Archive for the ‘Editorial’ Category
Out of Time (Part 3): A Wandering Market
… Or, Attack of the Giant Killer Robots![1]
As Forever Now has engaged the critical debate around painting through the lens of technology and science fiction, and if our current context or the paintings themselves (see Part 1 and Part 2) don’t support this argument, there may still be a way to map contemporary fictions onto the landscape of painting. Popular criticism of the show has been unable to avoid discussion of the current art market and its influences, and most of what has been written certainly has a dystopian flavor. So if the Postmodern landscape of the art world is a “Desert of the Real” and artists are working inside of this new (or really not so new) reality, then we must also consider that the structures that surround and support that art have also changed, perhaps without us knowing, perhaps irrevocably. The issue at hand in any contested environment is not only what can be done to right the mistakes that brought us to this place, but what unintended consequences we might visit on the future.
Painting functions as a barometer in the nexus of art and market. Painting’s deaths have coincided with economic downturns, and when things pick back up there is usually a resurgence of interest in colored mud hung on the wall. However these shifts are more a matter of narrative for critics and historians; it is safe to say that the best artists continue to make the work they want regardless of fashion, even pushing at boundaries further when they are out of the spotlight. The continuing upward trend in the market, whether bull run or bubble, is unnerving, and leading to art being assessed differently. Aesthetics and criticism are intertwined with economics and influence in a way that if not really any different than in past generations[2], is more apparent in our networked era of information wanting to be free. If Forever Now exemplifies our current condition, it is in the implication that the transition to Postmodernism has finally caught up with not only what art is being made, but how it is being talked about, exhibited and sold. As artists and dealers are being forced to adjust to a Postmodern art market[3], critics and historians are functioning more and more as market analysts, intertwining aesthetics and economics, and perhaps privileging the concerns of the latter more than they should. As the narrative threads are tied together, there is a real danger that art may eventually lose the individual spark that makes it more than mere commodity.
The painting being labeled[4] as zombie formalism makes the workings of the market easy to criticize, but the lesson to be learned is that what will come next isn’t going to be a return to what we used to have. Writing in the Brooklyn Rail about the less heralded Whitney Museum exhibition Remote Viewing a decade ago, Stephen Maine derided the trend of “vernacular abstraction” as
“…the order of the day, with formalists scarce among younger painters … In part, this is a response to pressures of an expanding market, wherein collectors with deep pockets but little taste for art history, impatient with the linguistic indifference of high abstraction, are provided some anecdotal avenues of approach to the work.”
It is troubling for the discourse of art that who buys the work, for whatever reason (real or imagined) affects the criticism of it. Certainly great works have had ignominious beginnings, and while charges of philistinism are routinely leveled at new money forcing its way into any rarefied market, such criticism can be just as much about reinforcing a status quo of back channel exclusivity and power as lamenting the passing of connoisseurship.
The work in Remote Viewing exhibited a strong trend towards the idiosyncratic and handmade; towards uneven surfaces that did not compromise their facture for easy decoration and did not skimp on authorial labor.[5] These qualities are not really less evident in Forever Now but they have become far less emphasized as personal expression through the manipulation of materials has come to be seen as historical redundant; if any mark that can be made has already been made, how can it be a vehicle for unique personal expression? Over the last decade painting has absorbed the values of a market that embraced artists like Jeff Koons, whose legacy and practice espouses commodification and production above all else. In “Zombie Formalism” this legacy has trickled down to young artists who emulate the slick look and easy production from the top of a flush market. There are consequences to removing the artist’s hand and head from making art. Previously every artist that turned the studio into a production line first had to figure out how to make the thing themselves; the vacuousness of the worst contemporary painting is the result of short cuts and shoddy effort, of time not spent on the work.
Likewise there are consequences to the shift to an economic Postmodernism. The rise of “art” within Western European society[6] as something for the individual was tied to the rise of the middle class. The art of the academy mirrored the ossification of a society that eventually birthed not only Marxism, but also Modernism; avante garde art ceased to be made for the middle (i.e. merchant) class as evidenced by the title “bourgeois” descending into deprecating slur. Modernism also saw popular culture embrace different media than high art, furthering the divide.[7] With the shift to Postmodernism all but complete, we are faced with the demise of the middle class’s relevance to art portending the demise of the middle class itself. As more wealth accumulates to the top 1% and the middle class shrinks, collecting art has come to be seen as a game for oligarchs and the super-rich. This perception is reinforced every time the art press puts sales figures ahead of aesthetic content, and it ultimately only serves those wielding money in the art market like a weapon.
