Srdjan Loncar, Value, Installation view, Old U.S. Mint, Prospect 1, New Orleans
My latest piece at The L Magazine is up. In this week’s predictions issue I discuss a few trends I see making their way into 2009. A few highlights below:
It requires no special foresight to be able to make ultra short-term predictions or remark upon the art world's most recent obsessions. Observe: Giant Barack Obama heads will last at least another three months before they go the way of 2008's greatest art casualty, the nude. But I do see a fair number of exhibitions each week, so it is with that background that I offer a few budding trends that I expect to move with greater force over the next year.
It's the End of the World as We Know It: Hello houses on fire, crumbling landscapes and barren forests! Understandably, artists currently have a rather bleak outlook on the world, and unless rainbows and lollipops suddenly take over the cultural consciousness, those perspectives are unlikely to change over the course of the next twelve months. I predict apocalyptic scenes depicting the fall of Western civilization will continue, though perhaps with a shred more hope (Thanks, Obama).
3-D Printing Technology is the New Photoshop: In 2001, artists like Lucas Samaras discovered photoshop filters littering galleries with art nobody cared about. It turns out common usage of the distortion tool isn't all that groundbreaking after all. Presenting artists with the opportunity to use these same sorts of technologies sculpturally, increasingly affordable printing techniques allows us all to stretch out photos of our faces and render them three-dimensionally. I predict this will inspire a remarkably bad, but ultimately short lived art-making fad exploring little more than what the technology does.Art on the Cheap: Now that we're all poor, I expect we'll see greater investment in art-making forms that don't cost much. Performance may ultimately see a come back, but as I noted earlier, nobody seems interested in nudity, so we may be spared the worst of it.
To read the full piece click here.
Comments on this entry are closed.