Situating Art Practice Kryzsztof Fijalkowski

Kryzsztof Fijalkowski

Lecturer Norwich University College of the Arts.

16th April 2012. Guest lecture.

What the art world is - who controls it.
How does art relate to values and economy.
Is making art  practice, a system or industry.
Discover where one is in the art world.
Art - outside normal value system.
Stallabrass - freedom - the attraction is that it is not part of the usual.
Expensive works of art become beyond value and judgement.
Conflicting values - because art must be sold.

Who or what form the art world.
Artworld - term from the 60's.
Artists and art.
Systems at top end - canon, dealers, museums.
Gatekeepers institutions.
Dealers - crucial - disseminate, create values, buzz and info.
Art fairs and biennials.
Collectors create demand.
Critics, curators, historians, auction houses.
Also - audiences.
Funding bodies.
Local, regional, national international networks.
Websites.
Studios and artists networks.

Other art activities - direct, art teaching, art projects and community engagement, art theory.
Links to allied practice - design, craft, illustration, nonprofessional and part time interests,

Self.

Also, art has changed over last century.
BUT RELATIONSHIP WITH AUDIENCES HAS CHANGED LESS.
The difficulty of definition of Art itself.
Is the skill - conceptualisation? organisation?
New art moves towards other non art activities.
Art moved towards more open and diverse sense of practice.

Thiery de Duve -
Distinguishes between medium, metier or skill, and practice.
Relationship between art and value.
All art is quite useless - Oscar Wilde.
Beyond value - also very expensive.
Also have to make a living.

Felix Gonzales Torres - take away artworks.
Marx - use value vs exchange value.
Known and unknown artists wrok - worth.
Exchange value rules.
The space artworld creates - exchange values of art.
Magazines - quicker reaction, global view - miniature network.
Part issues reveal .

Art fairs - frieze. gallerist - not all events for high end.
Top flight aspiration - museum.
Big resources, room media.
Epitomise, but are slow and non risk.
Stability tradition. building. Represents.
Art as spectacle.

Ambitious large scale corporate art.
Business relationships - art, money, power.
Wealth - Tate, Sainsbury, Saatchi.
Taste - art is useful to business by signifying power.
Piere Bondieu. Distinction. 1979.
cultural capital.
Network of systems, staff. trustees - commercial and political interests.
Artworld not as simple as art.
Complexity in background.

Hans Haake - uncovers unethical corners of art institutions.
work - industrial practice rather than genius.

Art rethinking what a gallery does.
Michael Asher 1960's What is a gallery space
Around. Le Plain - waster detritus 1974, political.
Reveals interest behind museum. critique of space, critique of practice.
Maurizo Cattlan, The Wrong Gallery 2002 - 2005.
Rise of artist lead spaces - own images.
An immense joke, also reflection - Closed sign - piece of artwork.
Andy warhol - business as art.
Art / commodity.
Adverts - absolut vodka - Warhol, Koons, Hirst.
Richard Hamilton - more cultural than Warhol - contemporary world, consumer mass culture.
Objects for consumption/ reflection.
Claes oldenberg - stove 1961.
tracey emin and sarah Lucas - The Shop , bethnal green, 1993.
Sarah Staton and Jane Simpson.
Kissing cousins.
Henry Moor Institute shop 2007.Neil cummings and Maysia Lewandowska.
the value of Things 2001.
other systems of economic engagement.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - the Street Markets of London 1936.
Joseph Connell - vitrine objects. junk objects 1950's.
Karsten Bolt .
.one of each 1993 - materiality relationships classification.
Martha Rosler. Garage Sale. first held in 1973.
challengge and critique commercial practices.
Duchamp - money - imaginary cheque. making money as art projects
Monte Carlo Bond. 1922.

Yves Klein. Zone of Immaterial sensibility. 1957.
gold thrown into Seine.
complete cycle.
work is also thinking through.
Duchamp - the ready made.
Selected and recontextualised.
authenticity of art.
Labout of the mind.
Skill is intellectual.
John Roberts. The Intangibility of Form.
Skill and deskilling in Art.
After the ready made. 2007.
Context relies on the artworld system.
Knowledge of that now vital.
Hirst - for the love of god, 2007.
Cost and waste.
Gearoge Bataille - value created and lost.
Labour/ Art/ Value.
Santiago Siena - pays people to participate in his art - tattoos, boxes - human cost.

Top down model - most are ground up - personal experiences.
Artists initiatives and action projects - immediate effects.
Impact within individual's grasp - occupy Wall street 2012.
Irwin Wurm - one minute sculpture series 1999.

Understand relationship to artworld.
Understand relationships to networks and systems we are part of.


Reflection

This lecture is in some ways a reiteration of other lectures and writings about the art world. The more angles one comes at it, and the different ways a similar story is told, the more it makes sense, and one can begin to do what the point it - to see one's own position in that artworld.

Seeing it for what it is - the system, the institution, the industry, although it is, like any other paradigm, a vast collective of individual networks.


10th June 2012