No, my point is that he's not a sculptor, no matter how a monument is made, until someone else, a curator with status abd power, says so. The Institutional Theory. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: ARMANDO BAEZA <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, September 30, 2012 1:35:19 PM Subject: Re: today NYT Today "ANYONE "can create a bronze monument, any size,of anything in a few weeks or months, and be called a sculptor, if he can cover the cost. AB ________________________________ From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 8:11 AM Subject: today NYT Take a look at today's NYT article on Wade Gayton. He's having a solo show at the Whitney. He doesn't paint or draw but makes 'paintings' by computer, printing out images he takes from everyday print ephemera. The curator of the show says "Wade speaks to the way images travel across out visual culture -- on our computers, Iphones, televisions and books". Please note the art-speak. What the curator could have said in ordinary language is, "Wade copies images from popular culture on his big digital printer". My point here is that we shouldn't blame the artists for doing transgressive stuff or making what seems to be silly, vacant art. There are always artists who are doing every sort of stuff but we never hear about them because no one is paying them any attention at all. It's the gatekeepers, the curators, who pick and choose artists through the templates of confabulatedart-speak. When the curator says, "Wade speaks", he implies that Wade has a thoroughly intellectualized or analyzed position, a stance, from which he issues a philosophy of culture and visuality. It's phony. Wade himself says he never liked drawing and thinks painting is too hard (acting out his inner Warhol). But admitting a slacker attitude as an artist is exactly the key, the push-button, to provoke intense concentration by the curator. But Wade really simply copies images from papers and magazines, book endpapers and the like according to whim. His fancy printer can blow them up to gargantuan scale (extremism at work) and the curator can present this ephemera as high art (extremism of intentional conceptual re-contextualization). There's an artist here in Chicago, John Miller, who has been doing similar computer and big digital printer art for several years. Few have seen this work outside of colleague artists. No Whitney curator has called. No big collectors are pasting his stuff to their dining room walls on Park Avenue. The article on Gayton makes it pretty clear that he has changed the course of painting! No, the curator is trying to redefine painting and Gayton came to his attention and thus exemplifies what the curator has already decided is the 'next inevitable step' (a Greenberg phrase, I believe). Meanwhile John Miller piles up hundreds of huge digital 'paintings' done before Gayton bought his first pair of trendy red tennis shoes, that curators ignore. The curators make art, not the artists. The artists and their work are merely the specimens the curatorial creativity, the footsoldiers used by imperialist, unaccountable curators. You go, Wade! wc
