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Vampire Castle Missive #1 - Anish Kapoor Bites the Hand That Feeds

                It seem that with the death of Michael Brooks that the uphill battle against the denizens of the mythic VampireCastle , a general term for what constitutes the various negative aspects of the modern liberal left from call out and cancel culture to HR ID politics and Karening, coined by the late Mark Fisher, has suffered another setback. Brooks had a lot to say about the modern leftist obsession with “pseudo-wokeness” and was generally seen arguing against it on his and other podcasts. While I intend to wrestle and engage with Michael Brooks’ ideas later, it felt necessary to bring his position into what I will argue next.                 In a very general sense, it seems as though the art world is yet again late to the game as to what is actually happening on the left and engaged in a fight against itself and using faulty pop theory and misplaced logic to propagate its insane moralizing tactics. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the artworld and its institutions ha

Ontological Incompleteness of the ‘Inward Immigrant’ or Why Nothing in Today’s Media-Saturated Overconnected World Makes Any Sense

Let me begin by using myself as an example.   I was born and raised in the Czech Republic.   My mother remarried when I was 11 and when I turned 12, she and I moved to the United States as a result of this marriage. I’ve lived in the US ever since.   I will spare the reader the nitty gritty details of the actual move, the integration, and so on, mostly to say that my experience and the experience of the thousands of others that emigrated to the US that year alone are on the surface typical. Cut to today and I can with a lot of confidence say that, as a first generation immigrant, having emigrated at the age I did, my experience of the world and of American culture can only be described as incomplete.   The same can be said of my experience of the Czech culture.   What would seem as an upper hand, being bilingual, having roots in both cultures (muliticultural), etc, to me seems, while not a handicap, as a void that can never be filled.   True, Walter Benjamin’s experiences as an exi

On Being a Professional Artist

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