Coming this Spring to PS1: Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci, 1973. Courtesy of Valueyou via CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

We can’t express how happy we are that on June 19, MoMA PS1 in Queens opens “Vito Acconci: Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway?), 1976.”

If there is an artist who deserves much more recognition for his work as an “artist,” thinker, teacher, architect, performer and writer, it’s Vito Acconci.

And why did we put artist in quotation marks?

“I hated the word artist,” he said. “To me, even in the years when I was showing things in galleries, it seemed to me that I didn’t really have anything to do with art. The word itself sounded, and still sounds to me, like ‘high art,’ and that was never what I saw myself doing.”

In today’s PC atmosphere, it’s hard to imagine that any artist would be brave enough to follow a stranger in public space, much less masturbate in a gallery space.

It’s artists like these that remind us why we got into this mess called art in the first place. The paper of record has a bit more on Acconci and the exhibition, here.