While the cult of the heroic individual artist will seemingly continue forever, collaboration around shared philosophies, shared knowledge and that a work of art is not necessarily anchored to a specific individual, time or place may well be the most effective response to the time in which we find ourselves – past, present and future as one.
Fearlessness is all well and good but when the criteria for critical appraisal are based not on objectivity, profound knowledge, understanding and an ability to express all of that in terms that elucidate and not obfuscate, what you are left with is simply opinion.
AS AN ARTIST YOU’D BETTER HAVE YOUR LAWYER READY
2,500 years ago Plato through his Republic sought to banish the mimetic arts from his notion of an ideal society, in that he recognised the distracting and destabilizing effects of art on its citizens
Historically we can look back over the last century and see how art reflected the time in which it was made.
I have lost count of how many times I have gone to an exhibition and been presented at the door with a book-length explanation of the work on the walls or the floor.