time for a new art mag?
fixated lately on Rudnick making the rounds in big pubs with his rose sale. seems like it’s time to pull the wagons together and launch a “grift” (a respectable art publication, [spiritually] based on the west coast, with an eye towards moving the art market towards the most important artists and writers of our generation [friends of ours who are very smart and friendly.])
this would of course be a “squad wealth” type operation, and would necessarily lack statements of conflicted interest, which would hopefully become too numerous to mention.
it would not take many of the incredibly wealthy people who float around online to begin taking us seriously to start making some of the phenomena real; the market has a way of forcing people to take hyperstitions seriously.
the material success is only a prerequisite though—the real focus would be on shaking away the entrenched boomerism that makes KAWS and Basqiat the brands worth holding today.
new art for the nouveau riche
suspendedreasonI think I made a pact with myself to never play zero-sum games, and especially not to zero-sum gamble. So while I'm down for trying to hype friends who make Actually Good Work, not sure I can get onboard with spending a serious amount of my life trying to shine pigshit into gold.
What's your plan for creating value? It seems to me like there are two paths: hype (among people with money) or legitimation (among people with symbolic capital as curators and taste-holders).
- In reply tobeiser⬆:suspendedreason
Like yourself, I have some major reservations about Graeber, but this talk has some real highlights on the topic at-hand.
I also think it's worth noting no one in the art world likes Koons or KAWS, feelings about Hirst are a bit more mixed but still overwhelmingly negative. These are folks who are strictly winning the financial capital game, their symbolic capital, relative to their income and status and visibility, is relatively low.
- BIn reply tobeiser⬆:beiser
i think it's the sort of thing i could only justify as a part-time venture, but I have this uncanny feeling that it's something the world is trying to pull into existence. even thinking about "doing media" is making me nauseous; it's not in my DNA. it so clearly feels like the time for it though.
- In reply tobeiser⬆:suspendedreason
I'm game if we can work out a theory of what/why art matters and how. That seems crucial to the sell. Having a theory of value people can buy into. It gives us a big competitive advantage against an artworld/market that's completely unable to articulate values (beyond paying lip-services to vagueries like "transformativeness" and "questioning" that only barely show up in the justified works themselves).
