Recent Comments
Re: “Glassholes”
Whatever your opinion of sarcasm is I think there is a significant insight to take from this article. Fine artist's can end up letting their conceptual choices be dictated by their incidental design ones. Glass is a material with some inherent aesthetic appeal, and it can be easy for a lazy artist to lean on that appeal to make their work look sexier while not necessarily making it better.
It reminds me of a fellow student from my thesis class a few years ago. She made a piece by destroying a bunch of her sketchbook pages, making little samples of homemade paper out of them, and then pinning the samples to the wall in a grid formation. It struck me at the time that the piece's visual impact was really coming from the paper's rough quality and their arrangement into a grid. In terms of design both of these things are very nearly non-decisions on the artist's behalf. A grid has its own visual appeal while essentially eliminating a swath of compositional choices, while the paper's rough quality is attainable without any significant skill.
These decisions didn't detract from the piece, but they were doing a lot of heavy lifting considering how easily they were arrived at.
