cyn: if i declared my lawn an exhibition space and you submitted a recording of your "piece" which would consist of shouting offensive things in advance--and i approved it knowing full well what you were going to do--then i would see it as weak on my part were i to pull the plug on it. and i certainly would not pretend that what was at issue was the content of what you were shouting.
lurkette:
your argument would be fine if we had the contract to look at--but we dont. maybe it was stipulated that a crowd over a certian number constituted an infringement of the owner's rights--and if the artist signed it, then fine, he is bound by the terms of the agreement---but without the contract, the question is not decidable, and debate about it is just an exchange of arbitrary positions based on relative understandings of the role of private property in turning private censorship into the equivalent of mowing your lawn, or not. which maybe it is. maybe this is all that is happening in this thread.
tropple:
your position too assumes that the owner did not know beforehand what would and would not hang in the show--if the story fit with your narrative, none of this would be interesting or public because the piece would never have been hung--and if the artist had then complained, much of what you say might have been relevant.
but it is clear that the gallery owner knew what was going to hang in the show. this is not about him being ambushed by a political work that he did not approve of. if you read the article, the motivation lay elsewhere. but whatever.
more generally, it is always encouraging to read arguments that would justify younger artists (anyone really....) having to grovel before a patron, before an audience, coupled with some bland, arbitrary "test of time" argument thrown in at the end.
dont worry, do what those with cash tell you, they have cash, they know best--(on this, marx was right--cash makes the stupid wise, the ugly beautiful, the boring interesting--simple logic will let you transpose it onto this field.)
if you try to go around these strictures, no worries, really: you will probably die without making a dime, but thats fine because publishers will publish you after youre dead and no longer have to be paid and critics will pick up on it and erase the vaguaries of reception, its preconditions and management, by integrating you into the Great Conversation of bourgeois cultural continuity as proof of the largesse of the system, its underlying dynamism. all the artists like this have to do is produce stuff and die, because they are really only producers of raw material for the reproduction of critical practice. besides, they are doubtless miserable people, these artists, and so maybe dying early and broke is a gift of sorts. dysfunctionals, these artists, as over against yourself, who is obviously the inverse.
the irony is that those who submit, as you advise, in the main are not noticed by art history. those who do not are maybe intergrated by art history as a function of the requirements of social positioning in academic work, which is itself determined by shifts in the institutional ideologies that structure what art history as a discipline says and does. none of this has anything to do with any "test of time" argument. there is no "test of time".
my favorite bit however comes at the end: you advise grovelling and yours is the authentic position--anything else is obviously articulated by someone with a trust fund.
well, well....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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