04.01.06 |
Happy April Fool's Day |
Miami |
Left: Your author tries to make sense of it all. Right: Just some guy looking at art, sober.
ArtForum Diary, we need to talk. When you came out in late 2004, I said that the art world described therein was "a giant cash register lubricated with liquor and horseshit." Tyler Green mused that you were all strung out on celebrity worship because of Art Basel/Miami Beach and that you would come around to serious art criticism eventually. He was rooting for you. I wanted to root for you too. Finally, an art glossy had made a high-production foray into blogging. Imagine what you could have done. You could have reviewed more shows than anyone. Your writers tend to fill reviews with jargon and awkward coinages, but they would have helped artists anyway. You could have covered shows all over the nation. All over the world, if you wanted to.
Now, look at you. Behind your back, people are calling you GawkerForum. Not only did you not come around, you followed the same formula since the beginning: a frantic shopping list of who got seen, their little bons mots, and what mind-numbing beverage was in the reporter's hand as he took it all in, feigning a sophisticated tone. I wanted to celebrate April Fool's Day with a parody of ArtForum Diary. I couldn't figure out how to write one. I can't outdo this: "After the talk, I managed an audience with Hans Ulrich-Obrist, who enthused in his inimitable way that Ellsworth Kelly was 'an urgent show - it is extraordinary that he is making this work now.'" Or, "Taking a beer break with the exuberant Mai Abu ElDahab for a quick lowdown on the manifold trials of curating Manifesta 6, I then joined the mob queuing for Jens Hoffmann's 'Wrong,' a bijou group show at Klosterfelde." Parody requires exaggeration for the sake of humor. These sentences leave no room for that to occur.
Left: An artist at work. That is the center of the art world, not all the glitzy nonsense. Right: The beautiful people, the beautiful people. It's all relative to the size of your steeple.
Look, I won't tell you what to do. You do your nutty thing, I'll write about art. I just want to tell you that you ought to pause, between shots of Jager or whatever, and consider that ArtForum Diary has come to represent a big part of what's wrong with the art world: the wholesale collapse of connoiseurship into idiotic fandom.
But I also want to thank you. Thank you for leaving the field open so that I can come up there and write about art with the intensity and thoroughness it deserves, without any competition from you. This is a wonderful opportunity for me and for the writers represented in the sidebar over on the right, an incomplete list of luminaries of an expanding genre. You don't understand the possibilities of publishing on the web, and you're going to get run over. In some respects, you're already under the tires. Maybe you know this, and have therefore thrown in your lot with fabulosity instead of rigor. Who knows. All I can say is that while the parties must be a lot of fun, you're missing out on the best part of art - the intensely private experience of looking at something beautiful and feeling a deep part of you shift. That can't happen in the midst of all that drunken yammering. Good luck to you anyway.