Do we have a contemporary art thread?

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby babycanteen » Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:42 pm

I had a similar feeling that the larger institutions operating with institutional racism in their DNA are often more responsible than the artists themselves. I felt the same way after how CAM dealt with the Kelly Walker situation a few months back

I think the frustration over the painting, at least from my viewpoint, has less to do with appropriation per se, and more to do with an assumed ownership. Painting takes empathy and sometimes, empathy can be at odds with claims to ownership. when you have a group that has gone centuries of bodies, histories, cultures and struggles owned by members outside of the group, this type of really unfortunate situation sees the light of day but should be of no surprise. My personal reaction to Schutz response, however, is that it's bullshit, i agree that the way the work is painted didn't contend any empathy or personal responsibility.

Cultural appropriation going both directions can indeed have really productive consequences. A fixation of mine for a while has been Hauka religious movement in west Africa, where members conducted religious ceremonies to become possessed by their colonial masters in order to extract their powers. I think there are tons of examples of this in the diaspora too, when you look at the syncretic relationships between catholicism and vodun, to the influence of the impressionists on jazz the list goes on.

to that point i should make clear that i am a strong believer in cultural retention, but only insofar that i think black culture exists precisely because it is non-rigid and completely permeable, and that that is actually the basis for its existence - successes and failures in all. i think that alone creates a sense of "otherness" as perceived under white supremacy, and in order to control it (in all fields) expectations and rules are prescribed to it when it enters a non-black space.

i had a similar experience at my first visit to the broad museum. the blindingly white space, with painfully unimaginative curatorial decisions almost squeezed any power the ligon, anatsui, mehretu, bradford had right out of them. Seeing the work by kara walker this fall, though still in an institution, but in an exhibition curated with more care, completely changed how i saw her work, just like more intimate scenarios do. so in that of course i agree with you on the value of minority artists to foster transformative experiences or dialogues.

I also see the potential of Taylor's work to invite white viewers to contemplate their ability to empathize with racial violence, and oddly Schutz's succeeds at this also. also, its interesting to see how these two painters, throughout their careers, have utilized humor in completely different ways. I think Taylor's painting is an incredibly strong work (like many of his paintings are.) at the same time, Henry Taylor is going making bank off that painting, just like Nick Cave has made an entire career turning police brutality into colorful costume fun. I'm being a bit flippant here, but you get what i mean. hate the game not the player - but it does make me think about formal decisions like handling of materials and abstraction when the violence is a concern of the subject, and who is allowed to make approved decisions on those fronts and why.
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Postby walt whitman » Wed Mar 22, 2017 3:27 pm

v good posts.
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Postby Phil » Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:17 am

Dear Mia and Christopher,

I am writing to publicly request that my painting, “Open Casket,” be removed from this year’s Whitney Biennial. Though it was not at all my intention to cause harm, many artists have come forward to announce that my depiction of suffering is in turn causing them suffering. I cannot rightly protect a painting at the expense of human beings.

I understand that many have attempted to defend my work in the interest of free speech, and with calls against censorship. However, the artists and writers generously critiquing “Open Casket” have made plain to me that I have benefited from the very systems of racism I aimed to critique, in a way that blinded me to what my re-presenting this image would mean to Black audiences. Particularly because, with my stamp of authorship, “Open Casket” could enter into the market and, in turn, commodify the very suffering I wished to explore. And while I agree with your curatorial statement that art can be an appropriate venue for political expression and debate, I do not agree with your implication that Black pain—what you refer to as “tremendous emotional resonance”—is a social good to be sought after through art. At least, not within a historically white-run institution, at the hands of a white artist, in an exhibit organized by a predominantly non-Black staff.

Indeed, I wanted to critique anti-Black violence and explore the real empathy I found between myself and the mother of Emmett Till, but I have learned that my re-presentation of violence against her son has proven to demonstrate its opposite: appealing to the universal truth of motherhood goes against what I have learned about the denial of motherhood, and of humanity itself, on the basis of race. I recognize that the calls for the painting’s removal have been made not as an imputation of my person or my career but of this artistic choice, this work, and the system that supports, even celebrates, such a gesture. Donna Haraway credits getting “called to account” by Black feminist thinkers for her most famous text (itself a call for sensitivity, a willingness to be wrong and a commitment to anti-racist coalition building). I want to model a willingness to learn from my mistakes, and honesty about accounting for them.

People who have been harmed by and are at risk of continued harm by systems of racist violence are in a much better position to know what is needed for restitution for that violence. If the removal of my painting has been called for by Black artists, writers, and activists, I can no longer protect an object at their expense. The painting must go.

