On the Cross asked eight artists and eight fashion designers to pair off and produce collaborative works, in the hope of blurring the boundaries between art and fashion. On the Cross, Linden Gallery, St Kilda, until April 1 It has been hard to find any exhibition around town recently that is not connected with Fashion Week. A cynic might wonder if artists and curators would have been so keen to jump on the bandwagon if this had been, say, Ethiopian Famine Week, or Distressed Orphans Week. The curator of On the Cross , Jan Duffy, asked eight artists and eight fashion designers to pair off and produce collaborative works, in the hope of blurring the boundaries between art and fashion. But it's doubtful that any such boundaries exist any more.
Art is fashion and fashion is art.
Consequently, these collaborations lack the frisson of difference. On the Cross is based on the apathetic postmodernist acceptance that no cultural expression is immune from commercial imperatives and that all are equally significant in elucidating our contemporary situation. This is not to mention the quite misguided idea that the function of art is to reflect our own lives back to us. If art really is as narcissistic as this, then it's no wonder Fashion Week has struck such a chord with Melbourne's galleries. Lazy assumptions inevitably lead to lazy art.