Tastemakers and the Artist's Vision
"There is indeed a downtown POV here in NY and elsewhere that likes to guard its favors. Downtown tastemakers will quietly rave about something or someone until that music or art achieves a relative popularity- then it is denigrated as having "been better when I first saw them". A lot of alt music publications and websites share this weird snobbism, it's a way of establishing a little in-crowd." -David Byrne, blog entry 01/30/05 from david byrne's tour journal at the met photo by Gregg Chadwick I have been discussing the idea of artist and audience recently with a diverse group of fellow artists and collectors. David Byrne's take on downtown tastemakers seems quite apt. The importance of being the first to find a new artist and then to quickly denigrate them as their popularity grows seems to have a relation to our contemporary inundation with advertising campaigns extolling the new and the fresh, as well as our fear of aging or worst of all-irr...