10 years pricking the art voodoo doll 2005-2015

Category: moogee says (Page 1 of 2)

Dancing on the YBA grave…

ozymandias1

A response to a Jonathan Jones blog entry on the Guardian website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jan/30/contemporary-british-art-recession?

A generation of lo-fi subversives may finally have found something to be lo-fi and subversive about. After all, Hirst, Whiteread and their generation found their striking voices at a moment of recession.

The artists who think like this are kidding themselves.

Thankyou JJ I am pleased if I dumped in the ‘Lo-Fi’ bin with all the rest….sadly you utterly wrong because as an urban white middle class professional you cannot see past the ring-fence that been in operation for the past twenty years and which the ‘revolutionary joy’ about which you complain actually directed at….put simply I live and have lived outside that area for most of my life until now…ironically…you have no knowledge or experience of that so how could you comment or are you thinking of the shallow subversives of our modern art schools as they the only ones you ever met?

see Nick Cohen on this factor here..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/25/television
as he says..

In general, though, literary writers and filmmakers (AND ARTISTS/CRITICS my addition!) had little interest in deprivation and wealth, and failed to see the connections between the two. Raised in public-sector families, educated in universities and working in academia, they were the artistic equivalents of Westminster’s political class: narrow professionals with few experiences of life beyond their trade. No writer is obliged to write a state-of-England novel, but so few wanted to that the critic DJ Taylor complained in 2007 of “the fatal detachment of the modern ‘literary’ writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect”.

Two generations of artists were as badly damaged as they were helped by the art market YBA years…..one of my best friends actually committed suicide because of it because of the depression of trying to survive with skills in a market which dumped those values and rode the stock market instead…..money and trash made good bedfellows …

So I found my subversive voice now have I??…sorry wrong again.

I like some others have been subversive since day I left Hornsey back in 1981…..I and others like me walked away and turned our backs on this parade of Goldsmiths driven rubbish and were ignored or worse pitied for our opposition.

There is no glee in my heart at all just a sad realisation that not only real lives but art school ethics and skills training has been dumped along with the giant YBA baby……Hirst was a giant Cuckoo in a very small nest who managed to distort a difficult occupation into an impossible one…now a lot of magpies, rooks and ravens are coming home to roost….they will pick a lot of corpses bare not just Hirsts….

CODA

Yesterday by some quirk of nature I found myself cheek by jowel with Mr Saatchi along with a dear friend who has been painting brilliantly in a council flat with no support from state or bankers for 30 years…..it was a strange moment to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of real artistic talent…..I know which knew more about art….

The only difference between them was about a few million pounds…..I have no doubt Mr.S believes he right and doing good for artists…I do not think he was right and the period of YBA you identify RIP YBA 1991 – 2007 is just another lazy soundbite piece of journalism…. the rot had set in way before and the damage will last far longer and goes far deeper than you realise…

Does this matter in face of mass poverty and recession probably not…..make hay while the sun still shines for its going to be a bitterly cold year in all the arts….I take no joy at all in any of this….

In fact I trying to rebuild from ground zero like a lot of others……the view from the ivory tower is over….

Moogee

The New Depression Gallery

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To be serious for a moment (it happens) the last post  from Badam saddens me greatly. I too was a ‘serious’ artist with unpaid bills,  a freezing studio, an interview at Goldsmiths (same year as Hirst if accepted..I wasn’t ..too serious for the times it appears..Fuller/Bacon self-portraiture didn’t ‘hang’ well with a interview panel of a graphic designer, a conceptualist and a student who hung black bin liners in rows…I kid you not.. to look for the real tale of why art where it is go to the enfeeblement of the art schools by profit and Thatcherism and YBA’s)…

I hung in there in the starving artist manor a lot longer than most – in fact until 2004 when I finally did teacher training and I now teach multimedia students.

What saddens me is that Saatchi being a wiley coyote knows that with the collapse of state support as grants and the recession hit the art schools we will see a downturn in both student numbers and ability as working class students fail to make the financial sacrifices demanded of them. What chance a new Hockney, Moore or dare I say it Hirst these days??

Then Hey Presto! here comes a new income stream for his ‘global reach’. No longer able to afford art school ..just log on and become a famous artist Charles’s way…no need for time consuming education. The fact that one in a million becomes your betting chance of success as opposed to 1 in 25 or less AFTER graduating from the Royal College or any other Art School (official statistics reveal that you may become a teacher but a successful artist….well you have a cat in Emins chance)

So as art education collapses for lack of support who better to take over the education of our new ‘elite’ than…Saatchi Enterprises..who was rumoured to be preparing his own Art School as we speak..privately funded of course and what better way to promote it than getting prime time BBC2 coverage to get it going…no fool that one.

