Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.
When I've worked with established artists, I've naturally been more restricted, but you still have to take risks and push yourself to do something different.
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
If we imagine that the only right that we have is to make commodifiable objects, then we limit our practice, and we limit the great potential for an understanding between collectors, curators and galleries.
Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.
When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.
Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.
It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Artists who take on curatorial activities have the advantage of negating the professional hurdles and limitations comprising institutions.