This text is the second of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the firstreport.
Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
Friday, April 29, 1983
Artists Talk on Art, New York
The event evoked another, allegorical commentary.
Moderator: Craig Owens
Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe
Once upon a time in a constantly collapsing and re-rising city, the inhabitants made buildings with large spaces where people sweated to make things for others to sell. But one day they painted the spaces white and displayed mysterious and precious objects there. At last, on a night in spring, 1983, many people gathered in such a space to hear messages from shamans who made the precious objects. They worried about a tool producing these objects quickly and easily, and wondered if the new objects would be precious in the old way. So they gathered to DEFINE THE DIFFERENCE. On the walls were canvases with scenes of the Far West painted by a person with a new kind of organ transplant—50mm lenses permanently in both eyes.
The shamans sat down on chairs on one side of a long skinny table with glasses of water on it and were lit by spotlights. The rest of the people sat on the floor on the other side of the table in the dark. A scribe who wrote important words about shamanism sat with the shamans and said the people on the floor were probably there to enjoy dissension between shamans who used brushes and those who used the new tool, but he was there to make peace and had personally picked these shamans to address the issues.
However, the first shaman, an acclaimed user of the brush, hadn’t brought his magic objects with him, saying that, anyway, holy objects made with a brush were now meaningless, and even worse, decorative, but unscrupulous folks attributed false values to them so people who had lots of money but inadequate wardrobes would buy them and feel like emperors.
The other shamans showed their precious objects and told of their powers, but no one could define the difference, because they had forgotten or never knew the old way of making something unique yet universal. Mostly they talked shaman shop talk and complained that there was too much of an abundance of their product and that they were saturated, alienated, repressed, politically “other,” and lost in multiplicity, while yearning for singularity or maybe irregularity and had a headache that night.
Because of these feelings, they used images they just found lying around. They ripped off some and copied some onto canvas in a larger size. The one who did that was so demoralized he said he didn’t trust his intuition any more, which may have been why he didn’t make the copies himself, but hired others to do so. Learning that this fellow had helped himself to images, like fruit in the Garden of Eden (denying existence of originality and authorship), one hopeful questioner from the other side of the table asked if these were political acts. This might be a very brave and principled shaman who denied, not only authorship, but also ownership and the putting of price tags on holy objects. But that one was very silent about the authorship of his bank account.
It turned out that all the shamans had, in one way or another, been using the new tool or its products. One modest shaman in rumpled Ivy League jacket and tie (although the evening was hot), who told in a low voice of changing photos into paintings and putting old shamans into new paintings of old paintings, had evidently seen Woody Allen frightening Susan Sontag. Another shaman harked back to the Russian Revolution. She advised that the propaganda of the culture should be turned against it and warned that in times of political repression people lose sight of the pleasures of multiplicity. She herself seemed to have suffered this loss because, although she uses the camera-tool and the printing-press-tool, her magical objects are nevertheless, one of a kind. She also stressed the importance of increasing the number of spectators with her kind of reproductive organs. The last shaman made no bones about it. He said he used the camera instead of a brush or a chisel. He thought he was good at helping his subjects show their fantasy or reality. And then he showed his work, which reflected his life: outrageous rock stars, men with magical erections, famous androgynous women, flower studies, and male members of the races embracing. Even a few children, although he admitted to not liking them. It wasn’t Rembrandt’s Saskia as Susanah, but there was an echo of the same process. “For whom do you do your work?” someone asked. Robert Mapplethorpe replied, “For the people I love.” And put his dark glasses back on.
Then everyone went out onto the sidewalk where a loud argument had earlier made it hard to hear the proceedings, much of which had been mumbled, as if the shamans found it very hard to communicate.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Gladys Osterman, “Night of the Shamans” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 222–23. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
As I recall the moment, Photo-Realist painting had become so well accepted it was passé; painting on photographs was still tacky, or anyway naughty, at least in New York—in the West or Southwest it was a regular style. But “discourse between painting and photography” was not yet so obvious and popular a topic as it soon became. (I was amazed, amazed, the other day to see Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf’s excellent book on the subject, in B. Dalton!)
Having myself recently switched from painting to photography, and being then on the Program Committee of Artists Talk on Art, I thought a “Difference between Painting and Photography” panel would be timely, and began casting about for a brainy moderator. Someone suggested Craig Owens, who not only agreed cheerfully, but turned out to be a committee person’s dream, conjuring up an all-star cast on time, not just for the announcement, but for the event itself, without so much as a reminder.
The panel Owens conjured up became one of those special SoHo events, measurably enhanced by the overflow gang on the sidewalk outside pounding on the plate-glass window. These were reportedly motorcyclist friends of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work, by the way, looked smashing in the evening’s format of slides projected onto a portable screen. I suppose it hardly needs to be added that nobody defined anything, let alone the difference, though since then I have heard others make a stab at it. (Ben Lifson presented a two-part theory at a photo conference in 1990. The part I remember was that the photograph has an absolutely even surface.) Another difference occurred to me that night: photographs probably mutate less in slides than do paintings.
Carol Steinberg’s report, which came in “over the transom,” precisely and eloquently defined the ways discussants begged—or fogged—the issues.
—Judy Seigel
Moderator: Craig Owens
Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe
Craig Owens, senior editor of Art in America, sat with the six panel members and spread his hands, butterflylike, cigarette dangling from the long fingers. We, seated on the floor of the crowded gallery, were, mercifully, not permitted to smoke, having squeezed in while others less fortunate clamored at the entrance and pressed against the window to see—an Artists Talk On Art panel!
True, it was, at $1, a cheap Friday night and an interesting topic: “Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference.” Owens’s hands seemed to point to two points of view even while he hoped those who had come for the latest installment of the historical battle would be disappointed. They were there, he said, to “define difference,” not define or create false oppositions.
Joseph Kosuth, in his perennial black outfit (is he making an unconscious statement about being in mourning, does black flatter his figure, or is it some kind of ’60s minimalist, conceptualist, artist’s statement?), read a tract about how the institutions of gallery, critic, market, etc., create what we think “art” means. He showed no slides, not to be arrogant, he said, but because those familiar with his work didn’t need to see them and those not might fall into that tendency people have of thinking they understand something after they’ve seen slides. No one told the audience he is a conceptualist. I guess he wasn’t on the side of painting or photography. Next, Jack Goldstein showed us a slide of his painting of a [Margaret] Bourke-White photograph of a Kremlin air raid. He jocularly read an interview and some comments on the dilemmas of quotation and authorship. He also said he was “not interested in Painting.”
