the only good one is a dead one

Quite similar to the Tate Triennial installation, but not it

That French guy who invented ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (the art theory based on a period of sustained economic growth and a rising art market, where everyone pretended that they weren’t trying to sell something to some rich man with hands on his face, YOU CAN’T BUY YOUTH OLD MAN, BUY ANOTHER HOUSE OH NO, PROPERTY MARKET CRASHED NEVER MIND) has curated a show based on a new made up word (my favourite recent made up word is ‘Factiality’, but that is another kettle of theory entirely, and is technically a translation of a French term {always French, why is that?}), ‘Altermodern’. Altermodernism is an, ‘in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation’. Not entirely untrue I suppose, but entirely unnecessary.

But someone else can do the review. I would simply like to ask a question’. And that question is, what the fuck Seth Price?

What the fuck is on the wall Seth Price? What the fuck is it made of? And what the fuck is it meant to be?

Oh right Seth Price, ‘images from the internet … cut from luxuriously exotic wood and coated in plastics to create works resembling bespoke design objects’.

What the fuck Seth Price?

Check Seth Prices website

You can download a lot of his essays, there are links to websites he is involved with, and a link to rent his films (though $50 seems a bit shit for a film without a proper story, know what I mean? Not like ‘The Crying Game’! Crazy shit man, I won’t spoil the ending. IT SINKS! I’m joking, that is the ending to ‘Titanic’, another must see. I saw it three times, by accident! Weird eh? First time I held a girls hand in the dark, second time I shouted, ‘LOOK AT THOSE BANGERS!’ when Winslet got her brags out, and the third time was with my parents, and nothing interesting happened). This is all presented in that affected, ms-dos, no fuss, geek-retro-web style we all love.

Also, one of his essays, ‘Dispersion’, is the basis for a group exhibition at the ICA, in which Seth Price took part. I won’t quote it (or bother to re-read it), but it has some interesting ideas about using capitalist modes of mass distribution to subvert the system of an object obsessed art market. Good idea. The film shown in the exhibition was on unlimited, low cost distribution, and featured a mashing together of loads of his previous video work. I like that lack of respect for your own art work, and the attitude to making work in general.

Let me just re-quote the blurb for the piece at Altermodern

‘images from the internet … cut from luxuriously exotic wood and coated in plastics to create works resembling bespoke design objects’.

What the fuck Seth Price?

This seems exactly like the sort of dead-end Post-modernism that Bourriaud is so smug about finishing off. The sort of art market, object-fetish, money-critical work that people have made for the last ten years without any sort of perspective on the ribs they must have had removed to make such a horrific position possible.

Again, not

They don’t resemble bespoke design objects Seth Price. They are bespoke designer objects. ‘Exotic’ wood just means rare and expensive wood. And no one gives a shit that the images are ‘ripped’ from the internet. I didn’t even know what they were (though, I didn’t look at them for very long, so they might be LOLCATZ!!! Who knows?), and where do you think designers get their ideas from? They don’t just magic the little bastards out of thin air. Pointing out the lack of originality in the culture/design industry is just massaging an over worked tautology. Seth Price, you are making the meaning explicit to the viewer in the worst possible way. They are from a private collection, which is fine, art is sold and bought, but you have made an aesthetic object, to be bought. You have then half-charged it with ‘concept’, so the collector can feel clever, while looking at a lovely, abstract, wall hanging. It is at odds with what you write in, ‘Dispersion’, and like a lot of the work in this exhibition, it is completely at odds with even the possibility of a, ‘re-definition of modernism’.

What the fuck Seth Price?
What the fuck Nicolas Bourriaud?

What the fuck, everyone.

Quotes from ‘Altermodern: Exhibition Guide’.
www.dekersaint.co.uk