The Gutter Art Critic

As disconcerting as the election of Trump was, nothing is more telling than the fact that authenticity is coming back into the lexicon of everyday use, courtesy of the populist right and the crypto-rightism of figures like Alex Jones.   When Hillary said she was two different people in public and in private she might in fact have been sincere, pointing out a simple truth.   In fact most of us act differently in front of different people. We are a different person in front of our friends or in front of our parents.   The same goes for the public and private spheres.   We not only act differently, we speak differently without realizing that we do so.   That Trump is seen as authentic because he seems to be the same person everywhere he appears, only shows how perfectly he plays his part in public.   Are we to assume that President Trump will be the same person as Apprentice Trump, the boardroom Trump, and the bedroom Trump? I can only surmise that Trump’s election is taking humanity b

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, n

First off, let me write that this is not a how to guide about how to become a professional artist.   There are hundreds, if not thousands of those out there, most of them geared toward commodifying the artist personality and by extension the artwork.   I’m not sure if following those guides actually help or not, just like I’m not sure whether my two years in an MFA program actually prepared me for a life of a professional artist.   What I can say is that after the MFA professionalism is something that is not given over by a degree or title but acquired, and even if one doesn’t sell the work they make, does that make them a lesser artist?   I suppose that to be a professional in western culture means to make money off of what one does, but does that immediately negate all the artists that slave away in and out of their studios daily who do not have gallery representation or sell their work, do not appear in flashy magazines, do not get to exhibit in the art fairs and biennials aro

I can’t stand the word archive anymore.   Every curator is an artist and every artist is a wannabe curator.   The tables have flipped almost perfectly against the artist in every imaginable way when it comes to vanguardism and edginess.   No longer, it seems, does the average artist work with any complex issues, though they may appear that way at first. The artist of today is content with towing the line of populist sentiment, pop and pseudo-philosophy, not even commenting on these issues as much as simply cleverly regurgitating what everyone already knows.   The archive is just one of these recent developments that the artworld better soon forget because it is fucking up a whole generation of artists that could have otherwise been helpful in other lines of work, like the food and service industry.    The ridiculousness of the archive is that as a term it has the right tone and desirability for the elite.   It reeks of academicism, and importance. But this importance is also ve

Repeating History: A Nostalgic Perspective  A typical critique of nostalgia has the same overtone of a cliché as does the sentence ‘when one does not know his history, one is destined to repeat it.’ This sentence seems as true as it is patently false in the same way that nostalgia, still a dirty word in our so called post-modern culture, seems to be a word that describes a true emotion, longing, but at the same time keeps its distance by suggesting itself to be a delusion, a sentimental longing for a simple past, a home. That history repeats itself because we are not aware of it is a simplification, a sounding board for generations that grew up with false wisdom masquerading as studied fact. What if it is precisely the opposite that is true? What if it is because we know our history that we repeat it again and again? The nostalgic knows this and therefore she yearns for a time when this was not the case, which is of course never. This case in point was well put in the short mini-s

It has come to my attention that The Gutter Art Critic has been dormant for a long time, over two years to be precise. I am not sure why this happened. Maybe it was because I got into graduate school, maybe because I was busy with making work and residencies abroad, maybe it was life and maybe I couldn't bring myself to write anything sensible other than complaints about the fucked up things I saw around myself. Whatever it was.... today is a new beginning, a rebirth of The Gutter Art Critic. I hope that two years of graduate art school has given me a new perspective, I also hope that living near Los Angeles, the supposed new capital of the art world (whatever that means) has given me a new impetus to write about art and culture from ground zero. Ok, maybe not quite ground zero, I don't actually live in Los Angeles, maybe ground five and a half, because I am pretty close, as close as I think I can stand it. But don't get me wrong, I actually like Los Angeles, well, part

How should one begin when writing about George Zimmerman painting? It might be a good idea to put Zimmerman in a context by which we can judge what he is in fact doing and why is it that this is either accepted or not. George W Bush as we know is painting also, and when he was alive, John Wayne Gacy was painting as well. As much as we would like to dismiss their art as hacky, or worse, let us not forget that it has been decades of unrelenting deskilling of artists, pluralism and appropriation of art for the sake of money and consumerism among other things that have resulted in non-artists claiming the status of artist and non-art elevated to high art. Can we at all imagine a time fifty years ago, when critics like Harold Rosenberg or Clement Greenberg were writing about art and producing actual criticism, which meant that artists had to be somewhat accountable to a de facto higher authority than themselves? Regardless of how wrong or conservative these critics were, in their appro