Previous: newbohemia and its discontents
fed up
Post #86 • August 19, 2003, 4:19 AM
Damarys Ocaña in Street:
American Tableux: Many Voices, Many Stories, currently on view at Miami Art Museum, won’t exactly set your brain on fire with its ideas. That’s because the “American story” far more complex than the show reflects – even with its pluralistic title and intentions – and because the show’s broad premise that pictures tell stories is practically begging for a “No shit” response.
See the original on the Miami Herald’s unnavigable, unsearchable, train wreck of a website. (Dear Herald: Attempting to find this article, I clicked the through the categories, got thrown irretrievably on to the main Herald site twice, searched on ‘Damarys’ and ‘Ocaña’ to no avail, and finally found it by searching for ‘No shit’. Fire your webmaster.)
Tom Moody on his weblog:
At long last, the Matthew Barney backlash has begun! I don’t know about you, but about halfway down the Guggenheim ramp I started looking at my watch, and I don’t wear a watch.
Overheard on Sunday in front of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres lightbulb-strings-named-after-Paris-hotels piece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “If we turned off the light bulbs, the piece could be named after a New York hotel.”
Just when you thought it was safe to step back into a gallery, here comes a show where the burka has been re-designed American style. I am talking about Redesigning the Burqa. This is an exhibit that features the Islamic female garment embossed with various logos from McDonald’s to the Cubs – it is on display at the Aron Packer Gallery in the West Loop. ...
“America didn’t invent the burqa, but maybe this is what would happen if we did,” says 31-year-old [artist Sean] Sorensen. “We take over Afghanistan, and then we take over Iraq, and it doesn’t seem that far of a leap to think that certain things about American capitalism will insinuate themselves into the lives of these people.”
How? Maybe we will “take over” their minds as well, uh? If it was up to me, which thanks to all the Gods it isn’t – I’d rather deal with a MickyDees burka than with Taliban killers running my life or Saddam and his sons raping my women.
Here in Phoenix Gregory Sale, another artist too lazy to do his own work (at least in this case),telephonically hijacked a phone-in part of Yoko Ono’s retrospective in San Francisco last year, then somehow made a fifteen-minute video of an audio piece, and called it “Looking for Yoko Ono.” He explained it, in part, this way: I am questioning museum culture while playing with celebrity and artistic intervention.Which I translate this way: I am an obnoxious party-crasher taking advantage of a venue I couldn’t mount in a hundred years, and this is the only way I’ll ever get into the San Francisco Museum of Art.
One rather gets the sense that people are getting fed up.