correspondents on Facebook raised the issue today, of big big art shows, my immediate response was as follows: "viewing/reading becomes a fly-past -- best to stop a while with one or two or three things - jostled in blockbuster shows by the fly-past-ers with & without their cameras - like don't you want to read the whole poem or novel or hear the whole sonata?-- painting though not time-based, takes time to 'grasp' & for scholars & artists takes time to 'digest' which is like 'memorising' - question is who are big shows mounted for?"
If Sir Joshua Reynolds wittily remarks that seeing so many together emphasises the artist's faults, one cd reply & the artist's virtues likewise. Reynolds remark needs to be contextualised within the attemopt to determine a rational basis for an over-arching Style that cd be qpplied to all kinds of subjects/genres - a meta-style, so to speak -- as a basis for teaching in the Academy.
Since there has been a big shift in art thinking towards process rather than market-product, the advantage of big shows of artists who think that way is that every work can be seen as part of a larger life-work not detachable master-pieces.
But the valuation of art works and artists that makes possible the economics of a big show is in fact that of the market-place. Which is not often that of active artists, unless they are re-working previously established validated marketable styles. Fashions in marketabilityy also determine which Old Masters attract large numbers of culture-tourist visitors & that is partly determined by collusion between museums and travel-tourism merhants.
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