There has been money and influence behind the form and content of art from the beginning[8], but the opinion of artists, critics and connoisseurs carries less and less weight. We’re nearly 30 years removed from Robert Hughes’ essay Requiem for a Featherweight.[9] His critique of Basquait included coupling the Whitney Museum’s interest with the economic drive for a retrospective, but instead of destroying Basquait’s reputation, in the intervening years all we’ve seen is his continued canonization and an increase in his resale prices. Setting aside the validity of Hughes’ critique, it is evident that economic interests trump the critic as lone curmudgeon.[10] Instead of tilting at windmills of artistic reputation propped up as an asset class, we would do better to provide an alternate narrative of art grounded in what we are for, not against. We do not all have to agree (indeed, we should expect to vehemently disagree at times), but we do have to make a story for contemporary art that allows the thinking and making of the work, not its price, to be paramount.
[1] Which I’ve been teasing here in the notes since Part 1; that’s why you read the notes, people.
[2] We’ve all read enough pithy references about the Medici and their influence on the art of the residence, so let’s just pretend I put one here.
[3] Best outlined by Tim Schneider in The Gray Market.
[4] It’s a label that seems very dependent on current popular culture and its fixation on Zombies (for example, with the Walking Dead). If this work had come to prominence even 5 years ago when vampires and the Twilight movies were all the rage, I’m sure we would’ve been hearing about “vampire formalism” and paintings that looked good (and even sparkled) on the wall, but were devoid of any reflection of substance or deeper content, and were ultimately sucking the life out of painting.
[5] It’s interesting to note that the only artist in both shows, Julie Mehertu, has gone against the grain in both shows; showing more highly polished and produced works in Remote Viewing, and more gestural and seemingly transitional works in Forever Now.
[6] This only applies to western art out of the Renaissance tradition; Eastern art has followed a slightly different path, although artists were still dependent on an infrastructure provided by the ruling elite. Perhaps an analogy can be drawn comparing working within the free market to academia?
[7] One of the more interesting implications in Postmodernism is so called “high” art circling back and incorporating these media (photography, film and video, digital and internet practice) into contemporary discourse.
[8] Everybody wave to the Medici!
[9] Originally published in the New Criterion, 1988 and collected in Nothing If Not Critical.
[10] See Dave Hickey as a current example.
Loss Leaders
I don’t know anyone who pays attention to the art world who is not dismayed with its increasing stratification, with concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of a tiny few. It’s a turn of events that has seen Art increasingly treated like an investment asset, just another high-end luxury good or status symbol. Edward Winkleman posted an essay on his blog that puts the onus on artists to take the lead in saving art and John Powers answered from an artist’s point of view, countering that instead artists need better data to make the proper decisions. While everyone involved has been motivated by wanting art to thrive and not see it’s aesthetic[1] and social value choked off by the market, suggestions as to real solutions are more difficult to come by.
My feeling is that the art world, and more specifically the art market, essentially reflects the capitalist economy we are all enmeshed in. Yet art is set at an acute angle to the culture as a whole; as an object[2] produced according to a singular vision[3] its reflection is distorted for the extremity of that position compared to other cultural products.[4] It is held to a higher standard not only for its legacy within culture, but for offering greater hope for change by providing an undiluted voice, and it is immeasurably darkened if it instead saccharinely manipulates those expectations. We might know that these expectations are messily built on fictions, but they don’t make any of us love art any less. What art allows us to express is something that no one who loves it wants to see transformed into another dumb commodity, but that also doesn’t mean we can excise art from the rest of the global economy and set it aside in its own crystal lined utopia. The problems ascribed to the art market are at their core problems of a certain trends of capital metastizing around art: increased prices leading to increased and watered down production, top galleries conglomerating and poaching talent to enclose the market in a near monopoly, speculators flipping art works at a high profit and to the detriment of artists’ careers, focused elitism alienating art from mainstream society; all easily map onto other markets, other bubbles. Any discussion of change must somehow account for this reality.