I now join them in calling for the immediate removal of “Open Casket.” I have already promised the work will never be for sale, and I will also promise to make it impossible for the work to re-enter the public sphere. I also plan to redirect all funds from the sales of my other paintings included in the Biennial towards the Black liberation movement.

Finally, out of continued respect for those harmed by the work, I ask that the catalog and the press in the future and retroactively remove all images of the work from circulation, and replace it with images of the work’s subsequent protest.

Sincerely,
Dana Schutz
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Postby scurrydog » Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:23 am

Link???

Phil wrote:
Dear Mia and Christopher,

I am writing to publicly request that my painting, “Open Casket,” be removed from this year’s Whitney Biennial. Though it was not at all my intention to cause harm, many artists have come forward to announce that my depiction of suffering is in turn causing them suffering. I cannot rightly protect a painting at the expense of human beings.

I understand that many have attempted to defend my work in the interest of free speech, and with calls against censorship. However, the artists and writers generously critiquing “Open Casket” have made plain to me that I have benefited from the very systems of racism I aimed to critique, in a way that blinded me to what my re-presenting this image would mean to Black audiences. Particularly because, with my stamp of authorship, “Open Casket” could enter into the market and, in turn, commodify the very suffering I wished to explore. And while I agree with your curatorial statement that art can be an appropriate venue for political expression and debate, I do not agree with your implication that Black pain—what you refer to as “tremendous emotional resonance”—is a social good to be sought after through art. At least, not within a historically white-run institution, at the hands of a white artist, in an exhibit organized by a predominantly non-Black staff.

Indeed, I wanted to critique anti-Black violence and explore the real empathy I found between myself and the mother of Emmett Till, but I have learned that my re-presentation of violence against her son has proven to demonstrate its opposite: appealing to the universal truth of motherhood goes against what I have learned about the denial of motherhood, and of humanity itself, on the basis of race. I recognize that the calls for the painting’s removal have been made not as an imputation of my person or my career but of this artistic choice, this work, and the system that supports, even celebrates, such a gesture. Donna Haraway credits getting “called to account” by Black feminist thinkers for her most famous text (itself a call for sensitivity, a willingness to be wrong and a commitment to anti-racist coalition building). I want to model a willingness to learn from my mistakes, and honesty about accounting for them.

People who have been harmed by and are at risk of continued harm by systems of racist violence are in a much better position to know what is needed for restitution for that violence. If the removal of my painting has been called for by Black artists, writers, and activists, I can no longer protect an object at their expense. The painting must go.

I now join them in calling for the immediate removal of “Open Casket.” I have already promised the work will never be for sale, and I will also promise to make it impossible for the work to re-enter the public sphere. I also plan to redirect all funds from the sales of my other paintings included in the Biennial towards the Black liberation movement.

Finally, out of continued respect for those harmed by the work, I ask that the catalog and the press in the future and retroactively remove all images of the work from circulation, and replace it with images of the work’s subsequent protest.

Sincerely,
Dana Schutz
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Postby Phil » Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:29 am

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Postby scurrydog » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:05 am

Oh oh oh. That is so good.
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Postby landspeedrecord » Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:31 am

that hoax is A+++

wow. so good
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Postby walt whitman » Thu Mar 23, 2017 1:52 pm

lol

didnt same thing happen last time w/ Donelle Woolford/joe scanlan?

http://hyperallergic.com/131687/i-am-joe-scanlan/
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Postby naturemorte » Thu Mar 23, 2017 1:56 pm

I wish I had written that fake apology letter
edit: actually I'm glad someone else did but it's genius
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Postby famnexdo » Thu Mar 23, 2017 2:40 pm

made plain to me that I have benefited from the very systems of racism I aimed to critique, in a way that blinded me to what my re-presenting this image would mean to Black audiences.


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Postby Jarl Skeletal » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:57 pm

Art, on its own, is powerless to change political realities.

Earlier this week, the video artist and Artforum darling Hannah Black penned an open letter protesting the inclusion of a 2016 Dana Schutz painting in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Titled “Open Casket,” it depicts the dead body of Emmett Till, a teenager who was tortured and lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman in 1955 Mississippi. (His mother, Mamie Till, held an open casket funeral for him, so the whole world could come face to face with the horrors of American racism, hence the title of the work.) A dark episode in the nation’s history, it is a reminder, seven decades on, just how little things have changed.

