Month: July 2006

Museum, Inc

Museum, Inc. describes from the inside the new arts conglomerates, whose roots are deeply imbedded in corporate culture. A critical analysis based on the author's nine years at the Guggenheim Museum, this pamphlet shows that the “Global Museum” is not the radical break with the past it claims to be but a logical outcome in the evolution of cultural institutions rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the colonial expansion of the liberal nation-state, and the rhetoric of freedom and democracy.

Insightful, incisive, written from the inside and very, very funny. Highly recommended as an institutional critique of contemporary.

Out to Dinner with Rolf – Danica Phelps 2002.

I like Danica Phelps’s work. There’s a number of reasons why.

She is combining intimate drawings of her life with simple data visualisation of intimate financial details of her life. The former was taboo under the universalising abstraction of modernism, the latter is taboo under the money laundering marketeering of contemporary.

She prices her drawings based on how good she thinks they are. The introduction of quality, taste, or difference into consideration of work is disruptive for contemporary.

She copies her drawings before selling them. You know the generation of the work you are buying, and your purchase of it becomes part of the financial record abstraction in the work. This reduces the scarcity of the work and introduces the sale and reproduction of it into the work itself.

And she had a show where she bought work from other artists, displaying and selling it alongside (as part of?) her work. This makes curation, reference and dialogue, and again taste all part of the work. Given the premium placed on reputation and the divisiveness of competing for opportunities it is also un-markety sociability and a Gift to other artists.

This is all a different universe from much contemporary art, one that acknowledges a world outside the gallery door and how that world corrupts (or at least intrudes on) the aesthetic plane. The work looks good too, all contour drawing and coloured stripes.

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts features | Thoroughly modern ManetIf you told me it was a contemporary work not only would I believe you, I’d be excited to see an image that’s so true to our time.Nineteenth-century art has such an invincible hold on us because we are still in confused rebellion against a social order that seems more permanent now than it did in the age of Manet and Marx. The real ghosts in Manet’s Paris are ourselves.