Conceptual art: what's the point?

craner

Beast of Burden
I am deeply indebted to the person who pointed me towards this superb 1999 Art Review essay by Brian Ashbee, which gleefully attacks the aesthetics and rhetorical tactis of Art Review itself and says a lot (if not quite everything) that needs to be said about contemporary art. What's amazing is that, in the 15 years since this was written, absolutely nothing has changed.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I am deeply indebted to the person who pointed me towards this superb 1999 Art Review essay by Brian Ashbee, which gleefully attacks the aesthetics and rhetorical tactis of Art Review itself and says a lot (if not quite everything) that needs to be said about contemporary art. What's amazing is that, in the 15 years since this was written, absolutely nothing has changed.

Some great stuff there. I particularly liked:

"X's work
{wryly/mockingly/cunningly/innocently/intelligently}
{deconstructs/subverts/disrupts/parodies/appropriates/undermines}
{popular notions/stereotypes/archetypes/conventions/the mythology/strategies}
of
{gender/representation/style/sexuality/commodification/identity}
by ..."

It's the same interchangeable, meaningless cant I talked about in my first post, along with the obligatory laughable pretentions to being somehow radical or subversive in a school of art that's been the Official Art of the cultural and academic (and, by extension, financial/commercial) Establishment for the last half-century or so.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
What artists do is throw things together and hope that some curatorial genius will apply meaning. If you wiped away all the curators, the art world would be in total disarray because no one would know what to say or think.

RIP Brian Sewell
 

version

Well-known member
I am deeply indebted to the person who pointed me towards this superb 1999 Art Review essay by Brian Ashbee, which gleefully attacks the aesthetics and rhetorical tactis of Art Review itself and says a lot (if not quite everything) that needs to be said about contemporary art. What's amazing is that, in the 15 years since this was written, absolutely nothing has changed.
I clicked that link and it went to a site for London escorts. At first I thought it might be some clever commentary on the art world, but I think it is genuinely just an escort site.
 

version

Well-known member
Where the art world differs from that of food retailing is that the art market is not a free market. It's rigged; hugely distorted by the presence of public subsidy - the grants and funding available to organisations and individuals deemed to be producing "significant" work. To get access to this, it's even more important that artists create the right theoretical discourse to surround their work.

Conceptronica.
 

version

Well-known member
It's already clear that Maloney's skills don't lie in painting; only a marketing genius could have achieved success with work of such embarrassing ineptitude.

😂
 
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