Author: Christopher Howard

The Carnival That Mocks the King

This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fifth texts.

The Artist-Curator
Monday, April 7, 2014
Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

Installation view of Kazimir Malevich’s work in 0.10 (1915)

What happens when artists act as curators, organizing exhibitions for museums, commercial galleries, and other venues? Well, they become curators, if for one show only. Is this new? Is it a trend? What advantages and complications result when an artist takes on a different professional role? The third session for the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” simply titled “The Artist-Curator,” explored these ideas and more.

In some ways, the artist as curator is as old as the curatorial professional itself, which developed in tandem with the rise of the modern public museum. Or so I imagine, since someone had to work in the Louvre and at the British Museum two hundred years ago. As the previous session demonstrated, artists organized exhibitions—usually of their own work—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it seems little research has been conducted on curators from that time.

The current session’s moderator, Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, named a handful of significant artist-curated exhibitions from the last one hundred years: 0.10 in Russia, which featured works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Lyubov Popova (1915–16); an exhibition of Surrealist objects in the Parisian gallery of Charles Ratton, a dealer of so-called primitive art (1936); Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox, held in several museums across the United States (1969–70); Richard Hamilton’s The Artist’s Eye in London (1978); the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, whose inaugural event was a curatorial contribution from Scott Burton (1989); Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum (1990); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which features an artist, Michelle Grabner, among the three curators.

Installation view of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox at the RISD Museum in 1970

A talk by the curator Florence Ostende titled “Exhibitions by Artists: Another Occupation?” added another exhibition to Musteata’s list, the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1938. Ostende then explained how a demand by the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 for a committee of artists with curatorial responsibilities at MoMA was realized (in part) twenty years later through Artist’s Choice; she also noted two exhibitions by the artist Philippe Parreno, Snow Dancing (1995) and Alien Seasons (2002) as being projects that combined aesthetic and curatorial practices. For an important group show called The Uncanny (1993), the artist Mike Kelley rigorously researched his subject and used art-historical methodology, she said. Ostende also cited Jean-Luc Godard’s self-directed installation of Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem (2006) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and its abandoned predecessor, Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema, as well as the Museum of American Art in Berlin, as examples of curatorial projects by creative types.

Acting as curators, Ostende told us, artists can subvert rules, turn things upside down, and present a “carnival that mocks the king.” While that may be generally true, and artists having a voice in an institution as powerful as MoMA is certainly important, it’s wrong to assume an artist curator would by nature resist conservative and safe approaches to exhibitions and challenge established categories and histories. After all, think about how often artists, when invited to give a lecture, follow a standard chronological method of presenting their work. It’s not that artists are inherently more imaginative and have more freedom than professional curators. I would expect an art exhibition organized by a lawyer, a plumber, or a biologist to be just as unconventional, even radically so. (Or not, considering the professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal’s Size DOES Matter in 2010.) Rather, I would argue, institutional conventions, constraints, and inflexibility are factors that inhibit the organizer of an exhibition.

Ostende dated what she called the “decay of the empowerment of the curator” to the 1990s, which is, oddly enough, the decade in which the art world witnessed the rise of empowered curator, if we are to believe the traditional narrative. Perhaps Ostende referred to scholarly minded, museum-based curators in dusty institutions, not to roving agents such as Harald Szeeman and Walter Hopps or globetrotting stars like Okwui Enwezor and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

In a talk titled “Gossip and Ridicule,” the sculptor Carol Bove positioned the artist’s career as a game to be played but wholeheartedly objected to the growing myth of a career as a single project, most crassly realized through the idea that everything an artist does is an artwork, based on the fact that he or she is an artist. In this situation, Bove said, the artist’s life is colonized by the career. “When the going gets professional,” she remarked, “the weird go away.” Her thoughts were especially provocative considering the erosion taking place between Americans’ work and personal lives, many are increasingly expected to be reachable after hours, in addition to the daily nine-to-five schedule.

Bove also said that “lying”—which I interpreted as withholding the truth rather than deliberate deception—is something that artists are allowed to do. Curators, on the other hand, with their budgets, boards, scholarship, and facts, lack this luxury. Nevertheless, she continued, curators lust after the looseness, personality, and potential for abuse that an artist can give to an artwork. Like Ostende, Bove articulated certain qualities that an artist curator can bring to an exhibition, but I reiterate that if a professional curator wants to organize more interesting exhibitions, he or she should closely examine his or her institutional situation and precipitate ways in which that situation can be changed, in both the short and long term.

Installation view of Carol Bove’s restaging of a 1993 gallery exhibition of work by Felix González-Torres

Bove’s sculpture, comprising wall-mounted shelves with decades-old books and small objects (stones, feathers) or composed of subdued, elegant juxtapositions of sizable pieces of wood, steel, and concrete, could be described as having a curatorial nature. Her intent with these works, however, is making art, but she was recently involved with selections for Felix González-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010–11), a retrospective of work by the late Cuban American artist held at museums in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. The lead curator Elena Filipovic had organized the show at all three venues but, halfway through its duration, invited three artists—Bove, Danh Vo, and Tino Sehgal—to reinstall the works according to their own ideas. At Bove’s venue, the Fondation Beyeler, she restaged González-Torres’s 1991 show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Every Week There Is Something Different, in which he switched out the works once a week. González-Torres was not the first to produce a solo show that resembled a group outing, Bove acknowledged, but he provided a template for it. And the result? “It looks exactly like curating,” she said.

Installation view of The Jewel Thief at the Tang Museum in 2010

For his talk, Ian Berry, curator of Skidmore College’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, declared that authorial roles shift even within a single project. A few years ago he worked with the artist Jessica Stockholder—an artist whose sculpture and installation are as much curated as they are constructed and painted—on The Jewel Thief (2010–11). This group exhibition of abstract painting, half of which came from the museum’s permanent collection and most of which was contemporary, was built from their in-the-studio conversations about the genre; it also emphasized the intersection of art with architecture and decoration. Berry said that he and Stockholder had fun choosing “hot and cold” artists, and works were grouped, hung, and installed in unconventional and playful ways. For her contribution, Stockholder created a multipurpose plywood platform that was used as an event space, a viewing space, and seating. You could say that she literalized the metaphoric “platform” fetishized by so many curators.

Josh Kline said he was asked to discuss ProBio (2013), a group exhibition on art, biology, and technology that he organized for MoMA PS1 last summer, but he hijacked his own talk to sort through the challenges emerging artists face, in particular those who curate. Artists today, he said, must become artist curators—which he explained through his own experiences. Working a day job at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)—where he was director of public programs—Kline perceived himself as a curator who secretly made art. At one point he wondered if he would leave EAI for an institutional job or to open his own space, but was discouraged after the Great Recession began in 2008, when many galleries had either closed or become less experimental.

Installation view of Josh Kline’s work in ProBio (2013) at MoMA PS1

Kline was also suspicious of trajectory of emerging artists in the twenty-first century: gaining visibility at MFA degree shows, getting discovered, participating in group shows, getting a two-person show, and earning that coveted solo show in a gallery before moving onto art fairs and the “biennial circuit.” Prior models of career building didn’t cross his mind as a viable option. “Artist-run spaces,” Kline commented, “were something that happened in the seventies,” and he didn’t identify similar activities in New York—including Apartment Show, Real Fine Arts, Soloway, and Cleopatra’s—with that history. In 2009 he curated the inaugural exhibition (Nobodies New York) at 179 Canal, a space run by the artist, curator, and dealer Margaret Lee, whose initial idea was to throw art parties as an effort to help the landlord find tenants for the building in a bad real-estate market. (Lee’s studio was in the building.) During 179 Canal’s year programming, a scene developed, and other shows, such as Skin So Soft (2011) at Gresham’s Ghost, followed. Several of these artists, including Kline, now show at Lee’s critically acclaimed commercial gallery, 47 Canal.

The young artist-curators that Kline knows have worked as arts administrators, artist’s assistants, and art handlers or on gallery staffs—they have experience that comes from the real world, not expensive MFA programs. Those in his group include their own work in their curated shows, a common practice that some still find controversial or unethical. For ProBio, Kline gathered work by like-minded artists—including his own—exploring the dismembered, distributed, posthuman body through ergonomics, bacteria, depictions of the insides of the body, and use of nonarchival materials. (He also noted that this work differs from art about the body from the 1970s, which he described as dematerialized and antimarket.) Concluding his remarks, Kline finally explained that the title of his presentation, “Conservative Curation,” came from a traditional view of organizing exhibitions based on visits to artist’s studios, the interests of artists, and the “discovery of works that speak to our times.” He also believes that curation is a “tool to be used by artists” to present their work “on their own terms.”

DIS, Emerging Artist, 2013, video with color and sound, 1:04

During the Q&A, an audience member asked about a difference between an artist-curated exhibition and an artist’s installation work? The Kabakovs make a distinction, Ostende replied, but the lines are blurry elsewhere. The answer can be found, I think, not with a silver-bullet answer—which so many seem to want—but rather on a case-by-case basis. Kline does not consider his curatorial work to be art but acknowledges that Lee absorbs works of art by others into her exhibitions. Regarding The Jewel Thief, Berry affirmed that Stockholder was clear about what was and wasn’t her art.

