Camilo Ontiveros wins ARCOmadrid prize

I thought for years that artists today have a lot in common with the impulses that drive Junkers, restorers of antiques and hobbyists who build miniature panoramas featuring their trains and cars. That drive that compels the mutation of the banal household product into art has been harnessed into a dominant force in art today.
This next step was inevitable.
 Camilo Ontiveros is stripping down that idea into something far better by doing less, so this artist outmaneuvers everyone who making clever entities from banal objects, closing the chapter on that tired form.  By just putting a coat of paint on an object, you don’t have to use the artifice of ego by making one thing into something else.  Really if you connect the dots, using one thing as sculptural form to make something else it just the same as old fashion sculpture. Forget transmutation of things into metaphor objects; just let an object be art. Genius. Bravo ARCO Madrid!!

What strikes me as the next step in this gentleman’s work is eliminating the painting the washing machines. Why be such a slave to surface artifice? Why not just present the washers in their informal state?  The unvarnished bravery of just presenting the objects “as is” seems more innovative to me.

Rodney McMillian at Susanne Vielmetter's Los Angeles Projects

Review of review at Cluture monster in the LA Times.

It’s impossible to write a review that makes sense because there is nothing to review; it’s my backyard dude.

I applaud the reviewer in finding this work conceptually lazy. I wish that they would find better work to give exposure to than this fakery that shows no respect for the public, the collector, and the gallery. This is not art, it’s slight of hand arrogance and as long as it’s reviewed its means it’s respected and promoted. I ask the reviewer to value his or her own time as well as ours. Just walk away when is sucks this bad. Don't review it.
There is a line crossed here between rebellion and nothing where it all becomes a joke. The whole anti- art thing has been done and done with an empty gallery or random clutter with junk for 30 years. You can’t slice non- ideas any finer. Why not just declare gutted buildings art galleries? Then Detroit can become the greatest art city in America.


Get back to foundation where we can see the artist taken everything in the their power to produce something of passion that evokes real emotion. The only emotion here is a feeling of being ripped off for your valet parking.