Funny New York Snob I Work in an Art Gallery
A lot of people have fallen for a imitation news written report about 'invisible art'. Collectors, claimed Canada's CBC, are paying through the nose for the art of 27-year-old Lana Newstrom even though you cannot come across whatever of it.
"Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you", the artist supposedly said.
The invisible art of Lana Newstrom is in fact a hoax, perpetrated by professional radio parodists Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring. But I can see why and then many people vicious for it – especially having only covered the Turner prize.
While all of the piece of work in this twelvemonth's Turner is simply about visible, this prize has often featured the not-quite-at that place. Martin Creed and Susan Philipsz both won it for empty rooms – Creed's with the lights going on and off, Philipsz's with a folk vocal sound installation. And that's just the tip of an invisible iceberg.
For Lana Newstrom is not the radical artist she has been taken for. Her work is old hat. I am yawning, information technology is and so retrograde and familiar – just another rehash of ideas that go dorsum to the 1950s. Ever hear of John Cage? The Hayward Gallery even dedicated a historical exhibition in 2012 to this phenomenon. Invisible: Fine art nearly the Unseen, 1957-2012 "is not a joke", insisted curator Ralph Rugoff. And it wasn't.
This yr, Marina Abramović acquired a stir when she said her exhibition at London'south Serpentine would be nigh "nothing". All the same the controversy was not about the potential invisibility of the idea – it was about plagiarism, for some other artist claimed prior rights in nothing.
Then, given that if anything Lana Newstrom'due south art is a flake staid and behind the times, it is not and then strange that people were fooled by the hoax. On the other manus, what they took from it is revealing. Information technology shows how much we hate the rich.
A website called Wealthy Debates relished the exposure, not so much of art, as of art collectors. Believing Lana Newstrom to exist existent, it sneered at her stupid rich collectors. "The most amusing attribute of the story," it enthused, "is the image of snobby art collectors walking through an empty studio studiously staring at bare walls ... Some of the fine art afficianados [sic] actually end and soak in the lack of fine art that is not hanging on the bare wall..."
Barstool Sports agreed: "If you're some artsy fartsy idiot paying coin for invisible fine art, you GOTTA impale yourself. Imagine paying someone a meg dollars for some Emperor'due south New Apparel shit?..."
The reason CBC's joke story had legs is not so much that we want to laugh at contemporary art, as that we are then shocked and repelled by the art market. The paradigm of rich people forking out for invisible fine art and proudly showing it to their friends as the very latest thing is such a glorious epitome of plutocratic idiocy that it only had to be truthful.
If only it were. I want to run across those rich art snobs endure, too. But not only is this story a hoax – it also appears to be untrue that collectors will pay a fortune for the not-real. For when Christie's tried to auction Creed'due south Work No 127: The Lights Going On and Off for £70,000 before this year information technology did non sell.
So here's the punchline. Invisible art really does be. And it's going cheap.
tomasinimided1986.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/sep/30/invisible-art-hoax-lana-newstrom-cbc
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