The Best Art Installations of 2010
No one writes a list naming the best paintings or sculptures or installations of the year. About a year’s worth of music a man will go on and on,1 and surely the number of pixels wasted on mailed-in year-in-reviews of TV shows and movies is greater than all the sands of the desert. And small forests give their lives to the annual Best American series of every genre of writing imaginable.
It’s not like fine arts exist in such rarefied markets that direct rank and comparison tarnishes their luster. Look at universities, which have plenty of reasons to think their products unassailable and unrankable: they clamor for U.S. News listings like pigs at a trough. Indeed, there is no bottom to prestige-seeking, no unseemliness in it at all. There is only tacit agreements between ranked and reader that ranks really don’t matter, except when they do. Moreover, the media certainly exists for those who are in the market for fine contemporary art.2
Even so, perhaps the reason is that the critics’ market for fine arts is so rarefied that the only writer that might survive in its thin air is Lawrence Weschler, who like as not would just put David Hockney at the top of every year’s list and wash his hands of the rest of it.
1 For 3,500 words! With more to come! It’s as though no one ever told Andy pith is soul food.
2 Only $250,000 for an Egyptian mummy and its sarcophagus! Seriously.
