...where "Whole" Foods just happens to be out of lentils (all lentils, red, green and brown) and where, when I was trying on super high-tech athletic shoes, one of the salesman's selling points was that he'd sold the very same shoes not to some major sports figure, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
I'm here with Erica and Terry, who's come over from England, to work on the editing of our film about Olafur and Einar's collaboration, and there's a part where Olafur talks about the lack of experimentation in our culture and Einar says that the human race needs dynamics, that anything that isn't dynamic is going turn into an institution and kill itself.
Now those are pretty general statements, but then I walk out onto M Street in Georgetown, which used to be lovely and historic but is now like a linear mall of chain shops--Tommy Hilfiger, Banana Republic,The Body Shop, Benetton, Steve Madden, a mini H & M, etc.--that could be anywhere. There are no local styles; all across the country people are wearing various configurations of clothing drawn from the same pool, at least until they get older and simply narrow it down to Donna Karan and Eileen Fisher. Experimentation? Hardly. And then I think that the art world is the same, that the exhibitions at nearly every museum of contemporary art in the world are configurations of art drawn from a pool of the same 50-100 artists. It's so BORING! But more on that when I get back.
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3 comments:
Yep. Writing my Whitney rant caused me to face the fact that I can no longer pretend to myself on any level that contemporary art institutions represent much that is meaningful to me as an artist. Not only do they fail to inspire me, but their organizational basis is designed to keep artists like me disempowered, as an integral matter of institutional survival.
As I realize this, however, I can also see that institutional power is declining and diffusing; who knows what it will look like to be a 'successful artist' in 20 years? Perhaps something we can't even imagine.
I'm still grappling with the thought of Pelosi shopping for trainers in DC.
ditto on art institutions, but what your post really made me think of was Lee Siegel's book "Against the machine, being human in the age of the electronic mob" and how even the creative freedom of the internet is not truly being realized. I wonder what it is that makes most people want to be everyone else? When I first moved to the US I lived in OK City and sold shoes, it was amazing, if you could sell a cheerleader or other trend setter a pair of shoes, that line would sell out in a few days, it was so weird to me, why did all these girls want a look that didn't suit them? I still don't get it, I imagine I never will! But thanks for a thought provoking post.
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