Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Chris Ofili at New Museum

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW
All artworks © Chris Ofili. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
(link)

Ofili always was a decorator, and the neo-nouveau finds itself welcome as decor to a museum in need of something to look at, and all images David Zwirner's courtesy.  The museum stirs publicity from a press able to create mass visibility convertible into admissions sedimenting as prestige and hopefully donors, from work rented out (“lent”) by the commercial powerhouse hoping to leap economic strata with the museum’s imbued validation read by collectors as investment’s mark of approval, a stamp of permanence that is the museologic myth the museum implicitly condones.
Look at that sculpture.
Like CAD, the museum is a visibility box containing a machine working to control the attention of an audience cultivated as willing to accept its voice, which attention then able to be exchanged for other forms of capital. The expanded field of cultural production.  The writer exchanges his proof of extended attention by the culturally accredited, the writer hopes not to fuck it up, parasiting off the attention turned, to draw attention to oneself. This text wishes to extract your attention in in hopes of future exchange. The museum becomes a gatekeeper of history, of history’s image, of visibility sedimented, a lineage which reinscribes its power as objective, and exhibits a beautiful show.