"You've got to know
How the strong get weak
And the rich get poor

Slave to love
Oh, slave to love"

- Bryan Ferry

Sometimes Contemporary Art does give something. Usually it gives us nothing new, really new. Mind you if something was truly new theoretically we couldn’t recognise it.

I went to a Documenta 12 at Kassel 2007. At first I hated it. It came at the end of a long road trek from Venice to Munster to Kassel and Basle, all art blockbusters. I was exhausted by contemporary art by then.

However looking back I wondered at what the Documenta wanted to do. The works were proudly exhibited with no explanation didactics at all. It was annoying but on reflection I felt it was ok. The underlying theme rereading what the Documenta website says is one of migration and I suppose lack of documentation.Just as many migrants have. This theme of migration has become the most powerful and relevant aspect of big international Biennials and Triennials. Venice’s2024 Bienniale titled “Foreigners Everywhere” which is a quote from a work by Claire Fontaine.

One theme of Documenta 12 was the concept of “bare life” which now seems to have morphed to “mere life” online. It was a rather abstract idea but I think it meant something like what is needed to survive, to live. In my head I remember these marooned John McCracken minimalist “planks” leaning in multiple venues. Subliminally I think I did get what the curators were at. What does art do when it’s stripped of its art historical and market value, just as a migrant person is stripped of their humanity by the “civilised” Western world.

Seth Price tackles similar ideas with his "trauma of context". Price compares a painting to a more conceptual artwork. If you see a canvas covered in paint resting against a city curb, you still recognize it immediately as a painting—it is simply "misplaced". Its physical form acts as an immediate frame. : In contrast, if you take conceptual or avant-garde materials out of a white-cube gallery and scatter them on a public pavement, they instantly revert to looking like junk or street trash. Without the gallery's walls, curators, and institutional validation, the work becomes entirely illegible to the public.

Seth price quotes Dan Graham reflecting on his experience running a gallery in the 1960s, observed: “if a work of art wasn’t written about and reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty attaining the status of ‘art’. It seemed that in order to be defined as having value, that is as ‘art’, a work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then to be written about and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine.” Art, then, with its reliance on discussion through refereed forums and journals, is similar to a professional field like science.

So these objects gathered from Facebook Marketplace, these orphans, tell us what fate befalls us all, for who really are any of us. We schlep ourselves to Venice to sit amongst masses of other Australians (Venice is the Australian art world’s Bali) but really we mean nothing to International art. The international art world makes out it is universal but in fact they are the opposite. MOMA wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire!

When James Mollison died no one said a word BUT Mollison was Australian art in the 70s. He was all powerful. So if his passing makes no comment then who will remember Tony Ellwood or Nick Mitzevich or any of the other members of the current Managerial and Curatorial classes.

To combat Power we need to think in reverse. The quality of a society is not measured in the winners but how we treat the supposed losers.

Scott Redford, 2026