Sarah Charlesworth said she was “freaked out” that day about having to do the panel and that she would read to us from a letter she had written to a friend. She even began, “Dear Rudy,” but I was not convinced her friend really wanted to hear about the gap between the subjective/presence of oneself of painting and the objective/absence of self-presence of the other in photography, which I found difficult to hear and understand. She showed a slide of a photo of a photo of a photo which had been ripped up and some other manipulated photographs.
Barbara Kruger spoke about the potential for creating feelings of richness or poverty in the spectator face-to-face with the artist’s image and the importance of understanding the politics of images, as well as her attempt to provide for a female art spectator. Her work consisted of photos with words collaged together, making political statements. I think one said, “You destroy what you perceive as different.”
Mark Tansey showed his joke paintings. Each got a laugh from the audience, as with the National Geographic photoboat crew on the edge of a waterfall, entitled, Take One, or a woman lying in bed pointing a gun at a man pointing a camera at her, entitled Homage to Susan Sontag.
Robert Mapplethorpe took off his dark glasses to tell us he really hadn’t prepared anything to say, just brought slides of his photographs, which he related more to sculpture than painting. The photos included Lisa Lyon (the bodybuilder) in the nude with graphite powder covering her body to emphasize its statuesqueness, portraits, a black guy who we were told could achieve erection at a moment’s notice, men embracing, children (whom he doesn’t particularly like, he said), flowers.
The most wonderful commentary on the difference between painting and photography came unexpectedly from the audience, when Cynthia Mailman, whose works adorned the walls of the Soho20 Gallery, was moved to shout, “Don’t Touch My Painting!” as another member of the audience on her self/unconscious way out was about to put her hand through one of the paintings to support herself. As the audience laughed at the serendipity of the moment, Mailman became a bit defensive and added, “Mine are only one of a kind, you know.”
I couldn’t decide whether this was more fun than realizing that the woman across the room I’d been admiring all evening was probably Lisa Lyon, as she left in her sleeveless white mini-dress with her beautiful arm and leg muscles bulging out just a bit more than one is used to seeing on the average woman.
Someone in the audience asked about the power of painters to paint what isn’t there. Mapplethorpe answered that, as a photographer, he feels his best work is that in which he sees what he hasn’t seen before.
Another member of the audience began to explain his understanding that, in light of the panel, “aren’t painting and photography the same thing except for content?” Sarah Charlesworth assured him that form was content and Craig Owens cautioned not to go from one extreme to the other, that is, from saying they’re opposites to saying there’s no difference.
Too late, I tremblingly raised my hand, shocked by this question, and burning with something to ask, if only I could figure out what it was, something, something about the process of painting—by its nature longer, with more potential for discovering relationships, meanings, ideas, feelings, images, subconscious meanderings, the way we perceive. Don’t most of us feel we must study a painting for longer than a photograph? How long do we study photographs, and for what purpose? Isn’t there some major difference between the act of painting and the act of photographing? And then, can we escape evaluating that difference, at least for ourselves?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I almost didn’t dare to write this and I didn’t dare to ask so I had to write. These ideas need deep questions and deep answers. Where were the painters, process painters, painters who discover ideas through their painting, not start with a pre-fixed idea or image and paint it? Where were the paintings, real paintings, not slides of photos of paintings, of paintings of photos, photos of photos. Slides are photos. Form is content. The panel was weighted, the sides were uneven, and the difference was never defined.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Carol Steinberg, “Repainting the Battle Lines” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 221–22. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
In her opening remarks for “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at the art fair Frieze New York, the panel’s moderator Orit Gat remarked that conversation about net neutrality has changed in recent years. Indeed, public awareness regarding the controlling forces behind the delivery infrastructure of the web has risen sharply after two pieces of federal legislation introduced in 2011—the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—failed to develop, along with the “internet blackout” protest on January 28, 2012, and the onslaught of related op-ed pieces over the last couple years.
Reducing the information superhighway to fast and slow lanes would no doubt pave the way to chaos on the roads on which millions of ordinary Americans travel daily. We would witness terrible bottlenecks and breakdowns, insufferable congestion and gridlock, and relentless construction work and impossible detours. If the internet behemoths have their way, Gat warned, “you will stream Netflix faster than you read the New York Times, if Netflix chooses to pay for it.” And the start-ups, the nonprofits, and all those individually maintained websites would presumably stall into obscurity. I wonder, though, how significant net neutrality is for contemporary artists, especially those who work closely with digital media. Based on this panel discussion, the issue doesn’t seem that important, but related topics—such as how the corporatization of the internet affects artists and the definition of postinternet art—are of particular interest.
Oblique view of “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Gat, a writer and editor for Rhizome and WdW Review, quickly gave a chronological history of the web as it intersected with digital art. While working at CERN in Switzerland, the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) in 1989. Internet art grew in the early 1990s, she continued, helped along when US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly expanded online access for many citizens and businesses. Artists have influenced the web’s look and feel as we know it today much more than we realize, Gat said, and that internet and postinternet art developed simultaneously. This makes sense—thinking about Web 2.0, you can’t theorize the massive influence of Facebook and OkCupid, which launched in 2004 and run at full steam today, without considering LiveJournal and the Makeout Club, both founded in 1999 (but now puttering along). Despite the term “post,” Gat insisted, there is no art after the internet. Rather, postinternet art is a product of, and a response to, the changing digital landscape.
The first speaker was Gene McHugh, a writer and curator known for the blog Post Internet, who spoke biographically. The mainstream migration of people to the web, he said, took place in the late 1990s, when he was in high school. “I was an internet addict,” he said. “My identity was as much online as it was a body sitting there typing.” I was relieved McHugh advocated a synthetic view of a person’s relationship to digital culture, instead of trotting out the clichéd internet/IRL divide.
The cover of the print book edition of Gene McHugh’s Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (2011)
McHugh intended Post Internet to explore and connect modes of digital production to modernism and the Pictures Generation—a pretentious approach, he admitted. Modernist terms, he came to realize as the project evolved, are not useful when describing the banal behavior of checking Gmail and social networks and watching cat videos. “The writing was rough, in retrospect,” he said, and also full of young fervor. For Post Internet McHugh deliberately chose the default blog settings, a kind of readymade design that he said created an awareness of the self-publication format. That sounds suspiciously like self-reflexive modernism, like Jean-Luc Godard foregrounding the act of making and watching films. The blog’s domain name contained a short string of numbers (122909a.com), and the posts contained only writing—no embedded links or photos.1 “It’s a certain way to approach the internet” that he said was characteristic of the late 2000s. “If you push it far into this banal realm, it works in an interesting way.”
