Anastasiya Coelho has been the latest young artist to express its dissatisfaction directly to the artists. This was the response she gave on twitter on Monday morning:

@anastasiya

You are a real genius and you are brilliant…this makes me wanna give you an award.

@anastasiya

The award ceremony I have been attending every year is a joke. It is the same old shit

The award ceremony

The award ceremony doesn’t really have anything to do with the art, rather it’s just bullshit.

You could say its a bit ironic considering that she is the one that took the award away. But that’s not really the point. There’s clearly something to be said for a genuine debate in the art world.

I’d certainly love to see something like this happen. There’s a very real chance that this isn’t what she means. But there’s a risk in trying to predict what she means. It doesn’t mean we’ll ever know what exactly she means and she could quite easily be telling us what she means with her statements anyway. If that’s the case, I’m going to stick by my previous suggestion to ask her to stop being a bit of a bitch and to stop tweeting stuff like that.

What she said here was definitely not what she meant, but it is perfectly accurate. I’ll just close by saying that if she does mean what she said then I fully support any efforts she has to do something about it. It’s the art world’s job is to discuss and argue amongst itself and I think the fact that artists are starting to engage with the Twitterverse with their tweets and conversations shows a healthy willingness to engage with others. If people are engaged on Twitter in a meaningful way then it’s probably because we’re having a really fun time together. Which is exactly what the art world needs right now.

I say all this because this is something that needs to be said. In the wake of #OscarsSoWhite, there is a real need for people of all races and creeds in the arts to speak in a way that isn’t defensive or dismissive when discussing race. There’s an expectation that artists of colour will try and take on the mantle of whiteness and attempt to push their own agenda and I’m definitely not the person to change that. I can say nothing but that I’d love for everyone to have a really good year