Usually associated with long-winded art historical articles and page after page of gallery ads, Artforum made an unexpected but exciting move in their October issue by placing Asco, a politically radical Chicano artist collective from the 1970s on the cover. Perhaps igniting a real art historical interest in Asco, Artforum highlights Asco’s merging of art and protest, which could directly inspire Occupy Wall Street (and now, other cities)’s own art and culture committee.
According to Eric Doeringer, the artist-curator of I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me, the exhibition’s title—a nod to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me”—is meant to convey the “fraught relationship between emerging artists and the art-world establishment,” one marked by a simultaneous desire to criticize the art world’s excesses and to be recognized by it. Art about the institutions of art, both physical and discursive, is hardly a new phenomenon, but unlike Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, cited by Doeringer as predecessors for the work included in this exhibition, what emerges most clearly here is not “institutional critique” but a sense of anxiety or anger about the artists’ own marginalization and lack of mainstream success.
We were recently deleting our hard drives from the aughts in an effort to upload everything into the cloud and we found these gems among the files. We almost forgot these things happened … oh wait, did they? Who remembers.
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Statue Porn
Shit Art World People Say
Luckiest Artist in the World Set to Make $200M from Facebook Stock
Can Art Create World Change? 3 Artists at Davos
Artists Kickstarting Their Own Careers
Earliest Known Paintings Discovered in Spain
Alone Among The Living and the Dead
Mike Kelley Dead at 58, Apparent Suicide
Beach Boys, Artists and Copyright Lawsuits
