"You’ve seen it before. It caught your eye. You smiled. Maybe at Frieze, Art Basel, the Armory Show, or NADA. Or it wasn’t there. It was at a gallery on the Lower East Side, or maybe in Chelsea. But it could’ve been on your computer. No, actually it was on your phone. Facebook? Wait, it was Instagram.
It’s everywhere, actually, and it’s called “Like Art.” It is art that looks very much like art you’ve already seen, that you know very well, and that you already like. Who doesn’t like Henri Matisse? Those sensuous curves and colorful overlaps of otherwise flattened planes. Pablo Picasso, too, and his architectonic forms and bold exaggerations. There are also the elegant anthropomorphisms of Georgia O’Keeffe. Run through 20th-century art and hit the high points, especially the most chromatic ones — like Judy Chicago’swork, or Ellsworth Kelly’s. If it’s a recognizable style, motif, or gesture, it’s probably in the database from which Like Art — or work that merely looks “like” art — is generated. It gets shipped from a Brooklyn studio to an art fair booth in Miami Beach, possibly still wet, but priced just right. That price is two digits shorter than the secondary market painting the work is derived from and gets curated next to. It’s “the look for less,” with no greater aesthetic aspirations. It lives for heart taps, thumbs-up clicks, and space on people’s walls — digital or brick-and-mortar." --- Rob Calvin
Shura Hughes, Lake Norway 2016
I keep thinking that this response to a zeitgeist going on in the art world is really surfacy, reductive and lazy. On a certain level, so is the proliferation of "zombie formalism" (as a descriptive term as well as a mode of making).
ReplyDeleteYou could almost use the same kind of unconsidered argument to say that: the mona lisa is "like art" because everyone likes it, there are pictures of it everywhere, it looks like something we already know as art to like, there are online images of it everywhere, including all over instagram and we agree together liking and smiling that we see it and we move on quickly.
Snarky bits of writing about things like this are entertaining, and I enjoy the expression of irritation, and yes there are aspects about the sentiment that are dead on, but usually in essays like this, they are black and white sentiments and I feel as though a lot of work being made today,
especially the kind you might find in "like art", are a celebration of painting; its history, its weirdness, a celebration of liking it, doing it, for painting sake, maybe out of joy and reverence, and as a way of being part of a community that feels secure enough to celebrate and share and support each other, secure enough to be like "yeahhh that's awesome!".... and I go on. There is a place for this, this is a valid position. perhaps the idea of what makes someone a successful artist has changed drastically.
Yes there are always market issues and market control. And there are artists making to fit the market, or to fit a certain "good" or to play a select game, but there are so many more artists working today who are not a part of either of those conversations and don't aspire to be.
Instagram is a different sort of arts community that has not existed before and I think the people writing about it are out of touch with the possible goodness of the equalizing effect of social media and aggregators. The art game is not about epic genius anymore, its something else. The model has changed.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize I accidentally deleted this. An article like this just makes me think someone is writing just to have a hot take on the art world. I think of sport and political pundits that all seem to have the same "ideas". This reads more to me like they just wanted to be the first to write something disagreeing with the social media aspect of he current art landscape and online presence. Essentially skipping the critic and accumulating "likes", if you don't like it, move on, or leave a nasty comment under the cloak of ones internet persona. Collecting likes seems to push away from the work its self and instead turns into a popularity contest. Whether you like it or not, this is the present landscape we work in/around. I love going to see work in person, I think most artists and art lovers do, so unlike most brick and mortar stores go under due to online shopping, the museum and galleries may still have a chance, but then again I can't predict the future. Maybe VR galleries are the future, you can just strap some goggles onto your face.
DeleteI've read this article a few times, and I'm still not sure what the author's gripe is. It seemed like general dissatisfaction in general with art that's popular on social media, Instagram in particular. While I (and many other people) post my art on Instagram, I don't judge a painting's success or failure by how many likes it receives. I'm willing to bet that many more artists do not, either.
ReplyDeleteInstagram has changed the game, undoubtedly. Rather than seeing it as homogenizing painting today, as the author seems to, I value Instagram greatly as a research tool. Living in Albuquerque, it's difficult to see a lot of contemporary painting. Instagram democratizes that in a way by making painting more accessible to everyone. For me, viewing art on Instagram is not comparable at all to seeing art in person, but it certainly makes it easier to experience what's happening out there.