Powers likened this position to “cosmic background radiation” and I must say that I agree; the cosmic background radiation permeates the universe in a way that the current incarnation of capitalism[5] has spread throughout most aspects of the global economy. If you look deep enough it is always there. Likewise, art can be separated from other markets only to a superficial degree: real-estate, fuel, and other commodities represent real costs to anyone operating a business. So if dealers must follow the laws of the jungle in order to maintain their business, why is the calculus any different for artists? They are running a small business, and if they are to make their practice sustainable (if not sustaining) then falling on their economic sword in the name of art[6] is not necessarily attractive. This is where Power’s comparison of artists to the young drug dealers chronicled in Freakanomics is the most apt. As the lowest rung in the art world’s economic ladder, artists economic power is diffused over the broadest population, and if there’s always another dealer willing to pander in the name of a dollar there are ten artists dying to have their work shown, eager just to get the work out of the studio and maybe start to recoup the cost of an expensive studio rent and maybe start to pay off student loans.[7] If an entry-level drug dealer’s best option is to quit, not play the game, and go work in fast food, where does that leave artists?Altering the market for drugs in Chicago required a host of changes, many coming from the top down[8] and involving interventions[9] and incentives unavailable to most artists. Art dealers have a more concentrated economic stake, and are better poised to recoup the benefits of a change to the system. Dealers of course operate at different levels, and I suspect that everyone at the market’s pinnacle is quite happy with the situation as it stands. That leaves change to emerge from the bottom up, and out of the middle. It’s all well and good to ask artists to lead, but actual change will require the organization of the entire community; not just artists, but also dealers, critics, and collectors.
The art world has evolved to an imperfect symbiosis with its own market, and perhaps the most relevant question is if it is even possible for it to survive independently? The influx of money is at the root of the symptoms; it has pushed the tiny world of contemporary art out of its confines where everyone knew everyone else[10] and is driving the current “grow or go”[11] phenomena that magnifies the distortion of the largest galleries and secondary market. But this growth has also allowed space (admittedly often small) for other voices to become viable and alternative narratives to gain purchase. When Winkleman notes that dealers in the middle are exhausted and finding it hard to climb above a certain level the thing that stands out to me is just how much climbing is built into the system for everyone. As our culture and politics turn more nakedly Darwinian, and the art world with it, I don’t want to see the realities of the market acknowledged because I agree with someone like Stefan Simchowitz, but because suffering its collapse would drastically reduce the diversity of voices.[12] A certain amount of churn is desirable to avoid stasis and ossification; the pressure to “keep climbing” helps birth new ideas, or rediscover old ones, but also raises the distinct possibility that change may not take a form that we envision.
I think that absent a profound shock to the system it is more likely that the art market continues to progress along its current path with the general economy rather than retreats to a form from the recent past that is more comfortable. However this is not to say that those of us who love art should not be engaged in arguing for art to move according to our vision (unified or not), but we must know what we are asking for. To make work that is less “flippable”, less of a commodity, flies in the face of art’s recent history, where anything can be sold. It is no different a request to ask artists to somehow reject the market as it is for a dealer to ask for something smaller that also happens to be a pretty color. Either option comes at a cost to the artist and their work, and the consequences of such decisions should be properly weighed.[13]
If we accept that everyone is climbing I would argue that artists are already leading. Granted, I think most artists move instinctively towards gallery representation and the popular notion of a career[14], but where that path has not been open they can still be found working to expand their voice in other ways; engaging in the debate waged with things by also curating, writing, and creating their own exhibition spaces.[15] Whether these projects become a core component of their practice or something to be left aside as they gain traction in the art world, they remain as the base of the art world that is committed to art for its unique value of expression and as a form of knowledge, not as an expensive bauble. Perhaps it’s time for gallerists, critics, and curators who want things to change to dig in their heels and start working with artists with whom they share this commitment.
[1]For the purposes of this essay I am leaving out any specific aesthetic debate; changing the economic structure of the art market is a separate issue from arguing how to be sure that ‘good’ work is what is being supported. We all like different art, but are working within the same economic system. Arguing about aesthetics is a second front, and we all know how multi-front wars tend to go.
[2] And I realize that I may need to use that term loosely in describing art.
[3] Again, looking at the more popular consideration of how art is made rather than how insiders might know it to be made.
[4]I’m thinking here of cultural productions with dedicated industries like film and TV that necessarily are collaborations from inception. Art (and art by “art stars”) has tended towards this style of production and is one of symptoms under discussion, but what makes “art” truly the art of our time is that it can still be produced from start to finish by a single person in a single room.
[5] References to it as “late stage” capitalism seem more like wish-castings on the part of certain critics more than anything else.
