“IT’S ALL A BLUR” (September 24, 2003)
Thus the title of Laura Gascoigne’s article in the last issue of The Jackdaw (No. 31, September 2003). She grumbles about the blurred boundary between contemporary art and everything else. As soon as I started reading the article I remembered the one and only issue of Statement Art, which appeared in Amsterdam in December 1999. Edited by Jacques van Alphen, himself a painter, the newspaper had a cheerful motto: “Everything will become art.” I learned about Statement Art a couple of months earlier, and I immediately submitted some of my writings about art for consideration. They were printed out and pasted on postcards. More than a dozen of them went to the editor over a few weeks. Thanks to his vision, they were published as such, as images of postcards—that is, as works of art. Returning to Gascoigne and her complaint that everything has become art, four years ago I took the motto of the Dutch art newspaper as a promise. I still do. Let’s celebrate the blur rather than complain about it. Let’s get over art. The quicker, the better.