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Like Silly Putty spread across the City, the katamari of art picks up its displays, content. Gathers the city, reroutes it back into the Museum as a cultural enrichment program.An appreciation for the sign painter, whose vernacular does what Painting cannot: communicate without pretense, anxiety. The sign painter functions, the artist does not. "They start to scratch at what we crave: not looking like art. Because art is mannered, stillborn, cliche." The long history of artists wanting to be anything but.They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.
Sign painters: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Lauren Halsey at David Kordansky Gallery
