Sunday, March 21, 2021

Ken Taylor at Simchowitz

(link)

What the artworld attempts to disavow always comes back to haunt it. (Andrea Fraser wrote about this well.) Disavowal "rejects a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept" - i.e. the artworld unable to accept some uncomfortable truth that doesn't agree with the self-image it needs to project. So for instance, Simchowitz is the artworld villain of the 2010s -  I can't even remember what the villainry was - maybe saying the quiet part loud - his name basically synonymous with "evil dealer."  But as new villains emerge evolving greater forms of evil, Simco seems tame, his methods all but accepted, and the artworld acclimates to the uncomfortable fact about itself. That people use it to make money. The lesson here being the ultimate adjudicators of [vitality] in art are not justice. It is the merely the ability to self-replicate - to procreate, survive, spam yourself into consciousness with press, sales, money. Power in the artworld is simply the ability to leverage ones assets into more.. well assets,  which eventually becomes visibility. Until it's non-ignorable. Until they all absorb the evil, still pretend something else. 

Same w/ the Cucchi/Clemente thing here - despite all the last 20-30 years warding against neo-expressionism, guess who is back.