‘Poor Artists’ Archives
Banksy’s cleaning up
Modern art is a disgrace. Never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little. - Banksy With the movie Exit through the Gift Shop, UK artist Banksy and co-conspirator Shep Fairey set out to clean up modern art while cleaning up in the process. The movie proposes to be about what it's not, the story of a guy, [...]
Enough with the arts already
Perhaps it is time for art communities to demonstrate the creativity and social conscience we so righteously claim for ourselves by critically examining whether we are helping or hindering economic recovery. We have become very adept at justifying ourselves and arguing for ever more funding. But if these justifications and arguments seem never to [...]
Calling all shamans
Evidently no one's losing their sense of wry humour over at the Canada Council for the Arts. The image on the cover of their just-released 2010 grant deadline calendar is a work by Adrian Stimson called Shaman Extermination Sunrise 2, photographed by Happy Grove.
How to Run an Efficient and Successful Studio with Adad Hannah
Notes from FREE SCHOOL at SAW Gallery, Ottawa Saturday, March 13, 2PM - 5PM / Le samedi 13 mars de 14 h à 17 h (see whole programme below) It's nice to think that successful artists are successful because they do certain practical things that anyone can do. It takes some of the mystique out of the art world and makes it all seem more [...]
Book Publishers Responsible for Recession
It's amazing what some people will say to get a little attention. Lawrence Osborne's article, with its designed-to-provoke title Why Publishers Fail, on Forbes.com doesn't exactly blame publishers for the whole of the recession. What he does suggest is that publishing is a paradigmatic industry, so arcanely enigmatic that no one, not even the [...]
Lions 3 Christians 0
Winter Olympic events like luge and downhill have become so absurdly dangerous you might as well take a bunch of elite athletes and shoot them out of cannons! This guy might weigh a bit more, that one have a sleeker body suit. One might open up too early for landing or another put an arm out for balance, and those factors [...]
Visual Arts Research – Three Books
(This post was written last April and has been sitting in the Drafts folder - time to let it go:)Craig Leonard, Clive Robertson and Michael Maranda are all artists. In their practices, they share a love of print, text, publication. And they all have produced research that they did on their own steam as it were, more or less self-directed, yet with [...]
Séraphine, Poor Mad Artist
The myths that underlie what Hans Abbing calls "the exceptional economy of the arts" are periodically reinforced by reality and when they are it is not unlikely that those rule-proving exceptions will be noticed, even celebrated, as if to say to unbelievers, "See, I told you so."Thus we have such ideas as: that art is situated so dangerously close [...]
All That and Yet We Are Somehow Not Entirely Convinced…
...by this rather fierce argument in support of the arts.
The $29 book about the $12 million stuffed shark
Had author Don Thompson started his book, The $12 million stuffed shark: the curious economics of contemporary art, where it ends, with the chapter on Contemporary Art as an Investment, few readers would have made it past chapter one. So sobering is the economist's view of the dismal financial returns to be had from playing the art market, that [...]
