Lucy Skaer at KW

(link)

They're just such nice things. Commodity's reproducibility, the quantity, the mass suggests its virtuality, the perfect other they all infer as individuals plucked from it, the ether of abstraction, the idea of the product. Obviously this is a lie, the commodity isn't its conception but rather the defecation of it, the bodily machined sweat object. Commodities infer virtuality. But are far more handmade than we generally think, factory sweat is wiped from every clean aluminum body. Things melt and are cast aside.  The particular begins to vanish from above, so we bejewel some, award them medals, give them titles, separate them from populations, learned like children from gameboards, how we deal with the world today.


See too: Katharina Fritsch at Walker Art Center, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

“duh? Art & Stupidity” at Focal Point

(link)

Stupid feels like an imprecise word when the history of art since Manet could be seen as evidence toward a theory of stupidity in art. Wasn't that luncheon an example of acting stupidly in the face of the era's high ideals. Duchamp's Fountain was stupid. Pollock claimed to be as stupid as nature. Minimalism was defacto stupid. Nauman, stupid. Appropriation, stupidity's bedrock. And if we define stupidity as the lack of intelligence, and intelligence is seen as a codified measurement of what a society accredits as valuable, then artists are almost by defintion a displacement of that system.