He no more interested in the talent than Lloyd Webber……their real talent is pushing their tie-in profit making concerns..via these programmes…pure Cowellism.

Musicals or Singers or Artists its all the same racket….

As for Badem…do it for yourself mate there are no silver linings, no Galleries paved with gold…..my lesson in reality started early.

Unable to attend a Royal College M.A. in painting because Thatcher slashed funds I wandered into a gallery with some slides….

‘Don’t bother showing me the slides’ said the gallery owner..
“Dear boy we toddle along to the Royal College M.A. every year and pick the ones with prizes’ They choose for us the rest like you are forgotten….”

How true…

So well done Charles for proving that nothing ever changes..as for poor students…at least they don’t have to waste years paying off loans..they can be rejected from the get-go.

A Rake’s Progress indeed?

I shall be first in line for dismissal in The new Depression Gallery….

working

You had it Cumming

tate

Laura Cumming finally gets it right????????….

It is not only the artists and galleristas that at fault but also the reams of mediocrity served up by so called critics who happy to party on their benefactors terms until the party over…

It is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker. Whether we will ever progress to anything better – more subtle, refined, intelligent, inventive, perhaps even original – is anyone’s guess, but these hard times have got to be propitious.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jan/25/art

Some of us have been saying that for years dear..glad you finally seen the light..

Funny Ms Cumming didn’t mention any of this when covering some of the major players in last ten years but when the mood changes hey presto..to be fair she has shown more sense than most..not as much as Robert Hughes but then you talking different class…

How come it was so great in 2007 and so bad now Ms Cumming or are there no freebies any more, no dazzling parties, no paid tickets to the balls…?

Yes these are good times for art – lets kill all the fat and fatuous geese..and some critics too for good measure..Hughes would never have written tosh like this …..allegedly a report on the Venice Biennale of 2007 by one L.C….cake and eat it comes to mind ???

A golden crop, a vintage year: that is the main news from Venice, with a better ratio of hits to duds than any biennale in decades. This is no small matter since the Greatest Show on Earth is now so huge – 800 artists, every continent represented – that it overflows one island and spills through six others, not including the fanciful ‘occupation’ of the city’s floating necropolis by two artists demanding last rites for the Swedish monarchy.

But the other good news is that this year’s director, the well-respected Robert Storr, has organised such a strong international exhibition that it makes the tortuous miles of the Arsenale count as never before and puts the national pavilions in proper perspective. Storr’s thesis in ‘Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind’ – that conceptualism is the lingua franca of global art – may sound obvious but it’s allowed him to group together many giants of contemporary art. Where else are you going to find Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sigmar Polke superbly displayed alongside the great film-works of Yang Fudong, the droll paintings of Raoul de Keyser and the fabulously groovy portraits of Malik Sidibe, the African photographer who has won this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (the prize for best pavilion is not announced until October), not to mention dozens of upcoming stars? If only the whole thing could be flown afterwards to Tate Modern what a momentous innovation that would be …

MOMENTOUS..or CRAP? Your call…over to you L.C.

Moogee waits with baited dog breath….

 

X-Factor for art – the arts devalued

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Charles Saatchi, the Citizen Kane of the art world, is about to transform himself into the Andrew Lloyd Webber of art.

A new BBC2 series, site Saatchi’s Best of British, will see him preside over a contemporary art reality show, comparable with Lloyd Webber’s I’d Do Anything. Talented hopefuls (I’ve put that phrase in as blog-fodder …) will attend his “intensive art school, where they will be tutored by top contemporary artists.” The show will “attempt to discover the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.” Well, I don’t suppose anyone would expect it to discover the next Cy Twombly or Jasper Johns. Continue reading…

I cannot really add to this ..the final nail in ‘brit art’ seems like a good comment to make..note the ‘judges’..they not artists of any worth just spurious artists-cum-celebrity types I expect..Creed, Emin, whatever…step forward for some exposure as your sales plummet darlinks…

It time all of this sh*t was bagged up and tagged with its true nature..i.e. it celebrity compost nothing more…

The saddest part is that those who pretend to know what they on about i.e. Arts Council and various arts organisations are terribly impressed by all this ‘exposure’, they long ago gave up pretending they could invoke any form of standards so now we have no common principles to work to..so quality and talent are jettisoned for ‘fame’ and joke opportunism like this.

Nothing here wasn’t flagged up long ago by the Saatchi website….if you allow people with no values and no taste to dictate to you then you get the artworld you deserve.

