Is Contemporary Art History? Friday, February 28, 2014 Mellon Research Initiative Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House
If a bomb had dropped on the building at 1 East 78th Street in Manhattan, the world of modern and contemporary art history would have lost its most respected and erudite scholars. KIDDING! A bomb wouldn’t even have been necessary, as the speakers and audience members who gathered for a workshop called “Is Contemporary Art History” are perfectly capable of imploding on their own. The person behind the Twitter account @AtrophicParenchyma (and a few other attendees) chronicled the meltdown last Friday at New York University’s venerable Institute of Fine Arts, using the hashtag #ifacontemporary to expose the bloated mess that is academic art history—which isn’t to say that doing so is a difficult task.
In Terms Of count: unknown (but the first eighty seconds of video below spits out the phrase three times, so proceed at your own risk).
A recent talk by the Brooklyn-based critic Naomi Fry was as wide ranging—one could even say scattered—as both her cultural interests and her curriculum vitae. “I always have to remind myself that I’m a writer,” she said, reflecting on her roles as a professor who teaches writing at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University and also as a copy editor for the New York Times. Like many critics Fry must do other things to earn a living, which creates a shaky self-perception. At a lecture for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in art criticism, she didn’t have a paper to read, just notes, and thus spoke off the cuff for a small crowd of students, alumni, sympathizers, and friends.
Asked beforehand to talk about her challenges and successes, Fry began by discussing a favorite piece of writing, her contribution to the series “See Something Say Something,” published by the Brooklyn-based journal Paper Monument in 2012. This five-hundred-word essay examined a photograph, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980, of the emerging actor Nicollette Sheridan at age seventeen with her then-boyfriend, the television and pop-music heartthrob Leif Garrett. This “check out my young girlfriend” photo, as Fry called it, “encapsulates everything that’s been interesting to me, ever … ever.” It was quite a surprise to hear this coming from a critic who has published in top art publications like Frieze and Artforum and other important cultural forums, such as the London Review of Books, T Magazine, n+1, and the Comics Journal. In both the essay and the lecture, Fry teased out what intrigued her about the image, which I understood to be celebrities, television, literature, sex, music, interior decorating, and politics. Putting the serious subject matter aside, how did she gravitate toward such vapid and vulgar things?
Born in Israel to left-leaning academic parents, Fry spent a significant amount of time in the United States and grew up with American popular culture. She was also an educational product of the 1990s, a time when, she said, William Shakespeare and chewing gum wrappers were worthy objects of scholarly attention, and when books, movies, and art formed the core of interdisciplinary studies. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University, Fry studied literature at the PhD level until 2007, and since then has always tried to throw references to nineteenth-century novels into her writing. D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser make appearances in her Paper Monument article, and Honoré de Balzac and Horatio Alger are name-dropped in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece. The latter essay, “‘Till They Choke on It’: On Wolf of Wall Street,” rages against Martin Scorsese’s newest, much-maligned film about “the disgusting people of Wall Street,” a project that many criticized as being complicit with the 1 percent. “I’m this incredibly angry, bitter Marxist,” she snarled, who has “psychological problems with morally repugnant artifacts” such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Harmony Korine’s debaucherous 2013 flick Spring Breakers.
After leaving Johns Hopkins, Fry worked as a fact checker for the glossy celebrity magazine Us Weekly from 2007 to 2011 while indulging her passion for writing. “You’re dancing with the devil,” people told her—or did she tell herself that? (My notes from the lecture are unclear.) At the time Fry was happy that someone had employed her, so when someone at an art opening asked her if she felt guilty about the real-world consequences of working at the gossip rag, she went ballistic on him. “By the time you read Us Weekly, you’re already fucked,” she explained. “I don’t feel like I was feeding babies poison.” Conversely, the work gave her endless material with which to work. “The trashy place is my happy place,” she said.
The cast of Spring Breakers on the set
An audience member asked her about writing a “deliberately negative” review. Fry responded by saying she can be negative about things backed by money and power—such as books and films produced by publishing houses and production studios—but would hesitate for an exhibition, as long as that artist was “sincerely trying,” she said. I would argue that the work of any artist takes not an insignificant amount of capital—from purchasing artist’s supplies to paying rent on a storefront space—but her point was taken. My larger concern was what the questioner meant by “deliberately,” which would indicate a critic purposefully and nefariously trashing an artist.
