More on Gursky
More commentary about the new Gursky show and reviews of the show. How "meta".
Tim Atherton: Is Gursky Spent?
Edward Winkleman: ...Or the Inevitable Dulling of One's Edge
Tim Conner: Getting to Gursky
Joerg Colberg: If you treat artists like entertainers...
AFC: Chelsea Gallery Crawl, Part Three
Jon Bakos: Gursky and the Crewdson Effect
Joerg takes issue with the expectation that artists are being treated like entertainers, that we approach each new show the way we would a new musical album. Can they keep cranking out the hits? First, art and entertainment have always been intermingled and I think most people would be hard pressed to say that Gursky's in particular isn't entertaining in some significant way. In a world that mixes high and low culture so freely, it's difficult to make the argument that there are pure arts and pure entertainment. I think what Saltz was commenting on, and I was as well, is the difficulty an artist faces when a certain mode of working becomes a signature style and breaking out of that mode to grow in new directions is increasingly difficult. Oddly, the example that always comes to mind for me is Bob Dylan's risky transition from acoustic to electric instruments in 1966, a move that alienated many of his greatest fans. But then, Dylan's only an entertainer, so I guess that's not really applicable.
In an old interview, Gursky comments briefly on his intentions:
Yes, my pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture. Apart from the constantly recurring elements I have already mentioned, another aspect occurs to me which explains the way my pictures function. You never notice arbitrary details in my work. On a formal level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall organizational principle.