The panelists discussed the curator as the primary creative force in an exhibition, eclipsing the roles of artists. Kline faulted graduates from curatorial-studies programs (like Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies) as those coming up with curator-centered exhibitions. He and his peers, he reemphasized, work in a different way, generating ideas from conversations in the studio. Berry said we learn interesting things from auteur curators, just like we find value in chronologically oriented shows. From the audience João Ribas suggested another curatorial genealogy—the collecting strategies of Alfred Barnes and Isabella Stewart Gardner—which derive from the nineteenth-century model of the connoisseur. This notion was off topic—Barnes and Gardner are not artists.

The panelists, from left: Natalie Musteata, Josh Kline, Ian Berry, Carol Bove, and Florence Ostende

A man in the audience said that he knows an artist who works as an institutional curator, and his dealers are telling him to stop. Another man suggested that artists become curators if they can’t find jobs. Someone asked a question about power, transparency, cronyism, and the decisions that lead to the work on the walls. The level of transparency, Berry replied, depends on the institution. Thankfully someone asked a positive question, about the pleasures of curating, to which Bove happily responded: “I feel like my entire MO is ‘look what I found!’”

As the session concluded, I thought about the anxiety many people have over what is and isn’t art, or what’s art and what’s curatorial work. It’s the intent of the artists, the panelists would probably agree. And it’s not too strenuous to make a distinction between roles. Reading and hearing about the debates covered in this session (and the overall conference) for many years has made me realized that scholars—not artists—are typically the ones who fret about creating categories, which is understandable considering their role as arbiters of history. What is strange is that these same scholars consistently often avoid challenging received wisdom regarding the authorial role of curators. When you break things down with case studies, as this and the other sessions did, you realize that generalizations many hold to be true are proved false again and again.

In Terms Of count: 4.

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May 13, 2014
I Don’t Want No Retro Spective

This essay is the third of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, fourth, and fifth texts.

The Retrospective
Monday, April 7, 2014
Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

Ed Ruscha, I Dont Want No Retro Spective, 1979, pastel on paper, 23 x 29 in. (artwork © Ed Ruscha)

For artists, the solo exhibition reigns supreme. For curators, it’s the group show. From major events such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Whitney Biennial to curator-driven institutions like the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Witte de With in Rotterdam, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the authorial curator’s name has typically transcended the artworks on view (or so the story goes). While the art-publishing industry ceaselessly cranks out new books on curatorial issues—nearly always an edited, multiauthored tome—few critical studies have considered the theory and practice of showing the work of a single artist, which is perhaps the bread and butter of art museums worldwide. For the second session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” titled “The Retrospective,” one panelist presented a brief investigation into the history of the solo exhibition while two more offered case studies on atypical exhibitions of a contemporary artist.

Exhibitions are generally categorized as solo, group, and collection, explained João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation in Portugal, and scholars have typically historicized the group show. He cited key studies such as Ian Dunlop’s classic The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art (1972) and Bruce Altshuler’s massive two-book set, Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (2008) and Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 2: 1962–2002 (2013), as providing concise histories of the form.1 For curators, Ribas said, group exhibitions contribute to economies of reputation and curatorial prestige. Nevertheless, the “one-man show,” he acknowledged, has formats, methodologies, and conventions of its own: chronology, biography, connoisseurship, evaluation, and mediation (e.g., the purity of the artist’s voice, curatorial self-effacement). Ribas didn’t discuss collection shows, though I imagine that museum handbooks and guidebooks follow a conventional scholarly logic of highlighting the greatest hits of an institution.

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855, oil on canvas, 142 × 235 in (artwork in the public domain)

Ribas’s preliminary research into the history of solo exhibitions started with Nathaniel Hone, an Irish artist who independently presented a satirical painting called The Pictorial Conjuror after the work’s rejection from the Royal Academy’s annual exposition in London in 1775. Ribas pinpointed the names of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists who had important solo and single-painting shows in public and private locations: John Singleton Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, among others. William Blake’s solo showing in 1809 had a visual and theoretical system, Ribas said, and Joshua Reynolds’s 1813 exhibition in London was organized for general symmetry and an overall pleasing effect. Further, Ribas noted that James Abbott McNeill Whistler designed interiors for his paintings and Paul Signac had formulated ideas about the ideal display of his work.

Various nineteenth-century accounts described one-person exhibitions as commercial and career advancing, which was certainly true of Gustave Courbet, whom Ribas said purposefully identified a solo presentation of his work—housed in a temporary structure near the official Exposition Universelle of 1855, which featured more of his paintings—as an “exhibition,” not an “exposition,” to enhance the term’s arrogant commercial connotation. (The Painter’s Studio, pictured above, was among the highlights of Courbet’s independently produced exhibition, which he called The Pavilion of Realism.) Ribas reported that other sales tactics involved concepts of a good picture and the importance of an artist’s late work. He also mentioned how a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work in Beijing in 1985 was highly influential to Chinese artists.

Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald)

Lewis Kachur, an art historian at Kean University and the author of the excellent book Displaying the Marvelous (2001), discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s “un-retrospective” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011–12, which Kachur characterized as a witty engagement with the career survey. The Italian artist was horrified, Kachur said, when the Guggenheim offered him a show. Cattelan proposed an all-or-nothing gambit: the museum had to display every work he has ever made. Despite his usurping of the curatorial role—the selection of objects would already be determined—the museum’s senior curator Nancy Spector agreed to the novel format. The show, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, had no chronology, theme, or choice: “It’s everything, it’s all,” Kachur said.

As Cattelan “sweeps his work into the immediate present,” the overall effect of his oeuvre, which hung from the skylight down the center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, circumvented the individual contemplation of objects. Kachur enumerated various precedents of artists engaging the museum’s central atrium and surrounding architecture. Alexander Calder was the first to suspend work in the museum’s open space, in 1964, followed by various types of presentations by Jenny Holzer (1989), Dan Flavin (1992), Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1995), Nam June Paik (2000), Matthew Barney (2003), and Cai Guo-Qiang (2006). Cattelan claimed to have seen every show at the Guggenheim since 1993, when he moved to New York, and would have been aware of these installations. Kachur’s research into the subject, he admitted during the session’s Q&A, was limited to the published material on the exhibition—he hasn’t conducted visits to archives or interviews yet. Even so, the scholar’s trajectory looks promising.

Installation view of Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (photograph by Benoit Pailley)

Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, described her experiences planning a retrospective for Rosemarie Trockel. Allergic to the white box, this German artist prefers to show in institutions that challenge her. And because she values her studio time and wanted to spend less on exhibition administration, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos was conceived as a traveling show for multiple venues. Each iteration of the exhibition, though, did feature new and different elements. Cooke and Trockel elected to include art by her peers and objects important to the artist, as well as works by so-called outsider artists like James Castle, Manuel Montalvo, and Judith Scott. The Madrid show included eighteenth-century botanical drawings—and also their late-nineteenth-century transformations into exquisitely crafted glass objects—that all Spaniards know, Cooke said, just like they know the paintings of Diego Velázquez and El Greco.

The two also took field trips together and considered past work, unfinished projects, and new projects. They didn’t write a list or set of goals—at least not at first. The show, Cooke said, developed organically, in an associative way. Despite such close collaboration, Cooke relayed that Trockel did not want to be identified as a cocurator for the show, but the Reina Sofía’s website credits both women as organizers. When A Cosmos landed at the New Museum in New York in 2012, my strongest reaction was that the show looked heavily curated, which may relate to Cooke’s discussion of the art historian Svetlana Alpers’s concept of the “museum effect” and of the differences between visual distinction and cultural significance.

Lynne Cooke, Lewis Kachur, João Ribas, and Chelsea Haines survey the retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

The audience Q&A, adeptly moderated by Chelsea Haines, a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, touched on concerns ranging from practical to absurd. Someone asked about a hypothetical exhibition that has neither artist nor curator, which Kachur called a “riderless horse.” Someone else brought up the idea of a curator’s “portfolio artist.” Sometimes our reception of individual artists, Ribas said, is shaped by their exhibitions, giving credit to Cooke’s past work with Hannah Darboven and to the 1960s dealer Richard Bellamy’s framing of his artists.

In Terms Of count: 10.

1 I would add Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994) and Jens Hoffmann’s Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) to this list, though I’m sure there are many others.

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April 25, 2014
Preexisting Conditions

Prem Krishnamurthy: Double Agency
Monday, March 31, 2014
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, New York, NY

Prem Krishnamurthy

Prem Krishnamurthy’s talk “Double Agency” addressed the speaker’s two primary roles: a founder of the design firm Project Projects (with Adam Michaels) and the director and curator of P!—an interdisciplinary curatorial space that he described as a “mom-and-pop kunsthalle”—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Project Projects has a critical and conceptual relationship to graphic design, Krishnamurthy said, that includes curatorial and editorial roles. Challenging the traditional worker/client relationship, he aims to produce design that is porous rather than unidirectional, working with existing materials and ideas instead of starting each project with a blank slate. He also applies these ideas to exhibitions and public spaces to encourage agency and participation.