Naomi Fry wears many hats (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The writing process is hard for Fry, but she has a routine, a unit system, in which she writes for forty-five-minute chunks of time. During this time she’s offline—no Facebook, no Instagram—and doesn’t get up or talk to anyone. Fry briefly acknowledge that people write for little or no money these days, which makes it hard for critics who, as she mentioned at the lecture’s beginning, were not born wealthy and did not marry rich. Did she have advice for current SVA students? “I couldn’t really come up with anything,” she conceded. What makes her hopeful? Fry admitted that although she might sound like a “middle school art teacher, I think about being creative. The work—I told you I was a Marxist.”
An audience member called Fry “intrepid” after the critic told a brief story on how she started getting assignments despite being a former academic without the usual writing clips. “The more things you put in your sack,” she said, “the more it grows. Before you know it, you’ve got a really big sack.”
Identity Politics: Then and Now
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
102nd Annual Conference, College Art Association, Hilton Chicago, Lake Erie Room, Chicago, IL
Hamza Walker speaks, with Dieter Roelstraete (left) and Gregg Bordowitz (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Drop “identity politics” into any art-world conversation now and you’re likely to get an eye roll—“so unfashionable.” This wasn’t the case twenty years ago, a time when the art museum—whether showing controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe or hosting the contentious 1993 Whitney Biennial—was a primary battleground.
With its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, identity politics addressed how a dominant culture abused, oppressed, and colonized other cultures, nearly always divided by race, sex, ethnicity, and class. Although often aligned with aesthetics, identity politics surpassed art to embrace solidarity movements of underprivileged populations and neglected communities of all kinds. Identity politics also became a punching bag for its detractors, who tended to gloss over the complexities of particular situations with the pejorative term “political correctness.” At least that’s how I understand it. Since I arrived to “Identity Politics: Then and Now” a few minutes late, I missed an introduction from a representative from the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, the group sponsoring the session.
The session’s four participants passed the microphone for brief opening comments before a free-form conversation began. A senior curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, since 2011, Dieter Roelstraete identified himself as European, Old World, Catholic, and northern (he hails from Belgium) and also in relation to his critics. To one reviewer he is the museum’s “resident thinker”; to another he is cold and heartless.1 “It’s just a muscle,” he said of the heart, underplaying the huge importance of this blood-pumping, life-giving organ.
Next was Hamza Walker, a curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, who described three recent exhibitions that could be understood as the progeny of identity politics. The curator of Blues for Smoke, Bennett Simpson, had initially proposed a rehanging of a permanent collection that would depose the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism from the modernist narrative; the blues, Walker continued, was a leitmotif to accomplish this. He also interpreted the exhibition as 1980s in spirit more than in object, which he contrasted with actual works from the decade in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, organized by Helen Molesworth. The third exhibition, Kellie Jones’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, examined the historical 1960s and 1970s, a time of the “disappearing black artist,” according to the photographer Dawoud Bey.2 Multiculturalism from the 1990s, Walker explained, had passed over older black artists—abstract painters in particular—in favor of upstart post-Conceptualists., which Now Dig This! aimed to correct. Now, he said, artists now are “not so disappearing anymore.”
Gregg Bordowitz, an artist, activist, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said that identity politics today embrace transgender politics, that is, who you are and how others perceive you. Now, he said, we see a confounding or refusal of identity: “Identity is turned on and off like a faucet.” This fragmentation is different from the past, when the AIDS crisis—with which Bordowitz was involved—necessitated a single dominant position.
Joan Kee, an attorney and art historian who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has observed a shift from choice to consent. Twenty years ago, she said, identity politics was preoccupied with laws about protection, denial, and exclusion, with disability and immigrant issues, and with the Equal Rights Amendment. A intentional disaffiliation with the nation-state was embraced by the nomad artist and curator in the 1990s, Kee continued, which I would argue was a lovely, feel-good myth that conveniently overlooked the harsh realities experienced by people living in abusive regimes. Now, she relayed, we are concerned about property, personal data, and the erosion of consent. She also brought up DNA fashioning and asked of the present moment: “What is the object of critique?”
