Well I hope everyone had a good break.. for me it was fantastic as it gave me time to get my work further along the installation train. I was able to secure the gallery so I have worked there almost everyday. I have two weeks left before the big show.. MArch 30 at 8pm.. Gallery 1716 Main Street. I think we will have champagne .. at least one glass to celebrate.

It appears I have at this point 2000 beeswax doorknobs. In the space it doesn't look like much so I am still in manic production. here is a sneak peak at the tumble of doorknobs in situ...

I've just been re-reading Dave Hickey's essays The Invisible Dragon. They are essays on beauty but I was thinking about the relationship of power that he suggests and thought it might be interesting considering what we have been reading etc re who is making decisions about what is art and who get s funding? Hickey’s four essays are wonderfully tangential and in the end they compliment and fit together completing numerous thoughts on our relationship with beauty and its politics. His critique is centered on the institutions that dictate ideas of beauty through dictum, erasure or obfuscation and the trickle down .. power relationships such as granting agencies.
One of the most interesting passages in the first essay was his discussion of the business of “pleasure, power and beauty” He suggests, that as far back as the 16th century, a point at which the power of the church and state as arbiters of meaning was shifting, that” images became mobile” and could be used to support..”doctrines, rights, privileges, ideologies, territories and reputations.” perhaps the NEA and Jesse Holmes read this??? Caravaggio’s The Madonna of the Rosary is cited as an example. Here the artist created an intricate tableau in which the contemporary drama of the day…the authority of the priest as intermediator is played out. But it is clear from the painting the line of authority is drawn like an ellipse between the priests, rosary, the beads and the worshippers. The Madonna is set apart, and she is separate and as such is the symbol of beauty ,the idea of Beauty but not the real. We, the beholders outside the painting respond to the visual instruction of the geometry and are forced to return to this focal point … the hands of the priests and the beads. It is here that Hickey makes the parallel between the priests of the church and the contemporary art institution, the new church and its’ academic priesthood. These are the art bureaucrats who hold the power and insist on mediating “meaning”. He posits that we are so busy looking for “meaning” that we miss Beauty. “Beauty, in their domain is altogether elsewhere, and we are left counting the beads and muttering the texts of academic sincerity.” just a thought?