(Thank you for the patience, the comments, the e-mails and links. I appreciate it all.)

Should we resist the myth of an art without a context?
Doris Solcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate’s Turbine Hall has sparked controversy for an unusual reason: one blogger found her work to be much better than what the artist had to say about it:

There is little in the world of art more deflating (…) than hearing an artist tell you what a work represents.

Considering the way Solcedo appears to have been talking about the work, it seems only fair to consider it a turn-off. You get this huge, rich piece, and a comment, a perspective that seems simply poor. One begins to wonder if it’s really worth all the fuss. After all, it’s a difficult exercise to go back from the work to the idea that

Doris Salcedo would like you to know that a crack in the floor represents borders, the experience of immigrants and the experience of racial hatred. She would also like you to know that racism is bad and that Europeans are bad for being racist.

However, I wouldn’t give up on Doris that quickly. For several reasons.
For one, every artist has the right to think of his work what he wishes. And if the work surges from a need to fight racism, then be it. Many a brilliant work of art has been made through a very local inspiration. Why should she censor herself when speaking about it, then? Oftentimes, we can hardly agree with the artist’s point of view, and from time to time the artist herself criticizes her standpoint after a certain lapse of time. But this does not necessarily discredit the work. Rather, it shows how the very limitations of an artist can participate in the creation of wonderful works (for some extreme examples, think of Leni Riefenstahl or the Soviet constructivists).
The artist’s work is the artist’s work. This is not as always as obvious as it might seem, given the various avantgarde adventures into questioning the work as work and/or the artist as the artist, on one hand, and the value the art market seems to give to the meta-work level, on the other. Still, we are free to go back to the work. To the object, the sign, the gesture, the mark. To what we consider of relevance. The work is there to be eaten up, to be devoured no matter what it takes. If we need to abandon the artist to do it, so be it.
I re-read what I have just written, and I don’t always agree with it. The principle is fine, but in practice things aren’t as simple. How can I forget what I hear, what I read, what I see? Whatever the context, it is present. And the less we get from the work, the more we are bound to bind ourselves to what is around it. Which is why a conceptual work is so difficult to isolate from its references. And why a crack can be so many things.
But here are two other points:
//considering we do listen to the artist, even if we don’t want to, let us first go and see the title up. A ’shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. To someone attentive to the context, this can very well be a guide. You might consider it too narrow already, too restraining and bluntly political, but then again, you might just embrace it as a proposed “appreciation reference”. And then, it’s a new game, isn’t it?
//why does a crack need to be so many things? What is this constant necessity we, artists, feel to not say what something is to us? Of course, it can be more than anything in particular. And we don’t want to ruin the experience for the spectator. But then again, it might just come out of a particular urge, question, opinion. What is so unacceptable about admitting that? Does every (good) work of art need to have a hundred possibilities, and does its creator need to embrace them all? Mind you, we are not in the zone of imposed lectures any more, only, maybe, of an honest artist’s statement that gets to the point: this is what I had in mind.

Another issue comes to mind. Considering we do accept the artist’s “pragmatic” and political point of view, and see it as (I’ll dare and use the word) a metaphor of a socially unfair world, what are we left with? What are we supposed to do about it? Will this act change a single thing? What sort of conscience do we develop through these marvelous poetic politics? Or does it chiefly bring us closer to the appreciation of our total incapacity to do anything about what we see? Can this despair be fruitful? And what can this fruit actually be?

Part of the Decampment series by the now 16-year-old photographer Megan Baker.

What I like most about this picture is the grayness.

“As an art-hungry child growing up on the wrong side of the world, I shall be forever grateful to a man called Albert Felton who, when he succumbed to prostate cancer in Melbourne in 1904, left his entire fortune to be managed as a bequest fund. Half the income was to go to public charities, and the other half to the Melbourne picture gallery, later the National Gallery of Victoria.

