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These days it seems that there are endless reminders of the grotesqueries of the wealthy and the disparities between the classes and none more so than within the art world, which is an endless parade of fashion and folly of collectors and their hangers on. Everywhere there are power plays from the critic who earns six figures while complaining that he has no real power, to arts administrators and academics that imagine they do and the bewildered artist seeking some status and self conscious affirmation of a sale of an object. Dave Hickey (one of the "powerless" critics) wrote "…the problem for me has never been who sold the dumb objects, or bought it (it was just a dumb object), but how you acquired the privilege of talking about it - how you found people with whom you could talk about it. My new masters were obsessed with things." 1 Artist Ofri Cnaani offers us a refreshing opportunity to talk about and peer into the orgy of the art hordes with her most recent body of ink drawings in the exhibition "Two Dimensional Days" at the Andrea Meislin Gallery. From one frame to the next are sticky depictions of the sun-glass and suit wearing style set sprinkled amidst depictions of clutching collectors who gawk and gamble on art vying for a puff piece in the "style section" or "page six". The images are presented as if in a sequence of film stills, rounded off rectangular landscape formats, the drawings on milky Mylar capture interior moments of elite lookers, the Peggy Guggenheim wannabes. Ofri captures something that is inherently perverse about the art world, and the rapid commoditization of young artists and new art. And while collectors may celebrate their vanity and role in the "trickle down" economics of the art market; the queer distaste of artists and their handlers eating the rich, is captured in gruesome detail. Ofri's facility is rough shod and has a goofy blotted line quality that I like, it's not as self-conscious as a Margaret Kilgallen, nor does it dwell in the shadows of derelict society like a Ben Shahn but, it shines an ugly light upon the vain glory of the elite, and captures something like the disdain that many of the German Expressionists found in their creative reflections of Post WWI and Fascist Germany. Unlike the abject horror which artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz must have felt for the dismembered subjects of their critical anti-war paintings, Ofri's gaze is less judgmental, almost scientific in its peculiar distant remove of the viewer to the subject matter. None the less, these pictures carry a punch, because they capture still moments of the dominant and the dominated amidst the frenzied social marketplace of the perennial art fairs and openings which have become the norm of doing business. The work left me wondering still about Hickey's question: "how you acquired the privilege of talking about it - how you found people with whom you could talk about it." I'm lucky enough to have this opportunity to talk with you about it, and Ofri's work prods me to talk about the business of art, rather than about a dumb object and that conversation leaves me wanting. I'd rather talk about a dumb object. By Andrew Cornell Robinson, Artist Exhibition InformationOfri Cnaani Andrea Meislin Gallery Related Links: |
 Young Collectors 2007 Ink and Spray Paint on Mylar 18 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm)  The Gesture 2007 Ink and spray paint on Mylar 18 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm)  Red Dot Ladies 2007 Ink and spray paint on Mylar 18 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm) |
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