Essays

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[6] It's a bit more complicated, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.

[7] I phrased this in terms of the taste of apples because if people can see the apples, they can be fooled. When I was a kid most apples were a variety called Red Delicious that had been bred to look appealing in stores, but which didn't taste very good.

[8] To be fair, curators are in a difficult position. If they're dealing with recent art, they have to include things in shows that they think are bad. That's because the test for what gets included in shows is basically the market price, and for recent art that is largely determined by successful businessmen and their wives. So it's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language.

[9] What happens in practice is that everyone gets really good at talking about art. As the art itself gets more random, the effort that would have gone into the work goes instead into the intellectual sounding theory behind it. "My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an urban context," etc. Different people win at that game.

[10] There were several other reasons, including that Florence was then the richest and most sophisticated city in the world, and that they lived in a time before photography had (a) killed portraiture as a source of income and (b) made brand the dominant factor in the sale of art.

Incidentally, I'm not saying that good art = fifteenth century European art. I'm not saying we should make what they made, but that we should work like they worked. There are fields now in which many people work with the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century artists did, but art is not one of them.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to use the image at the top.


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