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Saturday, September 26, 2015

Jan Fabre at M HKA

Jan Fabre at M HKA
(link)

If no longer a style, your common Artworld artist is intended to develop something distinguishing their career from others that look just like it, a sort of personal subjective measure called "sensibility," whereas Fabre has none. Fabre will do anything. If there is a sensibility it is something closer to Hollywood rendition of zaniness, the "working man" using all the tricks in the books to close in on some idea of what ostensibly wacky artists do opposed to the tasteful remove come to prominence from the artworld for artists and typified by the CAD roster international style. But, Fabre's over-plethora of identifiers, its wackiness, rather than achieving some profoundly great outsider status, paradoxically ends up looking like the art that underpins its different means, modes as mannequins dressed up differently to look different but the same. Its foreboding omen to all the young artists today engaging in this sort of cultural performativity, iconized by the last New Museum Triennial, in which artists seemingly engaged in some escape from art to culture, possibly aren't really at all.