This is pretty funny and has a lot of truth to it.
"The art world is teeming with professionals - curators, critics, journalists and many others - who are in the business of imposing their own narratives on the practice of artists, manipulating, for their own ends, the primary product that artists produce. It's a situation analogous to that of the food industry, where the primary producers of food, the farmers, are relatively powerless compared with the big supermarket chains whose buying power ostensibly enables them to drive down prices in the name of consumer choice, but in reality enables them to make vast profits. In the food industry, as in the art industry, the primary producer is in a weak position. If you are a farmer producing milk, you have few options. What you need to do is study the concept of "added value". That is, you don't just produce milk, you turn it into something more valuable: you process it further, into organic yoghurt, say, then find your own market and sell it direct. Artists, too, can add value to their basic product if they can further process and package it; that is, if they can impose their own narratives on the work, finding a literal space for its exhibition, and a theoretical space for its reception."
"Where the art world differs from that of food retailing is that the art market is not a free market. It's rigged; hugely distorted by the presence of public subsidy - the grants and funding available to organisations and individuals deemed to be producing "significant" work. To get access to this, it's even more important that artists create the right theoretical discourse to surround their work."
Full piece here
