To understand installation art we must understand where we are standing culturally.
What I find most interesting about installations is that they claim or are said to be more approachable than other form of arts; interactive installations in particular seem to be all about audience participation, a trend that currently involves all media from broadcasting (YouTube) to journalism (citizen journalism, blogging, tweeting).
Before an interest in art and before my hate for what Tate Modern or The Saatchi Gallery embody, I am interested in understanding at what extent authorities - aka money-making-oriented multinationals - are convincing us that art like all media is becoming more accessible and therefore democratic. Hence it's not the case anymore that culture is transmitted in a top to down fashion but in the exactly opposite way: from the bottom to ... to where? - this being the main point. . .
I would like to understand why skulls horribly painted by D. Hirst are said to be art and so is a porn movie when broadcast in a museum. Who wants me to firmly believe that by spending a Sunday afternoon amongst (expensive) rubbish I can feel good about myself?
Evidently, the same trend towards "sensationalism" and the same infatuation for the "gruesome"and for the "freakish"that has pervaded media, journalism and TV in particular, has also affected art. This is the main reason behind exhibitions like Pop Art (Tate Modern): they attract the tourists but also spread ugliness and nonsense before ignorant (in the sense that they ignore) and careless visitors.
The power that pornographic sculptures by Koofs once held is gone by now, in 2010. Why then insisting on displaying them when there are artists who'd beg and stab their mothers to have a space in Tate Modern? Why calling back to the Tate Fiona Banner who is "looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space."?
Art used to be about sensitivity, beauty, rebellion and excruciating feelings like fear and terror; but it was never meant to be just another gadget in our consumer culture. But now art, like sex, like everything, has been inglobated in the all-powerful-machine.
Sex has been commercialized: Kate Perry singing "I kissed a girl" didn't liberate any of us; it just dummed us - females - further down. Lesbianism isn't even transgressive anymore simply because it sells, contextualized, commodified: an item, not different from toothpaste on the shelves of Waitrose. Art is working its way down that same path - and it's doing so terribly quickly.
The British cartoonist and writer Alan Moore, an anarchic whom I consider a genius and find hard to criticise, still misses the point in his intriguingly well written essay "25,000 years of erotic freedom".
Moore says, in the sassy way that distinguishes him, that: "Our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable and back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists."
We also ate raw food and defecated in the wild back in the days but we then evolved into cooking meat and even in having to almost translate complicated menus at the restaurant.
First of all pornography differs from art in the sense that porn nothing is but a repetition of formulas; on the other side art is not that simple: it's creative and imaginative, it's a productive and unexpected force. Secondly, the extent to which pornographic images permeate our society has become self serving; it doesn't make the world more beautiful, it doesn't serve as a weapon of transgression: it's just there together with toothpaste on the shelves. If Wharol once had a meaning and a reason to be, it appears a waste of time to be repeating a formula emptied of signification and value nowadays. If art in countries where freedom of expression is limited employs nudity and porn to break the ice, that is welcome. But here, in the West, it's the time instead to be creative and with that creativity engage the public in a way that it will be able to appreciate, produce and enjoy good art - not crap.
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher and his work focused largely on the pervasive sense of relativism that has invested modern societies; he tried to understand its roots, why it's come to exist and what it says about us and our world.
Baudrillard's theories, with their focus on aesthetics are a good starting point to look at installation art however the nihilism that pervades his work becomes almost intolerable.
Starting from Baudrillard I would like to look at our culture with a more hopeful outlook and see how art and in particular installations can effectively become expression of a movement that positively and proactively involves the audience while giving up the nonsense and ugliness that too often surround modern art and our world nowadays.
What I find most interesting about installations is that they claim or are said to be more approachable than other form of arts; interactive installations in particular seem to be all about audience participation, a trend that currently involves all media from broadcasting (YouTube) to journalism (citizen journalism, blogging, tweeting).
Before an interest in art and before my hate for what Tate Modern or The Saatchi Gallery embody, I am interested in understanding at what extent authorities - aka money-making-oriented multinationals - are convincing us that art like all media is becoming more accessible and therefore democratic. Hence it's not the case anymore that culture is transmitted in a top to down fashion but in the exactly opposite way: from the bottom to ... to where? - this being the main point. . .
I would like to understand why skulls horribly painted by D. Hirst are said to be art and so is a porn movie when broadcast in a museum. Who wants me to firmly believe that by spending a Sunday afternoon amongst (expensive) rubbish I can feel good about myself?
Evidently, the same trend towards "sensationalism" and the same infatuation for the "gruesome"and for the "freakish"that has pervaded media, journalism and TV in particular, has also affected art. This is the main reason behind exhibitions like Pop Art (Tate Modern): they attract the tourists but also spread ugliness and nonsense before ignorant (in the sense that they ignore) and careless visitors.
The power that pornographic sculptures by Koofs once held is gone by now, in 2010. Why then insisting on displaying them when there are artists who'd beg and stab their mothers to have a space in Tate Modern? Why calling back to the Tate Fiona Banner who is "looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space."?
Art used to be about sensitivity, beauty, rebellion and excruciating feelings like fear and terror; but it was never meant to be just another gadget in our consumer culture. But now art, like sex, like everything, has been inglobated in the all-powerful-machine.
Sex has been commercialized: Kate Perry singing "I kissed a girl" didn't liberate any of us; it just dummed us - females - further down. Lesbianism isn't even transgressive anymore simply because it sells, contextualized, commodified: an item, not different from toothpaste on the shelves of Waitrose. Art is working its way down that same path - and it's doing so terribly quickly.
The British cartoonist and writer Alan Moore, an anarchic whom I consider a genius and find hard to criticise, still misses the point in his intriguingly well written essay "25,000 years of erotic freedom".
Moore says, in the sassy way that distinguishes him, that: "Our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable and back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists."
We also ate raw food and defecated in the wild back in the days but we then evolved into cooking meat and even in having to almost translate complicated menus at the restaurant.
First of all pornography differs from art in the sense that porn nothing is but a repetition of formulas; on the other side art is not that simple: it's creative and imaginative, it's a productive and unexpected force. Secondly, the extent to which pornographic images permeate our society has become self serving; it doesn't make the world more beautiful, it doesn't serve as a weapon of transgression: it's just there together with toothpaste on the shelves. If Wharol once had a meaning and a reason to be, it appears a waste of time to be repeating a formula emptied of signification and value nowadays. If art in countries where freedom of expression is limited employs nudity and porn to break the ice, that is welcome. But here, in the West, it's the time instead to be creative and with that creativity engage the public in a way that it will be able to appreciate, produce and enjoy good art - not crap.
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher and his work focused largely on the pervasive sense of relativism that has invested modern societies; he tried to understand its roots, why it's come to exist and what it says about us and our world.
Baudrillard's theories, with their focus on aesthetics are a good starting point to look at installation art however the nihilism that pervades his work becomes almost intolerable.
Starting from Baudrillard I would like to look at our culture with a more hopeful outlook and see how art and in particular installations can effectively become expression of a movement that positively and proactively involves the audience while giving up the nonsense and ugliness that too often surround modern art and our world nowadays.
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