I love Mira Schor's writing and I really enjoyed her recent essay, Reviewing the reviews of “Songs for Sabotage,” with some
help from Leon Golub. Especially her honesty about
inter-generational cattiness, or jealousy of the young.
But what really stuck with me was her
mention of ‘Trite Tropes’ where she seems to be talking about a particular kind
of painting. She describes it like this;
“In
such paintings, figurative and narrative, many of which emerge from BFA and
some MFA painting programs in the US, in direct contradistinction to what one
feels is straining for individualism, for some reason everyone always seems to
look alike, people even all having the same nose, from artist to artist.”
Later she describes
seeing an image that has just such a nose. This particular painting also has,
“… a
highly established faux naive outsider artist style of representation.”
She describes
how she and her colleagues always cull such art from slide juries. Interestingly, she
indicates that this kind of art would have some value;
“… if markers of redeeming
self-criticality and meta-stylistic content were present. “
On the one hand, I
think I know what she means (Is it an Alex-Katz-style nose?). On the other, I’m quite attracted to this kind of
painting. It may even be possible, I'm slightly ashamed to admit it, that this is the kind of painting I do. I
certainly don’t have any redeeming self-criticality or meta-stylistic content.
Also, my mediocre drawing skills often result in a faux naïve outsider artist
style of representation. But then I’m also not making any claims that my
paintings have any value as such. Well, they have value to me, but not to
anyone else, and certainly not in an Art Establishment context.
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