A while back, Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik discussed the "hot artist of the month"... John Currin and his success in the art world.
Apart from the silly and erroneous headline, this is actually a very readable article, and as posted by me earlier, I somewhat agree with Gopnik's puzzlement as to Currin's success in the art world.
However, I think that Blake gets most of his supporting arguments wrong, when he discusses why Currin has been so successful.
This is a perfect case where this eloquent art critic lets his personal beliefs and tunnel-visioned agenda get in the way of being remotely close to objectivity.
And that's somewhat OK, as critics don't have to be objective - but they should be clear about their beliefs rather than appear to speak from an objective pulpit.
Let's start by recalling that Gopnik has clearly shown that he doesn't like painting and above all he doesn't like realism. According to Gopnik's "Long Live Realism - Realism is Dead" lecture at the Corcoran, realism has been done, so why would "serious" artists still waste their time attempting to continue to do it?
Thus, it is understandable that Gopnik would be particularly repulsed by Currin's work - in fact I dislike it too. But he is wrong in attempting to use its success as an example of why contemporary realism is "dead" in his view.
Gopnik writes that "Within the art world, where Currin's career and reputation have been forged, he can get praise as an original not because he's doing anything new or special but simply because some vanguard curators and collectors don't get out enough."
I disagree that this is the main reason, but I certainly do agree that "vanguard curators" (whoever they are, as no star eclipses faster than a "vanguard" curator once his or her show has closed) don't get out enough.
As far as collectors, I do not believe that Mr. Gopnik (or most museum art critics) knows anything about art collectors, so these are just extra words.
Article comments
1 - Shark
a few quick things:
1) Your link to "Yuskavage" is a dead end.
2) Hard to think of a more marginalized, useless, and frustrated human than a 'critic' of contemporary art.
3) With a quick surf of TV, print, film, and popular culture, it's pretty obvious that we get the art we deserve. Currin, et al are merely oil painted versions of that grotesque latest craze, Reality TV.
4) To mourn the death of "Originality" in a post-modern world where Everything Has Been Done is the ultimate in naive, nostalgic futility -- which I find amusingly ironic coming from one of the 'elite' art in a critique of "elites of the contemporary art.'"
heh.
2 - Lenny
Hi Shark,
1. Link fixed
2. Concur!
Lenny
3 - David Lucht
Excellent article and it's encouraging to find clear-eyed observations of the current art scene. A particular gripe of mine is one you also touched on: the inability to see that the transgressions of formulaic painting are not limited to the realists. We are witnessing a mad infatuation with the current practitioners of abstract styles that are really more dated than realism. More so because these styles made pretension to the 'avant' and as such create an even more egregious violation in their endless iterations. They only feign legitimacy with their gloss of the 'modern'. In truth they are a rehash worse than the 'shopping mall realists'.
The real culprit here is academicism; that is, the desire to recreate the effect of significant works of art, regardless of whether the piece is realist or abstract. The goal should be a truly personal vision, realized in a mature style that elevates and validates that vision. Anything else can only be positively characterized as a school exercise.
And don't get me started on the New York Art Scene. It continues to tread circles around it's own self-absorbed zeitgeist of ugliness, meaninglessness and kitsch. Whoa to thee if your sense of art confronts them with a piece containing even a suggestion of beauty, meaning or sincerity.