“Going to the Dogs: Man (Dressed as Dog) Bites an Art Critic! Notes from the Front-line of the Struggle for Attention”
Impressions from a gallery-tour in SoHo during a weekend in New York, focusing on extreme cases of pushing the edges: Oleg Kulik, Andres Serrano, Paul McCarthy, Sean Landers, and Bill Scanga, Spring 1997, published in Art Papers, November-December 1997, pp. 78-80
A weekend in New York. A gallery-tour in SoHo. The April gallery map pocked with Day-Glo pink. Height of the season. Hundreds of people pass me by, going up and down, in and out of elevators. Swept into this strange choreography of rushing art consumers who share a similar look and blank expression, I asked myself: of all this surplus, what will ultimately turn out to be significant? What will leave even a tiny impression in my mind? I could not help thinking about the power center of the artworld producing all this abundance. Is this what they call “the crisis in art”? Has contemporary visual language really exhausted itself? Countless installations and performances, an enormous variety of objects and video pieces, an assortment of eccentricities. New-old variations on worn out ideas and themes. A fixed match with changing players. And so few thrills.
“Going to the Dogs: Man (Dressed as Dog) Bites an Art Critic! Notes from the Front-line of the Struggle for Attention”
Impressions from a gallery-tour in SoHo during a weekend in New York, focusing on extreme cases of pushing the edges: Oleg Kulik, Andres Serrano, Paul McCarthy, Sean Landers, and Bill Scanga, Spring 1997, published in Art Papers, November-December 1997, pp. 78-80
A weekend in New York. A gallery-tour in SoHo. The April gallery map pocked with Day-Glo pink. Height of the season. Hundreds of people pass me by, going up and down, in and out of elevators. Swept into this strange choreography of rushing art consumers who share a similar look and blank expression, I asked myself: of all this surplus, what will ultimately turn out to be significant? What will leave even a tiny impression in my mind? I could not help thinking about the power center of the artworld producing all this abundance. Is this what they call “the crisis in art”? Has contemporary visual language really exhausted itself? Countless installations and performances, an enormous variety of objects and video pieces, an assortment of eccentricities. New-old variations on worn out ideas and themes. A fixed match with changing players. And so few thrills.
Andres Serrano, from A History of Sex, 1997, Paula Cooper Gallery
