"lives in London, Berlin and New York"
artist is a DJ on the side
cis white woman talking/making art about race/class/gender and how privileged she is
"we today CELEBRATE the works of..."
Foucault, Adorno, Derrida or Baudrillard mentioned in the opening speech/catalogue
Neo-Marxist kitsch art by a guy who works on a MacBook
"web artist" = has an Instagram
video pieces interviewing people how hard it is to be famous or the child of someone famous
anti-capitalist show funded by a bank
artist's bio lists the same ten grants and galleries in the same order as the last ten artists shown at this institution
Virtual Reality headsets
the Vaporwave color scheme
artist couldn't be here for the vernissage, sry, is busy person
politician or diplomat holds part of the opening speech
"intertextual meta-narratives problematizing a disembodied subjectivity..."-waffling
"boldly experiments with form" = paints oil on canvas, but sometimes stabs the canvas
"celebrating diversity" - audience 95% white, 5% waitstaff
painter so keen on making grand macho art he just paints the largest canvasses possible
Arte Povera style shit larger than a moderately middle class apartment
"please don't touch the artworks" - the works are dirty bed sheets and remnants of a toe nail clipping performance never intended to survive the forty years they've already been on display
anti-establishment artist sucked into the system, looking dead inside
"please lock your backpack in" - all the art they show is just disrespectfully, obscenely large and heavy statues and canvasses no one person could ever lift or damage
"don't get too close to the works" - which are very tiny and really hard to see
white cube architecture
empty cardbord boxes + tape = installation
unused art supplies/raw materials exhibited to "evocate potential-ness"
ostentatiously non-white cube architecture (i.e. former factory building)
edgy b/w drawings
all visitors under 60 are art students or school children on a field trip
one trick pony artist who repeatedly made the same work for the last 25 years for the sake of his collectibility
"multi-layered approach" = double exposure photographs
ex-student of a famous artist working in the exact same style/format to be recognizably of that lineage
"the liquid self" = show on Internet culture and art like it's 1997
"Video Games in Art" = Dwarf Fortress, Canabalt, a Porpentine-knockoff and maybe Cory Arcangel crammed into a room
exhibition on Islamic art with an overzealous focus on progressiveness, resulting in all of the cringe
apparently comics are still counter culture
"critical examination of the mapping and surveying of our minds, bodies, and the world" = spreadsheets and X-ray images, maybe a Facebook logo somewhere
show on identity advertised with a photograph of an easily clockable trans* or nonbinary person
"examination of taxonomies and power relations" = showcasing taxidermied animals to prove the artist really, REALLY "got" that first chapter of "The Order Of Things"
impostor syndrome artist in a PhD programme, pushing the envelope by having longer texts next to their artworks
"insights into the 21st centuries' sexual psyche" = photographs of Berliners fucking while taking selfies
show on translateability of organic life into data: "Did you know there's such a thing as HTML and it's on the INTERNET and it's not how our BODIES function?"
one room dedicated to the collector who, in his unbelievable generosity, let the museum inherit/borrow/accept the donation of his symbolic capital investment/tax evasion scheme
show on the commercialization and sensationalization of art = Jeff Koons and YBA derivatives, a room curated by a collector or auction house, previous owners and prices of selected artworks on the wall to be edgy, 150 dollar catalogue
video work boldly exhibiting a complete disregard for the viewer's time
video piece: disembodied narrator talking over footage of LA/NY/Berlin/Shanghai b/c the artist had a nice big city residency once
ten minute still one-take digital video (50 mm lens) filming a a bra on a piece of toast: "made with the generous help of the [important benefactor]'s art fund"
"deconstructs the imposing architectures of modern life and big capital" = slightly abstract drawings of high rise buildings
"a sometimes shocking and disarming approach deeply examining the interrelations of intersectional feminism" = gender essentialist stuff about periods, sex toys, and naked elderly women, some maybe WOC
the dreaded graffiti room - "Did you know you can spray paint other things than walls?"
a show on beauty and how it's very subjective, and also kinda bad
rule of quick turnover: the infuriatingly lazy artworks about current events are the largest and most expensive ones in the room
indie project by hip young artists to "challenge the status quo" and "change the rules" either falling apart in front of your very eyes or being used as a platform to enter the market
small open studio show by indie artists in a neighborhood screaming to be gentrified by them asap
obligatory hyperrealist painter to deflect the "my child could do that" crowd
"challenging the colonial lens" = white curator inviting twelve Black artists to explain racism to a white audience
postcolonial kitsch
it's not illustration, it's contemporary representational art b/c it's oil on canvas, it has this very en vogue washed-out plain color palette, the ironic distance of the New Leipzig School, is unfinished in places, and there are DRIPPINGS
it's not obvious, it's surrealism
"We need to democratize the art world and expand the audience" said by someone whose last interaction with a working class person was ordering food via phone
"an investigative approach to problematic art/artists" basically being the left cannibalizing itself while leaving the moneymaking big names untouched or gracing them with "critical" solo exhibitions
POC and LGBTQ+ artists only being invited to produce art about being POC and LGBTQ+. If they don't comply, their POCLGBTQ+ness will still make it both into the catalogue and the opening speech.
"...this BOLD and NEW AFRICAN/SOUTH AMERICAN voice in art" - the artist lives in London, but sometimes has a sleepover at his cousin's house in Kenya/Chile
"New voices of Southeast Asia" - rest assured all the artists went to Western art schools and have almost exclusively Western collectors
in a baffling attempt to be inclusive, the interpretation of an artist's entire body of work is reduced to their biography/trauma/disability or their cultural-social background/identity/heritage
artist collective using no individual names because FOR SURE anonymity is how we get over the cult of personality and genius
praising the singular genius, ideas and concepts of an artist as code for "his workshop does everything and he doesn't even look at his own artworks before the vernissage"
Putting benches in a show with a total of six hours of video content? What a philistine idea!
"...one of the most important artists of our time..."
another quickly canonized attempt at institutional critique / systems art
everything is revolutionary
crypto art wasn't a scam, promise
appropriation of Japanese pop culture is okay when it's all gaudy and oversized on purpose because gaudy and oversized equals ironic
"despicable global brand" residency programme
preaching to the choir
live stream with 15 viewers because how does one even internet
residency programme/stipend for ethnic minorities tied to producing "ethnic" art
new media artist hyper-critical of self-marketing and our loss of privacy: follow him on twitter!
romanticized marketing of a big name to capture the allodoxia crowd
ivy league educated trust fund baby "using their platform to support the disenfranchised and the poor"
"power to the people (because the people are my customers)"
"I find the gallery system too rigid, slow and exclusionary" speech given at the oldest, whitest gallery in in town
post-internet art = millennial artists stuck in Tumblr memes from 2008 and South Park's non-committal "only losers care about anything" brand of humor
plush genitalia
"the poetics of..."
We're all "cyborgs", where does the human end, where does the machine begin???
Traditional/Ethnic/Cultural stuff repeated ad nauseum could never ever amount to kitsch
people in animal costumes/fetish gear
One channel video? Blasphemy! Tryptichs everywhere!
"Mythologies of the Future"
animal costumes/fetish gear
We're still doing textile art against the patriarchy, cool
Let's just voyeuristically follow the work day/rituals of these indigenous people I guess
~Fertility~
People in the woods, 'cause it's cheap & easy to shoot there
actors/performers either don't emote at all or overact dramatically
taxidermied animals, greenhouses, tubes connecting stuff, herbariums, botany & eco kitsch
grandma's carpets
"The artist is concerned with the everyday, the banal, the overlooked ..."