Tomorrow we head to Berlin to visit the 9th Biennale, which we’re hugely excited about! Unfortunately, on doing some research it appears that not everyone is as excited as us about the content displayed. We came across a Guardian article titled ‘Welcome to the LOLhouse: how Berlin's Biennale became a slick, sarcastic joke’ with the tag line ‘In the hands of New York fashion collective DIS, one of Europe’s biggest exhibitions is now a feeble blancmange of ads and avatars – where is the art?’. It was a shame to see such an old age, ignorant argument used by someone who is in a position of power and is supposedly an expert. Surprisingly it wasn’t Jonathan Jones who we firstly assumed would be behind it (his pieces include ‘The artist who lays eggs with her vagina – or why performance art is so silly’) but Jason Farago, another cheap-shot-art-critic. He isn’t a fan of Laura Poitras, ‘Astro Noise review – Citizenfour director loses the plot’ but loves Mary Heilmann, a painter in her 70s who is mainly focused with waves but we digress.
His issue with the work in the Biennale appears to be its alleged lack of sincerity suggesting that with the all the humanitarian and political catastrophes in the world how can anyone make art that is fun. On the contrary, why wouldn’t you?! Also this is similar to saying ‘how can you enjoy that triple chocolate hot fudge sundae, complete with flake, when that guy over there just stood in dog shit?’ Perhaps a slightly detached comparison but you get the idea. He also comes out with some pretty brutally elitist stuff too, our favourite being ‘at the very least, no one seems to have read an art history textbook’.
This is an unnecessary dig and even though we consider it interesting to know about what’s come before and learn about art and artists that have done things similar or dis-similar to us it’s not essential. One of the beauties of art is that you can create a thorough and concise work without knowing a thing about the great masters and you can make dull and un-insightful work with a PhD in Art History. It’s an incredibly difficult position to be in; reviewing art is challenging and we constantly struggle to be objective when viewing work, trying to steer clean of adjectives like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and more towards ‘well-considered’ or ‘inattentive’. However, we continue to work with the main principal that if something is being presented to us as art then it is to be considered as such. His questioning on whether this stuff is art is put to rest beautifully by roodvim’s reply to peter1234.
Artists we’re very excited to come into contact with include Simon Fujiwara, who’s furless fur-coats we saw at British Art Show 8; Jon Rafman, who’s solo show at Zabludowicz Collection sent shivers down our spines; Hito Steyerl, author of one of our favourite books of last year, ‘In Defence of the Poor Image; and Simon Denny, the artist who did reverse espionage on the NSA. Hopefully we’ll have a better time than Mr. Farago but only time can tell…
