This Saturday (May 18) 4-10pm, the Spring 2013 Artsgoggle event takes place at 69 different locations in Fort Worth’s Near Southside neighborhood. (It’s free, by the way.) Paintings, photographs, sculptures, video art, and mixed-media combinations by North Texas artists are being crammed into retail stores, restaurants, galleries, and homes for the viewing pleasure (or displeasure) of Fort Worth residents.
Artsgoggle is the perfect event to smash preconceptions that contemporary art is an elitist exercise for a limited audience. Your opinions are as legitimate (though, obviously, not as informed) as any fine arts doctoral student laboring over an arcane Picasso vs. Braque thesis. As Marcel Duchamp said: “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings the art in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications.” In defense of works you might dislike, though, Duchamp also said: “Art may be good, bad, or indifferent, but whatever adjective we use, we must call it art.” Then again, Duchamp stuck a bicycle wheel on a stool and said it was art, so what did he know?
