believed by the so-called curators. It is however coming full circle, and things may return to a normal and healthy obscurity. There are so many really bad exhibitions about, viz. The Light Show at the Hayward Gallery.What has happened to the intervening years since the quasi-theoretical GRAV and Kinetics? You are never going to find out here. But all that’s for another entry.
I just wanted to chew over a piece by journalist Stuart Jeffries attempting to deal with assistants to ‘well-known’ artists, entitled Behind Every Great Artist. It’s a bastion of the overworked and over-edified p word…
working in a restaurant and as a builder while establishing a sculpture practice…I sometimes regret that I have let go of my own practice…I get interested in his practice…He’s thrived too as Gormley’s practice has… to learn what he could before setting up his own practice… Wentworth’s later practice as a sculptor…At the same time there are so many bad editorial strategies ( don’t I mean curatorial?) available.
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s AK45 show is like much of what they do, an unintentional cartoon of its (them)self, and contains Gormley’s worst ever work. Artists being invited to make playing cards or chess pieces are such dumb ideas, but they seem to exist in every generation.But to take the biscuit, how about My View : Personal Reflections By Today’s Leading Artists, now doubt coming from Tate Publishing, who really haven’t got a clue. With so many curators, that enterprise is spiraling inwards, but I suppose you’ve got to do something with all those unused Ph.D’s

At long last, after all these years, Hans Ulrich Obrist has come to the same conclusions that we did at workfortheeyetodo in about 1993-4, that the ‘c’ word is beyond redemption. At the time we issued a lapel button-badge, merely stating that whatever we did was uncurated. Now he writes in a piece entitled Life brought to art in the Financial Times of August 18th:

Fly-in, fly-out curating almost always produces superficial results:it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion for applying the word ‘curating’ to everything that involves simply making a choice- radio playlists, hotel decor, even the food stalls in New York’s High Line Park. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition: curating follows art.

When will he make a similar assault on the ‘p’ word, the even more spurious notion of practice that artists are always talking about ?

A bowl of Irish gnocchi to celebrate a return to this column after several months absence. At times I feel that Irish potatoes can only  be mixed with flour and made into gnocchi as a way of preventing them from dissolving in boiling water. They don’t like ‘wet’ potatoes in Ireland, only the ones that ‘explode in your face’.