David Shrigley
Untitled (Fuck Off, I’m a Painter), 2011
Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner
Boston’s #RenoirSucksAtPainting Protesters Say
Exhibiting the Impressionist Is “Aesthetic Terrorism”
by on October 6, 2015
Another day, another protest at a museum. Not against labor conditions, the treatment of museum staff, or kimonos, however, but this time against Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the over-4,000 paintings the French painter executed over his lifetime, and their prominence in museums around the world.
Yesterday, as the Boston Globe reported, a small group of protestors congregated outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston armed with cheese pizza and signs that read, “Renoir Sucks at Painting,” “ReNOir,” and “God Hates Renoir.” The rally was organized by Max Geller, a Brooklyn resident who created the Instagram account @Renoir_sucks_at_painting, on which he posts paintings captioned with why he thinks the painter, well, sucks. The group is calling for the institution to remove its Renoirs from its walls — six are currently on view — and replace them with artists who don’t have “treacly oeuvres,” as Geller, who had traveled to Boston for the event, put it.
Destruction as artistic praxis
a project on iconoclasm and the refusal of images through their negation.
by Mattia Solari
This project investigates iconoclasm tendencies within artistic field and its various, contradictory aspects: refusal, destruction and negation as ways to express the denial of images; maybe these three have been the most useful tool against reification of oeuvres of art and the most ambiguous strategy employed by artists in order to avoid the misuse of their works. To refuse to work (strike), to destroy a work (basic iconoclasm) and to negate it (anti art) or negate the role and the very person of the artist, have all been strategies employed to disavow the abuse of artistic products. In the light of these remarks my goal is to develop an interpretation of a broad-spectrum phenomenon that includes iconoclasm but it is not restricted to its practice and history solely, I want to explore the critical tool of negation of images, among which lies also their destruction, but that can assume also other unexpected forms. This practice of negation can be either symbolic (namely to decontextualize and re-contextualize), a real destruction of an image (iconoclasm) or a refusal of production (retirement or strike); in any case it is self-evident the close relation between the two gestures of destruction and creation: in destroying a thing at the same time you create a value, it is a transubstantiation of intention and purposes, it is a creation from wrecking although in a different system of axiologies.
Lee Lozano
General Strike Piece, 1969
Ed Young
You are doing it wrong, 2015
Courtesy SMAC Gallery
Stellenbosch, Western Cape ZAF – Cape Town, Western Cape ZAF
Bolzano Museion Cleaning Staff Mistakenly Clears Out Art Installation Resembling Party Detritus
October 27, 2015
An installation by Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari, artists from Milan, staged in the Museion museum in Bolzano, was mistaken for refuse from a party and removed by the museum’s cleaning staff, according to Nick Squires in The Telegraph. The janitors, who were told to clean the foyer, started clearing out the “cigarette butts, empty bottles, paper streamers, confetti and discarded shoes and clothing,” even sorting them into recycling, according to Squires.
“Of course we tell staff not to clean away art,” Letizia Ragaglia, the museum’s curator, told a regional newspaper. Luckily, museum administrators caught the mistake before any of the installation’s items were sent to the dump or recycling plants.
THE ARTWORK BY GOLDIE AND CHIARI HAS BEEN FULLY REINSTALLED!
