too (long+stff)
Since this blog is to study the contemporary “crisis” in art criticism witnessed by readers of print media, it is best not to take the field of art criticism as an axiom. Why does art criticism exist? When did it have a non-crisis (stable) existence? If this period existed, the present state of criticism implies that something was lost. But what is it? Is it power over the market? Did the evolution of the art market in late seventies and eighties abolish the critic by taking away the power to judge the value of artwork that enters the market? Is that it?
At this point it is obvious that the art market can take care of itself. The educational institutions manufacture artists, and the products from elite programs enter the market immediately after grad school. Resulting exhibitions rarely provoke practices that are void of market consciousness as a protoconcept. The market is in the minds of the artists more often than actual content. It always was. There is nothing unusual about that.
In every field that claims to produce discourse for some kind of public value (good) only about 1-5% of work actually displays disciplinary advancement. The rub is that within the applied and pure sciences the crap is unnoticed and quality research is selected for its intensic qualities, it is championed, and utilized. In sciences the bad work is useless both for the market and academia. There, crap cannot be changed into gold by writing about it since there is no space for diagnostics and polemics. It is simply a waste of time.
However, in the art world, outside of academia, there is no separate control judgment before the academic work enters the market construct. The educational institution has already assigned value by stamping the graduate with a seal of approval. The work enters the market without a critic. And that is not the fault of the artist or the market. That is an outcome of years of improper positioning. Art criticism got lazy. Art criticism considered educating the artists beyond bfa's and apprenticeships an external issue. Art criticism only wanted to be there at the end when the work is in the salon to judge. Like 200 years ago. But, unfortunately time never waits.
Superstructure changed over and over again. Baudelaire and Verlaine are dead. Art criticism is in state of being rendered completely obsolete. The market simply bypassed it by institutionalizing its values within the education of artists, curators and historians (people who have actual economic stake in the artworks). The values of the art market are the rules of any market: it is in its interest that it buyers keep buying, and institutions that facilitate the product must keep at it. Once bought objects must not depreciate. The market must entice the investors with promise of profit. This leaves the market without interest in variables that could take the power to value away (or back).
This is of course as all very plain atom within the set constituting a crisis that spans beyond criticism. It is within art itself and the meaning of this word within a cultural matrix. We must not forget the problem of art. How did it come to be? What is the function of art? The market, the educational institution, the artists themselves: whom do they serve and answer to? What is their responsibility towards the public outside of the hermetic sphere of art culture? Is there such responsibility? These days the general public ritualizes the visual outside of the museum. It avoids ingesting advanced art. Is it because since the 1930’s the use of visual tools divided into high academic art and culture industry, evolving into a visual world where images cannot be trusted and since the fabrication of images originates in the field of academic art the artist cannot be trusted. The new world of images is there for the market and it is impossible to separate the people selling self-normalization from the people who want to give means for avoiding the same. There is something powerful in images that is proven to be easily corrupted. There is a responsibility to take that very thing back into the discourse that facilitates social vulnerability- a model that invites the outside public back into the visual that instrumentalizes the social. How is that to be done? This question is closely tied with the reasons for the existence of art and since the moratorium on art is unenforceable we have to face these issues as ones that cannot be tested for relevance. They are here.
At this point it is obvious that the art market can take care of itself. The educational institutions manufacture artists, and the products from elite programs enter the market immediately after grad school. Resulting exhibitions rarely provoke practices that are void of market consciousness as a protoconcept. The market is in the minds of the artists more often than actual content. It always was. There is nothing unusual about that.
In every field that claims to produce discourse for some kind of public value (good) only about 1-5% of work actually displays disciplinary advancement. The rub is that within the applied and pure sciences the crap is unnoticed and quality research is selected for its intensic qualities, it is championed, and utilized. In sciences the bad work is useless both for the market and academia. There, crap cannot be changed into gold by writing about it since there is no space for diagnostics and polemics. It is simply a waste of time.
However, in the art world, outside of academia, there is no separate control judgment before the academic work enters the market construct. The educational institution has already assigned value by stamping the graduate with a seal of approval. The work enters the market without a critic. And that is not the fault of the artist or the market. That is an outcome of years of improper positioning. Art criticism got lazy. Art criticism considered educating the artists beyond bfa's and apprenticeships an external issue. Art criticism only wanted to be there at the end when the work is in the salon to judge. Like 200 years ago. But, unfortunately time never waits.
Superstructure changed over and over again. Baudelaire and Verlaine are dead. Art criticism is in state of being rendered completely obsolete. The market simply bypassed it by institutionalizing its values within the education of artists, curators and historians (people who have actual economic stake in the artworks). The values of the art market are the rules of any market: it is in its interest that it buyers keep buying, and institutions that facilitate the product must keep at it. Once bought objects must not depreciate. The market must entice the investors with promise of profit. This leaves the market without interest in variables that could take the power to value away (or back).
This is of course as all very plain atom within the set constituting a crisis that spans beyond criticism. It is within art itself and the meaning of this word within a cultural matrix. We must not forget the problem of art. How did it come to be? What is the function of art? The market, the educational institution, the artists themselves: whom do they serve and answer to? What is their responsibility towards the public outside of the hermetic sphere of art culture? Is there such responsibility? These days the general public ritualizes the visual outside of the museum. It avoids ingesting advanced art. Is it because since the 1930’s the use of visual tools divided into high academic art and culture industry, evolving into a visual world where images cannot be trusted and since the fabrication of images originates in the field of academic art the artist cannot be trusted. The new world of images is there for the market and it is impossible to separate the people selling self-normalization from the people who want to give means for avoiding the same. There is something powerful in images that is proven to be easily corrupted. There is a responsibility to take that very thing back into the discourse that facilitates social vulnerability- a model that invites the outside public back into the visual that instrumentalizes the social. How is that to be done? This question is closely tied with the reasons for the existence of art and since the moratorium on art is unenforceable we have to face these issues as ones that cannot be tested for relevance. They are here.
posted by ika at 6:48 PM
1 Comments:
Falcon,
I think you hit the nail on the head. I was wondering if you thought any advancement could be made if there was an effort to seperate artists from, or at least lessen their dependance on, the market. Would more governmental or institutional funding help that seperation or would it only make artists lazier knowing that they would not even have to meet the demands of a market.
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