The letter, which attracted several dozen signatures and a shitstorm of coverage, calls for the immediate removal of the painting from the exhibition and enters the “urgent recommendation” that it not be sold or shown again in the future. But Black isn’t done there. She also demands that the canvas itself be destroyed. Yes, destroyed. From zero to book burning, all in the opening line.

Black’s beef with both the work and its display is understandable; “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” she writes. And later: “those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material.”

To her credit, it’s one of the more intelligible things she’s written in her career. After all, she has a point: it really makes you wonder what kind of internal calculus was involved in the decision by Schutz, a white woman and blue-chip artist, to portray this subject matter. Or why, for the love of God, she would try to equate the material agony of African Americans as a people to the hypothetical anguish of a mother who has imagined losing a child in her mawkish, backpedaling response to the scandal. Given that there’s no shortage of contemporary examples of black children and adolescents being killed by racist white men, you probably wouldn’t be wrong in speculating that she chose this incident precisely for its historic distance.

In the dog-and-pony show that is the art world, worthy causes may come and go but virtue signaling is always in style. But now that the damage is done, what are the moral dimensions of this political statement?

Artists would like to think of themselves as agents of political change, but the fact remains: art is a barnacle on the side of capital, which is why it can never be a political platform. The best it can hope to do, then, is comment on the political situation after the fact or, in rare, often purely serendipitous cases, anticipate it. The luxury status of art under capitalism leaves artists in a compromised position, reducing the most urgent debates to the level of internecine turf wars.

“[N]either art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes,” wrote Camille Paglia in a 1990 op-ed on Madonna. (To mansplain for the sake of accuracy, Paglia is referring to those human issues that are foundational to a society based on the principles of liberty and equality for all, not to the current meaning of liberalism, or its many pet causes.) When artists do attempt to act as moral arbiters of the political landscape, the result is usually contrived and almost always cringeworthy. Just look at Shepard Fairey. As a private institution, moreover, the Whitney is under no moral obligation to promote social justice or protect people’s feelings.

As for the protesters, meanwhile, their attitude, “‘This art offends me, therefore it must be removed from public view’ is identical to the stance of Jesse Helms and Rudy Giuliani,” notes Freddie DeBoer (the left, it turns out, is no less prone to censorship than the right). Unlike the Bible-thumping ghouls and Spanish Inquisitors who patrolled the culture debate stages of the nineties, however, they have both morality and a relative lack of power on their side. So while it’s morally indefensible to ban “Piss Christ” on the basis of so-called obscenity, a moral argument can in fact be made as to why “Open Casket” is misguided and, possibly, harmful. Yet the purpose of admitting morally questionable cultural products into the public record is not to protect the right to evil in the name of free speech but to ensure that evil itself does not go undetected. In the most basic sense, it forces us to have hard conversations about inconvenient truths.

Recently, the author announced that she is only letting black people sign the petition from here on out, and has purged the names of any original non-black signees from the list. If the point of the letter is to expose the blindness of white privilege to the materiality of the black plight, lobbing off at least a quarter of the signatories (I counted) sure is a weird way of doing it. It’s not that we ought to feel bad for the excluded “allies.” They’ll find a way to manage. Or, that anyone can tell the remaining petitioners what they should be feeling. They’re right in their suspicion and anger. But that this reasoning serves exactly no one involved. The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.

Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.

The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.

This isn’t to discourage young artists, writers and intellectuals from demanding political reform, which needs the idealism and energy of youth to propel it forward. Only to say that it’s a fool’s errand to expect sincerity or progressiveness from the art world’s institutional gatekeepers. We can all agree that the Whitney’s choice to include the painting in its bland, clunky survey of played-out conceptualism and poverty porn was a bad idea: factitious, insensitive and, all around, perplexing. Cynics might also reason that, given the visibility and rawness of the race question in the national consciousness, the show’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, could’ve anticipated the fallout. Predictably, the museum has been slow to take action outside of issuing an extremely potboiler statement justifying itself with a few lines of artbabble about “facets of human experience” and “empathetic connections.”

