ivan mASSow - beeyotch!

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In this morning's Grauniad, all the chattering without the class. Should this leech stand down from 'chairing' the ICA?

― suzy, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

New answers, eg. he's putting the ASS in Massow. Again!

― suzy, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Wooh great, perhaps I'll start getting more use out of my ICA card! *feels guilt for not haffing been to anything there since the retro video games thing apart from the BAR*

Quite frankly I do not care as long as they sort out the BAR. Bring back COMPREHENSIVE COCKTAIL LIST. Actually I quite fancy going to see a MOVIE at the ICA, I shall see what is on.

― Sarah, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat

but thats my favourite type!

― gareth, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Ah, but those who would drink there would already contain the comprehensive cocktail list. Cocktail lists are only for bars containing stupid bar person's who need a manual.

― Ed, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I would like to see the libel trial, with Emin in a paper bag trying to think her way out. Does that mean she has to use the power of the mind only - like some form of telekinesis.

I think the article is quite badly written stab to take some interesting opinions and whip up art world furore. The man of contradictions line made me laugh heartily as if you cannot be gay and pro-hunting. The Guardian really is vanishing into a smug demographic that deserves to get constantly slapped.

― Pete, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Oh, and Sarah, I believe they are showing Afterlife again at the ICa which is a super top Japanese film.

― Pete, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Also the whole point of conceptual art is that you have an IDEA and excecute it. Then you have another one, and another one. Tracey rightly pointed out on Parkinson about six weeks ago that the idea of the bed is worth £100k or so because she can never use that idea again and was very thoughtful and eloquent on the subject of art. Also C Saatchi bought the bed, so it would make no sense for him to have provided the idea and the paycheque - it's usually one or the other, not both, d'oh! He was also probably too busy chasing N*gella Lawson while J Diamond cooling in the grave.

Focus groupie Ivan Massow has only ever had one good idea, eg getting gay men together with insurers, which would be almost philanthropic if he wasn't getting a cut and if the insurance industry wasn't the most profundly conservative, lowesst-common-denominator ant-progressive industry there ever was. Other than that all he seems to do is vacillate in public and alert the fucking media every time he does so, which is why ALL of my gay male friends to a man think he is a total leech. I'm agreeing with Pete about his problem with the idea of liking hunting being somehow in contradiction with gay identity.

― suzy, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I think it would have been better - good even - if he'd said: OK I'm ICA chairman, and I think conceptual art is getting lots of exposure elsewhere and I personally am not getting much out of it, so the ICA is going to encourage other stuff and not bother with the conceptual so much. But as it is he's let his nose for column inches annihilate any chance of a useful debate, and he's let himself look like a reactionary (which possibly he is).

I hate the way positions on art get polarised so much - reading the press you'd think there was no art inbetween (or alongside) the Emins and Martin Creeds at one end and the Stuckist back-to-real-pictures idea at the other. The ICA could be doing loads more - the videogames installation for instance, taking something and saying, right, let's think about the art in this.

― Tom, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i would pay money to hear someone like this (so multiply self- contradictoy) spouting off randomly and, potentially, interestingly. he is one of the most interesting conceptual pieces of art i've ever heard of.

― Alan Trewartha, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Tom, this is what the ICA do ALL THE TIME. And remember, I'm speaking as someone who has curated a few events and seasons there, with the explicit remit of bringing 'art' into areas where people don't traditionally look for it. They also do really elegant art/science crossover projects and now have a writer in residence, for example.

What I would like to see happen is for Phillip Dodd the ICA director to say 'enough is enough - let's have a cull of all these people who are on our board purely to advance their own media/City careers.' Ivan Massow isn't much of an art buyer/collector, has zero grounding for his opinions, unlike people like Neil Tennant or Jarvis Cocker who also sit on the board and are a little bit more about giving something back to people through their presence there (I'd have thought after the night I spent drinking with NT - and getting a measure of his character - a couple of weeks ago that he'd HATE Massow but I had no occasion to ask as we were both too busy taking the piss out of AN Other in our party). NT for example on 1999 Turner panel, JC responsible for a lot of commissioning of modern artists in Pulp stuff, curatorial stuff etc.

Tom bemoans the lack of a middle ground in art but honestly, the media aren't interested in the middle ground of anything unless someone dresses it up and calls it something like Third Way. Also commissioning editors tend to gravitate toward New or Controversial, it sells papers...

― Ed, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

he has zero power at the ICA anyway

i think the ICA has *done* loads to be fair other than mere conceptual and (geez) stuckists (fuck em): i wd not expect massow to know or have noticed — he is the toby young of [something or other]

― mark s, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

That was suzy's comment, not mine. (Could you tell?)

― Ed, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yeah sorry I know zero about ICA inner workings and not living in London I dont know what's on there anyway - so discount that then, he's just being a twat. If the ICA is doing lots of this stuff then ace.

It's not so much bemoaning a middle ground actually as a suspicion that the focus on conceptual art has become the 'middle ground' - shock and grumbling and reaction as the new norm: conceptual art shouldnt be "new" or "controversial" any more surely and the lameness is that the media still pushes the same buttons in re. its shockingness.

― Tom, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

And yes I could tell ;)

― Tom, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

(Hmph I LIKE comphrehensive cocktail lists they are fun to pore over but obv. I am stupid)

― Sarah, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

That was suzy's comment, not mine. (Could you tell?)

Aha! I was just thinking as I scrolled down: 'blimey, Ed must've been spending a lot of time with Suzy lately'.

― RickyT, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

But I like the way that other peoples opinions leach into your own until - for one magical Zen moment - you find that you are writing just like them.

― Tom, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

If not spelling just like them.

― Tom, Thursday, 17 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

'to become rich and famous by acting like rock stars instead of succeeding through a tangible medium' - that's a telling phrase. I read another article recently about how British publishers had started requesting author photos of new writers to check whether they looked hip enough for the stable. How long til all the other fields go the way of rock? I can't wait to have my pharmaceuticals invented by Liam Gallagher's progeny. What the fuck is up with that? This rock-isation of the art world is bizarre and disappointing. People traditionally turned to art for solace, not like rock, which is such a trivial art form I suppose it scarcely matters if it hinges on pictures of people's faces.

― maryann, Saturday, 19 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Imagine how different the world would be if we had no instantaneous VISUAL media. 1 - Rockisation wouldn't have happened I don't reckon - I remember the pathos of reading about Roy Orbison's struggle because he wasn't good looking - but he just slipped in on the cusp. 2 - Is THIS, this bed, this square of concrete, is THIS all that artists can come up with competition with other forms of visual media? It's like Suzy says - these things are interesting ONCE YOU READ ABOUT THEM. But that's not right - it's not the competition with other media that's resulted in this dead end, is it. It's the art world itself. Dada fucking killed it completely. Artists these days are like analytic philsophers grimly struggling along after the death of metaphysics.

― maryann, Saturday, 19 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The G family were listening to 'Any Questions' over lunch yesterday, and the man Massow was discussed, leading to much heated argument around the table I can tell you. My dad agrees with Massow, but then he's of the school that believes that if it isn't a portrait or a landscape it's not worth bothering with.

― DG, Sunday, 20 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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