McHugh explained Guthrie Lonergan’s term “internet aware art” as meaning offline art made with the internet in mind, or art made with an eye toward how it will look online. Considering time as an element, McHugh theorized that multiauthor projects such as the Jogging and Dump.fm, as well as surfing clubs, can be understood as performance, since you can follow this activity online but in real time. He also identified Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith as artists exploring this kind of art in different ways.
The second speaker, the artist and writer Tyler Coburn, wanted to define postinternet, and especially that nagging prefix “post.” Instead, he read a formal, polemical, and somewhat difficult-to-follow artist’s statement that addressed the art market and art history. “The current market for postinternet art,” Coburn claimed, “is nothing if not robust.” He was less optimistic about periodization, which constricts some artists and renders others illegible. I don’t, however, find it unreasonable to group together similar artists and their work for the sake of convenience, acknowledging, of course, that such categorization doesn’t always make sense at a granular level. As problematic as they might be, terms like Cubism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism simply work. As much the term postinternet makes its supporters anxious, it still allows them to slide their work into a relevant discourse.
Regarding his own critical practice, Coburn firmly stated: “My work attempts to disenchant the dominant metaphors and mindsets at work in contemporary technology.” The reflexivity and opacity of digital infrastructure concern him greatly, as do finding a digital space outside Facebook and exploring emerging methods and practices, whatever those may be. He named Benjamin H. Bratton and Ann Hirsch as people doing critical work and cited his own project, I’m That Angel (2012–13), which took the form of a physical book and several readings inside data farms around the world, as another example.
Readings of Tyler Coburn’s I’m That Angel at EvoSwitch in Haarlem, the Netherlands, took place June 6–7, 2013
Christiane Paul, a professor and program director at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct curator of new media arts for the Whitney Museum of American Art, ran through highlights of a previous talk called “The Network Space,” which chronicles the transition from web 1.0 and web 2.0—in particular the move from publishing (e.g., personal websites) to participation and broadcasting (blogging)—through works of art. She mentioned Mark Napier’s browser mash-up Riot (1999/2000); Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces (2011), a fictitious dating website created from scraped Facebook profiles; projects such as Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam (1996–2003) and its commercially oriented spawn, lonelygirl15 (2006–8); and Aaron Koblin’s crowd-sourced drawings for The Sheep Market (2006).
According to Paul, “There’s nothing post in postinternet” art, which she described as work that is “deeply informed by networked technology” and is digitally aware but takes the form of material objects. Paul’s canon of postinternet artists includes Rafaël Rozendaal, Clement Valla, Petra Cortright, John Raffman, Evan Roth, and Katie Torn—artists who have emerged in the past few years. For me, some of the best work about the internet (using Paul’s formulation) came even earlier and often took offline forms. Seth Price’s ongoing explorations of digital distribution (since 2000), Adam McEwen’s drawings of text messages from a Nokia phone (ca. 2006–8?), Shane Hope’s rickety laptops built from painted wood scraps (2006) and his paintings of imaginary digital-device screens (2007), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s bizarre videos (2006–present), and even Dana Schutz’s Google (2006), where she sits in her studio entranced by the offerings of the almighty company’s Image Search—these artworks, made by fairly traditional and post-Conceptual artists (and not necessarily creators of digitally sophisticated forms), explore the condition of interacting with digital networks and technologies.2 On a side note, one of the most brilliant artworks of the George W. Bush era was Ramsay Stirling’s animated GIF, Enduring Freedom (2008).
Anyway, postinternet art takes on a physical form, Paul reminded us, but whether or not a viewer understands the concept of the form (or its subject matter) is another issue. Like Gat before her, Paul noticed the increasing corporatization of the internet during the 1990s but, in slight contrast to Coburn’s celebration of sales of postinternet art, stated that the market for internet art hasn’t changed since the 1990s. How do these observations square with Rachel Greene, who ten years ago wrote that “as yet, there exists no viable or stable market for net art.”3 Furthermore, Paul vaguely described an antimarket attitude among postinternet artists, who are “savvier” in some undisclosed way. It’s not clear to me how artists working in the digital realm are making money—or not—based on these three assessments.
Christiane Paul (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)
The conversation among the panelists after their individual presentations progressed productively. McHugh argued that first-generation net artists, who had trained academically, were happy working in the margins, and that younger artists would have used paintbrushes, too, if they hadn’t grown up digital. Nevertheless, he said, those younger artists still want the white-cube experience.
Gat complained that much digital art ends up looking the same, aggravated by the ubiquitous use of Facebook and products from Google (and Google Earth in particular). She wondered if artists are problematizing the operations of these corporations or are complicit with them. I sympathize with her wariness of the dependence on proprietary corporate platforms. If Tumblr, which allows people to use their own domain names for their microblog but doesn’t offer back-end programming access, pulled the plug tomorrow, the content for every site would likely disappear with it. Conversely, platforms are occasionally abandoned en masse by their users. Remember all those indie bands that created MySpace pages instead designing their own stand-alone websites? Well, they’re on Soundcloud and Bandcamp now, because that’s where the audience is. The question is, how much self-sufficiency should an artist relinquish to reach that audience? McHugh said that postinternet art aims for a larger audience beyond the art world. Paul doesn’t see Google taking over art with a nonexclusive right, and there are ways to combat marketing, such as, for example, by “liking” everything.
I agree with Gat in that postinternet artists often produce consumer-friendly work which anyone can make, and that using a popular, deskilled digital process does make things homogenous. But Coburn reminded us that, whether it’s art that conforms to the New Aesthetic, a term used by the writer James Bridle to describe a certain kind of visuality, or automatic, personless photography taken by drones and satellites and affiliated with corporations and governments, this is how we view the world now. Besides, Paul added, it’s easy to argue that any style or moment can appear homogenous. For her it’s Abstract Expressionism, but for me the black-and-white photographs, typewritten texts, and maps of Conceptual art and Earthworks readily come to mind. While artists in the late 1960s were emulating science and industry—what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called the aesthetic of administration—postinternet artists are making user-end art, based not on programming and hand coding, skills the first generation of net artist learned, but rather on out-of-the-box applications. Postinternet artists—who Coburn proposed are targeting nonart audiences but needing art-world legitimation—want to have their cake and eat it too. Paul said that criticality comes from within the medium, an awkward position of which artists are aware. A curator (like herself) looks at both critical work and the stuff “riding the wave of flashiness.”
