Spector's gesture may have seemed 'well played' to a few people on on a
few social networks for few days, but beyond that its impact can only be
neagtive. During a lull in high-pressure federal budget negotiations, a
posh museum curator insults a famously thin-skinned president who (a)
has a penchant for crushing his enemies and (b) rules by pouring
gasoline on smoldering culture-war issues — what could possibly go
wrong?
We learned what can go wrong in the '80s and '90s, when 'art' was
hijacked by a handful of attention-seeking pottymouths. But the main
result wasn't to establish that the work of Karen Finley or Andres
Serrano is brilliant or enduring. Maybe it is, I don't really care. But
we do know that arts programs of every kind across the US suffered
savage budget cuts — and reactionaries gained a whole new range of
weapons to pursue their agenda.
But isn't it a bit odd that we'd be debating it in these terms on
nettime now? The list's roots lie, in part, in the recognition that huge
swaths of contemporary art had collapsed into irrelevance — part
theory, part commodity, part ritual, part soap opera. Morlock suggests
this is a 'perfect illustration of the dismal state of what once was the
progressive left (20 years ago?)' — but 20 years go we were saying 20
years before, ad nauseam.
Think for a moment about the range of freedoms Spector had, the
resources she could have drawn on, to create some interesting or
challenging situation — *exactly* the origins of this list. Instead,
she decides to relive the golden moments from her youth.
Cheers,
Ted
On 1 Feb 2018, at 12:03, Keith Sanborn wrote:
I give the Guggenheim some credit, though the Cattelano is a cynical
piece of crap anyway. The ironies there are instructive. Where is a
more fitting home for it than in the bathroom of a racist who is
obsessed with gold?
And if both analogies are correct, then farting in the Fueher’s face
is not an opportunity to be missed. It’s on his level.
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