What someone replied to me
The reply I got to my reply on Powhida's blogJesse Patrick Martin responded to my response on Powhida's blog comment section (I enjoyed reading.)
@Maritza: I know it may seem utterly jerkish of me to say so, but your maudlin testimonial doesn't seem like a reasonable justification for WANGA. Actually, it smacks of the same generic tone that most marketing (and reality-show competitions) deliver: inspirational, "unpretentious" pap that appeals to the alienated-yet-family-loving consumer. Oprah would approve.I mean, WANGA's casting-call for the 2nd season has a similarly irritating, aspirational earnestness to it: "We want voices that believe in their art and want the world to know who they are and what they can do." And remember: Abdi won because of his "heart." Please. This all sounds like sentimental, "emotional" advertising copy 101, and it's bad news if this is the default tone of where the "broadening discourse" of art is heading. I'll slit my wrists with a Hallmark card.Maybe Powhida's "rant" isn't any better, but at least it's not condescending to those childless, art-world-insider dilettantes with the "luxury" "to stare at walls." C'mon.I'm sure you're lovely (I am, too), but the crisis in the "art world" is no different than the crisis in the real world: there are so many voices and conversations and confusions and standards over how things should be understood that we all just end up perceiving ourselves as being broken up into these little factions. Then, big-money (Bravo, Carrie Bradshaw, etc.) swoops in and chucks it all into the hopper and neatly packages our collective dreams, struggles, accomplishments, failures, misgivings, whatever into a pretty little paste. Because things are so groundless to begin with, the paste becomes the new point of reference merely because it was made conveniently available to the most people. It's like, great: here we are "talking" about "art" and our relationship to it by way of a twelfth-rate reality-show that actually wrapped-up many months ago. We might as well be communicating via kazoos in a typhoon.
(Jesse also has a blog, and we've discussed a few things in the here in his comment section incl. how I should've come out to say whose work I hated. So I did. Over there.) : )