Jillian Mayer, “My phone died meet me here” (2015)
MONTRÉAL — In the 24/7 news cycle of BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and every other “content producer” on the internet, there is a fine line between news and entertainment. In the group exhibition You Won’t Believe (. . .): A Group Exhibition about Entertainment at Division Gallery in Montréal, Québec, curator Loreta Lamargese appropriates the now-iconic Buzzfeed homepage, creating an exhibition postcard that pretends to entice the art viewer with the super clicky non-headline “You Won’t Believe What Happened When These 22 Artists Got Together For A Show.” Today it’s increasingly hard to discern between information, spectacle, entertainment, and infotainment. The works in this exhibition intelligently speak to this issue, but at times come across so tongue-in-cheek so as to feel either flat and data-driven or hyper-emotional like the internet media environment itself.
Some of the work on display does a simplistic, rather dull intermeshing of mass consumer culture and art history, as in Carly Mark’s pieces “Doritos Rivera,” “Francisco de Goya Plantain Chips,” and “Utz Fisher” (all 2015), layered digital prints that incorporate scanned oil paintings of bags that probably just as well could have appeared in a Buzzfeed Art post. (Things that do actually appear in a Buzzfeed Art section post are quizzes like “How Well Do You Know Art?” and “Is It A Warhol Or A Basquiat?”).
Read the full post on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/189274/your-art-entertainment-experience-is-here/
