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OF IDEAS, INFLUENCES AND SELECTIVE MEMORY
When I see the work of someone like a Phyllida Barlow with an installation endlessly taking over a gallery space there is a distinct feeling of amazement because what has characterised my art from the outset has been the self-enclosed limiting factor of the edge of a canvas or sculpture with a definitive outline.
YOU CAN’T BE ANY GOOD IF YOU ARE SELF-TAUGHT. GET YOURSELF TO AN ART SCHOOL!
Any and every artist is in the end self-taught and open-ended learning is a cornerstone of creativity.
THE NOVELTY OF LIFE AND DEATH IN THE ART MARKET
Are these the natural filters we have come to accept Novelty, boredom and death? Perhaps we of the 21st century can’t see the wood for the trees and will have to wait a century or a millennium to find out what has survived and what was worth preserving but who, or what circumstance, actually render that decision, if indeed it is even rational, remains a mystery.
ART IS FINISHED. OR IS IT?
A recent controversy over the work of Damien Hirst has brought the idea of conceptual and finished dates into question.
AVARICE, STUPIDITY AND FAME.
I think it comes down to the society we have created where the expectation of something for nothing pervades every aspect of the retail market
VOIDING THE VOID
Sure, the abyss is great for staring into. But if screaming is your thing, you’ll want to go with the void [anon]
THE EXPLOITATION OF EXPECTATION
The internet has democratised access to the visual arts but is the result an advance in culture or has it reduced culture to its lowest common denominator
THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHT TO SUFFER AS AN ARTIST
If there is a direct link between art and democracy it is that under any democratic society artists have the collective right to be poor, put upon, misunderstood, barely tolerated and to complain vociferously.
WHO STILL DRAWS AND WHAT DO THEY MEAN BY DRAW?
This all begs the question though of the value of drawing in this day and age. When McLuhan wrote that the medium was the message back in the 60s he also noted that we were still using the ideas of the mechanical age to evaluate the present. Linear perspective obviously falls into that category as does tonal rendering in a throwback to the Renaissance. Given how many artists and the general public still use these measures to evaluate the worth of art you have to wonder if anything has changed in the half century since McLuhan. Is drawing as a concept a universal norm, a learned technique or something else?
BANANA POLITICS OR WHATEVER YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH
Given three hundred years from now the baby boomers, millennials and Gen Z will be long gone and the ultra-rich will be camped on Mars thumbing their noses at the have-nots. ‘Comedian’ may well be an apt description.
THE AGE OF MORTALITY
The candidates for this year’s Turner prize all work with their political and social pasts, injustice, prejudice and colonialism as the reworking of history seemingly exists to teach us lessons. While art has always been utilised as propaganda, those lessons essentially fall on deaf ears.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
It is not often that portrait painting...