Slide Show - Images (mostly) from The Illustrated History of Painting

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Friday, October 24, 2014

La bohème





The formerly freebooting art-world - a place which once annealed young imaginations, has damped down, in my lifetime, to become a moist camarilla of pseudo-savvy courtiers. 

Artists and art-world hangers-on, in seemingly permanent hypnotic thrall: to exclusivity, with being on the inside, with having access to the ‘cool’ group. Folks with financial means – both artists and non-artists supplanting folks constructing low-rent, yet intellectually commodious, ends. Rentiers, all but replacing art's tenant class - as arts’ prime movers. Movers, but hardly shakers.



The former - because-fuck-you-that’s-why - world of plastic arts displays, of late, cringe-worthy degrees of in-your-place obeisance. Acquiesces to almost wholesale domestication. Partisan language has been displaced by vapid, vested-interest, promotional, syntax - posing as criticality. Creative superficiality, in a state of perpetual spate. A tepid torrent running miles wide and inches deep.



The visual arts threatens to become little more than a self-regarding social irrelevancy - a vestigial appendage to more lively popular arts. An über-elite, cultural non-place wherein posturing partisans glibly dispense with critical discourse and comparative evaluation whilst deriding (sotto voce, of course) court pretenders who might attempt otherwise.