WEEK 2 THOUGHTS

While I was unable to make it to the museum, I did read the NYT Write Up on it so I could get a gist. It seems like an overall great exhibit with good knowledge that I hope to make it too soon.

There are also good history learning moments that I think are important in a food desert like metropolitan New York City. In a place where you can buy probably anything that exists in the world, it’s good to be reminded about what the land and ecosystem here actually offers us.

I also checked their instagram and saw some examples of pieces. I hope to make it because it seems great, but for some reason my mind went to a particular place upon reading about the exhibit. Particularly after seeing pictures of some really cool and impressive art pieces, there was a quote by Monxo Lopez, associate curator for the museum, that “we need artists and designers to look for out-of-the-box solutions” that actually... did not give me hope. I am an artist, any time I try to branch too far out of the fine art world I find that I can do more and say more within it. I do think art can change the world and yet for some reason this quote in this context about food vulnerability and artist solutions to all the issues surrounding food kind of didn’t land for me. It made me momentarily question how much I think art can change the world, how much of artist work ends up in insular circles of groupthink and doesn’t reach anyone whose view it is designed to challenge. 

I guess I think this because the food issue is so large and daunting and profit driven. The capitalist supply chains for every aspect of food throughout the world are so extensive and embedded within geopolitical structures, violence, and theft, that I just do not know what a bourgeois art exhibit is going to do. And this is I guess the core of what’s hard for me about being an artist in general. It is a sort of faith based investment that the right person in the right frame of mind will be impacted the right way to enact change.

I just worry, with food particularly, that we are so far gone in how we process, sell, ship, consume, and waste. Could just be waking up on the wrong side of the bed.