Hi all...my god the summer's gone, and I didn't write at all for those months. Jeff and I were totally caught up with the shop North Adams Antiques during that time, going to auctions, buying and selling, getting known in town, hosting exhibitions, doing it all in North Adams.
Now the season has begun, school is back, exhibitions and open studios in full swing, elections brewing, war still raging, money disappearing, what else is new!!! The most notable thing hereabouts is the final dispensation re: Buchel vs Mass MoCA. The court ruled in favor of the Museum, and as I write the contents of Building 5, the largest exhibition space in the country, perhaps in the world, is being emptied of the detritus of 'Training Ground for America'. I do believe this was a postmodern event where the spectacle rose to much greater status than the actuality of the work itself. But I can't say for sure as I never did see it without the tarp. I can say that as a local business person, I was hit by the loss of that major exhibition from the summer roster of activities for tourists.
I'm all for protecting the rights of artists in the face of corporate institutional scale. As the 'auteur' morphs into the 'celebrity', however, and the costs of production go higher and higher, it feels more like theater [remember Michael Fried's 'Art and Objecthood'] and so the standards of individualized 'genius' and the felt truths of gesture and vision, recede into modernist memory.
As I live in a small town, and the sharp edges of art discourse don't cut all the way through old faiths, I'm having an exhibition of photos that explore older and more gentle experiences while attempting to touch upon the loss of that older reality.
Hope you all have a productive and kind season.