Friday, November 15, 2019

workers

14

   "Museums and the white room galleries focus attention by removing distracting information. This move works—museums are great tools for helping people see. But they also risk neutralizing the context of the museum or removing information that might enrich the art experience. Power has the privilege of rendering context invisible or natural. I’m interested in restoring or highlighting that contextual information for the viewer. Art exists in a tug of war between its role as a commodity and its potential as a place for culture to think about ideas. The context we choose to exhibit it in pushes it toward one pole or another. Art fairs maximize the function of art as commodity by stripping away all contextual information but the brand: the names of the artist and the gallery. Art fairs facilitate work that fits most comfortably into global rich person culture. Cultural productions with complex, opaque, unknown, or contested authorship resist commodification more than those with clear, well known, and established authorship. Individually authored art works have more economic value because they are easier to extract from their context of origin."


excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN 

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