Documenta 12 I

Κασσελιότες και Κασσελιότισες,

Αποσπάσματα από κριτική στην Daily Telegraph [προφανώς πρόκειται για τον Μάνο Στεφανίδη της Αγγλίας richard dorment]

[...]
The trouble with Johanna Billing's film about a group of musicians learning to sail on the Firth of Forth is not just that it is exceptionally dull - but that it doesn't transcend its status as a documentary to become memorable as a work of art.

And that brings me to the question of taste. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw how many works there are on show by the Chilean-born Australian painter Juan Davila, an artist whose high-camp imagery is best characterised as pornographic folk art. His heavy-handed satire is what you'd expect in the work of a political cartoonist, only Davila is a crude draughtsman, uses a paintbrush as though it were a sledgehammer, and isn't remotely funny. Until this show, I didn't think it possible that his work could receive attention outside Australia.
And then there is the inimitable Mary Kelly, whose Primpara, Bathing series consists of a series of black-and-white photographs taken between 1974 and 1996 showing the artist cutting her toenails. Now, for any of you who are too young to remember, this feminist conceptual artist achieved some notoriety 20 or so years ago by exhibiting her baby's soiled nappies at the ICA. Her art was so jaw-dropping in its banality that I've never actually met anyone who had anything positive to say about it.

Until now. Of all the female artists in Britain - from Gillian Wearing and Rachel Whiteread and the Wilson Twins - the one whose almost forgotten work the Documenta curators chose to resurrect was Kelly. And she's as terrible today as she was back then, showing an installation of texts and photographs surrounding an illuminated glass house in which she expresses her feelings about a women's liberation demonstration that took place in 1970. The quality this elaborate installation shares with almost every other work of art in the exhibition is the complete absence of nuance or subtlety.
[...]
This is a show organised by two pseuds and intended for graduate students and people who don't really like visual art at all.