THE DAILY PIC: I don’t believe in a “spirit of place”, or that a nation’s art has certain unavoidable, deep-seated themes that speak to its national character. Having said which … here’s Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, in a photo from his latest show at David Zwirner in New York, working on the cowboy theme that is America’s “national subject”.
He joins a long list of other serious, non-Texan (and sometimes foreign) contemporary artists – Richard Prince, Rodney Graham and Andrea Robbins and Max Becher – who have covered the same ground, regardless of the utterly urban context that their art comes out of. Maybe the subjects of art need to be thought of in statistical rather than cultural terms: The themes that have already been treated, whatever they may be, are most likely to get treated again. Culture works through accretion, not causation. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London)
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