StephenHero, you would probably like Charlie Finch's column on artnet magazine. I haven't read it in awhile, but he is one of the curmudgeonier skeptics in art criticism.
Quote:
I thought of this during the ridiculous kerfuffle -- timed perfectly by lazy minds for lazy August -- newly aborning from the Art Newspaper to the Winkleman blog to Artinfo about "the failure of the gallery model," based on some moronic study citing the rise of the art fairs as a harbinger of doom for our beloved way of gallery life (someone didn't bother to tell the dozens of galleries in last week's Chelsea Art Walk that they are goners, but I digress).
These deep thinkers, wool gatherers and statisticians of white cubes going dark are all proceeding from a mistaken hypothesis: the point of galleries is not to sell art, it is to show art. Forty years mooning around the New York art world have at least shown me that galleries emerge and continue for a variety of economic reasons, but always for one sociological one -- that of exhibition.
These deep thinkers, wool gatherers and statisticians of white cubes going dark are all proceeding from a mistaken hypothesis: the point of galleries is not to sell art, it is to show art. Forty years mooning around the New York art world have at least shown me that galleries emerge and continue for a variety of economic reasons, but always for one sociological one -- that of exhibition.
Not sure who painted this. In my mind it's a cross between Colin Campbell Cooper and the Ashcan School.
