I've been researching Green Chile Chorizo, a recipe originating in Toluca, Mexico so I have read. I want to pair a red, green and white chorizo for a project/tasting coming up. The white recipe may be elusive, since there aren't many white meats, but we'll see. As I've been postponing more and more this cooking venture I've thought a lot about what my last post detailed. I feel it's all based in my inner dialog as an artist, but this attitude also reigns prominently in the art world at large as well.

This argument addresses IMHO art with intention versus making "consensus-friendly decoration", as the Guardian blogger Jonathan Jones puts it. I think that might be the case. I am reminded of what some friends said once, that..."the audience for artists is other artists." In my last post I mentioned Damien Hirst, the quintessential famous wealthy successful artist. I noticed today that he held an actual show of paintings done with his own hand and critics tore him apart. It was partly that he showed his work next to works by master painters, and partly that the guy just doesn't have the talent to make technically skilled art. He even said of his own color spin paintings that they were "basically meaningless." Maybe collectors don't care, but then it's obvious that an investment in art is not in meaningful expression, but in a commodity no different from a credit default swap. It turns out that skill does matter in some cases.

This brings me to other aspects of art as commodity like Jeff Koon's recently unveiled art car.

This is a real car, I think. I actually don't know, but I saw a picture of him sitting on the real thing. Yes he's rich, and yes his work is vapid. These works, Koons' and Hirst's, are signs of how strongly object and commodity are still held together, and how empty they are despite the dollar value. I hear not that MOMA is now collecting performance much like you collect a painting. They collect the instructions on what it is and then re-stage the performance when they like. How strange is that? Something that is temporal by nature is forced to become a commodity. Then they can sell it, even though it's essentially non-existent other than when it took place. It's like the shower you took today becoming art and then someone selling the idea that you took a shower to someone else. Then they pay a young sexy New Yorker to take a shower in the same circumstances and call it equal to the shower you took. Maybe there's some inherent genetic predisposition by humans to need to associate monetary value to each and every thing, but I don't know that I get this compulsion.

Now our art world is blogging/tweeting heavily about a new TV show called Work of Art, which is basically a competition by artists to one-up each other and get a big bag of money for their efforts, and maybe for being a good artist. It's so strange that this is what they claim will bring appreciation of art to the masses, making artists perform akin to fear factor or iron chef. Why not make artists cook against one another and then be forced to eat all the food before running an obstacle course? It makes about as much sense as the real show.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, nor am I sure where to go with art in general. It's not to avoid objects for the sake of it, but more to think about what an expression is at its core and why we need objects to convey that expression. Art objects are great, and you'll see that in my apartment that I surround myself by them. I just like to think about these conundrums, and the daily occurrences in the art world. When I read about ideas about reformulating art in society both within and without capitalism, like in the new e-flux journal 17, it really gets my gears going. This makes me wonder about all this stuff we make and what we do with it. What the value of this stuff is, and what the purpose of over-valued stuff is too. I need to get a few tomatillos and I'm going to make some Green Chorizo, inspired by Rick Bayless. That is something I can put a fork in, tell it's done, and then eat knowing that I enjoyed it because taste-buds lie way less than art does.

Resisting Dematerialisation with Chorizo and Arizona Ice Tea

Over the weekend I spoke with my brother about the direction that my art might partially be moving towards involving potentially performative or interactive aspects of cooking along with more typical art objects. As seen in Marina Abramovic's MOMA retrospective "The Artist is Present", performance is finally blowing up after years of occurring but never becoming mainstream (and I hate to be the one to exemplify this show along with EVERY other art blogger). Just look at the abundance of college art curricula that don't even address performance as a practice. Its specialization, tending more towards theater and dance, have left it in a limbo that many avoid grappling with, and the preponderance of bad performance art hasn't probably helped either.

Abramovic claims that performance art edges on theater, but that it is real rather than pretend. Here's a post-show interview that is kind of interesting. I'm all for it really, despite the fact that I have rarely if ever seen performance art in person. There's an excitement to it; towards it's bold and courageous display in front of audiences who may or may not even understand what is taking place. People probably have trouble with interpreting lots of art, visual, audible, or performance, but that's not the point. I'm eluding to this renewed push for relational art, where experience is the conveyance of meaning, not objectification in a white walled space. Either way is a perfectly fine way of expressing yourself, but there's a growing trend here that I feel compelled to address, and one that ties to many things going on around me.

Art and life is curiously redirecting culture towards limited edition commercial object making (much of traditional art making, ie. prints, paintings, sculptures, etc.) versus the visual and audio culture that we readily consume becoming more and more ubiquitous and available in infinite reproductions on the web. Curiously I see it tying into the financial meltdown, art pricing, and the new wave of young artists finding their way out of school into the marketplace. What I've seen in Kansas City is a young push to capitalize on commodity, to make a screen printing business in basements, or to create objects gallery ready and with that certain glossy presentation that says too clearly that they are completely comfortable with art objects as collector fodder. It seems that art and consumer culture are vying to become one, and it's apparent as well in Hirst's huge self-purposed auction or in Murakami's hand bags. Art is simply business, and ideas can sometimes be subverted in the name of the sellable.

I saw an article from The Telegraph today about an upstart book-on-vinyl production operation. It seemed like a gimmick at best, but note the printed fine art object combined with the irrelevant collector technology. How many times can one listen to an audiobook anyway? When it was done in the past, there weren't cassettes or libraries full of CD's that you can borrow once and return. This is what they claim is the purpose of this,

The Underwood discs, scheduled to appear twice a year, represents part of the growing resistance to the dematerialisation of art. By emphasising tactility, scarcity (each issue is limited to 1,000 copies) and physical beauty, it offers something that can’t be digitally replicated.

Is there truly a "resistance to the dematerialisation of art"? With all innovation there is resistance to some degree. What is the value of continuing to make art objects? Lately I was in a gallery opening and people seemed equally invested in the experience of drinking free beer as much as they were in the art-gazing. What about the value of said objects? When the economy is down, and people can't buy art, should producers of art alter their approach to fit the economic realities? This I haven't seen, and its obviously represented by the multi-thousands-of-dollars that a young person's paintings are marked at here in Kansas City. Artists were taught in recent years a pricing model that isn't relevant anymore in the wake of the financial collapse. People aren't buying art, so should we still be pursuing the showing practice of white walled high-priced art displays? I'm not saying everyone should be producing limited edition stereographs of urban eccentric naked young people (if you want to pursue that idea, you can have it!), but what are we in the art game for? There are angles to pursue to make money, and there are ideas to demonstrate through our actions as artists whatever our practice, and when we go one way in an effort to demonstrate the other, these confused efforts only result in art that doesn't say what it intends, and thus isn't as valuable as something made for more commercial reasons. Is this making any sense?

So I guess where I come to is a place where making food as art has potential to satisfy all parts of the issues that I have addressed. I can offer an experience through eating, something that to me is the most relevant and ubiquitous of all experiences besides death and sex. And if I like I can commodify this approach, but neither arm of this will interfere with the other, I hope.

As for the overpriced art being pumped out across the globe, I hope that part of the education system that guided these artists into the art world has prepared them for the reality of having to fight to survive in a system that pays less and less and supports less of the most valuable expressions being made today.