Artist Statements

This 2013 Guardian article about artist statements resurfaced on Facebook yesterday.

Good stuff, although I would question whether artist's statements are needed at all.  As I've said in a previous post, I think they can be a bit of a cop-out in two respects:

1. I think a work of art should speak for itself.  If the artist has to explain it, then it's not working as it should.
2. By guiding viewers into what you were trying to express you're making it harder for them to come up with their own interpretation.

I love this remark in the Guardian article: "Academia is only one part of the art world."   To me, it seems like one of the more pretentious, snobbish parts - and the art world seems full of pretension and snobbery.

Quote:

This is a dialect of the privileged; the elite university educated. If you can't write it effectively, you're not part of the art world. If you're already inside but don't understand it, you're not allowed to admit it, or ask for further explanation. This kind of rhetoric relies on everyone participating without question. To speak up would mean dissolving the space between inside and outside: quite literally, the growing boundary between the art world and the rest of society.

Right on!!