Christina Davidson, Pam Hansford, Graham Coulter-Smith, Keith Broadfoot, Rex Butler, Edward Colless, Catharine Lumby, Mackenzie Wark, Ashley Crawford, Messer/Duloy
Art for artists: never a valued claim. In fact art for artists is the most insular and problematic, academic and turgid of art's many strands. Artists who subscribe to it are not wrong but they debilitate themselves (more than their public) by paying little or no attention to the "real world".
Everyone's a Critic was art by critics to give artists the opportunity to air their own critique. Theexhibition was erected to 'enact the limbo' of art as an institution: through what channels do artists have to go ('typically art school-studio-gallery' or 'a working knowledge of the artworld ') in order to set about "good" artmaking? it thus attempted to engage in or provoke a discourse that defined the limits of art by the problematising of a sedimented artistic "look".
Put differently the curators attempted to put Wittgenstein's 'game theory' to the test: is art only possible when, and only when, arbitrated by rules and strictures, media and milieux. The Wittgensteinian art critic, Richard Wollheim remarked that Monet, while being called 'all eye' and said to possess a sharpened perception of particular variations of light, was as much influenced by simply looking at pictures and observing their canonical relations to each other as he was by 'natural' stimuli.
But to confine art to a game and a look and to use a very specific angle of what is an uncircumscribable theory is truly cynical for it questions whether art is a mere quid pro quo, a clever effect extracted out of a set of rules. However provocative, one wondered whether the question was worth asking, and, if so, whether it was worth giving it such grand scale in one of