Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert

Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert:


*


“She quit solo shows at the age of forty, the point when, in recent decades, many artists’ profiles have dipped because they’re somewhat familiar, not the new kid on the block, exploring variation rather than innovation. The art world likes hot young artists and it likes reviving older ones after a few decades in the wilderness, but it doesn’t, as a rule, favor artists between about the ages of forty and sixty. Cady Noland, though, pointedly ceased production at the top of her game, which had the effect of ensuring a scarcity market for what she had already made.”


*


“Concerning those who don’t leave, what one longs for – or what this writer, who sees too many exhibitions that are blatantly products of the studio treadmill, which circularly pay for the assistants and the fair-booth acreage, longs for – is some tactical thinking. No artist needs to undertake a half-dozen solo shows per year, plus fairs, plus a continual side salad of group shows. Artists who do this, given the unassailable fact that most of them are not modern-day Picassos, will in most cases burn out and deliver diminishing returns in the meantime. One wishes, however vainly – one writes, at least in part, to accrue useful examples of such – for artists to make statements when necessary and be silent when not. We have no shortage of art, or of galleries, and, as Mark Twain once said, 'No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.'”


*