Now, I don't want to hear any snipping about how the New Yorker is actually a middle-brow magazine catering to the petty bourgeousie: it might be but I love it. I think the writing is really, really clean and clear, often, witty and other than their lamentable endorsement of the Iraqi war, which was written by David Remnick but ghostwritten by the American Enterprise Institute, it's a great magazine. Afterall, it has Anthony Lane as their movie critique and he is, in my humble - no one reads my blog- opionion the best person writing about (mass) entertainment/art today.
Last week was the special "Art and Architecture" issue and it was both infuriating and depressing and a reminder of how much bad art (and architecture) clutters the landscape. I am less knowledgeable about architecture than I am about art (and I am dilletante-ish on that, even) so the articles about architecture caused me less consternation than the ones on art and artists. Once piece in the issue that really caused me to clutch my forehead and wag my head was on the artist Rikrit. Let me qoute from the piece (and, no, I promise, this is not a page torn from an old Mike Myers draft of the Sprockets sketch on S'N'L). Here goes:
"Called Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai)." People who came to the opening found Rikrit at a cooking station in a small room adjacent to the main gallery, making pad thai and serving it on plastic plates. Quite a few visitors assumed he was the caterer. According to Randy Alexander, who worked with Paula Allen and had invited Rikrit to show there, "Rikrit's idea was just to leave everything as it was, so the detritus of the opening was the formal work people would see when they came into the space the next day. We had a concern about the olfactory presence of rotting food, but because of the spices he used it never went beyond obnoxious."
Alexander was impressed by Rikrit. "His gestures, his style, his elegance all became part of the piece." he remembers. "But at the same time he had this casual, funny, normal side. I never heard a critical word about him from anyone, and in the art world that was pretty unique." Later that year Alexander started his own gallery, Rikrit was the first artist he showed. For this one , "Unititled 1990 (Blind)," Rikrit offered a voice-activitated tape recorder, a pair of binonculars on the windowsill, and a floor strewn with discarded envelopes containing audiocassettes that Rikrit had recorded, viewers could make use of these items or not. Alexander served Rolling Rock beer at the opening, because he could get it at a discount. "Rikrit liked the bottles," he remembers. "I stacked them up in their original cartons and we made a piece of it."
The effect that Rikrit and his work have on some people is not easily explicable. Gavin Brown, who came in one day, was working then for Lisa Spellman at the increasingly influential 303 Gallery, but he thought of himself as an artist- he had gone to art school in London. Something about the four cases of stacked green bottles pierced his soul. "It irritated me so much!" he remembers. "Beer bottles in their cardboard cases, all empty tops off. It wasn't like a found object - there was so much more to it than that. I could feel this in waves, even though there was almost nothing to it. It was an object that seems to say 'You don't seem to realize how little everything else matters.' I couldn't get it out of my head."
Now you might be wondering who would be rich, bored and misguided enough to, say, buy Rikrit's "art". As if this article wasn't already reading like parody then wait, it gets worse:
"Some of his cooking untensils from the early shows were starting to sell. I wondered how Rikrit felt about that: if the work was suppossed to be about social interation, what did an unwashed wok that he'd bought and used once have to do with it" "I didn't think it through at first", he told me, "but then I realized, yeah, there was a problem. What I do now is ask people to use what they buy. Cook a meal, invite people to eat with you, have your own experience. The value and the meaning are in the use." Eileen Cohen, a collector who began buying Rikrit's work very early, gave a party in her apartment last spring to "reanimate" a cooking piece of Rikrit's she had just acquired. Three handomse stainless steel pots stood on pedestals, over propane stoves, cooking three different kinds of dumplings - mild vegeterian, not-so-mild veal, and highly spiced beef. I also saw a wok from one of Rikrit's first pieces, crusted with ten-year-old shrimp curry, displayed on a shelf in Cohen's library, next to a Hopi ceramic pot."
It is actually hard to know where to begin to pinpoint how many things are wrong and downright laughable about this article and, more to the point, that state of art, in this case, visual art in the 21st century (at least in the western world). First off: this is not art and no amount of rationalizing by the purveyors of taste will convince me otherwise. Yes, it might be a "cool" experience, and a "neat" installation and the artist himself sounds really "nice" and "super cool" and not likely to cut off his ear anytime soon but this is not work that will be remembered by anyone in half-a-century's time; except, maybe the rich offspring of art-collectors from Manhattan.
This article is about how the petty tastes of the individuals, or really the EGO, masquerade as art. Now, Picasso, according to all accounts had an ego like a mad bull but the man was an unbelievable genius (I just recently visited the Picasso Museum in Paris and his body of work left me gob-smacked; the sheer virtuousity that one person was capable of). Picasso's paintings and sculptures do not require instructions or cooking materials and while they speak to his personal experiences (as all art does, right?) they are not just "cool", self-referential, found objects/experiences that are, essentially, meaningless. There is nothing particularly universally meaningful about four cartons of stacked beer bottles with no caps on unless, maybe, you've lived in a frat house or go to a lot of cheap art openings. The Rolling Rock beer bottle installation is not art, it is just an attempt to find meaning where there is none plus, it's skilless, lazy, and, above all, boring. Yes, trash can be beautiful and meaningful, Bob Rauschenberg has an amazing body of work made from bazooka wrappers and car tires but that was thoughtfully put together, stacking up beer bottles after a party is not. Soon this "art" will be thrown away, afterall, Time acts as a great garbage collector.
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