As did many a Hot Bed Press member this weekend, I visited the Manchester Contemporary exhibition - a showcase of contemporary art galleries, some of them even from Manchester and the north (sorry).
HBP had a stand with a range of print and book artists, but I more or less knew most of that - I was there to see the rest of the show. Some of it I really liked, felt it had artistic merit (hah! How would I know? What I mean is I liked it, for whatever reason) or intellectual underpinnings or deep seated beliefs/arguments/outrage or whatever. And some of it took me back to a well established state of disbelief. It's very hard, sometimes, not to think that parts of the art world really are cynically pulling a fast one. You can only conclude that Duchamp's belief that art is art because an artist did it has become a ready excuse for an appreciable amount of art which, if not done by an artist, really wouldn't be considered art at all.
Nevertheless, there were numbers of pieces I would happily have gone home with (and that I might borrow from, sideways - for the excusability of this please google "Steal like an artist") but I didn't write names down. Well of course not, too easy. The only one of those artists I remembered well enough to look up was Abigail Reynolds. Marbling and cooling towers (and possibly maps?). She has started keeping (on her website) a list of books she feels have been important to her - I am already aware that I currently have no list of favourite books in the 'I like' section of my website - and as an avid re-reader myself I approved of the number of times her reading matter had next to it the word 'again'.
I think I shied away from a list for myself, for the same reason I was picky about listing the music I liked. Quite a lot of it is, if not dross (give me some credit), literary polyfilla. Comfort reading. Lazy. That's fair enough - I read to amuse myself, not to 'grow' - but there's no reason to inflict my choices on anyone else.
HBP had a stand with a range of print and book artists, but I more or less knew most of that - I was there to see the rest of the show. Some of it I really liked, felt it had artistic merit (hah! How would I know? What I mean is I liked it, for whatever reason) or intellectual underpinnings or deep seated beliefs/arguments/outrage or whatever. And some of it took me back to a well established state of disbelief. It's very hard, sometimes, not to think that parts of the art world really are cynically pulling a fast one. You can only conclude that Duchamp's belief that art is art because an artist did it has become a ready excuse for an appreciable amount of art which, if not done by an artist, really wouldn't be considered art at all.
Nevertheless, there were numbers of pieces I would happily have gone home with (and that I might borrow from, sideways - for the excusability of this please google "Steal like an artist") but I didn't write names down. Well of course not, too easy. The only one of those artists I remembered well enough to look up was Abigail Reynolds. Marbling and cooling towers (and possibly maps?). She has started keeping (on her website) a list of books she feels have been important to her - I am already aware that I currently have no list of favourite books in the 'I like' section of my website - and as an avid re-reader myself I approved of the number of times her reading matter had next to it the word 'again'.
I think I shied away from a list for myself, for the same reason I was picky about listing the music I liked. Quite a lot of it is, if not dross (give me some credit), literary polyfilla. Comfort reading. Lazy. That's fair enough - I read to amuse myself, not to 'grow' - but there's no reason to inflict my choices on anyone else.
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