“Color is also a luxury item sold like controlled substances by the ounce or gram. The Greeks don’t call color pharmakon for nothing. The word means color, drug, poison, remedy, talisman, cosmetic, and intoxicant. Art stores supply all of these at once; the ultimate bohemian experience. As the poet Lisa Robertson wrote: “Color, like a hormone, acts across, embarrasses, seduces. It stimulates the juicy interval in which emotion and sentiment twist.” And indeed, the purchase of color is an entirely capricious experience — an art store is a kind of fetish shop offering chromatic luxury in aisles, like a supermarket but with an air of esoteric connoisseurship. A good metropolitan art store is usually an intimidating multistory affair staffed by sullen but knowing art school clerks, with staircases to mysterious and all-encompassing storage rooms. It is set up like a bazaar where shoppers can touch and feel everything before buying, although at Madison Avenue prices. The more you touch it, the more you want it. That new gold lacquer, that little jar of iridescent lilac, that special kind of creamy modeling paste. When was the last time I got past the checkout with a big basket of oil paint for less than a thousand? But I shell it out because I need this equipment and am seduced by the ritual of purchasing it.”
“A week later, on March 18, an exhibition called “Street Art: Banksy & Co” was scheduled to open. The exhibition was organized by the Fondazione Carisbo, a local bank-owned foundation whose president is Fabio Roversi Monaco, the former rector of the University of Bologna, as well as the former president of BolognaFiere, a public-private partnership that organizes exhibitions. In Bologna, the name Roversi Monaco evokes power, money, and banks. The exhibition was expected to display works of art removed from walls with the stated intention of “salvaging them from demolition and preserving them from the injuries of time,” which means turning them into museum pieces, and eventually transforming them into value.”
“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.”
