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
Source: The Dreaded P Word