Comments on: The retreat of the avant garde

By: dirigible

dirigible — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:56:57 +0000

The Frieze blog author has graced you with a “you lack my special knowledge so nyah” comment under the post at their site.

By: Rupert White

Rupert White — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:49:58 +0000

I think the problem is the way curators like Bourriaud have the arrogance to assert the existence of some kind of identifiable ‘global’ culture, as if they alone understand it, and the rest of us are backward for not recognising it as such.

Their notion of a global culture is a concept that feeds their own narcissism because they have also appointed themselves as its leaders.

In reality it merely corresponds to a small cabal of self-deluded international artists and curators who spend their lives travelling between art fairs and major museums, and never really connecting with real culture, and real people.

By: dirigible

dirigible — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:01:03 +0000

Bourriaud’s mythology for service economy art has stunk out art criticism for far too long.

“There was no economic, historical or ecological significance evident in his pictures.”

That would get in the way of writing about them. Contemporary art needs to be empty, like contemporary pop music, content gets in the way of being used in the background of advertisements.

I agree that this is a failure of content, which makes it important to avoid being distracted by form.

“The sight of a watercolour would be far more transgressive. [...] Bourriaud quotes with approval the pseudo-leftist line of political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that anyone in the postmodern – sorry, Altermodern world who is against America or the West is somehow a radical worthy of support. This thinking dignifies the misogynist, the homophobe, the antisemite, the book burner, the theocrat and the psychopath.”

Supporting formally reactionary art due to its potential for transgressing the hegemony of state art would make no mores sense than supporting socially reactionary politics due to its potential for transgressing the hegemony of Empire.

In art as in politics, form cannot excuse content.