The idea of audience intrigued me. I wondered how much contemporary digital art—especially the stuff using Google Maps or Twitter—would be interesting to your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What would highly skilled programmers and designers make of work by all the artists mentioned during this panel? Probably with the same kind of amusement that a 1970s Hollywood filmmaker would have when viewing early video art by William Wegman and Vito Acconci. Similarly, what kind of distinctions would contemporary programmers and designers make between an art-gallery video and an amateur YouTube clip? We’re now fully immersed in the world in which the gap between art and life has ceased to exist. Would avant-garde artists who championed that notion one hundred years ago be horrified or pleased with early-twenty-first-century practices?
Tyler Coburn (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)
An audience member had the same idea and queried the panelists about differences between avant-garde or critical artists and the general public when both use the same digital tools. The gap has collapsed, McHugh said, but artists are examining issues other than these products, such as the physical and environmental impact of cloud computing. But that is also an important topic for mainstream media, especially in states such as North Carolina, where Apple has built several solar-powered data farms. Paul said that while some artists produce interesting work from behind the curve, most of them are “by nature and statistically” ahead of the curve, waiting for the technologies to be invented for their use. Char Davies, she recalled, was a frustrated painter who in the 1980s helped create Softimage, a software application for three-dimensional image creation that was later acquired by Microsoft in the 1990s. That happened twenty years ago—which artists have done something like this recently?
Another audience member linked the web’s founding in 1989 to the fall of communism and then asked about digital natives of technology and of “markets as the only way of organizing the world.” Is postinternet a condition, he wanted to know, and not a subgenre? “I would say absolutely, yes,” said Paul. “It’s not an art movement. It’s not an art genre.” She acknowledged that (art-historical) acceptance comes from the market, and that museums look to the market for validation. For her, artists and critical practitioners must therefore denaturalize the present condition and create suspicion, whatever that might be. McHugh wondered about the critical role of writers and curators, of articles and exhibitions. I’d say all of that is highly important to the development of both internet and postinternet art, which is still very much up in the cloud, I mean, in the air.
In Terms Of count: 12.
1 Funded in part by a grant from the Arts Writers Grant Program, Post Internet published regularly for most of 2010 but was then taken offline. McHugh’s collected posts can be read online or downloaded as a PDF for free, or purchased as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.
2 For a superb essay on Schutz’s painting Google, see Steven Stern, “Image Search,” Frieze 106 (April 2007): 136–41.
3 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 31.
Listen
Frieze Projects New York has posted an audio recording of this panel.
Sara Cwynar shows the original version of Kitsch Encyclopedia while Sonel Breslav looks on (photograph by Christopher Howard)
There’s a special kind of ordinary that folks in the art world love. Artists, curators, and critics often fall over themselves to praise the everyday, elevate the banal, and highlight the overlooked, momentarily relegating what normally would be banal to a distinct realm of interest and reflection. But sometimes the ordinary is, well, simply unremarkable. The discussion that took place during “Blonde Art Books: Artist Conversation and Launch” was ordinary in that unexceptional sense.For this evening’s event, the three people involved in the publication of an artist’s book, Sara Cwynar’s Kitsch Encyclopedia, met to present and discuss their work and to celebrate the launch of a special collector’s edition of the book.
In 2012 the New York–based curator Sonel Breslav founded Blonde Art Books, a project—one hesitates to call it a business—that sells artist’s books at exhibitions and fairs, as well as through an online store. Originating as a blog, Blonde Art Books was physically housed for most of 2013 at Schema Projects in Brooklyn. Kitsch Encyclopedia is the first book she published under the imprint.
Breslav stated numerous times that she intended her digital slide presentation to loop (which it eventually did, kinda rapidly), her words themselves becoming looped, which was unintended metacommentary on the direction of tonight’s conversation.1 She repeated fuzzy notions about accessible spaces, broader audiences, sharing information, and collaboration. For example, Breslav expressed interest in “materials as objects and the information they embody,” a phrase that exemplifies the kind of language that has developed around the everyday—at least in the contemporary art world—that sounds agreeable but, if not explained in relation to tangible situations, is trite, if not hollow or incomprehensible.
Breslav said she was given opportunities to do pop-up events, which evolved into full exhibitions—“my comfort zone,” she said. I wish she had better explained her curatorial projects, describing specific installation shots in her digital slide show or talking about other recent exhibitions, such as She Was a Film Star before She Was My Mother, held a few months ago at Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City. Breslav glossed over what she called a “summer tour,” which I later discovered was a Blonde Art Books traveling show for which she gave talks and conducted workshops on artist’s books across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest last June and July.
Born in Canada and based in New York, Sara Cwynar identified herself as a studio photographer and a graphic designer. She explained that Kitsch Encyclopedia was, in its original form, a one-of-a-kind hand-assembled artist’s book that she had started four years ago as a student. For this and other works, Cwynar adopts a strategy of appropriation, using other people’s images garnered from “the New York Public Library, flea markets, my parents’ basement, old encyclopedias.” Stuff from the 1950s through the 1970s interests her in particular, which she finds, removes from circulation, reworks, and redistributes, usually as digital prints for gallery display. While her art is largely visual, the book incorporates texts from three authors—a few sentences from Milan Kundera here, a few from Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes there—interspersed with her own writing. “All the texts are mashed together,” she said. The book’s alphabetical, encyclopedic format is a “quaint form of knowledge-containing,” and its organizing principle was Kundera’s definition of kitsch.
Cwynar claimed that the images in Kitsch Encyclopedia—photographs of flower arrangements, ancient sculpture, obsolete electronic equipment, and outer space—are the “stuff we see everyday,” which is certainly true if you’re the kind of person who sifts through old issues of National Geographic, sets of Time Life books, and vintage photography how-to manuals. (The artists Matthew Craven, Abigail Reynolds, and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht also mine these sources, but walk the aisles of any art fair and you’ll see dozens more.) Cwynar didn’t elaborate on the specific nature of the images in her book, apart from an awkward explanation of Kundera’s notion of kitsch, which made me wonder how purposeful or random her choices were. I also wondered why the handmade Kitsch Encyclopedia was republished in print—one thousand copies were made—instead of posted online using platforms such as Tumblr and Pinterest that are the legacy of André Malraux’s imaginary museum. Cwynar pronounced that we live through images instead of real experiences, and that we’re desensitized to horrifying images, reacting the same to pictures of bombings and flowers. Pundits have voiced identical opinions for decades. What’s significant about these positions now?
