“You might have heard recently about what’s going down in Sydney’s three major art schools. One has pretty much abandoned traditional art education like painting and sculpture for an offbeat hybrid art/technology thing that costs heaps to produce but has beautiful ’research output’ value.”
“This seemed like a good thing, a hybridisation of commercial and private approaches, and perhaps this is the future we’ll see elsewhere as major commercial galleries become private foundations and artist-run spaces are pushed out into the suburbs.”
The welcoming atmosphere of the room is enhanced by carefully chosen chamomile-lavender scented candles. I’ll sit in a chair while you can sit on the couch, and so we can begin our art therapy session.
You have to wonder: How did we get here? How did we end up with art as a ‘critical practice’ that is neither really that critical nor particularly good art?
“The rational, objective side of me accepts that art exists as an expression of culture, but the irrational, free-car-space-finding side of me accepts the proposition that an artwork exists in the world as much as a mountain does, which is to say, an artwork exists even when I’m not looking at it.”
“The offer to write on the artist’s work came with an attractive word rate attached.”
“For all the apparent difficulties of the collector-dealer-artist business model, there just doesn’t seem like a viable alternative, whatever the scale of the operation.”
“The most interesting quality of old things is that they even appeared new. I think that’s because they were never wholly, truly new: they were mostly just reheated bits of even older stuff but given a makeover, like a plain person getting a new hairdo or losing some weight.”
“They weren’t just painters, they were philosophers; they didn’t just do performances, they were political agitators; they didn’t just shoot wedding videos on the weekend, they were videographers; and so on.”
