POST BY PADDY JOHNSON
>
Gawker’s Brian Moylan offers a few reasons why he’s less than interested in Bravo’s Work of Art. His points would have a little more merit if he’d either seen the show or even read a review, but then that media outlet’s not even known for thorough commentary these days.
Regardless of these failures, Moylan manages to turn out an amusing indictment of the art world, massive holes and all.
A Picture and a Thousand Words: The art world is a fraud and so is the art it creates. It is no longer about creating aesthetically pleasing works or things that are objectively beautiful. It is about telling good stories. No work is complete without the narrative of how it was made. Like Jackson Pollock, “Oh, he was a horrible alcoholic who just threw paint around. Sure, they all look alike, but he peed on this one. Look, he put a cigarette out on this one.” Obviously performance art is the worst offender of this, but it has infiltrated its way into all other disciplines. It’s either about the materials, the process the artist went through to make it, or the concept behind it. We don’t care if it’s a column made out of turds from the field where the artists abandoned his puppy as a young boy. It’s still a pile of shit, and no matter how much someone paid for it or how much we’re supposed to like it, it still stinks.
Haha and all that but even acknowledging the Pollock slight to be misplaced, Moylan’s rant begs the question: If 90% of everything sucks why are the art world’s shortcomings so much more significant than those in the entertainment industry. Surely Julian Opie and the sitcom Reba are equally bad in their own ways.
Revealingly Moylan mentions the cost of the object as a false point of merit. Indeed this is the case but I suspect there’s a little less hostility directed at other fields because at least everyone can afford to consume them. In other words what makes the general public angry isn’t that some art sucks, but that even when it’s so bad we wouldn’t want to own it, we can’t.
