Claire Fontaine at Air de Paris

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The art equivalent of a Live Laugh Love poster. When you point this out they say yes that's the point. But it's a shitty point. Do collectors know they're buying fake art? Or does it not matter anymore. Shitty art self-naturalizes on the walls long enough. The artist is on strike, that's why the art is bad, it would be neoliberal to care. 

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu

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People hate Fontaine. It's easy to see why, and a particularly searing example writ by Chris Wiley for Frieze (and which contains the line, "I also consider the mealy-mouthed, jargon-besotted forms of this political position’s promulgation – utilized by the editors of Tiqqun, Fontaine and others – an impediment to reasoned debates surrounding political change, as well as a crime against language"- a single sentence in an unending screed against the work) is the front and first review of one of Fontaine's gallery's press packet on the artists.  Its use as introduction is exemplar of the artist's grandstanding the impotent and hollow feeling of political ineffectuality as big shiny horrors, the work performing double negation of art/politics that other Ready-made-artist Reena Spaulings was at the same time performing with equally thick hams skated on conceptual packages, but whereas Spaulings inflated the low quality hamminess of its art Fontaine used language of the mignon sort to describe its cleverness in being sable to derive new formulations of evacuation and ineffectuality that pretty much every artist had up unto that point been, thinking they were smarter.


See too: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Sturtevant at Air de Paris, Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu

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Again a blast from the 2000s past, the ever posturing Fontaine today looking winded, having lost of their fighting spirit, instead merely combating the weight of the world with global travel's candy, and presenting an exhibition exchanging their pre-packaged imposter anarchics and poseur declaratives for an ennui, a gentle boredom, looking out of planes and recursive self-questions, nostalgic for a time when this was still fun, or critically acceptable. The melancholia of the palinode is having watched someone look at themselves in a mirror and possibly self-reflect in their vampirism, a good vampire never does.