Today's
artist knows the importance of choosing a name for his works.
Damien Hirst made it clear that art itself is of secondary importance
to what you call that art (if indeed the art itself is important or even
necessary) with works such as Romance In The Age of Uncertainty
and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living.
Tom Wolfe's prediction in The Painted Word that museums will eventually
dispay postage-stamp size reproductions of artworks beside wall-filling
descriptions of the context in which that art should be viewed may
well have understated the case. Context,
in the end, is as unecessary
as
art. The sign is the thing it stands for. The name is the art.
