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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.

AS A SELF-CONFESSED ART [AND GRAMMAR] NAZI I CAN ONLY BE APPALLED AT THE DEPTH OF COMMUNITY INDIFFERENCE TO LANGUAGE.

Using language may never be an acceptable way of defining anything and when the audience for a work of art is so poorly equipped in terms not only of language but in coming to terms with their own emotional of intellectual capacity to respond to a work of art without resorting to deconstruction of meaning and semiotics, then the every-increasing divide between artists and their public will only grow wider.

I STARTED A JOKE – HAVEN’T I HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE?

I also read this week of a Ghanaian artist who went from selling his paintings for $100 a pop on the streets of Accra to selling for sums in excess of $600,000  on the streets of New York. Lucky him. Let’s hope his sense of humour is in place when he passes his use-by date in a year’s time and Larry Gagosian moves on to his next big discovery. After all, you’re worth a lot more dead than alive. Ask Basquiat, who died at just the right time. Now that is a joke.

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