William Bragg

Zoe Strauss’ experience of censorship by the printer, not the publisher. Given all the blatant phallic symbols around the world, it never ceases to amaze me how irrationally insecure and sensitive men are when presented with an image of another man’s penis.

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull: $24.95 edition.

The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube

This would be helpful with artist’s statements as well:

Salvation is here! 
Feeling inarticulate? Critically gauche? Or just verbally impotent?
We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy “insights.” With this device you can speak about Art with both authority and confidence. Use this marvellous tool to amaze and confound friends and colleagues. Don’t miss this opportunity to menace and dumbfound professors and artists emeriti! 

PIXMAVEN - The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator.

With the changes that I indicated here, I’ve managed to screw up my blog feeds. I don’t know if I’ve gotten them completely fixed - hopefully I will have this solved soon. So that may explain why you haven’t received any recent updates from me. I’ve set up a 301 redirect for the old address, but you should probably update your link to the new address, http://WilliamBragg.com/blog/. Enough of this tech screw-up talk, check out the review.

I’m glad I’m not an artist currently exhibiting at the ‘How Soon Is Now?’ Exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. From Roberta Smith’s review (NYT):

“How Soon Is Now?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts is almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, “now” may never come.

The difficulties with artist statements:

Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. Different artists claim that their efforts “contend with codes of power, authority, race and class,” “question man-made constructs,” “challenge the anthropological categorizations of early photography” or “reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.” A few statements manage to locate the art in the vicinity of the artist’s life. “My work focuses on Pakistani-American social and cultural customs and growing up in a working class Muslim family,” one artist says, a reminder that art comes from highly specific contexts. Unfortunately these words accompany a completely generic work involving the hair of the artist and her mother.

Followed by some good advice:

Aspiring artists need to expose themselves to the sheer intensity and variety of art, to learn what they love, what they hate and if they are actually artists at all. New York’s galleries and especially its great museums offer ample opportunity for this kind of self-education, which leads to self-knowledge. Anything is possible when artists set to work knowing they have something they urgently need to say, in a way it hasn’t quite been said before.

I try to comfort myself by alternately declaring that ‘I am no artist, I’m a photographer’, and other times just putting my head under my pillow. Also I absolutely abhor artist statements. The struggle continues, though I’ve had a recent string of very rewarding photographic projects.