It's been a somewhat surreal week so far, and yesterday I felt as if I'd woken up with an queasy hangover feeling (this time not a real one) after agreeing to appear on a NZ infotainment program entitled SevenSharp which is catching heaps of non-stories and puffing them up so you don't have to... At any rate, I agreed to dash down to TePapa to speak with presenter Heather du Plessis Allan who proceeded to ask boldly uninformed (and factually dubious) questions regarding the work now on view of veteran NZ artist (and 2013 Venice Biennale representative) Bill Culbert. No contextual information was really allowed into the satirical hatchet job non-story configured to mostly get out the tired old complaint that art shouldn't be publicly funded for large sums (that such funding is decreasing sharply and that such sums are not very large proportionally was not discussed at all.) Yet another example of slipshod, disdainful coverage of art. On a positive note, perhaps there is so much anger marshalled against (even outwardly poetic, heavily abstracted) art because it still harbours a genuinely radical potential to disrupt expectations.
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