Intimate Art


There is a consensus about certain issues and how they have affected the direction of art in recent years. The discourse of advanced art, whether formal, conceptual, or ideological, has clearly shifted from where it was four decades ago. Has it been the result of expansion or contraction? It is difficult to say. Perhaps the art world is moving like an undulation that is beyond our tactile experience.

As Guy Debord predicted more than thirty years ago, art has entered into the realm of the spectacle and is disseminated through an omnivorous appetite for publicity, fashion, and marketing. Buying art has become a competitive desire, more important than owning it, and like everything else in our globalized “culture,” art has become expendable. We seem to have lost the notion that advanced art can be significant for reasons other than its market value.

Media complacency has virtually extinguished our understanding of art as belonging to a history, any history. Art has been replaced by a constellation of logos. Like satellites hovering around us, we perceive images as if there were no continuity or relationship between them, as if there were no tactile means to understand their significance, as if there were no important ideas that might provoke a new way of looking at art outside the institutional ramparts that safeguard our vision from what is not deemed theoretically correct…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 85, May-June 2001.




Robert C. Morgan