The third speaker was Corina Reynolds, an artist, bookbinder, and founding partner of Small Editions, a studio and consultancy that helps produce artist’s books. She helped to make the portfolio of six zines included in the deluxe version of Kitsch Encyclopedia, which were hand-stitched into the original book. Summarizing her background, Reynolds learned the technical processes for bookbinding as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. Seemingly without a business plan, the fledgling Small Editions started in a living room, became a website, and expanded through networking. Suddenly money was there, Reynolds said, after working on projects with Dash Snow and Dan Colen. (The chronology and circumstances were unclear.) She then described a book that Small Editions produced in 2013, Sheryl Oppenheim’s Black Hours, which comprises screenprints of drawings that were inspired by an illuminated manuscript in the Morgan Library and Museum.
Corina Reynolds (right) talks about Small Editions (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The conversation among the three panelists lagged after their individual presentations, perhaps indicative of a lack of planning, resulting in rote observations. Breslav argued that Kitsch Encyclopedia “is very specific to Cwynar’s practice but also has this universality,” something that could described any number of artworks. Breslav also stressed—several times—how she plays multifaceted roles in the contemporary art world (as curator, publisher, collaborator, et cetera). She also delighted in discussing trivial details of the book’s production. For instance, the Chinese printer Breslav contracted required that she and Cwynar remove images of Disney characters and nudes from Kitsch Encyclopedia. (Publishers have certainly policed morality and been overly protective against copyright infringement for decades.) The photographer did sneak in a picture of a naked body: “There are nudes in the zines,” Cwynar said. I got the impression that Breslav was tickled at the collaborative process behind publishing a book, discovering for the first time the types of decisions people have made along the way when producing a book—for centuries. Oh, process.
Cwynar wondered aloud what it means to make an image that will be seen by a million people but neglected to offer an answer, even though she had worked as a designer for The New York Times Magazine until last year. How the context of images change over time greatly interests her, she disclosed, which sounded profound until I remembered that this is the inevitable fate of nearly every picture ever made.
During the audience Q&A, a man visiting from Australia fawned over Cwynar’s work, and a woman in the front row asked the photographer about her font choice. “I used the ugly version on purpose,” Cwynar explained for the “1970s” typefaces in the book and on her website. “They’re really all nostalgic fonts.” This response made me think about how the term “futuristic” now specifically characterizes things that are forty and fifty years old.
A display of Kitsch Encyclopedia (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Cwynar spoke more about the life of an image over time, how it loses and gains value, and also about what she referred to several times as an image’s patina. When looking at decades-old photographs in the New York Times, she explained, you can discern a quality, if not a style, of the era. You can tell “what looks contemporary,” she commented, “what looks classy.” That’s periodizing in a nutshell. Cwynar added that nostalgia is strong in graphic design of the present moment, and Breslav identified what she called “outdated colors” in Cwynar’s work. What exactly is an outdated color?
Breslav feels the DIY culture that produces free “takeaway” publications is going strong, but she nevertheless chooses to publish more expensive art books. Reynolds is a believer in the precious object you can hold in your hands, whether that’s a limited or larger edition. The group talked some about scarcity versus mass production, but that’s a conversation which usually ends in stalemate.
Revealed only at the end of the night was the fact that Cwynar’s book was largely financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign to the tune of $17,386 from 310 backers. (Wow!) I realized that the three speakers did an excellent job of avoiding conversation on financial issues, one glaring issue in the art world that needs more sustained and vocal attention. Since Breslav and Reynolds work in a multifaceted space that combines elements of for-profit, nonprofit, DIY, and entrepreneurial approaches, it would be beneficial for them to approach their models frankly, offering to the audience the solutions that they’ve found and challenges that they’ve faced.2 It would be interesting to know more about how art workers in their late 20s can sustain a practice and make a living, in New York and around the world.
In Terms Of count: 7.
1 Neither the panelists nor the Independent Curators International staff attempted to subdue the highly irritating bouncing iTunes icon on the Apple laptop’s dock, which was visible every few seconds on the projected screen for the full hour-and-a-half duration of this event.
2 Cwynar works with traditional art galleries and presumably makes a living from her art, since she left her New York Times Magazine job in 2013 and didn’t mention another one.
This text is the third of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and second reports.
Can and Should Artists Group Together for Their Mutual Benefit? Monday, October 28, 1974 New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
Moderator: Rubin L. Gorewitz
Panelists: Susan Bush, Sandy Relis, and George Segal, artists; Barbara Nessim, illustrator; Ed Cramer, president, Broadcast Music; Joshua Cahn, former counsel, Artists Equity; and Robert Wade, general counsel, National Endowment for the Arts
George Segal said a certain amount of “cruelty” in the art world is necessary for the making of good art, although one could reply that sufficient cruelty would exist in the art world even if artists got 15 percent residuals.
Susan Bush, an organizer of the Boston Visual Artists Union, said Boston artists have done it, and, with totally open membership, now run the largest gallery in New England.
Sandy Relis, board member of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, said artists don’t organize well. However, he noted that today we have allies—lawyers, accountants, and organizers—prepared to give time and energy to our cause.
Unfortunately, the single issue of the 15 percent royalty was too narrow for nearly three and a half hours of talk, mostly by lawyers. Participation from the floor, which might have enlivened [the] proceedings, was not encouraged.
Since so much of the vitality of the artists’ rights movement now comes from women’s groups, it was strange that no panelists represented the women artists’ view. Beyond that, residual rights is not an issue that will seriously concern many artists. Most of us have more immediate problems.
The attendant publicity is raising public consciousness, however. Both Time magazine and Esquire have recently had major articles on artists’ rights. As Nathaniel Katz said, “Artists, like Mozart, are tired of coming in at the servants’ entrance.”
This text is the second of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and third reports.
Residual Rights—Can the Concept Be Implemented?
Monday, October 28, 1974
New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
Moderator: Gerald S. Hobbs, publisher, American Artist
Panelists: Michael Botwinick, director, Brooklyn Museum; Martin Bressler, attorney; Herman Finkelstein, attorney, former general counsel, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); Rubin Gorewitz, financial consultant; Carl Zanger, attorney, Committee on the Arts; and Jeff London and James Rosenquist, artists
Rubin Gorewitz, coauthor of an artists’ rights bill under study by Congress, noted that the mafia is now buying art for profit and that his bill would discourage them. He also said it would deter thieves. (This reporter doesn’t see how a thief would be prevented from selling to a secret buyer who wants the work only for himself. Moreover, work could still be held for ransom, a common purpose of art theft.) Gorewitz said the law would work well because it would be administered by the Internal Revenue Service.
Herman Finkelstein cited ASCAP, which has been extremely effective in controlling royalties for composers. Gorewitz described a system of “follow-up” payments in Europe. Since the 1920s, France has had a droit de suite law, returning 3 percent on resale to the artist, whether prices go up or down. It apparently isn’t working too well, because the amount actually collected is very low compared to sales.