Krishnamurthy spoke in what he called a school context, which would leave historical and business matters aside and simplify his professional roles. He gave an overview of “Elective Affinities,” a design class that he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Mindful that teaching has a sole voice and that life diverges from the classroom model after graduation, Krishnamurthy experimented with different modes of collaboration with his students. For example, they used an Exquisite Corpse model in which one person worked on an assignment before handing it off to others to develop and complete. He also configured students into groups of two and groups of three during the semester before involving the whole class. For “Collective Collection,” a 2009 workshop at University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, he led a group of participants that activated unused space in the building. There he stepped back from his teaching role to become a producer and facilitator.

Prem Krishnamurthy collaborates with his audience (photograph by Christopher Howard)

The magazine Print allowed Project Projects to edit and design its January 2011 issue, and the firm settled on the theme of collaboration. Krishnamurthy and others took over the entire issue, assigning articles, hiring photographers, and designing the layout. In addition to producing an issue of a magazine, a form typically considered ephemeral, Krishnamurthy wanted to establish a community. To that end, Project Projects held a roundtable discussion about collaboration at Artists Space in October 2010, before which none of the thirteen participants—artists, designers, writers, fashion entrepreneurs, and more—had actually met. The idea, he said, was for the group to “drink a bottle of wine” and ruminate on what collaboration means.

An edited transcript of the Artists Space conversation runs through numerous pages in the issue, which also featured an unreleased typeface from a designer and several articles—on the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, the art collective Group Material, and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas—that would be normal content for an art journal but unexpected fare for a venerated design publication. An article from the Raqs Media Collective took the longest and was the most fraught, Krishnamurthy said, but when he finally received the text, it was amazing.

Krishnamurthy switched gears to discuss P!, a curatorial space that intentionally lacks a fixed identity and allows for many voices. The first exhibition, Process 01: Joy (2012), featured letterpress work by the legendary designer Karel Martens, who created P!’s first logo; a mural by Chauncey Hare, a self-taught photographer who left the art world in the 1980s to become a socially engaged occupational therapist; and a New York outpost of the artist Christine Hill’s Berlin-based Volksboutique. She chose to paint the floor in her signature red color, which remains to this day. The exhibition’s press release was distributed in English and Chinese, a decision made to engage two linguistic communities that straddle the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

Installation view of Process 01: Joy (2012) at P!

Another P! project was The Ceiling Should Be Green (2013), organized by Krishnamurthy and Ali Wong (also known as Kit Yi Wong) with a feng shui master known as Mr. Ye, who was charged with “circulating the energy” through a pleasing arrangement of artworks and objects. Permutation 03.x (2013) was a six-month-long exhibition and event series on copying and appropriation that served as a meeting place, a reading room, and an art gallery.

During the Q&A, Krishnamurthy emphasized not only a transparency in his methodology but also a resistance to conventions, such as avoiding the minimal signage and other visual codes of a contemporary art gallery. He compared the geographic location of P! to the overlapping metropolis in China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (2009), in which two cities occupy the same physical space in several places but remain strictly but irrationally distinct. In New York, Krishnamurthy said, pedestrians often pay attention to an art gallery’s storefront but “unsee” (to use a term from Miéville’s book) the Chinese characters in the window of the building next door.

In all of his work, Krishnamurthy seemed concerned with the conditions of interdisciplinary working, whether that’s organizing exhibitions as research for himself, creating innovative design for art biennials, or promoting the prescient visions of figures such as Brian O’Doherty, whom he claimed was not taken seriously as an artist forty years ago because he was both a critic and an artist (using the name Patrick Ireland). O’Doherty enabled those who came after him to earn respect in different roles, something Krishnamurthy accomplishes in spades.

In Terms Of count: 2½.

April 22, 2014
Real Estate: Living and Working

On the Needs of Visual Artists: A Roundtable
Monday, March 19, 2001
Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, Third Floor, New York, NY

On March 19, 2001, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and the Judith Rothschild Foundation cosponsored a roundtable discussion on the needs of visual artists. Irving Sandler and Robert Storr, members of the Artists Advisory Committee of the Sharpe Art Foundation, facilitated the discussion, which was hosted by Artists Space in New York. The event was also a follow-up to a discussion held on the same topic in 1988. Below is a short section on gentrification and real estate from the 2001 roundtable.

Real Estate: Living and Working

Artists get gentrified out of the neighborhoods they’ve rescued. Can real-estate professionals and activists be hired or made available to advise artists? Can mortgages or loans be made available to make ownership possible? Is the dispersal that gentrification creates necessarily bad, or can it be renewing?

Fred Wilson: Certainly housing is an important thing. I think one of the most stabilizing things for me was buying my loft. Having something of your own does mean a bit more longevity and more time for your work.

Alison Saar: Many artists still have convertible kitchens that they’re working out of. But, I think, especially for a sculptor it becomes more of an issue: you want your studio space to be accessible, but it usually can’t be in your neighborhood or in your home because other people just go berserk.

Bruce Pearson: About twenty years ago I moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Over a period of about ten years, more and more and more artists started moving into this neighborhood. And after I had been there for seventeen and a half years, having a nice affordable loft, the building got sold. I lost my loft. I couldn’t find a space in my neighborhood; it’s become a very popular neighborhood and the rents have just skyrocketed and a lot of artists that have been over there for many years are getting kicked out and they have no place to go. I had thought that you could always find an affordable new artists’ neighborhood, that there was always a community of younger artists starting up new neighborhoods. But during that time I found that there wasn’t; it was getting really scattered all over the place: Red Hook, Harlem, Queens. I was stuck into exile up in Greenpoint. There are a lot of buildings that are being threatened right now and it seems that the loft laws just aren’t strong enough. It will be really interesting to see if artists that have developed communities throughout the years could find some way to secure their situation when they do develop something.

Nancy Bowen: I had a loft in TriBeCa for many years, moved my studio to Williamsburg, which seemed like the middle of nowhere about eleven years ago, and I’m just now facing having to move out of that studio because it’s being developed for luxury living lofts.

At this point in my life I don’t want to move somewhere for a year or two years. So with a group of people I’m trying to get a long-term lease on a building or possibly buying one. But how do you go about doing all this? It’s all stuff I don’t know anything about—things like zoning issues and mortgages and legal issues. Clearly there are already people who know how to do all this. It would be great to have a clearinghouse of real-estate information for artists’ needs. It could be made available in one place that artists could come to and save a lot of time that doesn’t need to be spent in the real-estate business. This could be information added to the Hotline.

Also, it could be very helpful to somehow set up a way to help artists get mortgages, since we often don’t look financially good on paper.

Alexander Ross: What if an individual who was an organizer was paid for a period of time, a year, say, to go into a specific neighborhood, say Williamsburg, and figure out on a grassroots level the actual needs of the artists, and do the work of creating a new loft law there, or developing resources? Someone who was paid to devote time, because we need all the time we have to work on our work.

Janet Fish: If a group of artists found an empty building and wanted to convert it to work space—which doesn’t require all the kinds of things that you need for residential—they would probably not be able to get a loan from a bank. For a long time I had hoped that some foundation might turn up that would be willing to help in this way: if a group of artists made a presentation they could get a loan and then slowly pay it back, and that money could go to another group, and it could just sort of work around the country. It wouldn’t have to just be New York.

Alexander Ross: There should be some way that artists could stay permanently in the places that they carve out. The dispersal of culture in New York is a huge problem: if it gets spread too thin and people get pushed out too far, the energy and the vitality of the art scene is diminished. There should be some way that individual artists could get on the road to having a mortgage for their studio, and to actually own and be able to stay put in the location instead of being blown by the wind to one neighborhood and the next.

Bruce Pearson: Every generation of artists needs space to work. And they generally go to areas where they can find cheap large spaces or warehouse spaces. For a while it was SoHo, Chelsea, Tribeca, and then Williamsburg and now Greenpoint. And it seems like it is spreading like crazy now. I think that artist communities are just developing in a natural manner.

Irving Sandler: So we’re in a situation of dispersion and we’ve got to begin thinking of how, with this dispersion, we create communities again.

Bruce Pearson: Well, it’s really interesting because, right now, I don’t know where the community is. It seemed like it used to be that each generation was kind of localized. And now the real-estate market seems to have forced young artists all over, everywhere from Newark to Red Hook.

In Terms Of count: 0.

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“Real Estate: Living and Working” was originally published in Amy Newman, ed., On the Needs of Visual Artists: A Roundtable 2001 (Colorado Springs: Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, 2002), 14–17. In Terms Of thanks the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation for permission to republish this text.

