HOVERING Group Show

 

Art today is singular in its interdisciplinary. Criss-crossing all the industries of cultural production, contemporary art is just as much at home discussing popular music and television as it is film or architecture in as much as all of these discussions are fundamental to any analysis of contemporary culture.

 

HOVERING focus on the especially fraught relationship between contemporary art and fashion marketing. At times characterized by admiration, at others contempt, this relationship has progressed primarily as a series of flirtations. With artists increasingly posing for fashion magazines, designers opening art foundations, sculptors designing jewelry and stylists collaborating with performers artists, few taboos remain in the quest to provoke desire and sexual tension. As a result, every product must seduce the viewer, whether in the gallery or in the shop. On the more immediate level, the result of this ongoing flirtation has been the opening up of new audiences for each discipline. In contemporary art galleries, artists meet trendsetters in search of new original styles. Meanwhile the pages of fashion magazines celebrate the bohemianism of underground artistic cultures, transforming once radical gestures into the simply cool and trendy.

 

The goal of HOVERING is to show how this often-criticized contamination of disciplines is actually yielding an interesting by-product. As fashion photographers produce more and more revolutionary work under the influence of art criticism, an increasing number of artists have begun to interrogate the concept of coolness, approaching ironically the standardization of taste-- in the art world and beyond -- via the mass global circulation of trends.