Jerry’s assessment of the Biennale (linked below), and moreover of the curatorial climate of today’s art world, is poignant.  My big issue with his stance, however, is that just because institutional critique has become the incumbent vernacular of the curatorial establishment, doesn’t mean that we should suddenly favor painting, color, and form, as the alternative.  Painting is no  more or less relevant and than it has putatively been considered in recent years.  Painting may be the more earnest, less self-conscious practice in the context of current curatorial interests, but that doesn’t make it any less deficient or enervated when compared to wider visual culture.  I read a quote several months ago the source of which I can’t recall or find on Google, which provocatively asserted: “popular culture offers us everything contemporary art promises.”  I have a habit of pulling that one out after a few proseccos, and of course it’s blasphemy (it was about two minutes before the CCS student I was on a first date with yawned and said, “I’m tired, I’m going to head home…”), but it reminds me that if there’s to be a meaningful shift in curatorial practice it’s going to have to be towards including the broader landscape of “creative’ work being done today in all fields and industries, and not just work that is clearly assimilable as art by the arbiters of the art world.

Entropy in Venice via artnet.