Read

Elizabeth Flock, “Artists Want to Stay Put by Buying a Building Together. This Is Their Blueprint,” Bedford and Bowery, February 24, 2014.

Alexandra Glorioso, “Bushwick Artists: Maybe We Should All Just Buy a Building Together?,” Bedford and Bowery, June 20, 2013.

Vera Haller, “In Bushwick, Artists Try to Rewrite Gentrification’s Usual Story,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013.

Arit John, “Gentrifying Artists Whine about Gentrification,” Wire, August 2, 2013.

Whitney Kimball, “Ten Takeaways on Rent Reform: ‘Talk to Your Neighbors,’” Art F City, April 1, 2014.

John Powers, “New Ideas Need Tall Buildings: Gentrification vs Integration – Flying Wedges vs Rooted Anchors,” Star Wars Modern, November 13, 2013.

William Powhida, “Redefining the Role of the Artist,” Art F City, April 4, 2014.

William Powhida, “There’s Always a Problem, Sometimes There’s a Solution: Internal Thoughts from a Collective,” Big Red and Shiny, October 15, 2013.

April 20, 2014
Messages, Signals, and Noise

This essay is the second of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, third, fourth, and fifth texts.

Exhibiting Experiments
Monday, April 7, 2014
Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

A view of Daniel Spoerri’s room in Dylaby

“Exhibiting Experiments,” the first session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” comprised two graduate students and a fresh PhD recipient and was moderated by Grant Johnson, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center. Each speaker presented research on a single case study: unrealized projects by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann and two group exhibitions from the 1960s, Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum and Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

First was Caitlin Burkhart, an artist and writer earning a master’s degree in curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, who spoke on “Dynamisch Labyrinth: Deconstructing the ‘White Cube’ through Dynamic Environments.” Her focus was Dylaby, a 1962 exhibition in Amsterdam in which the curator, Willem Sandberg, gave free reign to six artists—Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt—to create interactive room-sized installations. A designer and typographer by trade, Sandberg directed the Stedelijk from 1945 to 1963, and Dylaby was the last show he organized for the museum. De Saint Phalle’s room contained a shotgun for visitors to shoot bags of paint, for example, and Spoerri hung artworks from the permanent collection in a room designed at a ninety-degree angle. Rauschenberg’s room, Burkhardt noted, wasn’t interactive with visitors despite the kinetic nature of his sculptures.

Because the exhibition was laid out sequentially, with the final room being the only way to escape from the labyrinth (unless you retreated through the galleries backward), the audience was obliged to participate to some degree with each artist’s installation—a situation that resembles the “curatorial dictatorship” described by Boris Groys in his keynote address. On several occasions Burkhardt described the rooms as “disorientating,” but I imagine that viewers found them amusing and delightful. Szeemann was influenced by Dylaby, Burkhardt noted, so I look forward to learning more about how significant museum exhibitions during the 1960s have shaped the curatorial landscape of today.

Lucy Hunter recalls the exhibition Art by Telephone (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Lucy Hunter, a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, delivered a paper, “Static on the Line: Art by Telephone and Its Technocratic Dilemma,” that examined a 1969 exhibition in Chicago organized by Jan van der Marck, for which an international group of mostly Conceptual artists provided verbal descriptions of works that museum staffers would build or execute in the galleries. The Dutch-born curator, Hunter said, had purposefully minimized written and photographic documentation, and the catalogue took the form not of a book but rather a long-playing phonographic record that offered excerpts from artists’ phone calls.

In addition to art-historical facts, Hunter construed Art by Telephone through communications theory, using Claude E. Shannon’s diagram from a book called The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) as her theoretical crux. In that diagram, an information source transmits a message to a receiver, but sometimes that message was disrupted by what Shannon called noise. Hunter postulated that documentation was van der Marck’s noise but didn’t quite establish if the receiver was the curator, the fabricator, or the museum visitor, or if the destination was the transcription of the instructions or the galleries. I’m not suggesting that she devise a formula but instead clarify the stakeholders in the equations and why they matter. Hunter felt that van der Marck hadn’t sufficiently exploited the medium of the telephone itself—certainly a lost opportunity to make a complex curatorial statement—but admitted that he was interested in using hardware and software to create a “wholly verbal exchange.”

Claude E. Shannon’s general schematic of a general communications system

Hunter also presented intriguing details about corporate sponsorship of the museum during the 1960s, which should eventually find an appropriate place in her narrative. I’m curious to know how she would respond to Art by Telephone Recalled, a recent investigation of the 1969 exhibition by the French curators Sébastien Pluot and Fabien Vallos, who have restaged works from the original Art by Telephone in several venues, including the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York in 2012, might fit into her chronicle.

“Failure as a Poetic Dimension: Harald Szeemann’s Unrealized Projects” was the title of a presentation by Pietro Rigolo, who works for the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as the subject expert on a team processing the Szeemann’s archive and library. Rigolo discussed the curator’s Museum of Obsessions (1973) and other projects, such as one that would have explored the four elements. For fire, Szeemann would have presented materials on pyromaniacs and bonfires as well as Yves Klein’s fire paintings.

Pietro Rigolo realizes a paper on unrealized projects by Harald Szeeman (photograph by Christopher Howard)

I was intrigued that Rigolo found documentation of exhibitions that Szeemann had left off his CV, but several times during his talk he jumped from projects that took place, those in planning stages, and those which were sketches and ideas. Did Bachelor Machines, which took the male characters in the lower half of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) as its subject, manifest in physical form, or was La Mamma, an exhibition on the subject of motherhood that didn’t have any art, the project that didn’t happen? What was the comment about an exhibition of outsider art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1988? And did visitors to the World Expo 2000 come across Szeemann’s exploration of sex and the holy Christian trinity, with sections on prostitution, birth control, cross-dressing, and masturbation? There is not much difference, Rigolo said, between Szeemann’s thinking for realized and unrealized projects, but this talk would have been coherent with clear divisions among the two groups.

“Exhibiting Experiments” confirmed my past experiences with similar sessions of occasionally affectless speakers presenting early drafts of essays on topics needing more research and further narrative development. But these shortcomings, typical of emerging scholars responding to a call for papers, didn’t distract from the appealing subjects on which the three presenters spoke.

In Terms Of count: 2.

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April 13, 2014
Suicide Solution

This essay is the first of five that reviews a recent conference at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the second, third, fourth, and fifth texts.

The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk
Monday, April 7, 2014
Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

Boris Groys poses for photographs during his keynote address (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Boris Groys presented a keynote address called “The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk” to kick off a daylong conference, “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” that explored historical and contemporary approaches to organizing exhibitions. An interdisciplinary scholar and occasional curator, Groys is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. A few years back he wrote an excellent book called Art Power (2008).

Groys’s accent made it difficult for me to concentrate on his words, and he repeatedly chuckled at what seemed like minor disciplinary quibbles between himself and other theorists (hardly anyone laughed with him). Reading a prepared paper, he relayed that “the artist of the future must be radically indifferent,” according to the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner. He also boldly claimed that “dictatorship is a curatorial project” and that documentation of such projects invokes nostalgia for the ephemeral event. I think he also made a quick reference to the experience of watching live sports (that is, in a stadium or arena) without hearing the play-by-play analysis and color commentary from a radio or television broadcast.

Since Groys’s keynote contained significant chunks of a previously published essay, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” I was able to grasp several of his ideas afterward—and they are good ones.1 First he establishes that art museums traditionally removed works of art from the flow of time “to resist material destruction and historical oblivion,” which are precarious, unstable, and finite things that happen to humans or to things not saved in archives. Groys’s cumulative argument elaborates on Wagner’s notion of an author’s self-sacrifice in the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he likens to suicide, and how the kind of curatorial project popularized by the Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann—something Groys calls a “temporary curatorial dictatorship”—has displaced the traditional art display and transforms into a new Gesamtkunstwerk that returns to art its provisional status. An exhibition goes on view for two or three months, he said of the typical institutional calendar, and then is dismantled. The art museum has consequently responded, as written in the essay, by becoming “a stage for the flow of art events … which include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth.”

What’s novel about the précis is how Groys postulates that the internet doesn’t embody the flow of time but rather, with its innate characteristics of surveillance and traceability, halts that flow. The documentation of museum events, he argues, whether a catalogue, film, or website—or streaming video, as his keynote was broadcast live online—is absorbed into the artwork. (Oh, process.) One crucial function for art museums, Groys concludes in the essay, will be to provide a space for an encounter to both take place and be “thematized and critically theorized.” The published text expresses a few more good ideas, but I’m not sure how to understand my experience of listening to Groys speak—during which I took few written notes because of his illegibility—to the written documentation I read later and can more easily remember.

Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun using mirrors, light, and mist for The Weather Project (2003), which he said was the basis for exploring ideas about experience and mediation. Within two months the installation at Tate Modern in London had attracted more than one million visitors

After his talk Groys was joined by the art historian Claire Bishop for a brief conversation and audience Q&A. She pressed him to talk more about the “suicidal dictator,” but he deflected the question, instead focusing on linking important curators to political leaders. “When you speak about Szeemann,” he mused, “you talk about Caeser, Alexander the Great.” Is reenactment a form of documentation? No, Groys said to Bishop, marking the former as a kind of fiction that the latter lacks. Curiously, Bishop told Groys that his writing has a polemical quality but does not advocate or criticize, which may reflect the lack of a straightforward position on the entertainment-industrial complex described in his essay.

From his chair in the audience Dieter Roelstraete, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was pleased that Groys identified visitors as the most interesting objects in an exhibition (a statement absent from the published essay). What about wall labels, asked Roelstraete. What about exhibitions without visitors? “It’s good,” Groys smiled while regarding the second inquiry. With a show that no one sees, he suggested, the curator becomes a legend, which corresponds to his idea of the suicidal curator as discontinuous and immortal. Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center (and also one of three organizers of the conference), asked Groys if he had a similar term for the artist? The artist has the ability to subvert the curator, he responded obliquely, and also become a curator. I’m not sure Groys answered the question—perhaps he is saving his thoughts for another essay on the subject.

In Terms Of count: 1.

1 Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal 50 (December 2013). The author had presented the essay as a lecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, on November 8, 2013.

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April 11, 2014
In Defense of Democracy

Chantal Mouffe
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium, New York

Chantal Mouffe, intellectual activist (photograph by Christopher Howard)

“People have lost faith in traditional democracy,” said the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. “They have a vote but not a voice.” But rather than call for revolution, she emphasized the need for better, more inclusive representation within institutions of power, such as when which leaders “come to power through election in order to implement a set of radical reforms.” Mouffe, a professor at the University of Westminster in London, is a hero in certain circles, and this lecture, presented in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, offered her the chance to elucidate her views for a diverse crowd of students, professors, art workers, and activists.

Mouffee summarized recent philosophical challenges to neoliberalism, running through the basic ideas of theorists such as Nicholas Bourriaud and Paul Virilio, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially concepts from Hardt and Negri’s book Empire (2000), such as “multitude,” the new term for the proletariat, Mouffe said. She posited that we’ve gone from disciplinary society of hospitals and jails to a society of control, that is, one of biopolitics, immaterial labor, and communications. The multitude uses communications to express itself freely: these subjects are active, not passive—a concept in which neoliberals and capitalists, whose globalization efforts have liberated them from modernity, would delight. In an absolute democracy, according to Hardt, Negri, and friends, minorities in the multitude would never aspire to form a majority or a state, but rather a common. This is liberation, not emancipation, Mouffe said, and it denies a hegemonic structure’s role in power.

Mouffe reaffirmed her ideas about agonism—a political philosophy she has long promoted—by emphasizing that change comes from working with and within institutions, transforming and improving them over time. (Agonism posits that political struggle based on difference and diversity can be passionate, constructive, and respectful, in short, confrontation is good.) This is a passive revolution and organic change, to borrow concepts from the twentieth-century Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. Even though the idea of swift revolution is enticing, representative democracy should not be abandoned or replaced. One gets to choose real alternatives, Mouffe said, in agonistic debate, which engages institutions instead of rejecting, resisting, or replacing them. “Pluralist democracy cannot exist without representation,” she said, expressing a point of view that, according to Slavoj Žižek, presupposes democracy is an idealized, optimum political form that cannot be questioned.1

Chantal Mouffe at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Mouffe generalized about the role of aesthetic practices, stating that art which transforms political identity and modernizes affect is good. So is art that allows for other voices. Radical breaks in art and the tabula rasa, she continued, ignore the importance of incubation and deny the function of influence. Transgressive art, Mouffe declared, is not the most radical kind, and harboring the illusion of art being subversive has inevitably caused the avant-gardes to fail. For her, art should contribute to a multiplicity of sites and—leaving arguments about framing, context, and validation aside— take place both inside and outside the museum. During the audience Q&A, the art historian Terry Smith requested examples of such works of art. Mouffe was hesitant to offer names but eventually gave two: an unfamiliar name [pronounced “eh too jahr”] and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

As one would expect, the Q&A session was a mess of convoluted comments disguised as questions. A man dressed like a Trader Joe’s cashier bloviated for several minutes about episodes in twentieth-century global politics before blurting out, “It’s not cool to talk about the communist party.” Mouffe responded by asking him where and when a communist revolution has succeeded. There are failures but also hope: “We have to keep trying,” she encouraged. “It’s a long process.” Indeed, I often think about how, in the United States, one hundred years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mouffe said that progressive political heroes of the past probably never realized how the “social rights of the welfare state could be dismantled,” as they have during the past couple decades under neoliberalism. Taking an agonistic stance, she fears that protest movements won’t succeed because they’re contesting existing institutions with the goal of deposing them. While I tend to agree overall that real change happens slowly, radical points of view—such as Occupy Wall Street—serve a crucial function of yanking political conversation into a certain direction. And some institutions—especially in the art world—would better serve their constituents if they were gutted completely.

In Terms Of count: 9.

1 Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4 (2001).

Read

Ayesha Ghosh, “GSAPP Lecture Addresses Architecture’s Role in New Democratic Systems,” Archinect, March 31, 2014.

April 2, 2014
The Social Network

Connections Count: The Power of Social Capital
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
New York University, Deutsches Haus, New York, NY

Mark Ebers explains a diagram of the Medici family’s social capital (photograph by Christopher Howard)

“It’s not what you know but who you know that counts” so goes the saying, which you’ve heard so many times that it’s basically become truth. But why? Among those who have investigated the issue—which sociologists call social capital—is Mark Ebers, a professor of business administration, corporate development, and organization at the University of Cologne. During a recent talk at New York University, he attempted to explain what social capital is, how it works, and what its effects are. Basically, Ebers stated, social capital is resources gained from networks—an incredibly vague, nebulous definition that begged for explanation.

Ebers summarized several conclusions about social capital theorized since the early 1970s: who you know is categorized as strong and weak ties, and how you know them affects brokerage and closure. A strong tie would be a close family member or business partner; weak ties are composed of acquaintances and professional colleagues. The sociologist Mark Granovetter examined how social capital helped people find jobs, apartments, and instructors (such as a piano teacher). People with strong ties know the same things, Ebers said. Aficionados of medieval lutes will have read the same books. In contrast, weak ties have dissimilar interests. A musicologist conversing with a physicist can generate new knowledge—and possibly social capital—for each person. Through empirical evidence, Granovetter proved that weak ties are better for a job search; they also favorably influence salary and promotion. Getting $50,000 in funding for a start-up, Ebers said, typically originates in a strong tie.

Brokerage, according to the sociologist and strategist Ronald S. Burt, describes negotiations between two separate networks. A broker, Ebers explained, helps to avoid redundancy, foster innovation, and serve as a gatekeeper. This is good, he continued, for an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs, who worked with diverse groups of people and drew upon distinct individual spheres of knowledge to realize his vision. Jobs was an interesting example: because although companies like Apple and Google benefit tremendously from collaboration and experimental production on the inside, its final products enforce an exclusive ecosystem that discourages the use of other kinds of hardware and software.

The social scientist James Coleman, an early adopter of the term “social capital,” theorized closure and established the concepts of dense connections (in communities) and network closure (a situation in which everyone is inextricably connected). Drawing from an essay published in 1993, Ebers discussed how the strong and weak ties of Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici (1389–1464) served the Florentine banker well on September 26, 1433.1 On this day several families in the Italian peninsula with loose associations—the Strozzi and Albizzi among them—considered toppling the Medici-approved government in what could have been, Ebers proposed, the Tahir Square of its time. Because support for the coup was lazily organized, Cosimo was able to mobilize his own allies—which did not have ties with each other but only to the Medicis—and halt the rebellion. Ebers, though, is interested in business, not history. What happens when, for example, the Eindhoven-based Dutch corporation Philips transformed its closed research laboratory into an open campus in which a hundred other companies were invited to set up shop, with knowledge (and presumably profits) shared among everyone?

Mark Eber works the crowd

Ebers’s published research has explored how social capital transforms and exploits knowledge from within a company and how that same company acquires and assimilates knowledge from the outside. Studying the development of six biotech start-ups in Germany, he found that the less-successful companies had reached “relational and cognitive lock-in” because their founders—who were scientists—perceived themselves as scientists whose business plan called for funding for research with the goal of presenting papers in successively more prestigious academic conferences, achieving success in the wrong venue.2 “We have a great paper,” these scientists would say, but the venture capitalists supporting them responded with a colossal “So what?” The more successful firms, Ebers discovered, had avoided institutional inertia by establishing diverse relationships in scientific, political, financial, and administrative communities; they also better divided the labor within each company, with certain leaders taking on specializations in these areas. One founder of a successful biotech, Ebers said, had a father in finance who had supplied advice; connections were also made with regulators in government.

