Tag: 12.11.17

Artist Kader Attia, who won 2016’s Prize Marcel Duchamp, has quite a lot to say (and create) about the topic – and it’s a timely discussion, timely art. “What ultimately makes the question of reparation so compelling is not its recalcitrance, but its urgency. In Europe, and France in particular, long-strained differences of culture are now bound up in a complex web of alarming social crises — systemic poverty, racism, extremism, and terrible violence — which offer no hope of simplistic conclusion.”

“In the United States, whether or not you are legally allowed to eat (or burn, slash, or destroy) an artwork depends on whether said work falls under the protection of the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). In America, property rights generally reign supreme—meaning that, if you own something, you can pretty much do whatever you like with it. But VARA carves out slight exceptions, affording visual artists certain rights over their art long after it has been sold or otherwise ceases to be their property. In this case, they have the ability to prevent their work from being eaten or otherwise destroyed.”

“It’s unlikely that any serious collectors have pondered this rather Seussian question – but it did pop up on Reddit last month, and we decided to get to the bottom of it. The answer, as with most things, is: It depends.”

“This was the year when postmodernism, for long derided as the gimcrack style of shyster capitalists of the 1980s, was well and truly rehabilitated. (In this it followed on the heels of brutalism, which was long derided as the inhuman style of arrogant socialists of the 1960s.) Historic England started listing postmodern works. Books were published. Playful reincarnations of the style – post-postmodernism, perhaps – appeared at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In truth, the late lamented architectural practice FAT was doing much of this before the turn of the millennium, but it takes time for the rest of the world to catch up with true visionaries.”