Thursday, October 15, 2009

Letter RE: The UNrepresented show - never, ever start a sentence with the word "Indeed"

The SF Reporter printed my letter to the Ed, regarding its show review.
Review here.

My pissy little letter:
Thanks for the scandalous revelations about the affair between art and commerce; sorry the reviewer skipped the show. Who doesn’t love a good, condescending lecture, especially one fueled so freely by the reviewer’s feelings of adequacy? True, one needs to weigh one’s desire to please with one’s desire for expression. Now that avant-garde has been reduced to a marketing term, the distinction between the edge and the middle is sometimes a matter of exposure. No one required an apology on behalf of those who serve the target demo, especially the artists who scrape, hammer and toil in the DMZ between curators hustling to make the rent and the battle-weary art investors. But lighten up; it’s only a title. How could anyone take even the most cursory stroll through Shearburn and fail to be charged by the interior force and ferocity in that work? Readers should not miss this opportunity to survey some of Santa Fe’s most accomplished young artists—Chris Collins’ wildly sensual and confident sculpture, Tuscany Wenger’s exquisite and idiosyncratic figurines, Leslie Ayers’ commanding, almost industrial paintscapes: just three of many works in the series, all of which are perfectly able to speak for themselves and saying so much. Link.