In the meantime, Dana Schutz’s painting of the defiled and mutilated corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till remains on display in the chic, minimal galleries of a major art institution for the eyes of jetlagged French tourists popping in on a break from shopping and “critical design” hipsters with thousand-dollar parkas. What better indictment of the folly and myopia of the art world than to let it hang?


http://www.annakhachiyan.com/blog/2017/3/23/on-the-whitney-controversy

Image
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Postby walt whitman » Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:13 pm

man

where to begin with that terrible thinkpiece??

the first line alone makes me rage
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Postby husbands » Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:41 pm

actually that thinkpiece is extremely right
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Postby jewels » Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:57 pm

really makes you think
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Postby Jarl Skeletal » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:02 pm

the idea that art can only be political in the preterite is either mistaken or totally true if we accept that almost all political activism is past-tense through that lens and that, therefore, an activism's position in time relative to this mythical moment of political immanence doesn't have much to do with its efficacy

either way, it's yet another way of denigrating the art market that sounds a lot like flattering it. pigeonholing art as the most vulgar, garish, gauche form of pretension to a political platform isn't salting the earth, it's laying bedrock for the reification of art as a political practice

that said, i think there's a lot that's right in that thinkpiece, even though i feel fatigued at the prospect of having to affect being perplexed at the whitney's inclusion of the painting, or black's letter, or khachiyan's response. i hope the next whitney biennial includes a retrospective of the last few biennials' controversies

ian cheng has a solo show coming up at ps1 this summer. i'm excited
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Postby walt whitman » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:27 pm

the futility of critiquing the artworld/art market dynamics within the show is fine and others have already pointed this out.

i take issue with the author's glib framing that all political art and political activism maybe is paradoxical, doomed to failure.

but who knows, maybe we'll get a followup piece on that old chestnut...one can hope
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Postby galactagogue » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:36 pm

i take issue with art is a barnacle. the idea that anything can become commodified under capitalism doesn't by extension turn everything into a barnacle, does it? that's a pretty rudimentary angle to take.

even saying ‘This art offends me, therefore it must be removed from public view' is corrupted reduction of what's going on but it does open an argument that i think is mostly falling by the wayside in a lot of the discussions about this whole fiasco.
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Postby jewels » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:42 pm

this controversy, which is insular but has extended beyond normal art media is the only reason I'm even aware the biennial is happening, and is the only piece from the show I've seen. And it's the only reason I spent any time with Schutz's art, which I kinda like.

I'm not accusing her of purposely creating the controversy, but it's likely going to work out well for her.

I don't know the point of my observation, just thinking out loud.
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Postby galactagogue » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:55 pm

i imagine she didn't really need it to work well for her tho, she's already got plenty of status
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Postby vivian darko » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:07 pm

"Art is never politically useful" is a pretty tired angle but I tend to agree with Rancière that the explicit political engagements of art are not usually where its political utility is going to come from (eg Brecht productions put on by and for the bourgeoisie)
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Postby jewels » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:09 pm

galactagogue wrote:i imagine she didn't really need it to work well for her tho, she's already got plenty of status


I'm sure, but now someone like me who has an embarrassingly limited knowledge of current artists knows her, and I'd imagine there is value in that.
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Postby Jarl Skeletal » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:11 pm

viv your new av has made me think that you're boarder PROBLEMATIC, no joke, maybe 8 times in the past week
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Postby galactagogue » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:14 pm

im inclined to agree but it also opens up this funny implication that to have political utility .... art has to avoid explicit engagement? this is actually something that comes up a lot with teaching, because students (esp vis com undergrads) LOVE to say THIS COLOR REPRESENTS RACE. AND THIS ONE IS VIOLENCE. and it's... hard to tell them Not At All, without getting into a big big discussion during a 10 minute critique.
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Postby vivian darko » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:27 pm

I don't think it means that art with political potential can't explicitly engage in politics, just that its political potential is going to come from a different place. Like Rancière's favorite example, Madame Bovary: to the extent that it has a political agenda it's a fairly conservative one. But its disruption of the "sensible" in art (depicting an "unworthy" subject and disrupting the hierarchy of which subjects are worthy of portrayal) creates this moment of rupture, which Rancière argues is where the political potential of the aesthetic lies. That Flaubert has an agenda doesn't stop Bovary from having political potential, but its political potential isn't attached to its agenda either.
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Postby naturemorte » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:31 pm

the thinkpiece on the last page is callow and argued from the false position of superiority that comes from total cynicism but it's a cynicism that i largely share unfortunately. most art is the production of objects and i don't believe objects can have political value that isn't overwhelmed by their commodity status in the current system...although objects can play on their complicity within that structure in thorny and interesting ways...

i also don't really understand the contentions made here

The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.
Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.

