In his art blog The Chronicle of Artistic Failure, Michael Fallon studies how art is failing in this country. Part journalism, part concentrated research, part memoir�it�s a series of blog-postings and articles that tell the tale of his own failure as an artist and what this failure has meant to his life�s course. “It is also a record of my odyssey to understand the struggles of myriad failing and failed artists across the communities of this country,” he writes, “as well as the failure of the entire structure that supports artists and arts viewing.” Today he points to the exhibition High Times, Hard Times. “This traveling exhibition takes as its subject a generation of painters�many of whom who are relatively unknown�who continued painting in their native styles, mostly abstract, into old age even as those styles were deemed increasingly pass� by the art establishment. A subtext of the dismissal of the old by the NEW in art is much of this, of course, is a power struggle. That is, the art establishment that determines fashions has long been ruled, generally, by rich white men who get ever richer by their machinations and manipulations. Not to be too paranoid and conspiracy-theorist about this, but there�s a reason why women and people of color are legion among those artists who fall through the cracks.” Read more.
“High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975,” curated by Katy Siegel, with advice from David Reed. Neue Galerie Graz, Graz, Austria. Traveling through August 2008.
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