What's the big deal?

Artist’s tend to talk preciously about exhibiting their work: don’t compromise about what you show or how you want it shown, because you know best and what you have to say is very meaningful. But, the fact of the matter is, when you show – especially in a group situation or at a screening – it ain’t ever going to be perfect. Life just doesn’t work that way. So, relax people. Until your solo show that is.

On another note, what’s so great about Elizabeth Payton? Calvin Tomkins’s article portraying her in this week’s New Yorker opens,

No artist in recent memory has sailed into the mainstream with work that seemed so far out of it […] Since [a show at the Chelsea Hotel] her vividly painted, lushly romantic images of rock stars, film idols and eventually fellow-artists and friends have brought her the kind of fervid admiration that non-admirers find inexplicable and annoying.

That would be me. I just don’t get it. All I see is hip people and what I consider to be bad painting. And, yes, it is annoying. I will go to the New Museum’s retrospective, though. To be continued.