Taste Factory: Art and the Lemmings

Register-Guard art critic Bob Keefer makes some excellent points in his review today of the Portland Art Museum's exhibit showcasing the annual "Contemporary Northwest Art Awards," aimed at highlighting up-and-comers in this neck of the woods. Of the lackluster and mostly forgettable show he writes:

"The problem was, and is, that this really isn't a show about Northwest art, or even Oregon art. It's a show about Portland and Seattle academically trained artists, whose work is so narrowly conceived that it's almost bloodless. Four of these five artists, not surprisingly, has a master of fine arts degree."

Keefer, who goes on to decry the "thin air of the university MFA factories," is spot on. I've long felt that these MFA programs were to blame for the suffocating conformity in the nation's artistic and literary circles. The whole bloody lot of contemporary art and so-called "literary fiction" has largely blurred into a morass of the overly introspective, ponderous and interchangeable. Hence, all the lengthy meditations on "loss" and various other forms of victimization. The cabal needs to be broken, or at the very least learn to keep an open mind.