An audience member asked if a certain type of product from, say, a pharmaceutical firm, would prefer development in a closed network. Apparently they do, but in a cannibalistic way. Ebers reported that Big Pharma has been buying smaller biotech firms and bringing them into the fold. Further, he said that two teams within the same company will sometimes be assigned an identical project so that two solutions are produced, the better of which may not have occurred if only one team had worked on that same project. Other times, he noted, such competition may lead to resentment.

Ebers discussed other potential and actual clashes. The boards of German companies, he disclosed, have few women and few non-Germans, which would make one assume that cognitive lock-in based on sexism and xenophobia might lead to financial downfall. Yet the merger between the Japanese automobile manufacturer Daimler and its American competitor, Chrysler, faced setbacks because of cultural differences. Still, the smaller the points of view, Ebers advised, the bigger the differences. Are Czechs and Slovaks all that different? Most definitely yes, a Czech or Slovak would believe. So, too, would residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn argue that their cultures are worlds apart.

From a certain perspective, Ebers’s conclusions seemed painfully obvious. Of course a company, biotech or otherwise, would not find success unless it diversified or segmented its approach. The scientists for whom research—and not a product—was a top priority were doomed to struggle. Likewise, a designer building a smartphone app would need to marketing and legal advice, unless he or she wanted to lose a patent or copyright. It would only be remarkable that Ebers had found evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the concept of social capital—like the notion of “collaboration” in the art world—is problematic because it cannot be quantified, only alluded to with anecdotal evidence. As the sociologist Ben Fine has written, “Almost any form of social interaction has the potential to be understood as social capital. As a positive resource, it is presumed to have the capacity to facilitate almost any outcome in any walk of life, and to be liquid or fluid across them to a greater or lesser extent. And it is equally adaptable across subject matter, disciplines, methods, and techniques, at least within the social sciences. In short, in principle, and to a large (if selective) degree in practice, social capital can be anything you like.”3

In Terms Of count: 5.

1 See John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May 1993): 1259–1319.

2 For the complete report, see Indre Maurer and Mark Ebers, “Dynamics of Social Capital and Their Performance Implications: Lessons from Biotechnology Start-Ups,” Administrative Science Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 2006): 262–92.

3 Ben Fine, “Social Capital,” Developments in Practice 17, no. 4–5 (August 2007): 567.

Read

Deutsches Haus, “Professor Mark Ebers,” Deutsches Haus: The Stories Inside, May 22, 2014.

March 23, 2014
Hitting Rock Bottom

From the Bottom Up: Rethinking Art Galleries in a Commodity- and Event-Dominated Ecosystem
Friday, March 7, 2014
Armory Show, Open Forum, New York, NY

“Welcome to the Armory Show TED Talks,” joked Christian Viveros-Fauné, a New York–based art critic who was the moderator of today’s panel. He said that everyone onstage for “From the Bottom Up: Rethinking Art Galleries in a Commodity and Event Dominated Ecosystem” is or was involved in exhibiting in a gallery situation or with an art fair, except for Georgina Adam, a columnist for the Financial Times and BBC.com and an editor-at-large for the Art Newspaper.[1] If only the panel had been, like a TED Talk, uplifting and inspirational. When the dust settled, the speakers neither established a historical assessment of the art fair’s ascendance over the past twenty years, nor did they interrogate—and I choose this word purposefully because of Viveros-Fauné recent cynical, under researched rants—the perceived state of the art market and art world.[2] While I recognize the panelists witnessed the rise of the art fair firsthand, their recollections of the recent past were grounded in anecdote, hearsay, and received wisdom.

History of Art Fairs

In 1970 art fairs took place in Cologne, Basel, and Antwerp, Viveros-Fauné claimed. By Viveros-Fauné’s count, 55 art fairs were held in 2001, 68 in 2005, 189 in 2011, and 300 in 2014. Galleries, which he said now number about 300,000 worldwide, need the art fair to sell work. I wondered where these figures came from and how a “gallery” is defined. The first Art Basel Miami Beach would have been held in December 2001, Viveros-Fauné recalled, but it was canceled because of September 11–related complications. An upstart group called Fast Forward couldn’t afford to back down that year and consequently hosted the “first” art fair in south Florida.[3] Viveros-Fauné and Kavi Gupta, director and owner of Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Berlin, participated in Fast Forward that year. “It grew exponentially overnight,” Gupta remarked. Collectors back then, he noted, were more enthused about finding new art than in securing investments. Adam said that she attended her first Miami art-fair week in 2003, watching from the sidelines as a reporter. The art-market boom, when collectors ran like greyhounds to the hot booths immediately after the fair gates opened to meet their prearranged five-minute reserve, took place through 2007. The Great Recession curtailed this heated contest, temporarily.

Golden Years

Viveros-Fauné asked the panelists to talk about those golden years. Darren Flook, cofounder of the Independent Art Fair and formerly director of HOTEL, a gallery he operated with Christabel Stewart, made his first appearance at Zoo Art Fair in 2004. His London gallery, located in a first-floor apartment, was visited only by other artists and magazine people. He did not meet collectors with cash until he showed at Zoo: “We didn’t know those kinds of people—doctors in Cologne, [various types of professionals] in Los Angeles—that didn’t come to East London.” Carlos Durán, the director and owner of Galeria Senda and a cofounder of LOOP, a fair for video art, entered the art world in Barcelona in 1992. His gallery eventually moved into the German and French art-fair circuit. “I’ve been watching this monster grow,” he said. “I’m part of the monster[’s] … foot.” The joke fell flat footed.

The growth of art fairs has been rapid and marvelous over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Viveros-Fauné described the bidding wars over works of art, with people shouting higher prices over other people’s shoulders. “It was ridiculous—but it felt good at the time,” he said as he reminisced about his past life as an art dealer for Roebling Hall. He turned to Gupta and asked, “When did the idea for Volta come on?” After doing his first NADA fair, the Chicagoan replied. (They are talking about Volta in Basel, founded in 2005, not the New York event, first held in 2008. Volta in both cities focus on solo and two-person booths.) Gupta felt he was filling a need for galleries that were doing important things but hadn’t flagged the attention of patrons and museums. Viveros-Fauné asked him to describe the environment for galleries. At the time, Gupta responded, there was no Frieze Art Fair, and Art Basel was very small—primarily New York galleries showed there. Apartment galleries were gaining traction and attention, he remembered, as well as young galleries in Chelsea, Los Angeles, and London.

Despite this first-hand knowledge of recent history, Viveros-Fauné and his speakers did little to establish the basic facts or a straight chronology for art fairs, pulling counts of galleries and fairs from thin air. Perhaps an intrepid scholar will take up the task, connecting our current situation to the Parisian salons and Refusé exhibitions of the late nineteenth century and to the Salon and Gallery Cubists of the early twentieth.

Helen Allen, the founder and principal of Allen/Cooper Enterprises and Site/109, grounded her observations in the 1990s, an era when [younger] galleries were getting locked out of the bigger fairs. The Armory Show was founded by dealers rejected by the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Art Show. The process is cyclical, and everyone tells the same story. The received wisdom is that galleries prove their reliability by showing up at art fairs for three consecutive years for face time with collectors. The art-fair model resembles the farm system of professional baseball: dealers play in several tiers of minor leagues before hitting the majors. Flook shared his experience putting together the Independent Art Fair, which he founded with the New York dealer Elizabeth Dee in 2009. Their approach was stripped down: Independent got rid of the sales catalogue (with phone numbers for galleries), the VIP benefits, and the walled booths and worked backward. The focus was on exhibiting art, and people like the approach and format.

Viveros-Fauné asked his panelists about sales. How do they look now compared to 2002 or 2003? Flook said he sold work at the fairs but not from the gallery’s physical location. But, he added, dealers who sold out their booth were “talking about a mystical city far away,” as if this kind of economic success were a myth. “An El Dorado,” replied Viveros-Fauné. “With bad food,” Flook continued. “Rice and beans,” topped the critic. I understood this exchange to mean that dealers inflate their business activity at art fairs—they fake it till they make it. Half of Durán’s sales in 2008 came from his gallery, he said, and the other half from fairs. Now the percentage is 85/15—the fairs dominate. He mysteriously thinks this tendency will change, or he hopes it will change. Regardless, Durán has become more selective about the fairs he participates in, and further hones his program. Adam believes that art fairs should serve the dealer but that dealers cannot sustain the rigorous schedule of international events. “I’ve been told that galleries are pulling back,” she said. Flook knew that New York didn’t need another art fair but felt he had something to add to the dialogue. Allen pointed out the obvious: artists are pressured to produce work for fairs—gasp!

Brick and Mortar Spaces

Are we in the twilight of the brick-and-mortar gallery? Not yet. Allen confirmed that art fairs don’t accept exhibitors that don’t maintain a physical space. Flook argued that galleries are social, conversational, and idea-charged spaces that foreground the “placement of certain objects by individuals,” or something like that. When pressed by Viveros-Fauné, Flook said that the Independent would accept a group without a gallery as long as that group had a social structure, whether online or off, that generated dialogue.

