Not necessarily hard news then, but the art world takes itself far too seriously to necessitate anyone else doing so on its behalf. Interesting open letter to the Tate posted a few scrolls down the page, protesting the recent program "No Soul for Sale" organised by artist Maurizio Cattelan and curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni at Tate Modern in London.
Apparently (or possibly "allegedly" is a safer bet) a fair few of the particpants were paying to appear in the iconic Turbine Hall, resulting in said letter from which an excerpt:
"Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?"
The hidden gem of this conversation is the lone comment at the end that points out "if poor unpaid artists are the elephant in the room, then interns are the elephant’s dung." Too true, yet how to resist the hegemony we're all part of, unwittingly, unwillingly, or otherwise? Apparently not through the NSFS program or Tate.
And on a lighter note:
Mark Bradford @ MoMA a week ago = best artist talk I've seen in ages. Read about how he went from hairdresser to MFA grad to MoMA guest in NY Mag.
