Trends

  
Went to a talk the other night given by the director of a well known university art gallery in a rather classy Southern town.  He discussed several recent exhibitions he had curated and what became obvious very quickly was that obsessional art is still very popular. One show was all about patterns made on the floor with thousands of pounds of salt in a little salt pourer.  Try it for yourself!  Take a box of salt and doodle on the floor...If you do this with a sewing machine on fabric, you can create similar patterns, but it won't be art till you reach about 500 square feet!

  Gompertz, in his book What Are You Looking At, suggests that the current art "-ism" is entrepreneurism.  Entrepreneurism in art is defined as the ability to make art, market art and build a profitable art business.  And being able to build a hugely recognisable trade mark - in Hirst's case it's currently The Painted Dot.  Hirst has painted dots for a long time - the paintings look like color charts only the colors are in rows of circles rather than rectangles.  He made his name with the shark in formaldehyde, and flies feasting on a cow skull but these are less marketable on a world wide scale than the dot paintings.  Amazingly he managed to persuade a well known gallery with premises in most of the world's art capitals to put on a solo show of his dot paintings all around the world simultaneously!  What a brilliant marketing ploy. He's a marketing strategist par excellence and there is something very obsessive about the dots too - though I doubt he crouches down and makes very many of them himself.

Rusty Answer (detail)

So how does this relate to the art quilt world?  I think we do see evidence of both of these trends - the obsessionalism has always been evident.  Nothing, if you think about it, is more obsessional than an art form that requires millions of stitches taking months of work.  There is such a meditation involved in repeated simple manual gestures that gradually build up into an art piece.  When I left school I went to get a job at the local chocolate factory, I wanted to be the one that did the squiggles on top of the chocolates. In those days (maybe now too though I've not had a classic box of chocs for a long time, alas) every chocolate had a different pattern on top reflecting its contents.  I thought it would be really neat to sit there with my little chocolate pourer making up all sorts of designs!! (a lot better than salt if you think about it!)...but alas the personnel department told me that people like me "ruined an assembly line".   Just imagine a gallery filled with chocolates !!! a chocolate installation!

Electric Fields (detail)

Obsession and marketability are two of the trends.  But what else?  I'm afraid to say I think it's a certain blandness - there's enough horrible things going on with really scary climate change, the eternal human appetite for dispute and war, and the, alas also eternal, belief that "my religion is the true one and you are an infidel".  So, people don't want to be "irritated" (as my friend described her feelings looking at one of my most recent quilts) by any reminders of these important issues.  Another friend said that he wanted art that calmed him down not aggravated him.

I think I'm going to make a cup of tea...now what about a gallery installation of 4,000 cups of tea? hmmm....
one room with tea and one with chocolate and both very marketable.....
And, if you have been, thanks for reading!!
Elizabeth
PS if you're in or near Athens, GA, this Saturday I'm one of the featured artists at the opening of the Classic Center (2-6); I'm off to buy some salt now....