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A review by aztheninth
Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World by John Seed
1.0
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book as an arc via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
I wanted to like this book. I hoped the author had curated an interesting selection of painters who bent realism and portraiture in their work. I hoped to find out about new artists I would want to follow on instagram. But I was distracted by what I soon realized was a pretentious faux progressive curation of artists. There are around 20 white male artists, 12 white female artists, 5 POC male artists, 0 POC female artists and only 1 artist who openly talked of being in the LGBT+ community. I kept flipping the pages and reading on hoping the numbers would improve. As the writer/editor/curator of this selection of artists, John Seed is just doing lazy biased curating. I was not surprised to find out John Seed is an older white male. There is no excuse in this day and age for those type of statistics in a book supposedly about contemporary artists. Seed has some European artists to make it more "international"but the efforts are flat and empty when there is so little representation of non white western artists or queer artists.
I don't dislike the art or the artists represented and actually was interested in how the artists explained their processes or themes of their works.
I don't want art books that only serve to highlight white artists with the POC artists or queer artists thrown in for "diversity" purposes.
I wanted to like this book. I hoped the author had curated an interesting selection of painters who bent realism and portraiture in their work. I hoped to find out about new artists I would want to follow on instagram. But I was distracted by what I soon realized was a pretentious faux progressive curation of artists. There are around 20 white male artists, 12 white female artists, 5 POC male artists, 0 POC female artists and only 1 artist who openly talked of being in the LGBT+ community. I kept flipping the pages and reading on hoping the numbers would improve. As the writer/editor/curator of this selection of artists, John Seed is just doing lazy biased curating. I was not surprised to find out John Seed is an older white male. There is no excuse in this day and age for those type of statistics in a book supposedly about contemporary artists. Seed has some European artists to make it more "international"but the efforts are flat and empty when there is so little representation of non white western artists or queer artists.
I don't dislike the art or the artists represented and actually was interested in how the artists explained their processes or themes of their works.
I don't want art books that only serve to highlight white artists with the POC artists or queer artists thrown in for "diversity" purposes.