[lbo-talk] art world in crisis!

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Jan 30 19:51:31 PST 2007


``I mean the first thing the Bad Subjects and Pulp Culture crowd did was positively sniff and point out that graphic artists are NOT artists. And you will find the same thing in plenty of books: people who make art for commercial purposes simply CANNOT be artists...''

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You must have confused me with somebody else. When BS was alive, I was in the middle of putting together a graphic design portfolio and it took a lot of serious art skills to do. Of course there were gatekeepers in ad agencies since they specialized in defining their own look, their own area of expertise, their own barn yard of clients. In fact they were extraordinarily tight-assed about it. Their premier speciality was defining capitalism's latest look and feel.

The problem I had was demonstrated work background in computer skills. I realised the portfolio was more or less irrelevant. Somebody else was going to be doing the design work. The job level that was open to me was carrying out those design specs on a computer, which meant mostly lay out and technical skills.

Anyway, I seem to remember Analee and others were into punk, gross-out art, off-beat eroticism and other things. I was not interested in that stuff, but it never stuck me as not-art. On the other hand, even if I didn't like it much, I learned from it.

CG



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