[6] …or someone else’s vision of what that means.
[7] Although, honestly, just getting the work out of the studio and seen is really motivation enough for most of us.
[8] In the form of both government funded programs and education, and the more direct intervention of law enforcement.
[9] Although the PSAs would certainly be entertaining:
“This is your art.”
“This is your art, over-produced and made by someone else hanging in a Gagosian gallery somewhere.”
“Any questions?”
[10]Starting roughly when America became (or declared itself) the center of contemporary art in the 1950’s. You can chart other milestones like the Scull auction or the rise of Soho and then Chelsea, or the explosion of art fairs down the long winding road to our current hell.
[11] Surely the analogy to certain giant reptiles of the Cretaceous period has been made by someone by now.
[12]Mass-extinction events tend to do that.
[13]It is worth remembering that for all of the horror that greeted the return of painting and its market in the early Eighties, history has largely corrected itself.
[14]Gallerists have probably noticed these efforts in their in-boxes.
[15]Some of my favorite programs in New York are in artist run spaces: Auxilary Projects, Centotto, Minus Space, Pierogi, and Regina Rex have all been started by artists; the number would multiply exponentially once one starts to consider other spaces, and in as much as artists are always concerned with space, forming their own exhibits in their own spaces has an august history.
Why Make it Pretty.
As developed nations actually produce and manufacture less and less, the aggressive expansion of intellectual property should come as no surprise. Defunct companies that produce nothing are bought and sold for fantastic sums for only the patents they hold, so that one mega corporation may sue another or compromise their markets or limit their competition. We are in the business of producing plans and ideas, and thus any notion set to paper may have economic value. Scholarship is not above the fray, and it is more than a little sad to see areas of intellectual pursuit that depended on community interaction and spirited discourse limited by an economic bottom line. As I have discussed in the past[1] , fair use should provide a mechanism for intellectual and cultural advancement within the framework of copyright, yet the mechanism and enforcement of the principal in the law is sorely lacking.
This brings us to the utter ridiculousness of the estate of David Smith and the rights management organization VAGA seeking to impose limitations on the works of Lauren Clay. Clay has made miniature, brightly colored papier-mâché works that reference (or copy) Smith’s Cubi sculptures, and when VAGA executive director Robert Panzer told Artinfo.com that “The importance of a work of art can lose its value when people reproduce it without permission. There’s ethical questions, legal questions here.” he’s right, only that he’s completely wrong. The ethical and legal questions raised are concerned with free expression, not any hypothetical loss of value to David Smith’s estate. When he states that Clay is not “familiar with the relevant legal issues.” he’s essentially assuming his own interpretation of fair use to be law:
“What she did was make them look just like the original,” he said. “Are you transforming it to make a new idea? We don’t think it’s transformative enough. She didn’t make enough of a comment. She just changed the medium. She said, ‘Look, I’m going to make it colorful and pretty.’”
So a female artist has taken sculptures from the cannon of art history that are steeped in overt masculinity and stripped them of their bombastic scale and aggressive materiality by rendering them on an intimate scale in common craft materials? This is essentially the art world’s version of satire, which is clearly protected as fair use. In “making them pretty” Clay has taken a specific form and reversed its meaning by simply manipulating material, color, and scale; if that is not transformative I don’t know what is.
Clay’s is not a deep statement[2], but it doesn’t have to be to be protected; satire tends to have a limited shelf life after all.[3] The more troubling issue is that nearly any morphology can be owned[4] and any form or geometry can quickly become off limits. It was easy for many to side against Richard Prince as a wealthy artist poaching from a less known photographer and using his work to sell paintings for millions of dollars; but Patrick Cariou’s case of the little guy was ever only going to be the exception. Here we can see the easy abuse of power that will be the common application of limiting fair use. Appropriation may never result in an artwork that is popularly loved, but is a process and principle ever more important to defend for just that reason.
[1] See ‘What Appropriation Means to Me and Mine’ and ‘On Copyright Parts One, Two, and Three.’
[2] It plays ‘Hot Shots’ to Smith’s ‘Top Gun.’ (David, not Tony.)
[3] When one yells that the emperor has no clothes on, once he goes and gets dressed it’s on to the next issue. However as far as the inequality of gender in the art world goes, it’s probably safe to say that the whole business is not likely to be putting a robe on any time soon.
