About my motivation: My wife shows her work and curates shows in the LA area. Consequently for the last 20 years I've spent a lot of time in galleries and museums. I was just trying to get across some of the thinking of the curators who decide what to put on the plaques. Not trying to get into an argument, particularly.
About "no critical consensus": Saying there's not consensus about meaning, doesn't mean curators don't know if there's value in the work.
Lots of times people know work is good, they just don't agree on why. It takes time to figure out whether it's a dead end or not, or to see where the artist goes with a line of work.
Here's another one: there's lots of work that is loved by even sophisticated collectors, but unliked by artists. (E.g.: large-scale paintings that "look like art" but are not new.) There's lots of work that is liked by curators, but not by many artists or collectors (e.g., work grounded in complex theories).
"arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim":
The artistic community operates outside your judgement and scorn. Go in expecting to learn something, and maybe you will.
About "no critical consensus": Saying there's not consensus about meaning, doesn't mean curators don't know if there's value in the work.
Lots of times people know work is good, they just don't agree on why. It takes time to figure out whether it's a dead end or not, or to see where the artist goes with a line of work.
Here's another one: there's lots of work that is loved by even sophisticated collectors, but unliked by artists. (E.g.: large-scale paintings that "look like art" but are not new.) There's lots of work that is liked by curators, but not by many artists or collectors (e.g., work grounded in complex theories).
"arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim":
The artistic community operates outside your judgement and scorn. Go in expecting to learn something, and maybe you will.