Introducing New Site for Art Criticism
If you’re in our Facebook group, you already know that the latest branch in the Chicago Art Magazine tree has been sprouted, and is held in the capable hands of Senior Editor and art critic, Bret Schneider.
Schneider is:
The Co-director of alternative art space Mvsevm
Contributor & member of Platypus Journal
Curator of the Home Listening Series at The Green Bicycle Organization
Working Artist (in a broad range of media)
Editor of Idea Bank Journal
Co-director of MoSo experimental music label
And most importantly, a ping pong enthusiast
It’s always been in the plans to launch a criticism site, as there is a great deal of consensus that Chicago needs more thoughtful, long-form criticism in order to encourage dialogue within our art community. On this site, we’ve always differentiated between reviews and criticism, and we treat them as separate editorial entities because it’s our feeling that you need both forms to best showcase a large city’s art scene.
So Mr. Schneider goes boldly forth with this new venture. He made an interesting comment once about not just creating written dialogue about art, but dialogue about art that comes from a physical community. So the hope is not just a written discussion, but also a community that gathers together in a room to discuss ideas, and some of the documents featured come out of those types of discussion as well.
For those of you interested in the business/logistics angle, Chicago Art Criticism is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chicago Art Magazine. You might want to look at the “Big Magazine Theory“, which details the plan for commercial content that subsidizes scholarly content. The hope is to develop a core, niche audience for Chicago Art Criticism. We can enter into this knowing that it’s fine for Chicago Art Criticism to not drive the large-scale traffic needed to satisfy advertisers. It’s the job of the commercial content (the top 10 lists and catchy features) of the other sites to draw enough funding to float this more non-commercial venture.
Please have Dr. Donal Kuspit contact me. Thank you. George Sakkal
by collagist April 9, 2012 12:50 PM EDT
Polarized Society: Responding to ART/BASEL “The Art World” piece on CBS 60 Minutes, April 1, 2012
Embedded in the commercialized ideological dazzle of ART/BASEL in general and postmodern art specifically is a serious reality that the art establihment would rather not acknowledge. It concerns the prophetic nature of postmodernism.
I hear frequently that our country is in a state of decline. We identify a national government that has become so polarized that it is unable to deal with the issues at hand…issues that if addressed could help reverse this slide. I see pragmatic approaches to problem solving challenged by ideology…where the search for and discovery of solutions are stymied by those who bring to the tables of discussion preconceived solutions…claiming they know the absolute objective truth in advance. Thus, we face a political conundrum, where those parties charged to do the business of government are unable to reach compromise to address and solve the issues that are in the nation’s interest.
When and how did this circumstance begin? Some point to the recent entry of ideology as an approach to government occurring at the turn of this century with the emergence of a “born-again” presidential mentality that fostered preconceived “gut” feelings in place of prgmatism (i.e. preemptive war) as the means for executive decision making; perhaps. However, I see the roots of this enigma going deeper…much deeper, at least half a century in time deeper.
Fifty years ago our national cultural appreciations began a dramatic shift. We went culturally from accepting a pragmatic approach to art creativity to one immersed in ideology…where those who create “art” believed that they possessed the absolute object truth and are endowed by the intellect of their free will to preconceive their creations. What we see appreciated and estemmed as great art today as exemplified at events like ART/BASEL (i.e. a line of urinals plastered to a wall, basket balls floating in a fish tank, cigarette butts crushed in an ashtray), are ideological conceived “art” relics of a decadent society.
This concept “idea” of manufactured art began nearly 50 years ago when the art establishment accepted Marcel Duchamp’s theory of art as gospel to begin the postmodern era. At such time was introduced a national postmodern cultural conundrum, involvling a cultural appreciation for the art of ideology; an ideology where the creating artist knows the absolute objective truth in advance and believes he can draw upon his free will to preconceive art. What at the time was unseen with the emergence of this cultural ideological belief was the prophetic message it contained. It set the stage for a conundrum in the political arena that is far more devisive than could have been imagined. It was prophetic…that once society’s cultural judgment turned to ideology as the true pathway to human creativity that at some time in the future the business of government would invariably follow suit. (Ironically, in both these conundrum arenas it is but one percent of society that exerts influence and control.)
As an artist and a research analyst I have spent the last three years examining the theory behind postmodernism to unravel its cultural conundrum and prove it to be fiction. If only we can learn from the mistake of our cultural delusion, perhaps the new knowledge we garner can be applied to disprove the assumed worth of political ideology as well.
My report can be read on the NEW YORK ARTS MAGAZINE’s web site at:
http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/catalogue-2011/the-paper-collagist-george-sakkal