The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

The website Art Obituaries is a very telling sign of the times–i.e., this age of artistic failure. So many artists are cluttering the cultural landscape, and making so much work that inevitably can’t find a home, that a huge percentage of cultural production over the past twenty-thirty years or more is simply ending up in landfills and bonfires.

According to the website:

Art Obituaries commemorates “art that was” by documenting accounts of an artwork’s death. Your intensely personal story provides a rare glimpse into an artwork’s eleventh hour, exploring the nature of an artwork’s life, death, and the process in-between, creating a living discourse where there once was none.

Artists can submit their stories–or artworks lost and put to rest–to Art Obituaries, here. 

The site also offers this description of the death of art, put into a historical context (that apparently concludes with Art Obituaries):

History is written by the winners, or so they say. Preservation isn’t easy: it’s a series of choices we make, to rescue objects and events from history’s wake. Not everything will survive, we know, so we give life support to those with the best chance. In art history, these lucky few are what we call canon. Other artworks have been doomed to a silent death, until now…

Art never dies, but artworks do. Some by accidents of nature, eaten by the strong or bred too peculiar to survive; some by force, put to pasture because they’ve gone bad, or cannot be understood by mainstream society. Art history’s heartbreak has been, simply, that it could not save them all. But now we have a miracle drug. Like some sci-fi invention: we’ve got a pill that cures death. And its name is Art Obituaries. 

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Death of art, Aging artists, Artistic failure in America, Decline of art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.