Dennis Hollingsworth

Brooklyn Rail: Tell Me Something Good

Last night, the Brooklyn Rail presented a panel discussion led by Jared Earnest, including Dana Schutz, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matvey Levenstein and introduced by Phong Bui. They were asked to present images of their works and another artist's work of their selection. Discussion was freewheeling, jumping off this starting point and moving to ideas about utopia, social media, where meaning resides, what they thought of NYC today and what has become of our much enlarged, engorged art world.

Here are my two cents about meaning in art. It has two manifestations. First, in the studio, it has to be acute, driven by the artist's feeling, imagination, experience, awareness of the currents of art history and the coordinates aligning with the materials at hand. Second, after it leaves the studio, art is charged with meaning in terms of its carrying capacity. It matters less as time passes what the intentions of the making of art was than the ability of successive generations to discover their own meaning within it.

I took notes.