It had to happen. The (new) Art Baloney Blog describes itself as a collection of the “most egregious and pretentious art speak or outright bullshit we manage to unearth.” (Via C-Monster)
Writing deserving such notice certainly exists. Reading it is like shoveling smoke. But too often readers lose patience with a complicated text, assuming if they don’t understand it right away, it’s bullshit.
Art lives in its complexities. Critics digging into them can lose themselves in the effort, but isn’t that effort admirable? It’s easy to be jaunty. No, that’s hard too. To be jaunty with brains takes real effort, with the final flourish of making it look effortless. But sometimes cruise-control clarity is wrong for the art under consideration, and the writer who lets the sweat show is being most faithful to the subject.
I’d defend at least a third of Art Baloney’s examples of baloney as struggling but real.
Isn’t Colby Chamberlain’s sentence, held up to ridicule on the site, really a fine sentence marred by a typo? (From his review of Frank Magnotta at Derek Eller Gallery, artforum.com)
A display of virtuoso draftsmanship and procedural rigor, the resulting drawings offer a fluid interchange between the recognizable and the repulsive.
I think Chamberlain was going for “unrecognizable.” There are no copy editors left on earth, but that’s another problem. (File it under “no net.”) If Chamberlain meant what he wrote, recognizable, he’s got a problem with parallelism, because the repulsive is contained within the recognizable. He could have written, between the reassuring and the repulsive, I suppose, or the recognizable and the unknowable.
Onward. As a decaying bohemian who is pleased by the shout out, I’m firmly behind the following sentence by Ram Moshayedi, part of his review of Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon at the Armory Center for the Arts, also from artforum.com.
Persisting as a remnant of the city’s unofficial history, the decaying bohemian icon enters into Pettibon and Okon’s project as the subcultural ideal, as the anachronistic embodiment of political nonconformity to the point of primitivism.
What’s wrong with that?
This is always interesting – I go back and forth all the time about language and art.
On one hand, I want art and talking about it to be super-approachable. I don’t want people to give up on the quicksand conversation and claim it’s bullshit. On the other hand, sometimes it just is that way – I’m guilty of talking in the same way as the things I rail against. How do we find the middle ground? I guess we just keep talking and hope that people start to believe they know as much about art as they need to in order to talk back?
I agree this site is kind of awesome, but not all of these quotes on the site may necessarily be intolerable art-speak.
What’s the point of any endeavor if it’s too self explanatory and doesn’t demand some investigation? Sometimes specialities deserve and require their own vocabulary.