Some Things Never Change

After a period of intense archiving in my studio/office, I have to return to the digital world, well, for a little while anyway; but I discovered many old art magazines that are full of names I don’t remember and a few I’ve come to know well. Um, well, one, no two. Alex Katz is always in there and shows no signs of withdrawing and Warhol of course. Looking at a few copies of October and some other very cool theory periodicals, I was noticing what used to be indispensible for the artists’ kit bag. It has gotten slimmer like a laptop. We aren’t encumbered by these big factory space studios anymore or these big books by Umberto Eco. We aren’t covered in paint any more. We aren’t smoking like chimneys and drinking like fish. We don’t have three ring binders bulging with slides. We are dancing around with our laptops and answering the cell phone. In brief, we are like everybody else. Of course there are artists who live in the past and consider that everything about the art-life is meant to be outside mainstream culture. But, maybe now that mainstream is so weird as to be artful – apart from Kinkaids at the mall – we can join the ranks of the middling. The only constant is that art is still bought by the rich and fed by the rich and that all the channels used to sanctify that process is still held dear and fought over. So, after much ado, my small piece of accumulated knowledge is that, Some Things Never Change. Oh, I take back what I said about Kinkaid. That is pretty weird too.