[4] Which should probably not be a surprise when gene sequences (i.e. life) can be owned as intellectual property.
More Questions: On Criticism and Political Art
In the wake of underwhelming critical response to Creative Time’s fourth summit on artistic activism, Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert released an open letter to critics writing about political art on their Center for Artistic Activism website. While I begrudge them neither the use of art to maximize the effect of their social activism or their appeal to political consciousness to aid them in finding an audience for their art, I think they oversimplify the intersection of art and activism, how art is seen, and how it is understood. The “art world” is too varied to define so broadly[i]; the interests at play from the various sites are too different. This variety extends to the interactions between criticism, activism, artists, and the body politic. The danger with rendering such simplistic generalizations is that if they ultimately undermine art as a tool to affect the change they seek.[ii]
Creative Time sees the artist as telling truth to power, and there is a long, laudable tradition of such statement within the arts, but such actions do not require inclusion within the bounds of artistic practice. After all many, many artists have participated in political actions[iii] or made work that engage with and challenge social issues[iv], and critics have not found any of this work impossible to address. One may certainly ask if they approached the issues with the same interest and understanding that originated with their aesthetic concern, and that in turn may make it more difficult to assess if the ideas raised have merit.[v] But that then begs the question as to why seek the attention of art critics, instead of more general media coverage that would go farther in promoting their agenda? If their goal (or the goal of any artist – activist) is to effect change, and the form of the work must be promiscuous in order to facilitate that goal, why is it necessary to be art? In laying out their premise it seems that despite Duncombe and Lambert’s claims to the contrary, efficacy becomes a central issue. How do the causes supported by activism benefit from the intervention of an artistic practice? If the “art” is not adding something to the message, it both demeans the art and artist[vi] and obfuscates and lessens the political point.[vii]
A fundamental issue is that if artists are going to entertain the notion that art can address any sort of discourse with the broader world, then the critics who write and think about art must be accorded a separate expression. Work by journalists, poets, philosophers, ethnographers, and even artists may be grouped under the rubric of ‘criticism.’ The term can be taken as any thinking about art and the understanding of its structure, but my reading of Duncombe and Lambert and their desire to make the critic (at least partly) responsible to the work’s social efficacy[viii] reduces such thinkers to mere cheerleaders. It would be a separate matter if they were calling for better or more thoughtful criticism.[ix] I think they would have a hard time finding anyone ready to defend the broad state of current art writing and its interaction with the market as the pinnacle of critical thought, but that does not excuse a call to press criticism into blind service to the goals of the artwork.[x]
The critic is only necessary if the work in question is to be treated as art, rather than activism; the latter finds its apotheosis by its ratification or rejection within the political system, but the former is a set of ideas and relations forever in flux. Whether working for short or long term social gain, activism has a specific and visible political end. On the other hand the point of art is a continual engagement and dialog about the work and the structures around it. Criticism is necessary to further a substantial dialog, but is much less useful within the political organization necessary for successful activism. The revision, doubt, constant examination at the heart of artistic discourse is at odds with political action.[xi]
The new critical tradition they call for would take the “art” out of the discussion of the work of “artist – activists” in favor of a pragmatism more amenable to politics. What is lost with the “art” is the disparate individual interest that drives people to become artists[xii], and for critics to interact with them and their work. Just as it is important to allow for art that embraces the political, space must also be defended for work that does not. Ultimately in asking for an “art that intends to change the very way we see, act and make sense of our world” Duncombe and Lambert have articulated the goal of (nearly) every artist, whether they work politically or not. Similarly, what is needed is not new standards, language, and traditions for critics and thinkers, but only a more careful application of the ones they already have; if the discussion is bigger than art, it’s probably not really a discussion about art.
[i] See my essay Site Specificity: Art & the Mainstream Part 2 for a discussion of the intermingling of various sites within the art world.
[ii] Starting with their assertion that the audience for most art is critics, and through the discussion on tradition, medium, and mastery, the stereotypes and generalizations run thick without any corresponding real world examples. If critics are the audience, then doesn’t the blame ultimately lie with artists for making that work?
[iii] For example, consider everyone who contributed to the Peace Tower, despite its genesis in a period where vanguard art rejected any outward reference beyond pure aesthetic experience.