The panel’s moderator, Kirsten Swenson, an art historian at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, proposed a conversation about institutional role formation. “I practice being black at home,” joked Walker before declaring that today “the rhetoric doesn’t feel as defensive.” While I certainly agree, I couldn’t help but think of what hasn’t changed in the twenty-one years between Rodney King and Trayvon Martin.
Hamza Walker continues to speak, with Gregg Bordowitz (center) and Joan Kee (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The discussion bounced around in productive, enlightening ways. Starting with the dandies of Charles Baudelaire, Bordowitz argued that choice is modern: to identify or disidentify, he said, is a bid for freedom. He also acknowledged how a person’s role changes from moment to moment, such as when, for example, he leaves the classroom and gets in line at Starbucks. Somehow I don’t think this what an artist like Ryan Trecartin, whose videos bend and contort identities into unrecognizable states, has in mind. Theorists assert that subjecthood is produced through structured, contextual encounters, something that Yvonne Rainer called “privileged” from her seat in the audience. Kee acknowledged that identity politics typically has a US-centric model, and Roelstraete admitted that the emphasis on economics in his current show, The Way of the Shovel, is North American.
Bordowitz described how AIDS figured prominently in his art and activism over the last twenty-five years. Now he is concerned with “drugs in people’s bodies.” What does choice mean in different places, he asked, where having clean water is more crucial than obtaining advanced drugs? Walker was intrigued by how the artist Paul Chan negotiates art and activism. Like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial, no clear distinctions divide the two: “There’s peanut butter in my chocolate,” he said, “and chocolate in my peanut butter.” Walker considered the importance of mobilizing bodies, whether that’s Chan’s on-the-ground involvement with Voices of America in Iraq or the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s protestation of the US Navy’s longtime occupation of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico.
Recognizing activism as art or vice versa is indeed an important topic that has been discussed passionately in recent years, most notably by the folks at Creative Time and A Blade of Grass. What is called social practice in the United States, Roelstraete said, is Relational Aesthetics in Europe. What about an asocial or antisocial practice, he muttered out loud, but the answer is painfully obvious: there isn’t an opposite of social practice, just different levels of engagement between art and viewers, or artists and other people. Roelstraete was quick to point out that European countries have ministries of culture, which take care of the public good, but in America artists become activists because of a governmental vacuum. Participation culture has thrived but painfully so, as the state becomes dismantled.
Bordowitz complained about labels and reiterated his choice of the term “freedom” over “liberation.” He also gets irked when asked by his students about what makes a radical today. “Stop privileging ‘radicality’ as a term,” he implored. “People do radical things out of necessity.” Back in the day he was arrested, but now he writes poetry. It would be an “arrogant illusion,” he said, to consider his most radical work was when he went to jail. Roelstraete recalled that the French Realist painter and occasional revolutionary Gustave Courbet painted apples and fish while imprisoned for anti-Commune offenses. The Belgian curator nicely offered a simply stated observation: if people are still asking what radical is, there is still dissatisfaction in the world.
Kee agreed with Bordowitz about the younger generation: “The same questions get asked over and over again.” Like Bordowitz’s pupils, her students want to know how artists can be radical now, but at the same time, she said, they shy away from discussions of identity politics. Issues of connoisseurship and quality, strangely enough, really get their blood pumping. If that’s misguided politics, then at least, one would hope, these students are resisting the authority of experts. In her classes, Kee takes a comparative look, using concrete examples such as Manuel Ocampo’s Untitled (Map of Los Angeles), a painting from 1987 that her class once discussed for three hours, to steer clear of complacency in the classroom. An audience member invariably asked why this is and what can we do about it. Kee blamed institutional repetition and intellectual laziness. Because we know the identity-politics canon, she lamented, we can repeat it.
An audience member sitting next to me who was a generation older than the panelists said that identity politics were actually liberal, not radical. People in the 1990s, she claimed, had misunderstood the 1970s. Further, she continued, identity politics in the US formed in collusion with the nation-state, a notion that opposed Kee’s view about disaffiliation. Although subjectivity and figuration in art had returned—as if these trends ever went away—the body’s appearance in Neoexpressionist painting usually meant something different that that in identity-politics art. Finally, she asked, what about feminism?
