Once upon a time, ‘good’ was a slow, stubborn animal. It required a gatekeeper with a monocle, or at least a gallerist in a black turtleneck running a shoebox space in a neighborhood that hadn’t yet sprouted a juice bar. Taste was an archaeological dig, conducted in dusty libraries and half-empty museums. You had to…
The Problem With Art That Exists Only to Be Photographed
The Selfie Stick and the Sublime You know the posture by now. The slight head tilt, the squint at a glowing screen, that little half-step backward, the tap. It’s the dance of the Instagram-ready gallery-goer, someone for whom the artwork is less a thing to sink into and more a backdrop for their own performance.…
Why Artist Statements Should Be Written by Someone Else
Picture the scene: a gallery opening, wine warm in your hand, a tiny cube of cheese dissolving on your tongue. You pause before a painting that feels like a bruise—all purples and sick yellows. You lean in, genuinely moved, and then you spot it. The laminated sheet on the wall. The artist statement. “My practice…
Let Someone Else Write Your Artist Statement: A Modest Proposal for the Verbally Challenged
Walk into any gallery, any biennial, any artist-run space that smells faintly of turpentine and delusion, and you will find it. It hangs on the wall with all the authority of a museum plaque and all the soul of a dishwasher manual. It is the artist statement. And nine times out of ten, it reads…
Why Someone Else Should Write the Artist Statement
The Tortured Syntax of the Soul There’s a specific dread I feel at gallery openings, and it has zero to do with warm Chardonnay or the existential threat of a stranger asking what I “do.” It hits the moment my eyes drift from the canvas to that tidy laminated rectangle pinned on the wall. The…
A Modest Proposal: Why Artist Statements Should Be Written by Someone Else
The gallery is crisp, white, and reeks of expensive silence. You drift toward a canvas that looks like a furious argument between ochre and despair. Your eye catches the small rectangle of text mounted beside it—the artist statement. ‘My practice interrogates the liminality of post-anthropocentric materiality through a haptic negotiation of memory and erasure,’ it…
How to Tell When a Review Is Just a Press Release With Adjectives
How to Tell When a Review Is Just a Press Release With Adjectives By Iris Delacroix | smirkbox.com The gallery press release is a weird little document. It lands in your inbox, typically on a Tuesday, wrapped in euphemism and institutional pep. It promises an exhibition that’s “thought-provoking,” an artist who’s “internationally recognized,” work that…