I received an interesting private message from a Commercial Gallery which I think I will make public as it might be interesting to see what other Canadian artists think about this. I posted a word, "boring" under Ben Mark Holzberg's limited edition of TTC series that was being featured with them on social media…I rarely say anything negative, almost always am supportive of other artist's work but honestly what is so spectacular of going into a subway and shooting blank walls...it just slipped out...
GALLERY:
Eva It's amazing that you feel the need to comment negatively about artists and photographers work. The arts community in Canada is very small and we don't need anyone ... let alone a fellow artist and arts educator insult other artists works. You clearly have an opinion which is your right but we don't need comments like that on a social media platform. Supporting creativity is what you should be doing .... I'll leave your comment on our site till tomorrow morning when I will remove it. I think you may underestimate what hurtful comments can do other artists and how you may be perceived by posting something so thoughtless. I think you may want to reconsider how you use social media in the future and also suggest you consider your next move before tomorrow morning. I'd love to see how your fellow artists perceive you when they notice how you treat them.
MY RESPONSE:
So being Canadian means being sweet and positive and gooey? Real dialogue is removed. I think maybe there is more fascism here of political correctness than in the US. Art is a visual description of human nature, smelly and sweet and intelligence is a hard dialogue, not saccharine phoney messages. After all in your choice of who to exhibit do you use political correctness as a criteria, do you support all Canadian artists? I don't think so, so who are you to tell me I should shut up and be nice or else be shunned by the Canadian Circle of Artists Society that has done zilch for me so far! Maybe I should leave Canada too?
It is healthy for artists to hear critiques of their work and they don't need to be protected by their galleries I think, otherwise they don't grow. Art can not just be about what galleries can sell, otherwise it might as well be dead...
One human's art is another human's garbage.
IMHO, the photos above are not artistic, artsy, creative or in any way interesting, except to a particular minority of people who find beauty in tedium. Neither the creators of those walls, nor the photographer, did anyone any favors. Sure, travelers might feel a sense of relief if everything is otherwise plain, but if I were a photographer I certainly wouldn't put trash like that in the gallery. If I owned the gallery, I wouldn't allow that to be hung. It's not art - it's laziness.
Perhaps it has some significance for the artist, but I don't care. It's like looking at Pollack's insane abstract work, or van Gogh's childish impressionism, but worse - there's nothing there to recommend it. It's not new, edgy, or even slightly remarkable.
The gallery owner should grow up.
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@reveurgam
I think it is about who you know rather than your art, I am afraid in Canada anyway...
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:(
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Yes, that is how I feel about it...
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I always thought this was an international thing: closed circles of connaisseurs where fashion, who-do-you-know and esoteric criteria determine what's hot and what's not, and where criticism can only be levelled outwards on penalty of being removed from the incrowd.
Combined with the type of artist who desperately tries to do things that haven't been done before, with the goal of being art-historically interesting in stead of making art, this leads to great amounts of crap finding their way into the art world.
Disclaimer: it's all a matter of taste, of course.
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Well put @ocrdu ...I never learned to play the games...
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