Art Meseum Thoughts

First, go read this entry from Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes, then come back for debate.

I will be brief out of necessity, since I have a heap of work threatening to engulf me at any moment (and since one of those crucial tasks is to get more diapers, I really don't want to be engulfed by any of that), but my basic point is that while the contemporary art world is global and completely interconnected, there is no reason to encourage that trend. I am more interested in what local collectors are looking at than what Saatchi finds compelling.

A show of what lives in local collections is a fascinating measure of the community (and note that I am not implying any sort of sophistication index, I am simply curious: we might find that Chicago collectors prefer secondary colors, we might find that Portlanders favor figurative drawings, who knows? I would like to, as it helps flesh out a portrait of the community). To give into the globalization of the contemporary art world is to do two things: first, it ratifies the McStarbuckization of even our higher culture. Second, it distracts artists from making art and looking at the real world around them.

If the Society of Six had been au courant they probably would have been far less interesting as artists. Instead they received a tiny exposure to fauvism and futurism and developed a home-grown way of painting that remains quite compelling today (yes, I was at the Oakland Museum again yesterday afternoon).

Now that we all know what is going on everywhere we tend to spend less time looking at the city, at nature, etc., and more time looking at reproductions of art on the computer, in magazines, and so on. That, combined with a completely archaic notion of an avant-garde, forces art to increasingly spend time peering up its own, well, you know what.

Let's call that an opening salvo and let the argument go from here!