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When Did the Art World Get So Conservative?

#1
C C Offline
http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/when-did-...ative.html

EXCERPT: First and foremost, the art world is a place that says it wants people to be free. This extraordinary openness is what gives art its ever-changing adaptable agency. Or gave.

Flexibility is life, but lately I [Jerry Saltz] keep thinking that the art world has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I've always thought of as completely foundational — freedom to let our freak flags fly and express ourselves, even bizarrely — has constricted considerably. And it’s happening at such mutated and extreme rates that we must ask if the art world is not now one of the more self-policing areas of contemporary culture. How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative?

Perhaps the art world is just enacting its own micro versions of the kind of flash fires that swirl around mass-cultural figures, politicians, and pop stars, transforming every public gesture, tweet, selfie, or silly picture into a contested act of identity-politics war. (Sex activist Dan Savage calls each of them a “tempest in a privilege pot.”) The weirdest part is that it all feels strangely familiar, very déjà vu. And pervasive. The sad part is that the art world has always been the place I'd run away from all that bullshit to....
#2
Magical Realist Offline
(Nov 20, 2014 11:19 PM)C C Wrote: http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/when-did-...ative.html
EXCERPT: First and foremost, the art world is a place that says it wants people to be free. This extraordinary openness is what gives art its ever-changing adaptable agency. Or gave.
Flexibility is life, but lately I [Jerry Saltz] keep thinking that the art world has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I've always thought of as completely foundational — freedom to let our freak flags fly and express ourselves, even bizarrely — has constricted considerably. And it’s happening at such mutated and extreme rates that we must ask if the art world is not now one of the more self-policing areas of contemporary culture. How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative?
Perhaps the art world is just enacting its own micro versions of the kind of flash fires that swirl around mass-cultural figures, politicians, and pop stars, transforming every public gesture, tweet, selfie, or silly picture into a contested act of identity-politics war. (Sex activist Dan Savage calls each of them a “tempest in a privilege pot.”) The weirdest part is that it all feels strangely familiar, very déjà vu. And pervasive. The sad part is that the art world has always been the place I'd run away from all that bullshit to....
This is why the only people who really know anything real about art ARE the artists. The vast entourage of art critics, art exhibitors, art collectors, art professors, art fans, etc. only know about what has become institutionalized AS "great art". But art is inherently revolutionary. True art cannot be fossilized and contained inside glass cases inside museums. It is explosive, irreverent, anarchal, and individual. They called Marcel Duchamp a one man art movement. When Andy Warhol started printing photos of soup cans on canvasses nobody knew that could be art too. That's what we should expect from art today. A whole new redefinition of art as per a new generation of artists--totally defiant of the formulaic conventions and pretentious conformity of the champaign-sipping artsy class.


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