Graw lines up her arguments up in accessibly short bursts of two or three pages, building tension by showing successively how the idea of independence or “autonomy” in all the various part of the visual arts has been lost to market determinants. A few examples: - a critical establishment now almost completely in tow to commercial dealers who commission writers to “fill in” the historical, theoretical context for the artists they choose to represent; - the end of exclusive contracts between artists and dealers by which the dealer could serve as “agent” running interference between the public, the market and the artist, affording the artist some degree of refuge, privacy or independence; - a museum community invaded by private collectors calling the shots, threatening to build their own museums or actually building them; - individual artists succumbing to pressure to create more and more “spectacular” work to get attention; - glamourization in the popular press of the social, “celebrity” aspects of the art world: the people attending and the gossip around art fairs, openings and auctions where price records are repeatedly broken; - appropriation of “the artist” as a model of the ideal worker in the new entrepreneurial, safety-net-less, capitalism;
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 05:43:56 +0000
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