Welcome to “To See or Not to See,” a recurring column covering a handful of exceptional Los Angeles gallery and museum exhibitions—the good, the bad, and the criminally overrated—in easily digestible, bite-size pieces.
As you may have heard, galleries won’t stop opening in Los Angeles. Fueled by the boom in e-commerce that erupted during lockdown, the commercial art world is now in its Manifest Destiny era, marked by a mantra of endless expansion and countless galleries launching first, second, and third locations in LA. But I have to say, the mood is very fast fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of poor-quality paintings that read better online than they do in real life. This is the art market’s equivalent to shopping at Shein: Everything feels disposable.
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Time, however, is an excellent filter. Lately the artists I’ve found worth talking about are all either passed or decades into their career; their works have both outlived the fleeting momentum of novelty and hype and predate the speculative asset market around contemporary art by emerging artists. Before we start, I’d like to share painter Claire Tabouret’s secret to longevity, a piece of advice for other artists she told me on a recent studio visit: “You have to keep an extremely high standard for yourself because the art world won’t have high standards; it’s just this big monster that wants more paintings.” Eventually, however, in the absence of quality, “They get bored and move on.”
Source: artnews.com