[iv] Think of the work of Goya, the Mexican muralists, Guston, Golloub, Spero, Chicago, Keinholz, Kruger, Holzer, Wojnarowicz, Weems, Hammons, Steinbach, Saul, the Gorilla Girls, the Art Guys, Gonzalez-Torres…
[v] Another implicit argument is that the political goals and beliefs they espouse are the ones to be championed. Especially in an election year, that seems obviously wrong.
[vi] As they are reduced to the attention grabbing schtick of good advertising.
[vii] As the confused viewer is more concerned about figuring out what they just saw, rather than why it was important.
[viii] One cannot state that questions are good, but then qualify as to the purpose, or speak to the need to aid political art without implicitly drafting critics into their own political ranks.
[ix] After all, who ever really wants to defend critics?
[x] It would be just as unthinkable as forbidding comment or criticism on certain work, and ultimately no different than a state dictating the terms of discussion. In calling for “a world in which artists work collectively in an embedded engagement with society.” Duncombe and Lambert are effectively asking art and criticism to support societal engineering on the scale appropriate to Gandhi or Goebbels.
[xi] Which may be why the Occupy movement had trouble gaining traction with a political procedures based on artistic process.
[xii] Instead of teachers, community activists, or social workers. Just because the interests or job titles overlap is not a reason to collapse them all together into a single pile.
Digging Deeper
The artist’s studios participating in the Brooklyn Muesum’s GO are now closed. If things go according to plan the voters, energized by their role as curators, will carefully think over what they saw and what they learned in talking to the artists about their work and make considered nominations of who they think should be part of a museum show. How effective using voter participation as a mechanism to get the community into artists’ studios is debatable. The few participating artists I talked to did not see a torrent of visitors. I would guess that the artists who have participated in neighborhood-wide open studio projects saw fewer visitors, likely stemming from the entire borough being in play at the same time; instead of seeing people head out to a single destination, they may have stayed in their own back yard.[i] Artists also mentioned that many of their visitors were not voting (or were somehow unaware that there was voting), they were just there for the art. If GO is really seen as an experiment[ii] then we should look forward to seeing if it is implemented again what tweaks or changes to the system might work, and we can judge what art winds up on the museum wall. But I think the real determination lies not in what comes into the museum for GO, but in pointing to what should be coming out of the Brooklyn museum next.
Right now voting is on, and nominations are piling up, but what is notable is that the process is very opaque. The ten artists with the most nominations are probably not going to be made public[iii], and so they next time we hear much about this it will probably be when the museum starts promoting the exhibition. In the meantime, once nominations are decided on the curators will head out to meet the artists, and essentially have to pick completed work out of studios for the exhibition.[iv] The scope of the exhibition is still undisclosed and probably open to change depending on what they find. These works could be added to a show already being worked on, or stuck into a side corridor as part of the museum’s Raw/ Cooked[v] series. This opacity seems designed to protect the museum from charges that GO is nothing more than a popularity contest, and giving the curators the final word would also keep them from winding up with an Artprize-like fiasco. But the question is then why bother to have voting at all? After considering rules the voting comes off as a more of a publicity stunt; popular vote and elitist selection are mutually exclusive. Votes by the community “curators” are merely suggestions to the real curators and they are not really accountable within this process.[vi] If the community was interested enough in the art being made around them to eschew the nominations process then it stands to reason that they don’t need official enticements to get out to see it. In my previous essay Don’t Vote, I pointed out that registering as an artist or to vote offers the Brooklyn Museum a treasure trove of personal data they can use to try and boost attendance and membership. I should be clear that while I have no knowledge that this will happen, it seems likely. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing depending on how it’s handled[vii], but the funny thing about asking for community participation is that the community, and perhaps especially the community of art lovers in Brooklyn, will know when they’re only being paid in lip service and the double talk. If you’re going to ask for community involvement you better be prepared for the community to be really involved and to meet them with your best effort. If you just wind up trying to sell them stuff you’re going to alienate them and find it harder to get them in your doors. If you ask their opinion, you can’t turn around and ignore it.
And that’s my big problem with GO; the Brooklyn Museum only barely took the first step. Everyone wants the Brooklyn Museum to thrive, and the museum itself deserves a ton of credit for putting the weekend together, building the digital infrastructure, and taking the risk to extend a hand to the community in a way that just doesn’t happen with MoMA, The Guggenheim, the Whitney, or the Met. And the Brooklyn Museum can’t really compete with those institutions, but it is the home museum for the borough with the largest concentration of artists on the planet. The community they are reaching out to is the one that is going to help shape the future of contemporary art more than any other and that points the way forward, but it is not necessarily an easy or well worn path.
