Here are the ten artists who stole the headlines while they held art back this decade....
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rbrdie said on 2 Sunday 2011 pm31 10:55 pm: Mat – I spent the day driving back to Atlanta from Miami…Hopefully you are still following this thread. I welcome the opportunity to elaborate. When I made reference to the “gatekeepers of the artworld,” I am thinking of the Intuitional Theory of Art put forth by Becker, Dickie, and Danto. In his article, Art a Collective Action, Becker talks about the “social character” of the artworld and defines it as a system of cooperating individuals. Obviously there is an inherent hierarchy to this system in which certain individuals and institutions play a larger role in determining what constitutes art. Judging from your response, it appears you find it amusing that I consider you one of the gatekeepers. But isn’t that what art critics do? By evaluating art for the Huffington Post are you not shaping the public discourse on what constitutes art…What’s good or bad? It would seem that an article entitled, The 10 Most Overrated Artists of the Decade is intended to shape opinion. I believe art critics not only shape public opinion but they also help define the underlying conventions… That is the structures, vocabularies, and standards of art. As Becker points out conventions not only play a role in the cohesion of “large network of cooperating people,” but also how they “dictate the abstractions to be used to convey particular ideas or experience.” In other words, I think art critics play a significant role in what gets made… So I view them as gatekeepers. |
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artists inspire conversations among intellectuals, those intellectuals then communicate the conversation thru media, whether its print, song, or the web.
Some artists are also funded by grants and patrons as Ms Walker has been. Google her name and see some of the stunning work she has done to promote this conversation.
One of America's deepest scars is the one of slavery. It still colors our relations with one another and sours it with other countries. The emancipation proclamtion may have freed the African Americans yet it freed them into a world still colored with unjustice and danger. No matter how much time has passed, how whites and blacks see each other and how blacks see themselves is colored by this societal lens. I am not trying to give you a history on american history just trying to say a conversation that should have been had devoid of pointing fingers but full of acknowledgement of what this country has done to a race of its citizens has never been had and continues to be swept under the rug to a point that the author of this article has the nerve to critique this artist as overrrated.
Yet what has he contributed to anything enlightening for posterity?
Now Damien Hirst is another matter altogether. He's the first person I think of when I hear the phrase "The 10 Most Over-Rated Artists of the Last Decade."
I do not agree that a critic has any responsibility to be objective (an illusion anyway), or be shackled to history (a fairy tale at best and always mushy) or "social dynamics" (whatever that means). My analysis leaves taste out of the equation at least 4 out of 5 times.
Don't you owe us that much?
Agita Keiri; Tadao Ando; Zaha Hadid; Anish Kapoor; Lisa Yuskavage; Fred Tomaselli; Liu Qinghe; Bruno Walpoth; Jakub Julian Ziolkowski; Juan Munoz, among others
Here's a good vid explaining "How To Be A Successful Artist" these days - It's delivered as tongue-in-cheek but it's really not: http://vimeo.com/11432533 - (3 minutes) language nsfw
(/end snark)
I agree about Hirst, though. How many animals can one stick in a vat of formaldehyde before you're A. Officially repeating yourself artistically? & B. Recreating the Museum of Natural Science but in another building?
Cezanne Mattise, Picasso, de Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Warhol
When my book comes out it will tell you why.
Check my web page for details
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/index.html