Artist

ARTISTS DO MORE GOOD BY DYING THAN THEY WOULD HAVE DONE BY LIVING LONGER LIVES. Discuss.

Sadder still was the fate of Elvis and Tom Jones. The latter is still singing the same songs of decades ago on the stages on Las Vegas while elderly women queue up to throw their underwear in his direction. The last days of Elvis [fat, flat and sweating] were mostly an embarrassment. The plethora of Elvis imitators who gather annually in various corners of the world choose to remember the early songs and the white jump suit. The King died at just the right time to be inaugurated as a legend. Given another couple of decades and the world might not have been so kind.

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WHEN A DARK HORSE CAN BE A RIGHT COW.

I’d be the first to recognise that the audience provides at least fifty percent of the meaning of a work but questions of beauty, not being given to sentimentality personally, is enough to give you a headache.

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WHY ARE WOMEN ARTISTS TURNING TO ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN SUCH DROVES? RITUAL, MAGIC, MISGUIDED CULTURAL IMPERATIVES OR ART AS ESCAPE AND THERAPY?

But why a dominance of women? To loosely quote Yuval Noah Harari, if you put 1000 chimpanzees in a room [our nearest evolutionary ancestors] you get chaos. If you put 1000 male artists in a room more than likely it will end up as war. 10,000 artists, on an internet site though, most of them women, and the mythical glue of creativity takes over in an atmosphere of communal conviviality. Art as self-expression? Art as therapy? Art as a social imperative? Art as a reiteration of hunter-gatherer society and the control of magic and ritual? Perhaps. The collective power that erected pyramids was the result of a collective belief and sense of community purpose but the uptake of a current course on Abstract paint application may leave no such legacy but you can’t deny that one exists.

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DIVISION, DIVERSITY AND PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS

No matter what selection committees deem to be the representative art of the day to hang or be installed in a Biennale pavilion, there is no guarantee that they have ‘got it right’ or that the artist/exhibit will even be remembered once the exhibit is over let alone become a beacon of cultural representation – unless a book is written about it.  What is more likely is that being hung as the representative artist will be forever emblematic of a time, a place and art thinking that seeks to draw artificial battle lines.

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