Robert Projansky, lawyer and author of the best-known transfer agreement, was invited up from the floor. He disagreed with panelists about government policing. Government intervention in the arts would be damaging, he said, while a voluntary transfer agreement would be effective if most artists used it.
Projansky pointed out that transfer agreements are used in real estate all the time, adding that artists could give up their royalty if they wished, keeping other provisions. He feels strongly that artists should maintain some control over their works after they are sold, even after their death. (The recent alteration of work in the David Smith estate by [his] executor Clement Greenberg makes a strong case for this point.)
This text is the first of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the second and third reports.
Residual Rights for the Visual Artist—Are They Desirable?
Monday, October 28, 1974
New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
An array of worthies in and about the art world met at Loeb Student Center for three panels on the question of “rights” for the visual artist. The principal topic, the controversial 15 percent residual payment to the artist on resale of his or her work, is nothing new. However, last year’s historic Sotheby Parke Bernet auction dramatized the issue.
That was when a Rauschenberg painting, originally bought by collector Robert Scull for $900, was resold by him for $95,000 [actually $85,000]. Rauschenberg was enraged, publicly scrapped with Scull [legend has it fisticuffs were exchanged], and, with his accountant Rubin Gorewitz (“the artist’s accountant”), formed a foundation and went to Washington to lobby for an artists’ rights bill.
The public had been invited to hear the pros and cons discussed. According to a show of hands, the audience consisted of perhaps 85 percent artists; they came and went in large numbers during the marathon event.
Moderator: S. Spencer Grin, publisher of the Saturday Review
Panelists: Paula Cooper, Paula Cooper Gallery; Lawrence Fleischman, director, Kennedy Gallery; Robert Scull, collector; and Ron Gorchov, Nathaniel Katz, Jacob Landau, Peter Max, and Robert Rauschenberg, artists
Then Lawrence Fleischman opened by objecting to the residual agreement, a not-unexpected position for a dealer. Artists would be more hurt than helped, he said; anyway, “90 percent of artworks go down in value.” Paula Cooper was in favor of the 15 percent, but pessimistic about implementation. She has one artist who uses the voluntary contract, but says she meets buyer opposition.
Jacob Landau thought the only artists to benefit would be the ones who have already benefited from the art boom, the elite few. Rauschenberg was succinct. He was in favor, “and I don’t want to argue about it.” Scull, charming and soft-spoken, had apparently had a change of heart. He now favors some sort of royalty for the artist and said he doesn’t believe it will slow the art market.
Landau felt it would. He sees a world depression coming [in] which little art will be sold. Rauschenberg countered, “No artist can afford that kind of pessimism.” As for size of the royalty, panelists either agreed on 15 percent or hedged, except Ron Gorchov, who insisted on 50 percent. “Fifteen percent is like a tip!”
Christopher Howard, founder and chief critic for In Terms Of, delivered the following untitled talk on a panel at the 2014 Open Engagement conference. The discussion, which was moderated by Chelsea Haines and included presentations by Sandra de la Loza and Juliana Driever, looked at new directions in writing about social practice from diverse perspectives.
Writing for Socially Engaged Art Friday, May 16, 2014 Open A.I.R. Workshops 2014 Open Engagement
Queens Museum, New York City Building, Queens Museum Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York
Artists, writers, and curators discuss socially engaged art in Creative Time Reports and on several blogs hosted by the nonprofit organization A Blade of Grass. Over the past two months, the blog for Open Engagement has published daily responses to questions about social practice, and I’m sure we will read more about what happens at this three-day conference in the coming weeks, adding to the growing body of literature on socially engaged art.
One could argue that participatory art probably generates more passionate debate than other form of art—although flipping through any art magazine or browsing any art blog would indicate otherwise. Traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video still grab the lion’s share of attention, and reviews of socially engaged art rarely appear in the reviews section proper.
Still, socially engaged art is totally mainstream. Last fall, for example, Artforum magazine, generally accepted as the pinnacle of art writing, published several major essays, including “Limits of Control,” Felicity Scott’s text on Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (2012) and other immersive environments, followed by several pieces on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and a reassessment of Andrea Fraser’s untitled sex video from 2003, which isn’t quite social practice as we generally understand it but which embodies many of the same issues confronting the field.1
A view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) at Forest Houses in Bronx, New York (photograph by the New York Observer)
Last month ARTnews published major exposés on social practice, Carolina A. Miranda’s “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” and this month’s Art in America has a pair of essays on the genre: on the artist Pedro Reyes and three architectural firms that involve communities in their process. The academic journal October has published several of Bishop’s key essays and devoted its Fall 2012 issue to Occupy Wall Street. In the popular press, articles have been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and many other news websites that aren’t art-oriented.
Considering all this activity, important questions arise: Are we content with the writing? Are we satisfied with the level of discourse? It depends on whom you ask. Many articles fret about documentation, about aesthetics, about experience, fussing over whether or not social practice is capital A art. Personally, I find such conversations to be uninteresting and unhelpful. My definition of art is elastic, expansive, and inclusive. Maybe I’m easy to please. But I fully recognize the need to keep having these conversations.
The result has been a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of this work, most of which entails variations of the same simplistic opposition between a naïve social art practice, associated with the evils of humanism or pastoral sentimentality, and a theoretically rigorous, politically sophisticated avant-garde artistic practice.
Often the conversation revolves around the ethical and political position of the artist, and how much the artist seizes or relinquishes power. I’ve found too much finger pointing and hair splitting in this strain of writing, which can be intensely puritanical.
So how do writers sort out the good from the bad, or the worthwhile from the inconsequential? Where does a critic—or a viewer or a participant—draw the line and evaluate a project? “Does it work?” offers one person. “Is it useful?” states another. These are two possible directions, but there are many more. A writer can discuss socially engaged art—or any form of art—through many lenses: the history of art, contemporaneous art practices, literature, music, politics, the social sciences, economics, religion—through anything, really, and that’s what great about art, and what’s fun writing about art. The only prescriptions I would suggest for a writer is: research your subject thoroughly, try to say something new, and always question received wisdom.
In the same e-flux Journal article, Kester encouraged writers to take a long view of social practice. He described a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there…. When does the work begin and when does it end?”
This is a good approach that is typical of historians and certain kinds of journalists writing long-form articles, but not really the methods of critics, reporters, and bloggers, whose publications require fresh content daily. When writing about a work of socially engaged art, it’s important to talk to the artist, the participants, the passers-by, the institutional organizers, the funders—whoever might have been involved in or witnessed a project. Consult the published record. Consult as many sources as you can. Don’t just rely on your reactions.
