Contemporary art is mostly crap, cynical, driven by the market, bullshit.
Mathew Collings & Robert Hughes might agree. They differ in that Collings might add that some of the crap is better than other crap.
Some quotes & images follow.
The mandarin people in charge of the Turner Prize, and the media people at Channel 4, and middle-class people who run the art columns on the broadsheets, all assume ordinary people must have this stuff explained to them — but the motivations for doing that are completely bullshit. It’s for commercial reasons, to get the ratings up.
…they don’t even pretend it’s out of decent motivations.
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I think you can be involved in an intelligent way, and that might mean being sceptical. It might mean thinking against the grain. But that’s only because you’re thinking about the bigger picture. I mean, if I think of Sickert – his paintings are characterized by a little bit of light in a general gloom, and the light makes the whole thing.
there has been one huge and dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25 years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of its full effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly everyone’s relationship with aesthetics. …
The art world is now so swollen with currency and the vanity of inflated reputation that it is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz. Hollywood doesn’t want critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers. Showbiz controls journalism by controlling access. The art world hopes to do the same, though on a more piddly level.
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Angus Fairhurst – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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