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4.0
What I expected: a book about video art in los angeles in the 90’s
What I got: a book about some artists Kraus was friends with in the 90’s, yet mostly an extensive knowledge of her sadomasochistic practices
I struggle a lot to understand what is now considered to be cool. I think that in Brooklyn, it is considered cool to have read Chris Kraus’ “I Love Dick”, a book I have not finished twice for various reasons.
The artists that Kraus mentions in this book are difficult to find via a google search, which pairs interestingly with what she says about the longevity of artists. It’s interesting to gauge this culture as one of the last local “cool” art scenes in America before the internet displaced everything, and there is certainly a lot of originality to the people that populate this book. But the pretension is thick. I don’t frankly believe that the “cool” that dominated the art scene here, where sentiment and the personal, even the notion of identity, are considered passé, would find contemporary art being made at this moment (2019) to be good or interesting - a large deal of art today hones in on the artist’s identity signifiers. Granted, my understanding of this is very surface level and I am sure ripe to be disproven.
I have lately been feeling that algorithms, lack of leisure time, and on-demand culture services are limiting our scope of what art is and thinking new ideas (you no longer have a DVD collection; netflix provides you with a temporary and terrible library of options - your success as an artist is determined by your follower count.) In Video Green, neoconceptual art prevents anyone outside of the elitist LA art world bubble from understanding or appreciating their work, but the wealth of artists creating individual work is impressive. While I frankly find her depiction of bdsm to be vanilla by today’s standards, the world that she talks about genuinely feels “cool” to me in a way that I don’t really experience in my day-to-day understanding of the world. And one day, when I finish I Love Dick, I too can claim to be “cool” and finally move to New York.
Some of her essays, particularly “Art Collection”, are fantastic.
What I got: a book about some artists Kraus was friends with in the 90’s, yet mostly an extensive knowledge of her sadomasochistic practices
I struggle a lot to understand what is now considered to be cool. I think that in Brooklyn, it is considered cool to have read Chris Kraus’ “I Love Dick”, a book I have not finished twice for various reasons.
The artists that Kraus mentions in this book are difficult to find via a google search, which pairs interestingly with what she says about the longevity of artists. It’s interesting to gauge this culture as one of the last local “cool” art scenes in America before the internet displaced everything, and there is certainly a lot of originality to the people that populate this book. But the pretension is thick. I don’t frankly believe that the “cool” that dominated the art scene here, where sentiment and the personal, even the notion of identity, are considered passé, would find contemporary art being made at this moment (2019) to be good or interesting - a large deal of art today hones in on the artist’s identity signifiers. Granted, my understanding of this is very surface level and I am sure ripe to be disproven.
I have lately been feeling that algorithms, lack of leisure time, and on-demand culture services are limiting our scope of what art is and thinking new ideas (you no longer have a DVD collection; netflix provides you with a temporary and terrible library of options - your success as an artist is determined by your follower count.) In Video Green, neoconceptual art prevents anyone outside of the elitist LA art world bubble from understanding or appreciating their work, but the wealth of artists creating individual work is impressive. While I frankly find her depiction of bdsm to be vanilla by today’s standards, the world that she talks about genuinely feels “cool” to me in a way that I don’t really experience in my day-to-day understanding of the world. And one day, when I finish I Love Dick, I too can claim to be “cool” and finally move to New York.
Some of her essays, particularly “Art Collection”, are fantastic.