Participants in Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) in Brooklyn, New York (photograph by Nicola Goode)
The history of art is far from static—it changes when new discoveries and connections are made. Moreover, a single review is a discrete piece of writing, never the final word, and one response at a given point in time. Would you get a sense of the 2014 Whitney Biennial if you just read one New York Times review and nothing else? Of course not. But read five, ten, twenty pieces—published over many months—and you’d get a good really sense of the reaction to the exhibition. The same goes for Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Stoop (2013) and Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, which generated many written responses in print and online. It would be fantastic if writers would return to Forest Houses in the South Bronx, where the monument was sited, and talk to people who had been there last summer. Or talk to the attendees who live elsewhere, or to Dia Art Foundation employees. I’m hopeful this will be done, and we’ll eventually get a better understanding of long-term implications of the work.
I’ve been a practicing art critic in New York for ten years, reviewing exhibitions for print and online publications and also writing the occasional essay, but I haven’t written much on socially engaged art. Perhaps a parallel project is something that I’ve been engaged with for a few years.
A self-published blog called In Terms Of publishes criticism of live speaking engagements such as lectures, panels, conversations, symposia, and the like, concentrating on events in New York City (but not exclusively). Public programs have existed for decades, yet the rapid increase of such events over the past ten years, as well as their standing in the art world, is astounding. An art exhibition today is inconceivable without an attendant calendar of events. Furthermore, live speaking engagements constitute a core part of the mission of libraries, bookstores, universities, and cultural centers. Since much contemporary art—not just social practice—depends on dialogue and conversation, the need for informed commentary on lectures and panels is tremendous but underdeveloped.
In Terms Of has examined talks with a wide range of players: artists, art historians, curators, critics, and students, as well as scholars in the related disciplines of literature, philosophy, architecture, and design. One recent post examined the intersection of aesthetics and politics generated from a panel of artists and activists that was moderated by the author of a book called 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Another five-part series covered a one-day conference on curatorial authorship in art exhibitions, which featured historians, curators, and artists from around the United States. A third post explored the notion of critique in contemporary art through an analysis of a lecture by the installation artist Mika Tajima. Events outside the art world are also important: I’ve written about the contributors to an anthology of feminist comics, the author of a book that historicizes the Riot Grrrl movement, a former New York Times columnist on ethics, and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, as well as the occasional forays into economics, politics, and law.
I consider texts in In Terms Of to be experimental, not in the avant-garde sense but rather because I’m drawing from multiple genres: basic reporting, investigative journalism, art criticism, newspaper editorials, polemical prose, book reviews, art-historical research, and so on. Most of the time I follow the chronological presentation of the speaker or panelists, but not always, and that’s one thing with which I constantly struggle. After attending an event and taking scrupulous notes, I conduct research and interject my own responses into the written narrative. If the event was recorded and the video posted online, I’ll watch parts or all of it.
I don’t approach live speaking engagements as art and would have a good laugh if you tried to convince me that a panel is a “performance of language.” I have no problem, though, stating that the overall goal for In Terms Of is to publish “socially engaged writing.”
What kind of writing do social-practice artists want, if they want it at all? Do they need a fatter CV and bigger portfolio to establish professional credentials for job applications? Do they need publicity that will help them get a grant to fund the next project? How about clips to show mom and dad to justify the frivolous and expensive master’s degree? It still feels good to see your name in print, right? In a larger sense, are social-practice artists looking for a silver-bullet treatise, a text that defines and validates their work, something like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” or Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”? You tell me.
I would assume that any artist would want feedback on his or her work, something that acknowledges their effort and legitimizes their work. Not as approval—after all, an artist doesn’t work for his or her critics. But the work cannot exist by itself. It must be supported by an audience and by participants, through spoken and written words, through memories and feelings, with some level of intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic fulfillment. Will there be good writing about socially engaged art? Most emphatically yes. Will there be bad writing? Without a doubt. Will some writers miss the point? Sure, but others will get certainly get it.
In Terms Of count: 0 (naturally).
1 See the table of contents of the November 2013 issue of Artforum for links to the articles on Hirschhorn and Fraser.
This text is the third of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the first and second reports.
First World Art Market Conference Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976 New School of Social Research, New York
Artworkers News also covered the Art Market Conference. Its report [from Gerald Marzorati] featured other speakers and issues, while showing that what seems witty to one reporter may appear distraught to another—although a bounder is still a bounder.
Speakers: Milton Esterow, Thomas Hoving, Thomas Messer, Clyde Newhouse, Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Ruth Braunstein, George LeMaistre, Rubin Gorewitz, Deborah Remington, Robert Indiana, and others
“Works of art of course cannot be compared to stocks and bonds,” warned Milton Esterow as he opened the first day’s events.
The keynote address, delivered by Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bounded quickly across the history of museum art buying in the United States and settled on the future role of the art museum. According to Hoving, whose own museum has escaped the financial crunch plaguing art institutions in the 1970s (the Met budget showed a modest surplus this year), all is changing for the better. He foresees an emerging “technotronic era” which will not, as Orwell warned, snuff out creativity, but enhance it.
“Our Western artistic manifestations will tend to diminish in importance, and we will begin to recognize a multiplicity of centers and styles,” he said, adding that the tastes of a few critics and a small group of curators won’t wield the power they do today. Hoving, whose cry for a larger art public and “museum without walls” seemed to leave many in the audience cold, concluded by predicting a greater role for art museums, proclaiming that art could become “the broadest and most powerful communicator” in history.
His exuberant optimism was countered later in the day by the somewhat distraught remarks of Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum, who noted that if the economy remains in its present condition, museums might have to forego collecting and concentrate their energies on conservation. “Museum directors may well be institutionalized dealers in the future, trading and deaccessioning to get new works and funds,” Messer said. He has guided all buying and selling at the Guggenheim since the early ’60s and promised to remain “an activist,” seeking services and funds from all available sources.
For the remainder of the opening-day session, two panels discussed specifics of the art market. Though all the dealers agreed that the boom in art buying of the 1960s is over, most hastened to add that the present mood of the market is a healthy one. Members of the panel, who collectively make up what one reporter termed “the sheiks of the oil-on-canvas market,” emphasized the importance of the quality dealer (usually pointing to each other), the seller with a good reputation, and the importance of the dealer to the history of art. “Every great collection has been formed by a dealer,” boasted Clyde Newhouse, president of the Art Dealers Association and third-generation gallery owner.