My advice to the Brooklyn Museum and its curators is to reach out to artists and engage with them directly. It doesn’t mean some sort of public approval by proxy of an uncountable vote; every neighborhood that has an open studio weekend should see an involvement with their contemporary curators[viii] and that involvement should be publicized on social media. Instead of just having the community direct the curators with a clumsy map drawn by nomination, get them out to work in the ebb and flow of those studio weekends and have them start drawing their own map. Perhaps they’ll find some good art that wouldn’t be popular enough to draw a nomination. The process should lead to more contemporary exhibitions drawn from the community, rather than just the rosters of Chelsea galleries. Combine the concepts behind Open House with Raw/Cooked and stake out the messy territory of championing the artists within your community.[ix] This is a much tougher business than canonization, but one that I would argue the Brooklyn Museum is uniquely suited to position itself for. Going further, get these artists into the museum. If you are going to try flogging membership packages, perhaps try offering a disappearing animal, the artist’s rate membership.[x] Build up a lecture series based on local issues and invite the artists you’ve met and engaged with to be part of the conversation on the stage, not just from the audience. This poses another problem that offers another opportunity: if there are too many artists to keep track of and engage with (and there probably are; there are more artists than you can shake a stick at in Brooklyn) then also reach out to under-employed[xi] curators and writers are living here as well, and they can be recruited to bring artists in and help organize these programs.
Establishing the Sackler Center for Feminist Art points in the right direction. The exhibition and curatorial program should look to mine areas of art history that are otherwise neglected and subject them to serious, rigorous scholarship. When you find an exhibition that truly does reach out to a part of the public who you don’t think would otherwise set foot in your museum, don’t cancel the exhibition because the corporate oligarch who’s one of your biggest sponsors thinks it would be inconvenient and messy. Throw the party and just figure out how to clean it up afterwards. The point is to get that part of your community into the museum so you can show them some other interesting things that may draw them back, and maybe they start to think about art as a possible means to expanding their horizons. The key to doing that, on the other hand, is not dumbing down the rest of the program. Popularity and populism work to the detriment of a museum when they are all that is on offer.
Previously I complained about the pitfalls of letting the general public dictate the shape of art to artists. The special thing about Brooklyn, is that with so many artists, many in the community pay attention to art and culture as part of their daily lives. They are already invested. The Brooklyn Museum should look at GO as the first step to bringing artists and the community together to find a new model for constructing the museum’s program and establishing art as a central plank within the community. This is a long-term plan for growth that must be willing to take risks and show the community something new, even if that turns out to be different, unexpected, or upsetting. And these are almost certain to be the results of helping a community (of artists) organize up from the bottom rather than being organized from the top down.
[i] Which is part of the stated point of GO, afterall.
[iii] Which is fair; shortlists are prestigious for literary prizes, but not making the cut for a group show would become a public failure. To say nothing to opening the curators up the criticism and second guessing.
[iv] Two and a half months is not a lot of time to organize even a small museum show, so the logistics are a limitation.
[v] A name that I’ve always disliked for it feeling a bit condescending.
[vi] As in a, ahem, “truly democratic” process.
[vii] It not being exactly a secret that the Brooklyn Museum is struggling when compared to some of its more well endowed relations across the river. Just another example of the destiny of real estate I suppose…
[viii] And I would argue that they should already have been doing this from the get go.
[ix] Of course most of us moved to New York from somewhere else, and we’re all familiar with the community arts center that shows local artists without any real judgment. That is a trap to avoid, but it shouldn’t be that hard as you’re pulling from one of the deepest pools of talent available.
[x] This would also encourage participation going forward, and could be extended to voters as well.
[xi] I hesitate to say this, because current funding being what it is, it probably means adopting a soul-crushing model of employing many low-paid, benefitless adjuncts that colleges have been using for years. A model that keeps the core work force impoverished is not the way to go, but there are also undoubtedly some young curators who would welcome the chance to work on large project at a major venue and show off what they can do. Perhaps there’s a way to integrate a young curator’s program just as the Whitney used to have its own studio program. The point is to think outside the corporate box here.