Bordowitz questioned the authority who would say such a thing, arguing that identity politics in the 1990s was not a misunderstanding of the 1970s but rather a blossoming of the earlier decade’s ideas. Besides, there’s “no inherent, pure, and honest good of identity politics,” he reminded us. In fact, he suggested, identity politics had trouble gaining traction in certain academic circles. During the Socialists Scholars Conference in the 1990s, for instance, proposals of panels on gay and lesbian topics were either declined by the selection committee or, if accepted, had only three people in the audience.
Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (2005)
Roelstraete stated that gays and lesbians still face problems in Sochi and in Russia, among other places around the world, but Walker sees engagement more than frustration when considering diversity in mainstream American entertainment, citing James Franco’s weird white rapper in Spring Breakers and the interracial lesbian couple with a daughter on the television program Under the Dome. In academia, Walker wants people to look at the faculty numbers: “How many blacks are there in your department?” We must look at identity politics at the structural level, he urged, in addition to institutional atmosphere. He said this, with a sea of white faces behind me.
An audience member asked about the choice of anonymity. It’s a double-edged sword, Kee responded. Are we aligned to the global, she asked, or do we disengaged or opt out? Roelstraete noted that artists work individually, not collectively, and that the art market doesn’t know what to do with things like Occupy and theories about the “multitude.” Smart curators like him should reject these commonly held attitudes that, with a little analysis, turn out to be false—they’re the type of “institutional repetition and intellectual laziness” that Kee resists. Bordowitz mentioned several collectives that have done interesting work, such the Bernadette Corporation and the Critical Art Ensemble, as well as collectively written novels and net art from the late 1990s. Is being anonymous a refusal, he wondered, or does it result from the lack of a better term to get at the problems?
In Terms Of count: 26 (during a ninety-minute panel, no less).
When Tim Gunn was writing his first book, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style (2007), the designer Diane von Furstenberg told him to never lose his voice as an educator. Gunn, a fashion consultant and the cohost of the television program Project Runway, had been struggling with the assignment of writing a self-help, makeover-oriented book instead of a history of fashion, which he originally wanted to do. He hated books about dressing and body types. Gunn must have taken the advice he often gives to others—trust your gut and your instincts and know who you are—and he pulled through. In other words, he made it work.
Mentoring and education describe not only Gunn’s role on Project Runway and its spinoff show, Under the Gunn; they also form the bedrock of his entire career. During a freewheeling conversation at the Brooklyn Museum with Valerie Steele, a pioneer of fashion studies, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the owner of a Akris handbag (which sat by her chair onstage), Gunn recalled how he arrived in New York in the early 1980s to teach at Parson’s School of Fashion. From then until 2007 he “wore a lot of hats,” he said, serving as a teacher, chair, and associate dean. Because the school’s administration didn’t want students to be influenced by anything—an inexplicable position in a highly diverse, interdisciplinary creative field—Parsons offered neither courses in fashion history nor classes in computer design until the late 1990s, when Gunn helped to rewrite the program’s curriculum and change the institutional culture, which hadn’t deviated much in over forty years. At the time, he noted, designers such as Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein had dominated American fashion. Adventurous students must have been starving to innovate, and Gunn helped them burst their seams.
Steele asked Gunn how he liked the Jean-Paul Gaultier show at the Brooklyn Museum. Gunn delighted in the fine line between fashion and costume, the freaky mannequins, and the sensory enticement (which, he noted, stopped short of sensory assault). Gunn quizzed Steele about her most recent exhibition at the Museum at FIT, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, finding it surprising that no one had done a “gays in fashion” show before. Steele talked about the show’s website, Facebook page, and syllabi for audiences and then relayed a story about giving a talk in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she was told to not speak on gay propaganda. (Her son laughed, saying “You’ll be in jail next to Pussy Riot”; Steele will “hold out for vodka and caviar” instead of bread and water.) Gunn laughed, “If you’re [a man] in the fashion industry, I’m going to assume you’re gay unless told otherwise.” Steele had a full house for her talk in Russia.
Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele (photograph by the Brooklyn Museum)
Gunn and Steele’s conversation moved quickly. The rapport between Gunn and Steele was loose and friendly, as if they’ve known each other for years. Sometimes the jokes felt scripted, as if the conversation were taking place on a minimally rehearsed television talk show for which the two played both the host and the guest. Steele editorialized on the trouble of fast fashion: the speed at which trends move from the catwalk to retails stores such as H&M, Forever 21, and Zara. She also declared Fashion Week, during which high-end designers debut their collections, to be dated. Gunn agreed that the event, which is held multiple times a year around the world, is a “dusty anachronism.” Steele would love a turn toward slow fashion, like the trend of slow food, which takes advantage of regional and seasonal varieties of ingredients and their traditional preparation. Gunn noted that we don’t want junk but are still budget minded. After Steele complimented him on his suit, he recommended Suit Supply—“it sounds like Dress Barn,” he said, but is a Dutch company found throughout Europe that makes quality clothes (and that also just opened a store in SoHo).
Scene from episode four of Under the Gunn
Gunn begged the audience to watch Under the Gunn, which he described as “Project Runway meets The Voice with scissors,” in order to boost the lower-than-expected ratings. The program cast the latest batch of applicants from Project Runway, which is on hiatus due to the cohost Heidi Klum’s absence. “We have way more content for a one-hour show,” he said. His “world-class problem” is: “What story do you tell?” His advice for the emerging designers runs from warning them about the difficulties of creating menswear to not scrapping a project if something goes wrong. When you quit, he implored, “What have you learned?” Gunn encourages the participants to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution—which is worlds apart from how the art world fetishizes failure. Learning damage control, he urged, is essential.
After about thirty minutes of conversation, Gunn and Steele answered prewritten questions from the audience, which covered Brooklyn as brand, three-dimensional printing technology for fashion, and fashion icons from the last ten to fifteen years.1 Steele said Daphne Guinness; Gunn picked Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, and Anne Hathaway. What has been the most transformative era in fashion? Gunn and Steele agreed on the 1960s right away. From Mad Men styles to paper dresses to vinyl to hippies, that decade, Steele informed us, was the most important for clothing. What country has the most captivating fashion? “France!” exclaimed Steele. “Come on, people!” Gunn agreed but declared “We owe great menswear to London.” And Naples, Steele added.
Someone asked if we can bring back manufacturing to the United States. If that happens, Steele said, people should expect to pay more for those fashion, warning us that we won’t find those $30 jackets anymore. “We’ve created this problem,” Gunn said, blaming the culture of sales, which I took to mean high-low pricing strategies, where the original, sale, and clearance prices of a garment are considered in advance. He, too, would like to see a revitalized Garment District in Manhattan.
Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele onstage
Gunn acknowledged Parsons as his greatest success, and his most defining failure was the end of his long-term relationship in 1982. He was cheated on and dumped, experiences that saved his life and made him who he is today. A thoughtful question asked how young designers with limited resources can break into high fashion. “You know what’s harder?” Gunn mused. “Staying in.” He suggested that young designers work for another, more established designer—like Donna Karan worked for Anne Klein before her own career took off—to find opportunities and to learn about sourcing production, marketing, and buyers. Steele said that most failed designers are undercapitalized. The days when four clients could support a couture house, which happened in the 1920s, she said, are over. Gunn reminded us, “The fashion world is very unforgiving.” Adding to Gunn’s suggestion, Steele recommended that a young designer should find a “posse” to work with: a photographer, a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and the like, but stopped short of calling for collective labor practices.
Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s (photograph by Felix Clay)
Gunn called out retailers for moving in directions that would squeeze out designers. A store like Macy’s may eventually dissolve brand names, he predicted, and create a private label—it’s cheaper for a retailer to design, create, and sell clothes in house.2 The work of designers wouldn’t disappear from the department store, he continued, but would rent space in them. This latter idea resembles in part the model for art fairs, which typically rent space in convention centers and other large public venues for commercial events to individual galleries, who sell works from their stable of artists. Using Gunn’s forecast, it would not be inconceivable for art fairs to begin representing—or more specifically, selling the work of—artists, cutting out the middle-man dealers entirely, not unlike how Damien Hirst circumvented galleries and dealers to peddle his wares directly with the auction house Sotheby’s, in 2008.