“They’re a monopoly—it’s that simple,” commented a young art consultant attending the conference as a reporter for Wall Street Weekly. “Price fixing is a given and 100 percent profits are commonplace.”
At the afternoon panel, “What’s Happening in Contemporary Art,” discussion once again centered on the difference between the market of the 1960s and 1970s. “I’m pessimistic,” offered Leo Castelli, who amassed a fortune over the last decade through the sale of works by such contemporary heavyweights as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. “There is art activity,” he added, ignoring the audience’s mock sympathy, “but no art business.”
Ivan Karp, calling himself the only “downtown” gallery owner on the panel, accused fellow dealers of ignoring the surge of creativity among younger, lesser-known artists, whose work Karp claimed to spend “four hours a day” examining. The most outspoken member of the panel, Karp also denounced the auctioning of art (“the process distorts prices”), the role of critics, and the validity of the conference itself, since, in his words “there is no art market—my artists don’t sell a thing.” Karp, unlike many of his peers, didn’t reap a fortune in Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and therefore had no reason to bemoan the current scene.
The four out-of-town dealers from Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and San Francisco made few comments, as talk centered on New York gossip. The one issue which finally involved the entire group stemmed from Castelli’s assertion that it remains “essential” for all artists who take their work seriously to come to Manhattan.
“Nonsense. I just don’t believe that,” snapped Ruth Braunstein of San Francisco, who had drawn applause for noting the lack of women speakers. “If an artist feels he should be in New York, then he should be. If not, that’s fine too.”
The audience seemed more interested in hot tips and inside information than discussion of trends and comparisons. “What’s the best buy in modern American Art?” read one question put to Castelli, who refused to respond to that and others he said could only be answered speculatively. Most dealers noted, however, that such advice is usually given to customers as part of the rationale for buying a particular work.
“Let’s face it,” said a young Parsons art student working as an usher. “These characters paid a couple hundred bucks to learn how to make more. It’s no different from buying a scratch sheet at the racetrack.”
The second day began with an address by George A. LeMaistre, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Outlining the expanding role of banks in the art market, he said most banks remain hesitant to loan money for purchasing art. He listed some ways bankers’ fears might be assuaged. For instance, one Chicago bank, rather than lending exclusively to collectors, extends credit to artists themselves, usually to sculptors for cost of materials.
In the afternoon panel on artists’ rights, discussion, heated at times, focused on recent legislation in California guaranteeing artists a 5 percent royalty on work resold for over $1,000. Rubin Gorewitz, accountant and adviser to artists and art groups, said the law, which he helped draft, “will help the artist and help everyone else five times more.”
Artist Deborah Remington doubted this, pointing out that there is no mechanism for enforcement. ‘‘I’d have to sue for my money,” she said, adding angrily, “It’s an elitist law anyway.” Only artists of great stature, “the Chagalls and Mirós,” would benefit, because only they have “secondary markets.” “Where we need help is when the artist is young and struggling,” Remington said, “not after he’s getting six figures.”
Robert Indiana, who spoke little during the royalty law discussion, emphasized that the real issue is the status of the artist in America. “An artist is a nonperson, a nonentity—just look at a museum board and see if you can find an artist. They’re not even accepted by those in the art world.” Indiana also was critical of American copyright laws, which, he said, are the primary hazard for visual artists. “The copyright laws have been the tragedy of my own life,” he lamented, referring to his LOVE painting, which was reproduced in thousands of posters without his permission and without royalties.
Both artists agreed that the country needs a federal “cabinet level” department of cultural affairs to give art a higher priority in the national life.
In Terms Of count: unknown
Source
Written by Gerald Marzorati, this review appeared in Artworkers News 6, no. 7 (November 1976); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 49–50. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
This text is the second of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the first and thirdreports.
First World Art Market Conference Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976 New School of Social Research, New York
Not only is art alive, it is thriving, was the assessment given by some of the nation’s foremost museum officials, art dealers, and artists to some four hundred persons at the first World Art Market Conference over the weekend. “Far from being less pertinent, the fine arts and the art museum will become more important,” Director Thomas P. F. Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum of Art declared.
“If the art museum does harness the contemporary tools, techniques, and aesthetics of the very best aspects of communications, it can go beyond art education, art appreciation, and art history and can become the broadest and most powerful communicator in visual history,” Hoving continued. “This will most assuredly be the next great epoch of the art museum.
However, Director Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim Museum said it will be possible only if museums get enough money to make acquisitions. They are made now, he added, mostly through borrowing, trading, and begging.
One panel disagreed about the extent of artistic creativity, while another attributed the slump in the art market following the booming 1960s to a return to realistic prices. “I can say the market is on a solid trend now,” John Marlon, president of the prestigious Sotheby Parke Bernet auction house, reported at the New School for Social Research, which sponsored the conference with the ARTnewsletter periodical.
Speaking of a surge of art interest in the South, dealer Louis Goldenberg, president of Wildenstein & Co., said he was “very, very surprised” at the growing number in the last half-year of private individuals’ buying art destined just for museums. “The market, the future for those museums, is absolutely enormous,” Clyde Newhouse, president of the Art Dealers Association of America, added.
In another panel discussion, there was accord on New York City as the world’s art capital. But the prominent dealers who participated—among them New York’s Leo Castelli, Chicago’s Richard Gray, Houston’s Meredith Long, and Boston’s Portia Harcus—debated whether it was an art collecting center as well. “Where are the new collectors, then?” Castelli demanded. “Well, there aren’t any. They are mostly elsewhere.” Countered dealer André Emmerich of Manhattan and Zurich: “I think there still are collectors around, perhaps not as spectacularly as there once were.”
As for new movements in art, Lawrence Rubin, codirector of M. Knoedler & Co., said, “It may very well be that the creation of art in the ’70s is slower, less dramatic.” It would not be the first time, he continued, that creation was at a pause. “The reason the ’70s look slower, it’s because they are slower,” Rubin said. Said Ruth Braunstein, director of San Francisco’s Quay Gallery, today’s artists “will emerge as strong a group as [those which] came out of the ’50s and ’60s.”
Other panelists included artists Robert Indiana and Deborah Remington, plus George A. LeMaistre, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), who foresaw an expanding, profitable role for banks in financing art.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Malcolm N. Carter, “Art Market Booming, Dealers Say” was published in the Morning Record, a newspaper based in Meriden-Wallingford, Connecticut, on November 1, 1976. The article was distributed nationwide through the Associated Press and appeared in numerous other dailies with headlines such as “Experts Feel Art Thriving,” “Conference Concludes Art Is Alive and Thriving,” and “World Art Conference Paints Rosy Picture.”
