Okay...really....
I swear!
I’m on my way to the David Weinberg Gallery (one of the very best in Chicago) to see and take notes on the rest of the work in the Richard Hunt show....
I've been so busy with school and teaching and making a living that really living almost always has to take a back seat...
And for me...really living involves chewing on the metaphors of really great art.
But in order to find great art to chew on, sometimes it's necessary to take in all sorts of mediocrities...
and then actually figuring out that something is mediocre takes time...and attention....
I can’t simply write somebody’s work off as a mediocrity unless I’ve actually penetrated the metaphor...
And all of this takes time that I too often just don’t have...
(or worse...I've got...but can’t seem to change gears quickly enough to utilize.)
Maybe there’s an easier way than the one I choose to follow...which is to actually treat work as genuine art...until proven otherwise...but there’s no reliable shortcut that I've ever heard of...
I once asked a Famous Art Critic who lectured to us how she deals with the need to spend so much time with new work....
and her answer always struck me as cavalier...
She said that if it took her longer than 5 minutes to figure out the metaphor, she would essentially trash the work....
Of course now I can certainly appreciate her sense of Capricorn efficiency...
But I guess I'm personally intrigued by any and all so-called art works...good or bad...at least as a manifestation of the artist’s psyche...
Although I must say...that if somebody produces a whole lotta mediocrity...I can be awfully bored and disappointed...and not at all inclined to offer the gift of constructive criticism....
And then there's the obvious question...
Why not rely on the curatorial labors of one museum or another where "great works" tend to be reliably on display...?
And of course, I've got a long winded answer to that...
but let's just say that so many great museums are really not much more than art cemeteries...with a bunch of impressionist headstones and a few renaissance headstones and plenty of baroque headstones, etc...not to mention the picasso headstones scattered all over the place....
Visit one cemetery / museum like this and you’ve pretty much visited them all....
it's not the work I object to...or the artists...but the fact that it’s almost impossible to chew on master works when they’re presented (as they usually are) like just so many headstones in Père Lachaise....
Okay...it’s already getting late...and I gotta get moving or this Richard Hunt show is gonna close before I can finish writing about it....
