Opening: 2009 South Florida Cultural Consortium

Last evening’s opening of the 2009 South Florida Cultural Consortium at FAU’s Schmidt Center Gallery and Ritter Gallery brought out the students, faculty, and local art lovers (and haters) from the region. Brandi Reddick said a few words at the opening along with FAU’s Dean of Visual and Performing Arts. A few of the artist awardees were in attendance but, quickly dashed off into the darkness of the night. Hopefully, I’ll get another chance to speak with them about their awards and future plans and projects.

It wasn’t surprising, of course, to hear a few negative words regarding the selections, based in large part upon the conceptual nature of some, not all, of the works. As an example, most of us are familiar with the woven sculptures of Frances Trombly. According to the intense words directed my way, her work as well as all the other work in the exhibition was “manipulated and controlled by the marketplace, collectors, and their [denizens]. None of these artists have any freewill and therefore, nothing they create can be called art.”

When asked to agree I posed the question as to which artist had a gun up to their head and was being told what to create, the argument went off into what sounded like a blanket, cut-and-dry indictment of what we call contemporary art. This artist (who shall remain unnamed) continued by saying that art should be understood by everyone and should be in the service of the audience (who was left unclearly defined).

Since I recently saw this artist at a new “vanity gallery” in Ft. Lauderdale (a gallery where the artist pays for wall space, creates their own marketing and promotion), I assume the collecting audience at that type of gallery may be one of the main audiences in his discussion.

At any rate, this blog is not here to convince an extremely conservative viewpoint into more of a middle ground, but I would invite this artist to let us have a look at his work for the sake of comparison.

A more extensive look at this exhibition will come later when we have images.