Monday, November 3, 2008

Bad Painting -- a fantasy

Forgive me a little detour. As I walked around the myriad fairs, museums, and galleries in Berlin last week, I started to be consumed by the idea of fantasy collections. I'm surprised that there aren't more virtual collections. In an art world consumed by photo books, actually owning the work seems less and less important. Why not just make a book of what you'd like your collection to be? In this vein I had a deviant thought; who says that a collection has to be good? Walking through the halls of all these fairs, I saw yard after yard of bad painting. Could one make a collection that only contained bad painting? What would be the taxonomy of this idea? Would there be just as much disagreement about this collection as there is about "great" collections? How would you present your idea to artists? Maybe one could even commission bad work. It could be a goal, a movement! Sure enough, as I was sitting outside of Liste refining my idea, a happy new owner walked past carrying one of my first fantasy purchases for the new collection. I doubt if he had the same curatorial concept in mind when he wrote the check for his new canvas. Hmmm.

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