Art BS alert

Jen Graves thinks that this Johanna Burton-ism is a big deal:

Installation acknowledges the viewer as central to the work, provides or professes to provide or satisfy an experience, where sculpture continues to posit itself as central to the work. It's glad you're looking at it, but it really doesn't need you.

I think it's a massive waste of pixels (and it's worse if you read the whole passage on Slog). Who talks like this?! A Picasso sculpture doesn't need me but a Thomas Hirschhorn does? Huh?! (And believe you me, I'm being kind by not pointing you toward the entire 90MB podcast from which Graves took said Burtonism.)

What does "need me" mean anyway? If we for 10 seconds accept this 'neediness' drivel, I'd suggest that a Henry Moore 'needs' a viewer to walk around it as much as anything else does. Matisse too. Jack Flam wrote about how the compression of space and the demolition of a single persepctive in Matisse's sculpture are best understood when viewing from multiple angles, which requires -- needs! -- the viewer.