After reading MY NAME IS CHARLES SAATCHI AND I AM AN ARTOHOLIC, there were a few points about the nature of contemporary art, its philosophies and its business that I wanted to reflect on:
Many artists achieve iconic status by dying before their work has a chance to dwindle into stale repetition - a phenomena I have been interested in throughout my practice; how can an artist continue to stir interest and appear to yield originality? Some die, some seem to provoke and toy with offensiveness (think Shock of the New). I choose to work in the context that originality is not longer the key in this post-post-modernist arena, but instead a focus on the way ideas, themes and aesthetics can be reprocessed, reconsidered and revisited.
Mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered - The reality that some of the most brilliant creative minds are often misunderstood or overlooked for a long period of time (Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson to name a few). This both serves as a reason not to become despondent when your own work falls short of the expectations of others but also as a realistic outlook on the fickle nature of the art business.
There's a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art - the authority an artist holds, to express themselves in any way imaginable and have unwavering confidence in the value of their own work
Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on
I used to feel a little depressed whenever I visited an artist in one of those buildings housing 50 or so of those artists' studios, knowing that 49 of those artists would rarely get a visitor of much help to their careers
Leave me a note if you think that anything there [his USA Today show] is truly more tasteless than so much we see around us every day and Some people like the art, some people like being shocked by it - the discussion of taste, the misconception that the primary function of works such as Terence Koh's Medusa (http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/terence_koh_medusa_toilet.htm) is to shock and offend when in fact most often they are reflecting the surrounding culture and musing on its absurdities
Many artists achieve iconic status by dying before their work has a chance to dwindle into stale repetition - a phenomena I have been interested in throughout my practice; how can an artist continue to stir interest and appear to yield originality? Some die, some seem to provoke and toy with offensiveness (think Shock of the New). I choose to work in the context that originality is not longer the key in this post-post-modernist arena, but instead a focus on the way ideas, themes and aesthetics can be reprocessed, reconsidered and revisited.
Mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered - The reality that some of the most brilliant creative minds are often misunderstood or overlooked for a long period of time (Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson to name a few). This both serves as a reason not to become despondent when your own work falls short of the expectations of others but also as a realistic outlook on the fickle nature of the art business.
There's a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art - the authority an artist holds, to express themselves in any way imaginable and have unwavering confidence in the value of their own work
Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on
I used to feel a little depressed whenever I visited an artist in one of those buildings housing 50 or so of those artists' studios, knowing that 49 of those artists would rarely get a visitor of much help to their careers
Leave me a note if you think that anything there [his USA Today show] is truly more tasteless than so much we see around us every day and Some people like the art, some people like being shocked by it - the discussion of taste, the misconception that the primary function of works such as Terence Koh's Medusa (http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/terence_koh_medusa_toilet.htm) is to shock and offend when in fact most often they are reflecting the surrounding culture and musing on its absurdities