as an addition to my previous post, i must recommend an exhibition i finally visited today called all we want is everything at gallery kalhama & piippo. rauha mäkilä's paintings of pop culture faces du jour are as neon as cassette playa was a couple of years ago and as contemporary as they get. sure, they're easily recognizable and somehow create a feeling of "hey, i took this great photo from a magazine, scanned and expanded it and splashed it with color, yay!" which is joyful and almost feels like you're collaborating although yer not. happily i noted that most paintings were sold already.
unfortunately, before i left i took some time to read the reviews and, quelle surprise, there was some nag-nag-nag about the pricing of the paintings. the accusations were directed towards the gallery for inflating the recently graduated artist's value, but the tone was showing contempt towards the artist for noncompliance. such a prime example of suffocating control towards new artists for thinking they could actually live off their artwork, as if asking a price that covered the cost of producing the art and the time it takes to create was too arrogant a request for a beginner...
no wonder artists are torn between the axes of creative freedom, marketing demands, artistic purity and putting food on the table. oh my.
2 comments:
I think that the whole Finnish culture has a problem in relating with success (and perhaps with failure, too) - in any areas of life. It is kind of natural that it culminates on fields where the individual achievement is the essence.
Well, perhaps this does not apply to sports. If you achieve in sports then you are legitimated to succeed in other areas of life, too... =)
kamicha, you probably have a valid point there.
if taking the most negative stance it almost looks like success should not be an aspiration at all and if failure follows, it was bound to happen anyway because the project was suspicious to begin with... in an environment like that, the only rationale to do art is to suffer for being selfish enough to think one's work is worthy of being expressed at all. compensation and admiration would be too much to ask, i guess.
sports may be different because there achievement is measured "objectively" or at least within systems that are understandable. if you're slower, you're slower. the vagueness, subjectivity and complexity of success in other fields is probably much more difficult to grasp. and you seem to be right: if the basis of your success is in sports, then it seems fine you do alright in other fields of life, too... curious, right?
Post a Comment