Don’t Vote
The new art season is upon us, bringing with it packed openings, ridiculous gossip, and the latest scandal d’jour. For artists it also marks new cycle of applications for grants and residencies. Everyone is back from vacation and programs and exhibitions can begin in earnest, just like the transition to serious movies and the end to summer popcorn fun at the movies, most artists will turn (or at least divide) their attention towards offers of space, funding, or some sort of patronage that they won’t find within the market place. This weekend the flood gates are officially open, and the Brooklyn Museum launches GO with the stated mission to having the community interact with and discover the art being made around them within the one territory that is more densely populated with artists than any other.
The question becomes, why is everyone so eager to mash art and community together? In this day and age of diminished arts education and funding, a seemingly ubiquitous requirement of grants these days is that the art and applicant to also provide some sort of service to the community.[i] This is usually left rather vague and up to the artist, but the fact that the requirement is there at all either privileges work that where the conceptual underpinnings are rooted in activism or requires the artist to contort their practice into some sharable event of dubious utility. While there is nothing wrong with the former (after all such work is much less likely to find a base of private collectors that will support it), that kind of practice is much less common among the general population of artists. The effect in demanding community service from artists is that it ultimately distorts the perception and demand of what sort of art is being made, the same way people claim that the art market does.[ii] It also effectively states that the art itself is not of sufficient utility to the community, something that I think is baldly wrong.
My suspicion is that as public education has been cut back more and more, and as the arts have been the first programs on the block, political and arts non-profit leaders have tried to help replace or otherwise shore up the decline. But the final commitment becomes only a less effective vestige of what we should see in our schools every day. The responsibility falls on community leaders, and ultimately on to the community themselves[iii] but is passed on to artists[iv] to lead the community back to art. Interest in art appears on the rise[v], and art has always been a part of the community[vi] that communities are reaching out to their artists is a good thing. The problem arises when the art becomes subservient to the whims of that community. Michigan’s Artprize turns art into a political campaign, which in the end leaves it as a mere popularity contest and there can be no mistaking that a popular vote is not a friend of serious aesthetic investigation. Consider the careers of Leroy Neimann or Thomas Kinkade, or the attendance numbers of Paul Schimmel’s fantastically scholarly MOCA exhibitons in the face of Jeffery Deitch’s Art in the Street. What is good for art (and is good art) and what is popular with the community are not usually the same thing.
GO seeks to combine the voting structure of Artprize with the grass roots, get-out-and-meet-your-neighbor spirit of any good old fashioned open studio event. If there is something worse than the populist demand of Artprize, it is the equivocation and lack of effort that is put forth by the Brooklyn Museum. A quick glance at the rules shows that the community is only nominating artists for studio visits. Those that receive the most nominations will have a studio visit with the curators of the Brooklyn Museum, who will curate a show from what they see, including those artists into a group show. A lot of work is being put into GO on organizational and technical levels, and both artists and voters have to jump through quite a few hoops in order to participate in what is an outsourcing of the curator’s job by the curator themselves, who could (and should) just as easily be out looking in artist’s studios.[vii] GO relieves them of a great deal of legwork and responsibility, and will simultaneously provide a huge trove of contact information that the Museum can use for future membership drives.[viii]
Art has long had function to serve the information and propaganda needs of those in power. Perhaps the greatest achievement of art history is the slow unyoking of art from the whims of the elite, a project that is nowhere near complete. GO is ultimately an attempt to co-opt grass roots methods for institutional advantage, but it also asks the community to do something good: go look at more art and think about it. That in itself is enough benefit and doing anything more isn’t really being done for artist or art.
[i] Consider the NYFA grants that almost every artist that I know (including myself) will begin applying for in September.
[ii] … and to be clear the market causes the same distortion. Money around art is like a large gravitational mass around light; it bends and distorts its path. The money available in grants is far less than the art market proper, but the effects will still be there.
[iii] Who have ultimately voted for this structure in one way or another
[iv] Who are only too happy to take it on; some funding is still better than none.
[v] Witness museum attendance rates, the volume of the art market, and even reality TV getting in on the act.
[vi] What did you think those cave paintings in Lascaux were for, anyway?
[vii] And seriously, does anyone think it would be so hard for the curator of any museum to get an invitation to the studio of an emerging artist?
[viii] This likely the real reason for the museum to put so many rescources into what is otherwise a minor publicity stunt. If you are registered to vote, you are sure to get a great deal of email from the Brooklyn Museum. Some of it will certainly pertain to the exciting results of GO and invite you out to the museum to see the work you helped curate, but even more of it is probably going to be asking you for money.
Brian Dupont: Artist's Texts 