I've just spent two days at art fairs in New York, and tomorrow I'm going to the Armory Show—59 "modern" dealers (20th Century), and 146 "contemporary" dealers. Ken Johnson in today's New York Times notes that the typical artist in the contemporary section—in contrast to the wide variety in the modern section—is "a canny juggler of ready-made signifiers. Everywhere you look, you see artists mixing and matching generic styles, images and devices in the forms of photographs, paintings, high-tech simulations and myriad nontraditional materials, sometimes using all these at once." (p. C31) He later mentions the "strange feeling of no context that prevails in contemporary art." This engenders a similarity of style between the art from cultures as diverse as China and the U.S. The Internet is ubiquitous and everything is pretty much available to everyone. Does this mean national styles are becoming as extinct as so many animal species driven out of their habitats by deforestation and agriculture?
In my own wanderings so far today and yesterday, I see lots of cleverness, lots of manipulation of cultural tropes, but very little of the world outside the U.S. and European cultural merry-go-round (the exceptions were by African artists). You see a lot more of the outside world at photography art fairs, and one of the reasons I'm going on this trip is to bring some more of this outside world home. It's astonishing how global-parochial we have become, imagining that our Internet connections and mobile devices actually bring us the diversity of the real world to our screens large and small. Of course, popular culture (including sports) can and does entire fill the minds of most Americans. Brief cultural forays outside it on a PBS station or serious play or documentary bow to the wide world outside, but most of us still live culturally within a cocoon inside a box inside a room. I'm traveling to get outside this room, and to bring back as much direct testimony and as many truthful and powerful images as I can, which is, of course, the royal province of Photography.
Please remember to visit my Indiegogo site, http://igg.me/at/marvels2014/x/6154797
In my own wanderings so far today and yesterday, I see lots of cleverness, lots of manipulation of cultural tropes, but very little of the world outside the U.S. and European cultural merry-go-round (the exceptions were by African artists). You see a lot more of the outside world at photography art fairs, and one of the reasons I'm going on this trip is to bring some more of this outside world home. It's astonishing how global-parochial we have become, imagining that our Internet connections and mobile devices actually bring us the diversity of the real world to our screens large and small. Of course, popular culture (including sports) can and does entire fill the minds of most Americans. Brief cultural forays outside it on a PBS station or serious play or documentary bow to the wide world outside, but most of us still live culturally within a cocoon inside a box inside a room. I'm traveling to get outside this room, and to bring back as much direct testimony and as many truthful and powerful images as I can, which is, of course, the royal province of Photography.
Please remember to visit my Indiegogo site, http://igg.me/at/marvels2014/x/6154797
Wonderful and pertinant reasons for what you are doing Joel. Have a fantastic time and good fortune be with you both.
ReplyDeleteWendy