AnaMRuiz

thank you! I really appreciate that.

I was mostly referring to the inaccuracy of your first sentence, which states: “30 American artists share a national identity, American”. I wouldn’t suggest to change the name of the exhibition, just create a critical discourse around the selection and application of political definitions.

I’m aware that it is common speech in North America to refer to US citizens as Americans, but it is our role as cultural critics to counter imperialist practices, even if they’re only discursive. And that’s why I need to tell you that “American” is not a national identity, but a continental one.
The US imperialist discourse has normalized the employment of the American continental identity to mean exclusively US citizens, effectively silencing the rest of the thirty-four other countries who can claim American continental identity. I think magazines such as The Artifice should not condone this sort of discourse, and us, as Americans of of varied national identities, should combat it too.

Other objects should be considered artwork in order to be inclusive. Reducing the worth of artwork to economics (how much someone would pay for it) is a disservice to the social role of art; unfortunately, this is a position that is widely adopted in North America and Europe. However, this economic valorization is not universal and it should not be treated as such. In Latin America for example, the artist traditionally fulfills a social role of information and debate, and his/her work is understood in terms of the ideas contained in it, and not stylistic concerns which, after all, were mandated by the international market.

It is important to note that the context analyzed in this article is North American and not universal. The patterns of interaction among the artist and the audience vary widely outside of the Western world. In Latin America for instance, the artist and the intellectuals have always had strong roots in the popular audiences that do not rely on familiarity, but instead in political identification. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized the role of the artist/intellectual in these sort of scenarios as “organic intellectuals.” His analysis might be of use to deepen on the topic. Overall, while I do not disagree with the author when referring to the relationship between artists and audiences in North America, the dictum that the personal is not political should not be universalized through discourse, since it ignores the reality of other cultures.

The general audience adoption of ballet can be heavily influenced by education. The most illustrative example I know of this is the Cuban National Ballet, created only fifty years ago, shortly after the Revolution. Before then, Cuba had no ballet, and no popular culture of attending the ballet. But in that half century, an internationally recognized ballet company was created and the Cuban population, regardless of socioeconomic status, became ballet aficionados. How do you do that? Accessibility: lower the prices that act as barriers for lower income individuals to enjoy ballet or opera, and educate the audience to appreciate it.

This article echoes a big push encouraging graduate students in the arts towards entrepreneurial paths. Although I agree in principle, I become exhausted just looking at the postmodern descriptors we now adopt: grad student, researcher, writer…PR Twitter specialist?

This article really made me think about definitions of art prevalent among the general audience and specialized groups. I know a former primary school director who taught art, worked for the government as an arts consultant, and simultaneously affirmed that murals created by students could hardly be classified as art. Why? Because as argued by TheRaptorFence, art -like genocide- must be recognized in the intent of the artist when creating it? Isn’t this a very narrow understanding, affirming all sort of colonial attitudes that divide art into better or worse, according to geopolitics?
Stripping art of its context and presenting it as having universal and quantifiable formal characteristics is, I think, a huge mistake. Yet it is made often, by school teachers and officials and even museum curators, who often perpetuate international political hierarchies through their traditional selection and presentation of sanctioned art work (European, North American, preferably in durable mediums).
And what of the curatorial and institutional interventions that mediate the audience’s experience of art? The artwork does not exist in a vacuum, and very rarely the general public is able to access art that hasn’t been curated and contextualized for them. This mediation is crucial for instance, in priming the audience for how they are going to feel about an artwork.
I don’t want to keep going; I am not an art student. But I am interested now in what do other people think art is, and it was thanks to this article, as much as I disagree with it.