“Because Bowie’s most important lesson was how to be an artist. It’s become a truism that he influenced generations of art-school students and it’s because he was art school for so many.”
Crazy emotions
“Everyone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The small cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is going to be a playground for crazy emotions.”
Por mais que a gente se esforce para imaginar o que seria um cabaré, como o Voltaire, num país europeu resguardado da Primeira Guerra, não é fácil alcançar o que podem ter significado as sessões, as bebedeiras, as apresentações, as criações, as pegações, as experimentações e todas as locuritas dos dadaístas de Zurique.
Tento relacionar com os movimentos e produções contemporâneos meus, pensar no tipo de bar que poderia receber uma revolução cultural, no tipo de artista que bagunçou o padrão de ideias desse trânsito século XX-XI, e não é fácil apostar em nada em especial. Tem um palpite aqui, outro ali, mas identificar alguma força criativa capaz de reconfigurar o comportamento de quem tem necessidade de criar, quando a lógica ainda pede para produzir, é pouca brincadeira.
What can be considered a truly Latin American art and philosophy?
“After years of neglect, this category was revived in the 1960s and ’70s under the pressure of military dictatorships and debates around “dependency theory,” which sought to understand Latin America’s economic underdevelopment and its dependency on the United States. In the arts, debates raged across the continent: If our economy and culture has been imported from Europe, how can the South overcome this position of being a bastard copy of the North? How can we know what is or is not properly ours? What can be considered a truly Latin American art and philosophy? Or as Marta Traba would ask: Can Pop art occur in Latin America without the existence of a truly accessible mass culture? In the midst of this debate, the category of the anthropophagus reemerged as a way to reclaim the mestizo and anthropophagous nature of the South’s intellectual production, and offered a means for reworking Euro-America concepts without any need to “be authentic,” and without being predestined to represent “cactus, parrots, and palm trees.””
part of the very mass culture
“The art system is thus on its way to becoming part of the very mass culture that it has for so long sought to observe and analyze from a distance. Art is becoming a part of mass culture, not as a source of individual works to be traded on the art market, but as an exhibition practice, combined with architecture, design, and fashion—just as it was envisaged by the pioneering minds of the avant-garde, by the artists of the Bauhaus, the Vkhutemas, and others as early as the 1920s. Thus, contemporary art can be understood primarily as an exhibition practice. This means, among other things, that it is becoming increasingly difficult today to differentiate between two main figures of the contemporary art world: the artist and the curator.”
art and illustration
“In 1901, for example, Bok offered reprints of Ladies Home Journal illustrations (without text) for sale to the public. The notice stated that the reproductions (by W. I. Taylor), if framed, were ‘works of art fit to hang beside any painting’. [...]
Artists and editors were conscious of vocational differences between illustrators and career painters. Nevertheless, the practices of Curtis, Bok, and Lorimer contributed to a blurring of borders between art and illustration on the part of the general public, who framed the pictures of and for whom such covers signified ‘art’. ”
John Sloan, "The Football Puzzle" (outubro de 1901)