- Making the rounds this week: The Wall Street Journal’s profile of Venice Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni. “Lately,” he says, “people just think that contemporary art is something there to pass the time of the wealthy, or because everybody else is doing it or because openings are cool and fashionable.” Gioni, by contrast, sees art not as the exclusive domain of the hip and the well-to-do, but as a kind of mental playground for the masses.
“We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don’t understand,” he says.That’s some Gioni gloss on an actual problem, though, to be fair, there is some truth to what he says about coexisting in the context of class. The middle class isn’t always friendly with those from the upper class and visa versa.
Meanwhile, want to know what drives Gioni? “That’s ultimately my interest,” the curator tells the journal “to get the artwork to tell stories.” [WSJ]
- British artist Stuart Semple has signed a contract for worldwide representation with the fashion agency Next Management. Oh goodie; the art world was sufficiently lacking people whose job description is to make demands. Now we have a whole new group of icky people to make the field more annoying. [The Art Newspaper]
- Jillian Steinhauer visited the archives of the American Folk Art Museum and got a chance to look at some of Darger’s writing. He wrote a 15,000 page novel. [Hyperallergic]
- Artist Jayson Musson is responsible for a line in that Harlem Shake meme that’s been going around. Background on that, from Animal. [AnimalNY]
- President Roosevelt was no fan of the Armory Show, Duchamp or Cubism. Highlights from his scathing review courtesy of Benjamin Sutton. [In The Air]
