After visiting a certain Bush League MFA show and then going to the Brooklyn Museum for the Gustave Caillebotte show my wheels and gears, pulleys and levers started grinding, (Yawn! most decidedly.) and I came up with an original thought. Now if the Impressionists were avant-garde or whatever you would like to call their mode of expression what on earth should we call contemporary artists who flock to the institutions, schools and academia for patronage, protection, productivity and so forth? Well I would clearly state that the Salon, Academy, call it what you will, is back and even harder to get into than when Caillebotte was painting. Only now, one’s concept of the thing is what moves one forward, well yeah one could say that it was highly conceptual to just focus on the play of light upon the landscape as the Impressionists did. But I might argue that at least they had some skill and proficiency in the traditional art of representing something figural. Now it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aeQ3DmKU7A Anything Goes! I mean not to disparage anyone in particular but! my disdain for video pieces can only rise with the tide and fall, irrevocably into indolence. Video pieces are an indicator of sorts for the theme here. That the avant-garde has been institutionalized and is now fed three hot meals a day and given its’ cot to slumber upon. All of the rage, passion and fuel for any new movement must somehow go through a credibility game of conceptualization and a process of gross, misleading mystification in order to sparkle and find its’ place on stage. The revolution isn’t televised it is just hypnotised, made a commodity and sold to you in the form of an MFA, BFA or in Russia you can buy one at a subway station. But lets not leave it at that, here is a fascinating website that I found which lists hundreds of artists on its’ programmable site: http://www.indexhibit.org/participants/
Tags: Art, Culture, Indexhibit, Trickery in Couture
