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Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.
Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.