Unlike painting, sculpture, and photography, clothing designs cannot be copyrighted, which situates fashion designers in a precarious position in which knock-offs plague the high-end market. Advocating a Design Piracy Prohibition Act on Capitol Hill, Gunn believed, might help slow down fast fashion, preventing retail supply chains from replicating haute couture in down-market stores. Yet Americans are a nation of copiers, he said, borrowing looks from French styles through World War II. A bill would “grandfather out” all current design, such as von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses, but I’m not sure if he meant that iconic designs would fall under copyright or be released into the public domain. Another pressing issue, he continued, is counterfeits: a single Asian factory will manufacture a blue Liz Claiborne bag and ship it on the same boat to American as the same purse without the label, each having different destinations. Whether the problem is with trademarks or with identical products sold for radically different prices, he didn’t say. The art world also has issues with authenticity and reproduction that are too numerous to enumerate here.
1 During her introduction of the event Lisa Small, coordinating curator of The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, asked the audience to write their questions for the speakers on small cards, which were then collected and read to Gunn and Steele. Moderators who wish to upgrade the quality of their Q&A sessions—and eliminate the contribution of panel attendees who ramble for five or ten minutes before ending with the dreaded confession of “I guess that’s more of a comment than a question”—should begin this practice
2 In an exact quote, Gunn said, “I predict that with a huge, gigantic store like Macy’s, you’re going to see all of the individual designer brands disappear, the whole place is going to be privately owned. It’ll all be designed internally and you will see the private brands return.” David Bologna, “Tim Gunn, Valerie Steele Together in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum,” Washington Square News, January 31, 2014.
“Is it ethical for an artist to make work that sells?” was the first question asked of Randy Cohen, who responded by saying that terms like “sincerity” and “ethics” do not apply in aesthetic situations—you judge an artwork on its own merits. Drawing a distinction between creating good art and being a good (or bad) person, he argued that the racism and anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century authors shouldn’t discount the quality or importance of their novels. Cohen then asked the room, “Is it shameful to produce work that people enjoy?” If a person has an urge to make money, he mused, then art is a quirky field in which to earn a million.
Cohen, who wrote “The Ethicist” column for the New York Times from 1999 to 2011 and the book Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything (2012), took a few questions from the conversation’s moderator, Sharon Louden, an artist and a faculty member at the New York Academy of Art, for a half hour before fielding queries from the audience, comprising mostly MFA students. An art-world outsider, Cohen drew from knowledge gained over his diverse career path, which includes writing for Late Night with David Letterman—he is usually credited as inventing the Top Ten List—during the 1980s and hosting a radio show, Person, Place, Thing, in which his guests, often celebrities, talk not about themselves but about something else that interests them.
Randy Cohen talks with Sharon Louden (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Cohen went into the talk cold, specifically requesting that Louden withhold the topics of discussion. He handled the questions extremely well, and his responses were refreshingly atypical from the usual chatter regarding business and education in the arts. Cohen decreed it unethical for professors to accept gifts from students, even on graduation day, because doing so may establish a dubious precedent, “a way of doing things,” he said, in which intentions and responses are unclear. No more apples for the teacher!
Can an artist sell work from his or her studio when represented by a gallery? Both artists and dealers have good arguments for and against the practice. Early in an artist’s career, dealers have power and can bully the artist, not unlike the music industry in the 1970s in which record companies took advantage of bands. These relationships concern power, Cohen said, not justice. But the right call usually comes down to what’s permissible according to the written agreement between both parties.
Presuming an artist and dealer agree to split the sale of artwork fifty-fifty, is it ethical for a dealer to sell a work originally priced at $10,000 for $15,000 and then pay the artist the expected $5,000 instead of the higher $7,500? Again, he said, it depends on the written agreement, he said, though I believe that he hinted at the artist receiving his or her equal share of the sale. Can an artist or dealer sell a work to one person for $10,000 and offer a similar work to another person for twice that amount? Cohen found no fault in variable pricing, as airlines practice it on a daily basis. A smart buyer will ask what a work like this typically sells for. But if a buyer agreed to the seller’s asking price, there’s no harm.
