#in situ 2023 you WILL always be famous to me

[merryfortune]

my two cents on the modern art discourse as an art gallery worker who loves modern art and yet works at an art gallery which has soft banned modern art from displaying.

People hate ugly things.

They automatically consider something ugly to be bad.

If it was good, it was beautiful and if it is beautiful it is good.

Deeper messages? No thank you, I want to look at pretty things and I will get pissy at you if you explain that the trash on the floor (<- actual quote I was told to to my face about one of the artworks)

Even though I connected every artwork in that exhibition back to dadaism and modern art of the 80s, I wasn't able to change a single mind of someone who had already decided they hated it. They didn't care that the artist's praxis was about sustainability and using local sources to make her own paint & dye, they wanted to see landscapes made from cheap acrylics. I was in agony that the average Joe who came in didn't know who Barbra Kreuger was or who Marcel Duchamp was. They didn't want to know.

I also think anti-youth sentiment, so many people complained that it was too inner-city student, and "I'm not racist, I don't use slurs but those blackfellas who leech off gov-lov need to get a job, boohoo the stolen generation didn't have an impact!" type racism also plays a part. Like the "trash on the floor" comment was made about an Indigenous artist's work which was named in reference to the removal of certain, racist policies affecting First Nations people.

I loved these artworks, I tried to get other people to see why I loved them so much but it was an uphill battle I lost. But I did get to put my cunt of an aunt in her place so thank you for that at the very least.