Mat Gleason - 'You're Killing It Dude!"
This letter to Mat Gleason is a deliberately crude reduction of art history's oldest visual hypocrisy into one art-world question. Williams contrasts the abundance of naked women in old art-history books with the abundance of women in galleries whom he would like to see naked, making the joke almost too blunt to be safely aestheticized. Its force lies in collapsing historical nude, contemporary desire, criticism, and social propriety into a single embarrassing sentence. The letter functions as a small satellite of the UACAWSACCADB universe, where looking is never innocent and the professional art world's erotic economy cannot hide behind pedagogy. It is offensive by design, but its offence is pointed at a culture that has always laundered desire through taste.
- DATE:
- July 6, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- PUBLICATION / VENUE:
- Huffington Post
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Mat Gleason
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Huffington Post; UACAWSACCADB
- KEYWORDS:
- historical nude vs contemporary desire; looking never innocent; erotic economy exposed; desire behind pedagogy; professional art world hypocrisy; offense pointed at culture; desire laundered as taste