What's Hot, What's Not

HOT:

Complicated, unexpected media:
e.g. crushed champagne bottles with appaloosa pony and
chop-stick
Camera obscuras
Lemons
Sticks leaning on walls
Sticks with faces on them
Collages using triangle shapes
Vintage photographs of horses
Unfired clay bearing imprint
of fingers
Bad painting (figurative)
Bad painting (abstract)
1980s Postmodern painting
Getting engaged
Growing vegetables
Guinea pigs
Famous actors in low-budget
art films
Artists directing Hollywood films
Michael Fassbender
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Obscure British Modernists
Mothers and children
Sellotape and pins
Putting on plays
Poodles
Doing a reading (as in: ‘I’m doing
a reading at ...’)
Gustav Klimt
The abstract photography backlash
Art critiquing ‘the market’ doing very well on ‘the market’
Pretending you’ve always been into West Coast art
Being concerned about ‘the crisis’
Shelves
Revolution
Referencing Occupy
Deleuze & Guattari
‘Performatively’ installing the work
Last Year at Marienbad
Animal paintings, especially of cats
Upside down photographs of people
London's West End

HOLDING STEADY:

Genius
Most galleries showing mainly male artists
Susan Sontag
Pseudo-archeological fragments arranged on a table
Fake movie posters
Dressage
The Princess Bride
Lying
Jean Genet
Sculptures leaning against walls
Dance
Adultery
Despair
Picpoul de Pinet
Loneliness
David Bowie
Virginia Woolf
Science fiction
Writing a novel/play/poems as
a conceptual statement
Making work using a fake identity
Taxidermy
Slide projections
Modified film projectors
John Cage
Plywood constructions
Jorge Luis Borges
Pliny the Elder
Long nonsensical titles
Failure
Bronze sculptures of everyday objects, painted to look like everyday objects
Canada
Old Dead White Male Artists
Old Living White Male Artists
Beards
The Wild West

NOT:

Heaven and Hell
Institutional critique
Eggs
Fidelity
Lightboxes
Earnest titles that reveal the work’s meaning (or lack thereof)
Le Corbusier
Performance involving blood
Getting married
Croatian Modernism
The late 1980s
Marina Abramović
James Franco
Marina Abramović making work with James Franco
Time-lapse footage
Ponderous soundtracks
The high/low divide
Apathy
Biennials
Action painting
Digital painting
Boastfulness
Bossiness
Pâté de fois gras
Post-surrealist history pastiche painting
Referencing Jacques Lacan
Reductive politics
Overblown claims
‘Bad boy’ art
Multi-channel video installations
Portrait photos with eyes punched/cut/burned out
Western hegemony