[-empyre-] For whom is art "made"?

[sdv at krokodile.co.uk]

Helen/Brad/All

I suppose the problem with your understanding of artist and audience is 
that I cannot see exactly why should I regard your understanding of your 
proposed audience, as being any better than a professionally curated 
art-institution such as Tate-Modern or Whitechapel. Where you propose a 
difference between new media workers as creators and oppose this to one 
that art-institutions support,  is this difference real ? Perhaps only 
an artist might imagine that the former is more democratic and public 
than the latter.

s

Helen Thorington wrote:
> Wow, Brad.  Yes, too much art is made for art-institutions, and it
> saddens me to see it as a direction some of the artists we have dealt 
> with over the years are
> taking. But if you check out the networked_performance blog -- an 
> archive of networked
> projects since 2004, you'll see that thousands of creative people are 
> in fact creating
> work for themselves and for others like themselves -- not for 
> art-institutions. A lot of it is
> "open" work.  Many of the people doing this do not identify as 
> artists,  So question: can
> academics open to the change that has brought thousands into the new 
> media field as creators
> of open, participatory work. Or will they stick with an older idea of 
> artist -- the one the art institutions
> support?
>
> BTW, many of the projects I'm thinking about make use of  familiar 
> objects and things
> from everyday life. They thus "offer a return to the connection of art 
> and life.." [Landy],
> which for many is most welcome.
>
> Helen
>
>
>
> On May 6, 2008, at 2:42 PM, { brad brace } wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> That's the problem Megan... AArt is determinately-made for
>> art-institutions and the plethora of art-minyons and
>> acolytes who profit-from-it and
>> say-everything's-ok-as-long-as-they-get-paid... Basically,
>> if it's called Art it's really not. I'm sorry but you have
>> no viable future... maybe that's called 'AArt-History.'
>>
>>
>> /:b
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 6 May 2008, Megan Debin wrote:
>>
>>> First of all, thanks to Jennifer and to all for introducing me to an
>>> interesting community of discussion.  I would like to introduce a 
>>> new topic
>>> about audience and the public in general.
>>>
>>> For a long while, I have, for reasons unbeknownst to me, been 
>>> resistant to
>>> Jennifer's urges to check out errorista's work.  I hadn't quite 
>>> figured out
>>> why I felt this resistance until today.  *Light bulb!** * I am 
>>> afraid of not
>>> understanding.  I have an intense fear of being wrong – a truly
>>> anti-errorista sentiment – that what these artists do will be beyond my
>>> mental grasp.  As I have learned from errorista, there is no wrong
>>> answer.  There
>>> is right in the mistake.  All this self-doubt... and I'm in academia!
>>>
>>> So, this got me to thinking about an often-forgotten segment of our
>>> population: the general public.  The everyday person, when asked 
>>> about their
>>> thoughts on art, usually thinks things such as, "I don't understand 
>>> anything
>>> about art," or "Maybe if someone explained it to me, I might get 
>>> it.  But
>>> probably not."  How have we lost touch with the audience?
>>>
>>> My questions to the empyre community are these: How does current art
>>> production relate to the general public, to the Joe Shmoe on the 
>>> street?  How
>>> is the public *really *involved?   Shall we sit in our ivory towers 
>>> and wax
>>> philosophical, using complicated terminology that most of the 
>>> general public
>>> does not understand?  That *is* our job, right?  How can artists and 
>>> critics
>>> reclaim a true relationship with the people?  Why do we have these
>>> discussions?  How does it relate to the larger population? And a 
>>> critical
>>> one: For whom is art made?
>>>
>>> P.S. By the way, I checked out errorista.  It's witty, ingenious, 
>>> all right
>>> and wrong all at once. I love it.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Megan Lorraine Debin
>>> M.A. Latin American Studies, UCLA
>>> meganldebin at gmail.com
>>>
>>> "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to 
>>> shape
>>> it" -Vladimir Mayakovski
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