THE LOOP

From the erosion of land art to the rise of fake art in the US, stay in the loop with what RealTime editors are reading about this week.

For what it reveals about continuing tension between analogue and digital in photography, Keith recommends this NYT article:

‘Perpetual Revolution’ Shows Artists Shaping Their Time, New York Times.

“‘Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,’ looks different from shows past because digital media — smartphone videos, Twitter outtakes, Instagram feeds — outnumber photographic prints.

“The embrace of the digital was probably inevitable for the [International Center of Photography], an institution that clearly doesn’t want to freeze into a yesterday-museum. But it necessitates a rethinking of old ideas. It requires seeing photography as part of a larger, amorphous category, one morally up for grabs, called visual culture. And it requires recognizing that in the digital present, visual culture does more than reflect reality: For better and for worse, it creates it.”

Lauren wonders what the rise of fake art means for Australian artists in the Trump era.

Richard Prince Just Showed Artists a Way to Fight Trump. And May Have Cracked Open a New Contemporary Art Code Too? Vulture.

“Perhaps all the living artists in the Kushner-Trump collection might disown their work, say it is ‘fake,’ making it instantly worthless (in addition to being an aesthetic and political slap in the face). I couldn’t help agree with all of them that having one’s work owned by the Trumps does somehow taint the work, almost negating it already. But even if this en masse disowning is only an isolated action, limited to those artists lucky enough to live off their work, just a drip in the middle of this building shitstorm of a presidency, I gleaned an artist trying to take back his name, his work, do something, anything.”

Did anyone see this coming? We ponder the end of 20th century land art as we know it when climate change ‘desiccates’ Spiral Jetty.

As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, “Spiral Jetty” May Be Marooned, Hyperallergic.

“Comparing a Google Earth screengrab of Spiral Jetty taken by Hyperallergic in 2014 to one today shows a…dramatic movement of the shoreline away from the sculpture.”

RealTime issue #137 Feb-March 2017