picturepeople #26

LAUDATIO-SERVICE : a project for the Biennale de Paris 2004 – http://www.biennaledeparis.org/

You have to open a vernissage but no one to hold the laudatio? You don’t have a laudatio in the first place? We can help you out! See for yourself:

Dear present, dear ladies and gentlemen!
Let me first of all express my utmost gratitude to the artist X for his/her/their most excellent art and the managing director Y of company Z for their most excellent funding in times of dire monetary hardship for cultural productions.

We are happy, dear friends, that you have come to this important evening, the grand opening of this wonderful, inspiring and challenging artist!
Together let us welcome these colourful, powerful and masterfully crafted pieces, ponder them, let them seduce you with their existential urge!

Honoured guests, madams and sirs!
To approach art and specifically pictures such as these with words is almost pointless and certainly reckless. To follow Maurice de Vlaminck, in art, theories are of the same use as prescriptions in medicine: you have to be ill to believe in them. Let us then not talk about theories but about usefulness, especially in our times.

PS: These are real excerpts. Names and places have been changed to maintain anonymity. For more information, contact the author.

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Our proposition for the Biennale de Paris consists in a Picturepeople-issue dealing with the laudatio-phenomenon in the artworld. A honourable activity which unfortunately often tends to be boring for the audience and embarrassing for the artist…
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