I’m a fan, personally, of art that sucks at marketing itself, that doesn’t have a cute backstory or a built-in ‘platform,’ that is not cuddly or ‘adorkable’ and doesn’t immediately lend itself to a hierarchy of ‘rewards’ for ‘backers,’ that is antisocial and prickly and deeply strange.
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Why not credit Emily Gould for writing this?
Backstory, rewards, cuddly, etc. seem necessary to young artists striving for recognition, because contemporary curators know that today’s viewer is visually illiterate. If he/she is not told what to look for in a photograph, he’ll just go away frustrated. It would be the same as someone not knowing how to read and being frustrated because the poem doesn’t have pictures.
Of course, everyone understands puppies.
In related news, Dietch is hard at work willing the LA County Museum of Contemporaty Art with this same crap, while also selling exhibit space to Mercedes Benz.
That was Killing, not willing, the LACMCA.
It’s a great quote.
The slightly longer quote from Photographs on the Brain is good, too. (It ends with the following: “…sorry if $2 is too expensive for you but to me it seems like a really, really, really small price to pay for A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING LITTLE SCRAP OF HOPE FOR WEIRD NEW WORK IN THIS SHITSHOW OF A MARKETPLACE.”)
And the entire blog post called “Shitloads of Money” written by Emily Gould is even worth a read.
Apologies if the colorful language offends anyone; I am merely quoting. (It does not, for the record, offend me.)
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