
Outing the Inside: On Louise Bourgeois - prismatic
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/louise-bourgeois-outing-inside/
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jhiska
It always seems to me with modern art that the blurbs about the artwork or the
artist are more interesting than the artwork itself, or that the blurbs make
the artwork interesting, or even that the blurbs are part of the artwork.

~~~
nsfmc
Dave Hickey calls the phenomenon you're talking about a piece of art's "social
value"[0]. this goes for lots of things though, not just art (modern or
otherwise) because all things exist in some historical context and so you can
read them (accurately or not) as a cultural reaction or as being part of some
larger Scene. my take is that one of the things that makes some art
particularly effective is its ability to provoke these reactions when placed
in new historical contexts.

modern art is particularly complicated because something like Duchamp's
Fountain or Readymades can become easily reduced to trope or gimmick "<groan>,
another toilet-as-art piece." but software is like this too!! "great, another
algebraically-typed fp language with poor unicode support and no stdlib." the
thing that makes us keep paying attention is the culture that develops around
these things and advocates for and argues for the thing's "social value"
irrespective of the "social virtue" we may observe as outsiders.

[0]: [http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-
ab...](http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-absolute-
authority-in-the-art)