At fairs, art is seen for four days, or as a JPEG, Viveros-Fauné disclosed, before it enters the collector’s castle. He wondered where if dialogue is happening there. As a journalist, Adam doesn’t write about art fairs, whose crowded booth format and brief encounters with objects “put enormous demands on viewers.” Perhaps she hasn’t been to Chelsea lately, where visitors may spend all of two minutes viewing a show before strolling to the next gallery. The most important aspect of fairs, she concluded, is a dealer choosing to represent an artist shown by another dealer. Unpacking this echo chamber of consensus would take some time. Flook made an asinine claim that “art is an expensive product no one really needs,” taking an incredibly narrow view of art.

Most people would agree that art fairs are hamster wheels—so much energy is expended for so little yield. Someone brought up an article by Adam Gopnik—actually written by his brother Blake—that quoted the former art dealer Nicole Klagsbrun: “stop it.”[4] What can the lovers and sellers of art do? Allen described friends who are closing their gallery to start a residency (and also placing their artists with other galleries). Artists are getting into museum shows as a result. Flook witnessed the spectacular bust of a gallery (what it his own?). But with “a certain affection for empty buildings,” he cannot help but to fantasize about their potential when looking through the windows of them when walking by them. He pondered aloud about running a business without making money. “I wish,” fawned Viveros-Fauné wistfully, “there were more of you.”

Financial Speculation

Allen commented (again) on the love of art versus buying for investment, but there is money to be made and attention to seek. Art magazines have advertisements from not only galleries but also “BMW commercials and fashion commodity,” she said. Publications, however, have accepted publicity dollars from nonart business for decades. Viveros-Fauné affirmed Allen’s notion of art as financial instrument, finding a correlation between the financial and art worlds, which is “the huge, massive elephant” in the room. Adam linked luxury goods such as haute couture to the top end of the art market, where “there you’ve got commodification—there’s no doubt. The question is how you deal with it.” Viveros-Fauné also cited a rise in art crime as an indication of pecuniary worth, without providing police reports. Adam noted an increase in art litigation. Viveros-Fauné said that the public looks at us [who?] as the 1 percent, no matter how wonderful everyone on the panel is. Speculation has been an art-world subject for over sixty years—if not longer—and the panelists talk about it as if it were something new.

The panel has identified the problematic areas—really!—and then discussed the changes that must be made. A recent Huffington Post article “paints a really bleak picture,” Viveros-Fauné cried. We complain about a model that works, Gupta said. What about a return to art for art’s sake? “I don’t know,” Gupta conceded. Viveros-Fauné demanded that art should not be sold to speculators or to people younger than thirty-five years of age. What a meanie he is, with all those rules!

Durán said there are significant issues with big galleries, when an artist’s career rises. Viveros-Fauné wondered what happens to the middle tier, as if he was a politician wooing middle-class votes. Allen said that middle-tier galleries close when bigger galleries poach their artists. What happens, she asked, when artists are asked to represent a country [in an international biennial]? Can a small or mid-sized gallery come up with $300,000 to fund the project? I wonder why an invitation to exhibit in a major international showcase doesn’t come with funding for the artist, or if artists at such a high level must still work for exposure.

In many businesses in America, people change jobs regularly. Say I work for a company for five years and get a better offer for my services somewhere else. Do I take that job, which has more money and better opportunities? Why is it an ethical issue when an artist jumps ship? Does employment by art galleries offer the same kind of job security and opportunities for promotion that a corporation does? When you think about it, have artists ever been company or union men? Flook said job-hopping happens so quickly, so often, and that younger artists just don’t understand why some old guy would have a moral or ethical issue with this. Artists have a “corporation me” attitude that was unthinkable twenty years ago. Yet, Flook conceded, “You can’t really argue against it.” Applications for art fairs cost big bucks, which steer the odds toward the bigger gallery, which will win. Again, a myopic understanding of business world that pretty much anyone with a job is a part of fails because the art-world folks can’t see beyond their little sphere.

A self-identified businessman and art collector in the audience said whether it was art or a cheeseburger, he wants “relative value” for his money. The art fair, he continued, is a remarkably inefficient way to acquire art—but didn’t explain why. He wants art and access to artists (I think), but he doesn’t want to run in and out of galleries. It seemed like collecting wasn’t exactly a leisure activity for him. Gupta said that fairs are filtering systems run by the people who spend time with art twenty-four/seven. But he also encouraged collectors to visit alternative and artist-run spaces. Keeping up with contemporary art takes a lot of time.

Possible Solutions (Again)

Flook wondered what success is and how do we measure it. Value self-corrects itself, he said. Okay. The artist Theaster Gates does marvelous things with money, Viveros-Fauné said, working on projects that don’t always produce objects for sale via Gupta’s gallery. It’s an interesting model for people to wrap their head around, he marveled, seemingly unaware of the rich history of dealers, gallerists, and curators, from Seth Siegelaub to Robert Nickas, who have long operated as art dealers without a gallery. Others, such as Virginia Dwan, John Gibson, and Howard Wise, have found a way to sell art made outside, and can’t be presented in, the white cube. Progressive minds in the early 1970s were predicting the end of brick-and-mortar spaces, yet today’s dealers continue to marvel at the potential of the idea.[5] I am not suggesting that an art dealer needs to know the history of the business, but commercial art galleries are not terribly old—one hundred years or so, right? The historical amnesia exhibited by the panelists was astounding.

Durán said Brazilian galleries are sharing costs instead competing against each other. Perhaps galleries can run careers like the music industry, he offered, presumably like agents and managers instead of record companies, whose twentieth-century business models have floundered over the past fifteen years. In a conservative move, Durán suggested people become antiglobal and get back to their roots, cultivating audiences for your shows, returning to the good old days of slow culture that had disappeared with the rise of the art-fair monster. Allen mumbled something about travel, the internet, phones, always being connected, and having to respond immediately. People today don’t experience experiences in person: “They’re looking at sunsets through the Instagram app,” she astutely and stunningly observed. Flook countered by saying that, in his personal survey, people won’t pay for songs and films but will shell out $200 for a live show. Or $40 for an art fair, which is this year’s admission for the Armory Show.

In Terms Of count: 3.

[1] The panel was presented by an organization called Talking Galleries, the International Platform for Gallerists.

[2] See, for example, Christian Viveros-Fauné, “How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art,” Village Voice, February 6, 2013; and “Art’s Big, Dirty Secret,” Village Voice, January 1, 2014.

[3] Fast Forward, Kavi Gupta and Viveros-Fauné claimed, evolved into the New Art Dealers Association, or NADA.

[4] Blake Gopnik, “Great Art Needs an Audience,” Art Newspaper, February 13, 2014. For more on Nicole Klagsbrun closing her gallery, see Charlotte Burns, “Nicole Klagsbrun to Close Gallery after 30 Years in the Business,” Art Newspaper, March 28, 2013.

[5] The April 1971 issue of Arts magazine devoted its entire editorial content to galleries to describe their approach, strategies, and thoughts.

Read

Charlie Finch, “Survival Strategies,” Artnet, January 12, 2009.

Steven Zevitas, “The Things We Think and Do Not Say, or Why the Art World Is in Trouble,” Huffington Post, February 28, 2014.

March 17, 2014
Curatorial Assistance

Here and Now: Biennials in the Twenty-First Century
Friday, March 7, 2014
Armory Show, Open Forum, Pier 94, New York

Michelle Grabner counts the beans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

“I’ve been thinking a lot about biennials,” mused the artist Michelle Grabner, seemingly without irony. No kidding—she’s one of three curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which opened to the public on the day of this panel, held at the Armory Show. “Here and Now: Biennials in the Twenty-First Century,” moderated by the curator and scholar Lynne Cooke, assessed not so much the current state of biennials—of which the Whitney’s signature exhibition is a leading example—but rather demonstrated how she and two other panelists have shaken off what some call “biennial fatigue” to reinvent the form and scope of these large-scale, super-hyped exhibitions that take place around the world every two, three, or more years.

Cooke had asked her three participants to present on his or her recent projects before opening a conversation among the group. Dan Byers, a curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and cocurator of the 2013 Carnegie International, described the origins of his institution’s showcase as conservative and Western but with a widening scope over the years. He and his two cocurators, Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, approached the task with a group of concerns, a “constellation of ideas,” he called them: the exhibition of artists and an exploration of the museum’s collection, of course, but also a close engagement with the host city and a nutty idea about playgrounds.

The team started their work, Byers said, two years before opening day, with a blog, Tumblr, and Pinterest that featured scanned photographs of past iterations of the international along with press clippings and other archival material. The curators also rented an apartment in Pittsburgh for hosting dozens of diverse events “to create a community of conversation” in addition to the show, which he said always “lands like a UFO” in Pittsburgh and “leaves for four years.” Byers showed installation photographs and described artists’ works, which made me wish that I had seen the show, which came across as innovative, thoughtful, and dynamic. I couldn’t help but think, though, how many insatiable curators have cannibalized other parts of the museum—public programming, community outreach, digital publishing—that have typically been the purview of specialists in the education department. Yet I appreciate how Byers emphasized the importance of civic space, whether that’s a private museum or a public library, which is conservative position of a different kind.