Balancing ethical obligations against legal responsibilities was an unexpected theme during the conversation, with the law often superseding ethical notions of right and wrong. For example, an artist sells a painting to Person A, and Person B wants the same work. Can the artist make an identical piece to sell to Person B? As an example, Cohen brought up recent litigation between the financier and collector Jonathan Sobel and the photographer William Eggleston, who sold one darkroom print of a limited edition to Sobel but later made a new edition of the same image at a larger size and printed it digitally. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in March 2013, according to the Art Newspaper, in favor of Eggleston. Apart from the court’s decision, it is “subjective and unmeasurable,” Cohen said, if the second work were similar, identical, or new. Does Balthus have a monopoly on cats and little girls, he speculated, referencing the recently opened exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I thought of Claude Monet’s twenty-five paintings of Haystacks and the thirty-plus Rouen Cathedral series found in museum collections across the world.
Considering ethics in teaching, Cohen felt teachers have an obligation to tell students the truth, to deepen their understanding of a subject. Nevertheless, he has identified an ongoing tension between a solid education and giving good grades. Educators, he said, no longer fail students for fear of a lawsuits (presumably from parents). In art school, the “pernicious effect of grades” happens when a teacher all but requires his students to paint like him in order to pass the class. Prompted by Louden, Cohen talked about how teachers should provide realistic postgraduate expectations for students in MFA programs: “Here’s what art might offer when you get out,” he suggested they say. Further, teachers should address questions—in professional practices or more generally—that students did not know they needed to ask.
An audience member asked, “If you inhabit an utterly corrupt society,” do you have an obligation to be ethical? Cohen brought up a recent scandal at Stuyvesant High School, a top-notch public school in Manhattan with an accelerated college-prep curriculum, in which cheaters make it difficult for honest students to compete. When the stakes for Ivy League admission are high, he seemed to say, sometimes it’s okay to bend the rules.
An apple pie with a lattice upper crust (photograph by Dan Parsons and in the public domain)
Should critics collect art? Cohen emphatically said no, and they should also refrain from writing about artists who they’ve seen naked or who invited them for dinner at their house. Writing about friends in whatever capacity, he said, will yield a skewed or uncontrollable perception. While I agree that knowing an artist may influence a critic’s perspective, I scarcely believe that the effect is ethically detrimental to the writing. Often knowing an artist personally, as a friend or as an acquaintance, can produce unique insight valuable to viewers and readers—which may not be an ethical dilemma since art criticism can be highly subjective. Critics should nevertheless refrain from accepting gifts from artist friends, Cohen said, whether the gift is a $50 pie from the bakery or one lovingly made at home. No apples for teachers and no apple pies for critics? Rats! The perceived problem of writing about artist friends needs closer examination, as important distinctions can be made between the appearance of a conflict of interest and an actual conflict of interest.
Cohen’s approach to appropriation and copyright was less strict. “We have a narrow definition of plagiarism,” he said, “that protects commercial interests.” Yet it’s okay for him when the guitarist Eric Clapton lifts a lick from the blues man Robert Johnson. Whether it’s Led Zeppelin or Richard Prince, the practice of borrowing encourages artistic progress but often runs foul when the original creator fails to be credited or compensated. Certainly copyright laws in the United States are overburdened and outdated, but invoking the irresolutely defined word “transformative” as a cure-all solution obscures a complex, contentious issue. But tonight wasn’t the place for such a discussion.
Throughout the conversation Cohen referenced his unusual career path. He attended California Institute of Arts in the 1970s for electronic music composition and knew David Salle, Eric Fischl, and other members of the CalArts Mafia. After finishing the degree, he realized that he couldn’t think musically or with sound—though he is proud of the score he composed for a Prell Shampoo commercial. From music to comedy to writing, Cohen’s living consisted of “stumbling from thing to thing.” He has experienced failure but time was never wasted. “You’re not paying attention,” he said, if you’d live your life in the same way if you could do it all over again. Cohen’s life changed tremendously over the years, but for every big break he got, fifty other options were unsuccessful.
