Art Review is one of the foremost art magazines in the art world. It essentially acts as an advertising platform for commercial galleries, featuring large, glossy whole-page adverts and the odd art criticism feature here and there if you're lucky. Their yearly feature for which they are most well known, 'Art Review Power 100', is a who's who of the art world. It often draws criticism for its focus on directors and collectors rather than artists themselves and indeed in this year's edition, the top 20 only featured three artists. For a publication that seems pretty lacking in critical content I was happy, and somewhat surprised, to find Grayson Perry had written a forward to a special edition catalogue published by Art Review, detailing prints, editions, plectrums, necklaces, anything as long as it is by an established artist and comes in quantities. At the end of his forward Perry writes:
“While we have so many artists that are very good, since Marcel Duchamp there has been a conception that artists can just point at things to bestow significance on them, and this has become pretty tired, I think”
Words that ring true. Painfully true in fact as the artist whose show just closed here last month was one big, lazy nod to Duchamp.
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