The Case for Transparency

The project Opacity proposed and discussed a collaborative and productive model, which researched current conditions of institutional work and proposed and analysed alternative strategies, be they activist, appropriative, mocking, actual or purely utopian. We wanted to initiate a discussion, trying to imagine an institution as a place for temporary withdrawal, for working in an opaque space behind the scene, as one critical strategy among others within the field of institutional work. With the presumption that the participation of artists in institutional systems shouldn't exclusively be aimed towards the show or display, we instead turned software into hardware and set up a temporary model that includes artistic practice as an operation mode for institutions.

Nina Möntmann
Opacity // 2006
From, "Abstraction: Documents of Contemporary Art", edited by Maria Lind

Some Notes on Taste

Taste doesn't matter, it is too subjective and varies according to time. It is too hard to chase after what's 'contemporary' or the latest trend. What's important is obsession, it's the desire for excesses, to go past the edge or fringe into an rabbit hole.

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"According to Greenberg, the ideal spectator of avant-garde art is less interested in it as a source of aesthetic delectation than as a source of knowledge – of information about art production, its devices, its media, and its techniques. Art ceases to be a matter of taste and becomes a matter of knowledge and mastery. In this sense, one can say that, as a modern technique, avant-garde art is, generally, autonomous – which is to say, independent of any individual taste."

Art and Money
Boris Groys
e-flux journal #24

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Perhaps it is best to move away from taste and towards questioning the assumptions of where you're coming from.