John D. tells a story of an art professor who sent his students out in winter to the side of deserted roads with nothing but the tools of their craft and they had to create something there and then hitch a ride back. The point was that if you could not create art that would make someone want to slow his car to take a closer look, that if your art didn’t move someone to let you hitch with them, then it is is not good enough. To me there’s a lot wrong with that exercise, not least of which is the privileging of the large-scale, high shock value, gaudy forms over the small and intimate forms of beauty, and ’m sure the story is only apocryphal anyway, but I do take the point. Two points: the first being what Elaine Scarry used to say in class, about the nature of beauty being that which induces a cessation of motion in the seer, and the second a more pragmatic one, which is that at a big scale art fair where the buyer’s senses are cluttered and the eye only roves and skims quickly over what there is, getting him to stop at all, let alone linger over your work, is crucial to a sale, unless attendee is a Herb or Dorothy Vogel.I was meandering through Art Stage half-heartedly yesterday — without Adeline, my usual art fair companion, the experience was less instructive, and admittedly I was not properly looking (I was half-worrying about all the work I need to get done by Monday and haven’t.) And so I discovered something about myself: the things that I stop before instinctively, felt emotionally drawn to to go up to for a closer look, nearly invariably turned out to be by a Korean artist. It’s true I went in the first place because I wanted to see what the Korean galleries brought (rather staid, actually. I knew Chun Kwan Young was being exhibited — but there was only one and it turned out to be an old work)(although very surprised that Galleries Hyundai brought a large Lee Ufan work — he seems both too well-known and too ‘establishment’ to be here.) but even so I was startled to realise how much my preferences today, unconsciously, have been influenced by my four years working with the Korean community, and not only that, how much I had unconsciously retained from the many small Korean art exhibitions I used to visit — something out of the corner of my eye, something I didn’t even like, would make me think: that one looks like it could be by a Korean artist who exhibited in Singapore within the last 3 years — and it would, in fact, be so, something from the same series. I had not thought the Koreans had so infiltrated my tastes.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird