NYAB Event - “GDA1” Exhibition

“GDA1” Exhibition

Envoy Enterprises (87 Rivington St.)

This event has ended.

For the next seven months “The Great Debate About Art,” a book by Roy Harris, Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford, serves as the basis for an exhibition series that comments on certain aspects of the current art market.

Widely reported in the British press at the time, in 1918, Mary Pickford told Lord Desborough, that Charles Chaplin entered a Chaplin walk contest at a fair and that he came in 20th.

A visitor to a well populated group exhibition walked by the work of a well-known artist, without giving it the light of day. After having looked at the entire exhibition, while glancing over the checklist to see which artists were in the show, highly surprised, the visitor noticed that the well-known artist in question had work in the show. The visitor returned to the exhibition, checklist in hand, to then almost faint in awe of the work, which just moments before had utterly failed to capture the viewer’s attention.

The first part of envoy enterprises’ GDA series, GDA1-anonymous, focuses on Oscar Wilde’s dictum: “Art never expresses anything but itself.” The exhibition invites the viewer to look at works of art that are presented in a completely decontextualized situation/environment. Well-known and emerging artists are shown anonymously, side-by-side, which forces the viewer to judge the work by its artistic value, and not by any other criteria.

The exhibition poses the question how much context is needed to enjoy a work of art and to what extent our perception is influenced. Are objects of art only art when the art world decrees them to be, as Arthur Danto says? Where does that leave the works “in themselves?” How does that prevent its “value” from being determined by the interests of big business?

What about the notion that the essence of art cannot be put into words, which has obvious links to Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing? Combined, they yield the thesis that what art is can be shown but never said and that there is no “outside” viewpoint from which it can be observed and described without falsification.