Someone did this painting… but who?
“The gallery staff have bought wisely with the billion dollars or so that the bequest has brought. I can still remember the first time when, as a small girl, I tiptoed towards a small panel of the Mother and Child limned in jewel colours, set in a dimly lit room of its own, as if upon an altar. It was acquired in 1923 as by Jan van Eyck; it is now reattributed to the Flemish school, on no better grounds than that the Madonna doesn’t sit upon a throne, as she does in other Van Eycks, but upon a cushion. A Monk With a Book in the style of Titian is actually a Titian. A self-portrait by Rembrandt isn’t, but the portrait of Doge Pietro Loredano, thought to be a copy of a Tintoretto, turns out to be the original, after which all the other versions of this famous portrait have been made. Few provincial galleries have had the chance to play for such high stakes, and it is to the credit of the gallery’s directors that they have so often found themselves on the winning side…”

Germaine Greer: Not a Van Gogh, but is it a Rubens? Guardian Unlimited.

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Fompesca 2006

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“It used to be that good-looking waiters and cold plonk were the sole essentials of a good museum opening. Maybe there were some crackers on a tray. These days, though, no such fete is complete without a little curbside controversy, some wacko bit of theater, a harried staff of professional-event duennas and a guest list that can often seem as if it were composed by shredding the White Pages and picking names out of a hat.

Eva Herzigova and Marc Jacobs at the Brooklyn Museum

“Here, then, at the gala opening of the Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, an evening of unseasonal chill and spitting rain, was the obligatory chorus of protesters on Eastern Parkway, raising voices against the developer Bruce C. Ratner, who was being honored that night for his support of the arts at the annual Brooklyn Ball.

To those on one side of the museum’s new glass-walled addition, Mr. Ratner is a deep-pocketed patron and, as the museum’s director, Arnold Lehman, said, “a nice boychick from Cleveland, Ohio.” To those at curbside on Eastern Parkway, he was viewed less benignly, as Satan. Most developers are.

“Atlantic Yards is truly going to make a lot of people miserable,” said one protester, Eleanor Price, referring to Mr. Ratner’s $4 billion plan to refashion downtown Brooklyn into a commercial wonderland of shops, a basketball arena and fanciful buildings by Frank Gehry. “They’re using eminent domain to get rid of a lot of people and to close businesses,” Ms. Price said. “Where are they going to go?”

This Is Not a Sidewalk Bag, The New York Times.

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“Next month in New York, for the first time ever, Christie’s is including a house in a sale of post-war and contemporary art. Along with some multi-million-dollar Rothkos and Warhols will be the Kaufmann House, a minimalist 3,200-square foot residential house in the Californian desert designed in 1946 by one of the leading modernist architects of the day, Richard Neutra.

The Kaufmann House is a minimalist 3,200-square foot residential house in the Californian desert.

“In doing this, Christie’s is marketing architecture as art and expecting the buyer to pay the premium – in this case between $15 million (£7.3 million) and $25 million (£12.4 million).

“Andrea Fiuczynski, Christie’s president in Los Angeles, says they are including it in an art sale because, “not only is it a timeless masterpiece, and the last important example of modernist architecture in the Americas to remain in private hands, but it is also symptomatic of the trend to include design in contemporary art sales. The barriers between the two disciplines have now become blurred…’”

Art sales: is it a house, or a work of art?, The Telegraph UK.

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“David Hockney has given the largest painting he has ever made – a landscape 12 metres long by five metres tall (40ft by 15ft) – to the Tate.

“The work, Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney’s native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter.

Old bloke and painting.

“Although Hockney settled in Los Angeles in 1978, he has always spent Christmas at his mother’s house in Bridlington. Four years ago, he began to work there seriously, splitting his time between Yorkshire and California, with the rolling chalk hills around Bridlington the focus of his art…”

Hockney donates huge work to Tate, The Guardian.

RACINE — For the roughly 40 members of the Wednesday Studio Art Group at Cesar Chavez Community Center, their weekly gatherings provide an opportunity to learn from one another.

Police said Thursday they had visited the prestigious National Gallery of Australia in Canberra as part of a search for the works of an art photographer accused of producing child pornography.

I like to think of myself as a broad-minded fly fisherman. Even after my best efforts have been likened to using a broom handle to fight off a bee, I prefer to think of my angling as a form of art.

May 29 (Bloomberg) — Dealers preparing for Art Basel in Switzerland are hoping wealthy collectors from around the world remain as eager to spend money as they were at record-breaking auctions this month.

Art in Your Eye proudly announces the second year of its amateur songwriting contest.

NEW YORK – Rufino Tamayo’s “Troubadour” was auctioned Wednesday for $7.2 million, more than doubling the Mexican painter’s previous high and setting a new world auction record for Latin American art.