I for one long ago stopped playing in the saatchi sandpit and looked to people with true value to provide a deifferent definition of ‘standards’. Sorley Maclean in poetry, Howard Hodgkin in painting, Ken Loach in film there plenty of real artists around just they haven’t been much favoured in Saatchi Land’s carnival of minor celebrities……people of substance….not telly addled clowns…

For those with short memories there was a hilarious version of art school where various ‘intellect-challenged’ Chelsea School of Art scenesters tried to teach various celebrities to make art…a forerunner of this barrel-scraper of an idea…..

In that show such ‘artists’ as shown below changed the art world forever 🙂

Looks like this will be much the same…..i.e. rubbish

At least John Humphrys said what he thought….doubt if anybody in Saatchi Show will…oh and BBC2 as well- What a shameful waste of taxpayers money sayeth the man on the Battersea omnibus…if you don’t succeed give up next time and save us all the effort….

Five celebrities – John Humphrys, Ulrika Jonsson, Keith Allen, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake – are filmed taking part in a two-week crash course in fine art with tutors from the Chelsea College of Art. The series culminates in an exhibition; Winkleman’s role is to interview them throughout the fortnight.

Yes the artworld is waiting with baited breath for the shows judges to be revealed……

Here my betting slips…

Hester Von Blumenthal the III

fresh from revitalising Little Chef the cheeky chappy from the fat duck shows that the thin line between art and fine cookery is non-existant. Hester reveals that his whole premise for being a chef was it a stepping stone to being the greatest artist since Hogarth….his crispy fried duck will be shown at next year’s Venice Biennale as an example of site-specific cuisine..

finally the greatest artist in the world…..yes Rolf Harris ( 2009 before his sojourn in prison mind) will down tools for a second. Long enough to bring a much needed sense of tradition and actual technical ability to bear on our assembled ‘conceptualists’ , ‘site-specificers’ and ‘film makers’. Rolf will show them the correct end of the brush to use in episode one before doing an in-depth anlysis of the horrors of sable hair-plucking in a co-production with the RSPCA. Chanel Plus and some Tokyo cable channel.

I also hear there a famous surprise guest….yes….after disinterring Picasso’s bones his corpse will be ‘re-animated’ by forensic scientists in a tie-in with Waking the Dead. It is hoped that Picasso’s involvement will bring a much-needed sense of dignity to the show.

It rumoured that the winner will get to produce a family portrait of the Saatchis ‘en plein air’ like Stubbs…..a treat indeed

keep watching punters it can only get better from here on in….

Recession TV and Bankrupt ideas .com copyright all rights reserved….

reasons

There's no diversity problem….

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‘There’s no diversity problem in the arts, check ‘ my friend said. ‘As long as you’re middle class.’

full article

shop ,2269478,00.html”>http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2269478,00.html
Mark Ravenhill
Monday March 31, 2008
The Guardian

For the past 20 years, we’ve censored ourselves from thinking about class. In part, this is understandable: class became more complex in the 1980s, as the manufacturing base of our economy was ripped apart. This left a great gulf in incomes and social expectations, and a society even more divided than before. The Thatcher government told us class envy was pointless – that we should all celebrate the wealth of the few. Blair absorbed the rhetoric, and the nation, weary of the class battles of the past, seemed to welcome this. By the 1990s, to talk of class, to point out the massive divisions in our society, became an embarrassing, almost forbidden, topic of conversation.

I can’t help feeling, as we board members prattle away trying to ensure that we address issues of race, gender, disability and sexuality – all important issues – that there’s a great big elephant threatening to sit on the table and squash our sandwiches. I’m sure we can gradually achieve greater diversity among the board, staff, artists and audiences. But I suspect that, though diverse, we’ll all be as plummy as each other. Recent evidence suggests – and is corroborated by friends of mine who teach – that it is white, working-class boys who are falling behind in school. What future for them as audience or artists? To involve the least wealthy in our society in the arts: there lies the biggest diversity challenge of them all.

Sharkforum Chicago relaunched…

The very good Sharkforum from Chicago has been relaunched and a Moogee cartoon now on there….

Alex Meszmer: So That is Art? Und das ist Kunst?

Belcher_cartoon_nutshell.jpg
Cartoon by Moogee the Art Dog, here Nottingham UKArt is booming and the auction houses are rubbing their hands with glee. After the short dry spell, unhealthy one is allowed to hype again. And the transition within the art academies from the European system to a modified Anglo Bachelor and Masters system will certainly contribute to the cause of manifesting and solidifying the new Academicism.
Read More…
http://www.sharkforum.org/
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