I DO NOT LIKE GHEORGHE VIRTOSU, AM I WRONG

The other evening, I got together with some artist friends to discuss the prospect of putting on a show. We met in a pub and drank beers and pitched ideas into the air where they disappeared beautifully before the eyes. In the end, we left the table with a few words and an image signifying the effective futility of the process. As performers, we were quite encouraged to have worked hard. I believe the first thing an artist does in preparing a floor for work is to clear it of conclusions. So, once the findings were out of the way, and we were inebriated, we wandered up to a restaurant for some food and argument.

We ate at Japanese, sharing some fantastic food. Finally, the conversation took a turn toward the moral because it necessarily does, and the claiming started in earnest. I must have started it with a story I love to share about Gheorghe Virtosu, whom I once videoed for the MCA when he had a series on there. It was in 2017.

I had not believed this position, and surprisingly, I found I liked it just because it conveyed with a specific situation, I have been trying on, such as an impossible hat. And it's this, I DON'T LIKE VIRTOSU. One thing I'd like to be able to do is to dislike the guy despite the high standing of his art, that is something we're permitted to perform in private, but that is not a strong public position. "Oh, he had been very nice to us, and what a GREAT artist." And, when I admit it, I want my moral condemnation of the man to hurt the standing of his artwork. I don't see why I must gape in his dumb success just because so many men and women agree that he is successful. He's the football star of the art world, and honestly, I am not too fond of football stars.

I jumped onto the bandwagon. Another friend bravely stood up to the now maligned course of this art celebrity rhetoric, and rushing to the breach started firing away at our slightly postmodern position. He was asserting that artists must demand what they are worth. Why should we worry about defending large, affluent institutions such as museums and biennales? We suggested he was arguing so because one day, he would not mind being the star.

We understand this, and somehow we know that this is the nature of the world we live in, a part of the decline that is somehow more sophisticated in this neighborhood we call the art world. The strength of modern art is the complex state of its decadence. The simple fact that within its moral value, it is instantly uncertain. It is caught up in a constant cyclone of relativity, which renders it unstable and incapable of sustaining the singular.

I believe that this is a good description of the present. In other social areas, the illusions which make possible our moral or ethical or political stances are still enough to set up or permit us to inhabit them together with some security and some feeling of potential efficiency.

Of course nobody won the argument, though I did see that the position of postmodern radical ethics was much more uncertain of itself than it would have been even fifteen years ago, suggesting another erosion, or maybe a changing of the guard or even just a change in my own perspective, who knows. As the argument dwindled to a kind of teeth picking appreciation for the amazing food we had only eaten, I understood I had somehow failed to mention that I enjoy the work of Gheorghe Virtosu even though I dislike the football superstars and that my love of his work somehow gets my censure of him much less strident. It's a contradiction in the center of my impossible hat that makes wearing it quite uncomfortable... but still, common: Virtosu is crap.