Yesterday I went with my wife and son to visit the Victoria & Albert`s Museum exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970. The aim of the exhibition was quite clear:
How have the finished and unfinished revolutions of the late 1960s changed the way we live today and think about the future?
I was very much looking forward to visiting the exhibition. It is SO timely, and SO needed, I thought.
I have often criticized artists who hide behind “my work speaks for itself” or “it’s up to the viewer to interpret my work”. Nice try, but that’s bullshit.
Of course, anyone can interpret anything when exposed to an artwork! But the artist should at least make an attempt to explain the meaning behind a piece. No matter how self-explanatory (or obscure) it might be. It’s not “restricting the viewer”, it’s guiding; suggesting is not imposing.
INTERVIEW with JORGE CORTELL, curator
By Airida Rekštytė – November 4, 2016
According to your profound theoretical education (sic) it will not be difficult to present us in short your intentions for organizing this event.
When did the idea of making this exhibition occur and what inspired it?
I have spent years as activist defending free software and online privacy, and opposing censorship.
During a dinner with the director of an event that focuses on those themes (the Internet Freedom Festival, also known as Circumvention Festival), I told him how it would be a nice challenge to try to convey the main messages of the Festivals themes into an art exhibition.
Walking towards my London Shoreditch office
to meet the Swiss investor and his impeccable suit,
leaving the City bankers’s coffee-holding fast pace behind,
I notice the absence nobody seems to
Where did he go?
His sleeping sack and pillow still on the sidewalk
as annoyingly positioned in the corner as always
But he’s gone
.
I wonder and I worry
his failing body, almost as absent as his lost gaze
Yesterday we went to see a couple exhibitions at Somerset House, in London.
The first exhibition we saw was “TINTIN: Hergé`s Masterpiece”. Basic but obviously appealing, it was too crowded to be enjoyable.
The second one was “Big Bang Data”.
While undoubtedly interesting, especially for someone who works in, teaches, and loves bid data and technology like myself, to me the most interesting aspect of this exhibition is that everyone who was there had already experienced the subject.
December 2 I went to the Tate Modern with the whole family, since my mother-in-law was visiting from overseas.
I really like how it is set up according to concepts, rather than chronologically, by artists, or by styles. It feels more like an art gallery (which it is) than a museum. It puts things into the subjective focus of the curator. I wonder how much the artists themselves would agree with the collection parameters, but it definitely is a welcome departure from the more traditional museum logic.
Yesterday, after spending the day at a tradeshow in Düsseldorf, on my way by train to the hotel in Mülheim, I stopped in the town of Duisburg, which was on my way, because I heard they were setting up a Christmas market. The market was indeed being set up, but it was still closed, so I decided to go back to the station. To avoid the sprinkling rain I took the 901 tram at König-Heinrich Platz.
