Friday, June 16, 2006
OUTSIDERS DECIDE
The Guardian’s Mark Lawson—your patient zero of plastic turkey paranoia—defends the Royal Academy’s accidental chunk ’n’ stick exhibition:
The argument that the selection panel has been stupid - and fooled into elevating a mistake into art - rests largely on the fact that they were not seeing what the artist intended. But an artist’s interpretation of his or her own work has only limited validity; it’s outsiders who decide how it goes down. You can write a play and call it a comedy, but if theatregoers don’t laugh there’s no arguing with them.
The reverse is true of Lawson’s serious opinion pieces. Outsiders decide how they go down.
The vast slate slab supporting its fragment of skeleton has a peculiarity and spookiness that makes it unusual; dismissable as art only by those who believe that good art necessarily requires heavy effort.
A vast slab supporting a fragment of skeleton; that would be the media and its arguments against the war. It ain’t art, Mark, and it involves no heavy effort.