Avignon festival 'catastrophe' meets with boos

Expatica ^ | July 21 2005

[stripes1776]

As long as government money is used to fund them that is. Let them compete in a market where true talent will rise to the surface and the current hacks will fade away.

Have you stepped into a private art gallery lately? Private money is supporting this type of shock, political protest, "experimental" art even more than government subsidy. In this case, the supremely untalented have risen to the top.

So why does both the general public and art collectors, who are offended and scandalized by this junk art, continue to support it by buying more it? It is almost as if we expect to be shocked by art, and if we don't get the experience of our senses and emotions being assaulted, we feel cheated. The mark of art has become incomprehensibility.

So unless art intimidates us and we get some expert to interpret it for us in pretentious language that no one can understand, we aren't sophisticated. Let's all pretend that we aren't hicks after all and say, "How interesting!"

[rabidralph]

Looks like John Edwards.

[leilani]

Freedomcalls: good post. Thanks! Calvin Locke:Thanks for making the distinction between modern and post-modern contemporary art. There is a difference.

Stripes1776 said: ”Have you stepped into a private art gallery lately? Private money is supporting this type of shock, political protest, "experimental" art even more than government subsidy. In this case, the supremely untalented have risen to the top. So why does both the general public and art collectors, who are offended and scandalized by this junk art, continue to support it by buying more it?”

The people who are buying all this trite, shopworn postmodern schlock in the US are the new bourgeoisie: overnight internet millionaires, lower-tier match-day MD’s who’ve made a killing doing lasic, hollywood & sports celebrities who grew up in trailer parks, in other words, the usual suspects - intellectually insecure people who naiively believe that whatever they find in some ostentatiously hushed art gallery or at some studiously funky downtown theatre will give them the “culture” or right-brain heft they didn’t get growing up with a Vanderbilt-by-marriage mumsy in Greenwich or at a top-flight university.

You won’t find people who actually studied art buying any of this sclerotic post-1960’s junk, er excuse me…installations, of course. They are well aware that this pseudo-intellectual kitsch is the big bucks equivalent of tourist trinkets for the newly-monied’s excursions into the upper classes and that there’s actually more originality to be found stashed away behind the dusty depression glass at any local garage sale in one of those paint-by-numbers Cape May beach scenes that someone’s Aunt Mildred did in the 1950’s. Nope, you’re right, here in the good old US of A, the postmodern art con is largely a capitalist/non-profit foundation racket and everyone knows that the joke is on the pathetic status-seeking schlubs opening up their bulging Prada purses for the privilege of putting somebody else’s soiled diapers up on their living room walls. Call it “paint-by-bank-numbers” But it isn’t just the ignorance of art buyers. We can’t ignore the widespread scam of art ‘investors’ who “donate” money to unscrupulous museum directors on the condition that pieces from their worthless collections are given a show, the value of the pieces then skyrockets because they were shown at said museum, investors next sell the trite junk newly endorsed by the art establishment to unsuspecting s-s. schlubs, and both the museums & investors make out like bandits.

But in France, ah, that’s a different story, where their trite, shopworn schlock is almost totally subsidized by the masses through the Ministry of Culture. Supposedly these obscenely huge publicly funded expenditures are needed to combat the global onslaught of American Cultural Imperialism although it is a mystery how any government hack in their right mind, even a french one, could possibly expect that Haitian school children would be lining up to buy tickets to watch a parisian transexual opine about the ontology of dasein while dipping his naughty-bits in turpentine rather than plunking down their allowance for a Jessica Simpson CD and, even more improbably, that any of this absurdly cliched, tediously tendentious & compulsively redundant performance ‘art’ would actually have a culturally transforming impact on them.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux needs to reissue The Painted Word in french, pronto. From what we read in this article, it looks like there just might currently be a market for it over there. Then what the french taxpayers (and nouveau-riche poseurs in the US) need is an “Armory Show Redux: 100 Years After”. Some courageous curator needs to pull open the curtains on the P.T.Barnums and naked emporers of the terminally pretentious prevailing art establishment (AKA the “salon”) and expose them for the old-fashioned (good grief, they’ve been cranking out the same stinkin’ “postmodern” garbage for 40-odd years; check your calendars, messieurs-dames, you can’t accurately call something that was being done way back when Alan Ginsburg was diddling his big toe in public remotely “modern”!) money-grubbing charlatans that they are. Alas, I don't think any of us should hold our breath waiting for it just yet.