On Not Necessarily Naming

I know that's a weird title for a post, but here's where I'm coming from. So much art criticism and reviewing and thinking about art has to do with button-holing, creating a presumed category, then attaching a label. Such that in the previous post on the work of Jeff Koons, I totally and deliberately avoided the terms Dada, Neo-Dada, New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, but allowed 'ready-made' because I think that term is quite descriptive.

I am mindful of this quote from Donald Judd from 1964, "the history of art and art's condition at any time are pretty messy. They should stay that way. One can think about them as much as one likes, but they won't become neater; neatness isn't even a good reason for thinking about them." Page 92, Kirk T. Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock, 2006, Princeton University Press.

To further elaborate on the ideas of Varnedoe, the objects Koons make exist in an interstice, in a space between object and illusion. There's a nihilism in which he is attempting to destroy the existence of that original cracked egg by expanding it way, way above its original size and grossly flipping the fragility of the original shell to the strength of the aluminum. I am sure that his intent in the Cracked Egg is confrontational. My concern is that we have been confronted in this manner so often, that our own heads are battered with the knowledge and it has become meaningless.