"You were told how much space so it was a matter of whether you could send in two paintings or three paintings, you know, pending where the show was being held. You did submit work to be accepted. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in"
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The bureaucracy of art sounds almost quaint in Krasner's recollection: you got a measurement, you made a choice, you shipped the work, and once you were in, no one micromanaged your voice. She’s sketching an ecosystem where gatekeeping existed but didn’t metastasize into branding strategy and institutional choreography. The constraint was literal space, not the endless, soft-power negotiations that now orbit curators, collectors, and press.
Her bluntness carries a double edge. On the surface, it’s practical shop talk from a working artist: two paintings or three, depending on the wall. Underneath, it’s a quiet defense of autonomy in a scene that’s often mythologized as heroic and individualistic while being deeply structured by clubs, juries, and social networks. Krasner doesn’t romanticize the process; she normalizes it. That refusal to perform myth is itself a kind of critique.
Context matters: as a woman in Abstract Expressionism, Krasner lived inside a movement that loved the rhetoric of freedom while routinely narrowing who got to embody it. “You did your own selection” isn’t just procedure; it’s a claim to authorial control in a culture that too often treated women as adjuncts, muses, or footnotes. The line also signals a lost trust: once accepted, you were presumed competent to define your own public face.
The intent, then, is less nostalgia than a reminder that institutional permission doesn’t have to mean aesthetic surrender. Constraints can be real without becoming total.
Her bluntness carries a double edge. On the surface, it’s practical shop talk from a working artist: two paintings or three, depending on the wall. Underneath, it’s a quiet defense of autonomy in a scene that’s often mythologized as heroic and individualistic while being deeply structured by clubs, juries, and social networks. Krasner doesn’t romanticize the process; she normalizes it. That refusal to perform myth is itself a kind of critique.
Context matters: as a woman in Abstract Expressionism, Krasner lived inside a movement that loved the rhetoric of freedom while routinely narrowing who got to embody it. “You did your own selection” isn’t just procedure; it’s a claim to authorial control in a culture that too often treated women as adjuncts, muses, or footnotes. The line also signals a lost trust: once accepted, you were presumed competent to define your own public face.
The intent, then, is less nostalgia than a reminder that institutional permission doesn’t have to mean aesthetic surrender. Constraints can be real without becoming total.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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