Amy Goodwin

 

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whoworeitbetter

Who Wore It Better is an ongoing visual research project presenting associations and common practices in contemporary art. This platform was created to promote formal and conceptual dialogue over originality

 

 

 

 

Ever since Duchamp’s urinal hit the scene in 1917, and possibly for a dozen or more decades before that, what has set artwork off from other things in the world is not what it looks like or what it references or anything it does, but the fact that we’ve been invited to contemplate it as art. 

-Blake Gopnik TDB

 

 

 

At the moment in art culture, any proposal to do with “form” is considered bad. As something transcendent, it is automatically linked with considerations of ideology and hegemony, and is seen as an illusion that allows the viewer to remain blind to social realities. Hot contemporary art is interested in plugging in directly to those, and in this kind of art, form can be anything so long as it is explicable in terms of that connection.

We, on the other hand, believe that plugging-in to social realities is often an illusion. We think institutional critique, for example, has become formulaic. We address this problem in the textual component of our show in Fort Worth. Our paintings don’t avoid difficult issues but neither do they spell them out as directly readable propaganda. We look at the material and the tangible. Things have to work: The colour has to be objective, it has to be meaningful on colour terms—the same with shape, line, tone—all the elements we use. We attack mystification ruthlessly. If there are comfortable illusions, we see our work as a blow against them. …

…I think material meaning has become the overlooked aspect of visual culture. The idea behind current art thought to be critical is that power works to blind people to what is superfluous to its operation, and critical art lifts those veils. I can’t help noticing that in the art world—for perfectly understandable and even laudable reasons, like fighting hierarchical patriarchal value judgments, or prioritizing meaning over means so that anyone can have a go—a close observation of the way materials work, something that was once inextricable from all forms of visual expression, is itself marginalized.…

…Artists have put down many of their visual tools; I want our work to offer a tangible demonstration of what it might mean to have skill back. A lot of contemporary art is a like a geography lesson from a liberal-minded teacher with a bent for social studies. That’s fine, but it seems to me that de-skilling is what happens to a trade before the axe falls, because the trade has been complicit with its own demise.

- Emma Biggs + Matthew Collings

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Abstraction: Right Now

 

Johnathan Lasker

 

Valerie Jaudon

 

Wade Guyton

 

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Trees

 

Myou Ho Lee

 

 

Tzu-chi Yeh

 

 

Amy Talluto

 

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Does Anyone Here Speak Art and Tech? NYTimes

 

 

Andy Warhol

Tunafish Disaster 

While auction houses are forbidden from explicitly sharing certain details prior to the sale of a lot, such as the reserve price, a good deal of information gets signaled to a favored collector—particularly if interests align. This was certainly the case for Gagosian and Mugrabi, who were told by Sotheby’s not to worry about the most valuable of Froehlich’s three Warhols, Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown (Tunafish Disaster), a 1963 painting—of two suburban housewives whose deaths from food poisoning had briefly been the subject of tabloid notoriety—with an estimate of £3.5 million to £4.5 million. Sotheby’s already had interest in it, Mugrabi told Gagosian: “The Tunafish Disaster is pretty covered. That’s going to sell.”

- The Trials of Art Superdealer Larry Gagosian, Eric Konigsberg

 

 

"But for me, the single most limiting problem in contemporary criticism is the meaningless academic language which leaves everything ambiguous and prevents all but a few from making it past the first paragraph. So when many of the responses to Sandler’s piece start off with “the notion of dualism,” or 20th century French philosophy, or The History of Criticism, it’s not exactly a mystery that this conversation isn’t getting anywhere." - Whitney Kimball, Art Fag City

 

 

 

 

 

"But the real reason for critical timidity is that everyone is scared of the young, and art has allied itself with youth. Who wants to be seen as an oldie who just doesn't get what the kids are down with?" -Jonathan Jones in the Guardian

 

“Artists will emerge as the new business leaders” 

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A yearlong celebration of remarkable women who have changed

how we see the world. http://thereconstructionists.org/

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Sunday Dialogue: What Is That Art Worth?

NYTimes

 

 

Pop goes the art bubble? here

 

 

 

Top 10 reasons NOT to write about the

art market  - by Sarah Thorton here

 

David Shrigley

High Line

 

 

 

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Henrik Vibskov — How to Fashion Art from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Pussy Riot

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Actual poster issued by Senator Joe Mccarthy in 1950s, at height of the red scare. 

 

Agnes Martin

 

 

 

ZOMBIE NOUNS here

 

Jennifer Dalton, "How Do Artists Live?"  

artinfo

 

Post-war artists at auction

The price of being female

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I'm sick of pretending: I don't  "get " art.  here

 

 

Bertien van Manen

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ARThood SELECTS

curated competition  link

 

 

 On October 29, 1985, a little over a year before his death, Andy Warhol meditates:

I broke something and realized I should break something once a week to remind me how fragile life is. It was a good plastic ring from the twenties.

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Melbourne Hotel Challenges Visitors To Steal A Banksy  link