
Ten years I learned this year about exhibition organizing.
Molly Stevens
Basically, it's that moment when you've been working really hard on something and you realize it's just not going to pan out, so even though everything in you says to just keep it, you've got to just get rid of it, i.e., kill your baby. I just found comfort in the idea that there was something universal trying to hang on to something that needed to be let go of.Below, please view a drawing on a sheet of $48 paper that just could not be saved. RIP, little one.
[There is] a process to learning when to kill the baby. For [X], I think his writers' group and [Y] in particular helped him learn this by telling him when something really wasn't working and pressing him to cut it out, and eventually he got better at realizing when he was trying to hold onto a baby he needed to kill. For me, I think I learned it through being edited and then self-editing -- there'll be a concept or an argument or a phrase that I think is brilliant, but it just doesn't fit in with the whole, or it just doesn't get me where I need to go. So, I'm getting more efficient at identifying when that's happening. But, it's hard. Especially when it's something I've invested a lot of time or energy in. It's definitely a process.
It’s all nicely diverting – but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.Holland Cotter makes MoMa look just as silly. It made Gabriel Orozco’s work look concrete, planned and loud (when it just ain’t). And Cotter's depicts the deference paid to art-starness as frankly smarmy:
During the installation of his exhibition in the kind of white-walled MoMA gallery that that he once spurned, Mr. Orozco, tousle haired and rumpled, received a visit from the museum’s immaculately groomed director, Glenn D. Lowry, whose red silk tie matched his pocket square. “Hola!” Mr. Lowry said, sweeping into the nearly empty gallery, where just a few pieces had been uncrated. “Exciting, exciting.”The irreverence is refreshing. It is. Would I reject any approach by either of museum? Of course not.
Pleasure is the only trusty teacher and guarantor of seriousness in art. Why is that so easy to forget?If by pleasure, he means interest, passion, curiosity, I’d have to agree – even in light of Monday’s post.
The Botticelli show at the Städel Museum is the first big survey devoted to him in the German-speaking world. The galleries are annoyingly jammed. It’s like rush hour all day in there.
Am I the only idiot around who still doesn’t quite get his popularity? [...]
You might say Botticelli represents a bygone ideal of high art, with its literary roots in rhetoric and poetry, which is to say only that what attracts so many people to him today surely has to do with something else. Is it all that decorative panache and those pretty, melancholy young women? I suspect, as with van Gogh and Rembrandt, it also has to do with the way he devised a signature style that acts like an advertisement for himself. [...]
The myth of the pining, profligate lover, craving religious consolation in extremis and dying forgotten only to be rediscovered many centuries later as an artistic genius, accounts for his popularity too. His suffering is like van Gogh’s ear, the perfect fictive yeast for celebrityhood.
The truth is something else.
It’s to do with the vagaries of taste.