Carol Sommer

Are You An Artist? @ Make Your Own Damn Art World, MIMA, Middlesbrough

An attempt to complete an encyclopaedic compendium of accepted notions and culturally prevalent definitions of what it means to be an artist. Sourced from my own books, the work forefronts its essential relationship with the institution of art writing on what an artist might be, both now and at different times throughout the history of Western art and Western art writing.The juxtaposition of a wide range of definitions through taxonomies, data lists and distillation of information into data sets deliberately unsettles the cultural relativism of points of view on Western artists and aims to engender wider reflection on the subject.