The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.


so is the author suggesting something along the lines of: it's bogus to assert that contemporary art is a "fundamentally white supremacist institution" and to protest representation along cultural lines when the "actual" problem is in the real subsumption of the entire sphere of artistic production under capital?

maybe i've just had my head turned around by too many tempests in teapots this week but i'm seeing some echoes here of an argument that bubbled up around some jacobin tweets about the whether class struggle was superior or fundamental to intersectional theory. we are never going to get over this are we
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Postby galactagogue » Sat Mar 25, 2017 4:44 pm

sure i see what you mean. i think some times the desire for successful political utility is built up on a lot of failure, that's all.
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Postby Jarl Skeletal » Sat Mar 25, 2017 5:01 pm

naturemorte wrote:
The sort of catharsis that comes at the expense of dissent can only ever be symbolic. “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless,” Black acknowledged in an update to the post. “But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.” This isn’t justice, it’s madness.
Reparations are certainly in order, but they cannot be made by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone. Even if you think that this is a small price to pay for what black people have endured throughout American history—what’s the destruction of one art work to the destruction of countless lives?—it’s unclear how extracting punitive concessions from glorified market consultants is supposed to help anybody in the long run.

The civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum have good intentions and are justified in their outrage, but they’re just the foot soldiers of an inside-baseball wager among people whose main point of difference isn’t the color of their skin but how many MFAs they have. In the end, everybody wins, and yet no one does. Both Black and Schutz, intentionally or not, get a boost to their brands, while the Whitney goes back to selling tickets, business as usual.


so is the author suggesting something along the lines of: it's bogus to assert that contemporary art is a "fundamentally white supremacist institution" and to protest representation along cultural lines when the "actual" problem is in the real subsumption of the entire sphere of artistic production under capital?

no, c'mon, that's an obtuse read. the author is speaking against black's positioning the painting's destruction as a pragmatist common-sense solution against the hand-waved, implicitly 'self-evident' corruption and uselessness of the institution of art. khachiyan isn't promoting a hierarchy of "legitimate grievances," she's saying that black's argument undermines itself by promoting collusion, symbolic wrist-slaps, and the ritualistic investment of works of art with the stock of a corrupt institution's accursed share over responses that are whatsoever related to the violence that the painting actually performs
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Postby naturemorte » Sat Mar 25, 2017 6:01 pm

i don't know, i'm struggling with this piece, maybe i'm being obtuse, but what course of action is being advocated here beyond ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

like, i understand the idea that black's efforts to have the painting destroyed assume that the institutions which display it have a some responsibility and credibility which she elsewhere completely rejects out of hand. and i also grasp that the author's frustration is that as long as "reparations" are made "by extending special treatment to certain protected classes on the level of culture alone"--i.e. as symbolic actions within a cultural sphere insulated from the violence to which the image refers--even acts of protest ultimately only serve to reproduce the circulation of power and status within that insulated cultural sphere. but where then might political struggle take place? and how much activism is necessary to even make visible the absence of "sincerity or progressiveness from the art world’s institutional gatekeepers"? even the "civilian activists blocking access to the painting or picketing the outside of the museum" are positioned as well-meaning rubes by this piece. so while there's not necessarily a hierarchy of grievances, i think implicit to the argument that any internal struggle within the hopelessly corrupted art world is ultimately misguided and ineffective and purely symbolic is the assumption that there is a more meaningful struggle "out there." where is that? what would a more efficacious form of protest look like, who would lead that protest and who would be its target? what should black and her co-signatories be doing to address the real violence of the work if demanding its destruction?

i guess my point is that from my perspective, this argument ALSO falls prey to the same idea that it's criticizing because its assumption that contemporary art is irredeemably poisoned by capital isn't much different from the idea that contemporary art is irredeemably poisoned by white supremacy. both arguments hypostatize an "art world" which is both a supreme manifestation of a larger oppressive cultural logic but also suggest that it is so cut off from the world at large that the intellectual or political convolutions within it have no bearing on the actual violence which subtends it.
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
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Postby walt whitman » Tue Apr 04, 2017 3:29 pm

yeah. ^ its tricky to make sweeping generalizations about art worlds and their relation to politics and/or capital because it is nearly impossible to resist swinging the pendulum radically in one direction. to resist this temptation requires more space/time than a snarky lil thinkpiece would allow. naturally, the actual art object triggering these conversations is almost always a casualty and quickly ignored in this kind of game.

the recent profile on dana schutz was pretty good and rather ambivalently ends on the controversy around her 'open casket' painting:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... mmett-till

she emerges as a well meaning and very talented white artist, but basically clueless and isolated from any engagement with racial justice. im not sure if thats what the author intended to do, but his genealogy of her career/making of the painting doesnt help her cause, i dont think.
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Postby cartola » Tue Apr 04, 2017 3:44 pm

Why did she even fucking paint it?
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