Word: picassos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Picasso is obviously the focus of an incredible biography industry. Picasso as a subject seems never to end as a fascination maybe not for your generation, but for an older generation. And what's interesting to me is that this Picasso, who after all did do something pretty great--cubism--immediately afterward begins to do something which many people would normally feel is not really great: namely a whole career as a pasticheur. So after cubism he becomes this super imitator of Ingres, Corot, Renoir, Poussin...
...course then there's a kind of irony that he's the center of this biographical fascination, and yet he is working at leeching away the substance of a unified subject. So, for me Picasso poses the interesting art historical problem of what counts as an explanation, I've come up with an explanation I would call symptomatic, which has more to do with the structure of what happened. A symptom is about a kind of conversion of something that's internal which then interacts with something external to coalesce in a certain kind of formation...
...Talking about this reminds me of last summer's "Picasso and Portraiture" show at MoMA, which was organized around Picasso's biography and almost completely ignored the issue of style. Although this approach seems out of place in the contemporary critical climate, I wonder if it develops from a real practical need for a narrative structure, similar to an undergraduate's desire for a chronological art history survey. Maybe the public coming to MoMA would find this narrative easier to deal with than a show that grappled with a more complex issue like style. Do you think that this kind...
...have found the Picasso biography industry incredibly damaging, because it diverts one's attention from much more important issues. And pastiche seems to me to be one, especially when dealing with the role of pastiche in postmodernism and our contemporary experience of culture. Given that, to ignore the issue of pastiche or to write it off and say the great master can take whatever he wants and use it as grist for his mill simply ignores a real and pressing problem...
...issue of Picasso's stylistic appropriation and contemporary post modernism seems especially appropriate to your work, given your past writing and October's theorizing of post modernism and visual practice in the eighties. I'm interested to know, however, if you still see a place for critical writing on really contemporary art in October...