Dan Byers discusses biennial politics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Next to speak was Grabner, an artist and occasional curator who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She claimed responsibility for the Whitney Biennial’s fourth floor and, in fact, relayed that the curatorial team for this year, which included Stuart Comer and Anthony Elms, did not collaborate on anything except on the catalogue design. Each person organized his or her own floor at the museum, and for her space Grabner wanted to establish the idea of building a curriculum for a classroom. Many schools hung portraits of presidents in classrooms, so she put up Dawoud Bey’s portrait of Senator Barack Obama, which the Chicago photographer took in 2008 as a fundraiser for the politician’s presidential run.1 Grabner quickly contrasted Bey’s donation to a political cause to the blurring of aesthetics and activism as seen in social-practice art, hinting that the latter pursuit might be self-indulgent or even misguided. One focus for her floor is abstract painting by women, another is materiality and affect theory, another is criticality—though not, she pointed out, critique shot through appropriation and irony. “By the hour the reviews are coming in,” Grabner said, “and they’re not good.” Self-conscious joking aside, the Whitney Biennial “is a structure that never yields positive criticism.” Just like, she added, how President Obama is relentlessly thwarted by Congress.

Grabner ran through a slide show of her chosen work. One apparent theme is nesting, a type of collaboration that can be either parasitic or symbiotic. The artist Gaylen Gerber, for example, is a “platformist” who makes backdrops to support other people’s work. He will first hang paintings by Trevor Shimizu in his allotted wall space and later present pieces by David Hammons and Sherrie Levine. Elsewhere, Philip Vanderhyden reconstructs People in Pain (1988), a sculpture by Gretchen Bender that fell apart and was discarded after her death in 2004. The Whitney’s Replication Committee, Grabner revealed, had a difficult time accepting the fact that an artist was doing their work. And of Joe Scanlan’s fictional black female artist Donelle Woolford: “Uh, oh. Super problematic!” Grabner exclaimed, this time ironically. The actor playing Woolford is touring across the United States doing a Richard Pryor comedy routine but hasn’t been warmly welcomed everywhere. Thelma Golden, for instance, refused a request for the Studio Museum in Harlem, which she directs, to host a performance. The artist Theaster Gates, though, accepted an invitation for Woolford to perform at Dorchester Projects in Chicago.

Gaylen Gerber with Trevor Shimizu, Backdrop/Untitled, n.d., Untitled, n.d., n.d., latex on canvas, oil on canvas, and oil on canvas, 208 × 528 in. (artworks © Gaylen Gerber and Trevor Shimizu; photograph by Bill Orcutt)

Franklin Sirmans, a curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and artistic director of Prospect.3, said that the third iteration of the New Orleans–centered exhibition will open in October 2014. He expressed a desire to make his show the opposite of Mithra, the Hurricane Katrina–inspired ark that the artist Mark Bradford set in the city’s devastated Lower Ninth Ward for the first Prospect, in 2008—a bold claim for sure. Sirmans didn’t provide many details about his show, mainly because the list of fifty-five artists won’t be announced until May. Instead the curator underscored several important concepts for the exhibition. A historical slant of Prospect.3 looks at Paul Gauguin finding himself in the “exoticized Other” of late-nineteenth-century Tahiti, as well as the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” from 1928, which proposed a new Brazilian identity based on cannibalizing other cultures, particularly European ones.2

Franklin Sirmans on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Sirmans borrowed his title for Prospect.3, Notes for Now: Somewhere and Not Anywhere, from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), “a small but quiet book that rose to a degree of prestige and prominence,” he said, most notably by besting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, among other novels, to win the 1962 National Book Award. The Moviegoer will serve as a form and an outline for the exhibition, whose twelve to fifteen venues will be scattered across New Orleans, but Sirmans stressed that the show could happen elsewhere, too. And it doesn’t have to reference Katrina, either. Rather, he wanted to know, how we can bridge the gap between an adult boxing gym and the contemporary art center.

The open conversation among the panelists circled around three primary issues: audience, curatorial ethics, and rescuing neglected artists. Grabner said she took the “absolutely selfish” route, organizing an exhibition that she would want to see herself—but also made it for other artists, she conceded. She also wanted to buck the “young new talent myth” that the biennial holds for the art market and highlight artists’ important but often unsung role as teachers. Push back so far, Grabner noted, has been that this year’s biennial is not political enough. Perhaps critics don’t see the right politics, I wondered, or cannot perceive the political nature of artworks that are not overly didactic.

A portrait of Joseph Yoakum in 1969 taken by an unknown photographer. Whitney B. Halstead papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (copyright status undetermined)

Cooke questioned Byers about the ethics of exhibiting outsider art, since Joseph E. Yoakum (1890–1972), a self-taught artist from Chicago, was a selection for the 2013 Carnegie International. What does it mean to pick this kind of artist, Cooke wanted to know, and drop him in this context? Well, Byers replied, it’s usually the artists who lead him to other artists and other subjects. Sadie Benning and Vincent Fecteau, both in the International, are interested in Yoakum’s work, which Byers described as incredibly beautiful but rarely seen outside the outsider context.3 He captured the wonder we can’t see, the curator marveled, the wonder of Old Weird America. “The act of sharing is one good reason to do it,” he said.

Cooke’s line of questioning irritated me, mainly because she uncritically restated the hackneyed position of exploitation without identifying any problematic issues.4 Exhibitions of folk art have been taking place in galleries and museums for decades, going back to the early 1930s at the Museum of Modern Art, an “ethnographic turn” as noted by Sirmans. The museum also hosted surveys of African Negro and Native American art back then. The panelists didn’t challenge Cooke directly on this point but did say they found nothing unusual with exhibiting ceramics by George Ohr (1857–1918), the notebooks of the writer David Foster Wallace in the Whitney Biennial, and other kinds of not-quite-art material in their shows.

Alma Woodsey Thomas, Untitled, ca. 1974, gouache on paper, 6¼ x 8¾ in. (artwork © Alma Woodsey Thomas)

Sirmans, who brought up Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978), a female African American artist who was a Color Field painter in Washington, DC, whose work has been infrequently seen and discussed for many years. He rightly wants to ensure that recuperated artists don’t become a three-year wonder, like the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, who were in vogue over ten years ago but have dropped off the art world’s radar. “People should make it stick,” Sirmans said of the trend that the critic Roberta Smith has called “no artist left behind,” with the recovered work being more than just a new commodity to buy and sell.5 The funny thing is, one critic fed up with the dominance of the art market, Holland Cotter, is partly responsible for Thomas’s resurgence, as demonstrated in a New York Times article from 2009 that commented on President Obama’s selections for White House decoration; so is the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning, 1963, welded steel, 14½ x 9¼ x 5 in. (artwork © Melvin Edwards)

Graber noted that the massive amount of inventory of overlooked artists might be the result of no longer having a monolithic version of art history. “There are huge ethical issues” around inventory, she said, but sadly did not articulate them. Was she referring to how overlooked artists such as Lee Lozano and Steven Parrino now posthumously show in top blue-chip galleries, or that late works by Picasso, previously ? I wonder if all this is an updated version of the old Vincent van Gogh sob story, or Émile Zola’s novel’s The Masterpiece (1886) brought to life?

Personally, I’m grateful for all these rediscoveries, which significantly help to rewrite art history, even as a little money is made. Jack Whitten has received a small bump in popularity since a few vintage paintings were shown in the Rotating Gallery at MoMA PS1 in 2010 during Greater New York (incidentally a large group show that takes place every five years). Furthermore, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 at the Brooklyn Museum (and elsewhere) was an eye-opener, and an exhibition curated by Katy Siegel called Americanana, held in a small gallery at Hunter College in 2010, introduced me to the painting of a young artist, Josephine Halvorson, as well as an older one, Melvin Edwards, whose Lynch Fragments were subsequently hung at the Museum of Modern Art and included in touring exhibitions.6 But notice that institutional scholars and curators are organizing these exhibitions, not dealers or collectors.

In Terms Of count: 5.

1 Grabner claimed the photograph could be had for $100 back then, which differs from Bey’s account.

2 Some of these facts were published in Charlotte Burns, “A Sneak Peek at Prospect.3,” Art Newspaper, December 5, 2013.

3 Yoakum had solo exhibitions at several galleries and university museums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, but not at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, as the Carnegie International curators insist in their webpage for the artist.

4 One exception is Cooke’s observation that art is everywhere in New Orleans and being made to look like outsider art.

5 Christopher Bollen, “The Art World: Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz,” Interview 43, no. 10 (December 2013/January 2014): 56.

6 Siegel resuscitated interested in a previously “lost” generation of abstract painters in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975.

March 12, 2014