Andrea Bowers at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

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Taking a public phrase, created and upheld by the multitudes who echo it, and giving the
the privatizing glass of artistic glitter reeks of bad faith. This was the tone deaf fiasco of Bower's public black eye: taking something that was given to a public and collecting it as her work. Art, despite all its PR and back patting as a common good, is a privatized endeavor.  Museums are behind paywalls, is a pony show of the elite. Art is not medicine, it is only sold as such. The monuments of art will never be as public as an actual class consciousness, as the public itself, which the phrase already was.


See too: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

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Surely the protest sign is a means of a populace's ability to steal back the language of advertising for its own self generally subaltern to the messages that those in power have the ability to broadcast at volumes stuporous. No one likes advertising, the brusqueness of messages to amplify through clipping of thought, but the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with turn a monied knob. The protest sign requires streets and people to amplify. When it already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign.


 Peter Fend at Embajada