Last April the painter and critic Walter Robinson wrote an essay for Artspace Magazine on a particular strain of contemporary painting, which he named Zombie Formalism. Others have similarly described work by the same group of mostly artists—among them Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Oscar Murillo, Parker Ito, Fredrik Vaerslev, and Dan Colen—as Crapstraction and MFA-Clever art. Laura Hoptman, in her catalogue for the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Forever Now, used synonyms such as hauntology, retromania, and super hybridity—phrases by an institutional curator aiming to appear hip.
In March 2014, the economics journalist Catherine Rampell crunched numbers from an online US Department of Education tool that collected data on college costs. Her results were stunning. After “subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid” for private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, she determined that “seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are art schools or conservatories of some kind.”1 These included the familiar institutions: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the San Francisco Art Institute. What’s more, two others on her list—the New School and New York University—offer numerous degrees in the arts.2 Tuition and required fees for the top ten range from $36,032 to $42,882 a year—which doesn’t include room, board, and related nonacademic expenses. Keep in mind that these are undergraduate degrees—master’s and doctoral degrees run even higher.
It’s no secret that the tuition for all kinds of schools has increased significantly over the last thirty years, and thousands of students take out huge government and private loans to cover their educational expenses. Those armed with BFAs are unlikely to make tons of money right out of the starting gate, as the familiar narrative goes. Yet we live in a time in which euphoric articles pronounce the MFA as the new MBA appear with alarming regularity.3 What should a young artist do?
Coco Fusco finds art-school debt to be unreasonable (photograph by Tal Beery)
Neither alleviating nor preventing student debt was the subject of an informal, passionate lecture by Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and visiting associate professor in comparative media studies and writing for 2014–15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking from her perch in the academic ivory tower, Fusco vented about the debt crisis, pointed fingers at numerous culprits, and found many sympathetic listeners. (She was a professor at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008—spending five years in the School of the Arts’ renowned MFA program—and following that was director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design from 2008 to 2013). Fusco was a “lone wolf in the wilderness” while teaching at Columbia during the boom Bush years, said Noah Fischer, a former student of hers and a founder of Occupy Museums, the group that sponsored her lecture and was participating in Momenta Art’s exhibition Work It Out.
A year has passed since Modern Painters published Fusco’s essay “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns” in its December 2013 issue. For the article Fusco gathered anecdotal knowledge from conversations with students, arguing that debt influences the kind of art a person makes after graduation, that schools use recruiters, and that art theory influences students, for better or worse. While “Debating an MFA?” focused on expensive graduate programs, tonight’s forty-five-minute talk made few distinctions between bachelor’s and master’s degrees and interchangeably addressed art schools, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities. As a result, the targets of her accusations were confused, perhaps deliberately so for rhetorical effect, leaving me without a solid grasp of the problem. It felt like the mark in Three Card Monte.
Cost of the Ticket
The “cost of the ticket” for art school has risen significantly, Fusco said. The 1980s, when she earned her BA and MA, were different. “It’s not that we didn’t borrow money,” she explained. “We didn’t have to borrow as much.” Fusco ended up with “relatively little debt” from her undergraduate education and none for graduate school.4 Back then “school wasn’t the problem—school was the escape,” especially for those riding out tough economic times. Waitressing lunch shifts for four hours a day after first finishing school, Fusco said she was poor but had time for art, and even worked for other artists for free. Needless to say, few can afford this lifestyle today, at least not in New York.
Design schools such as Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago figure disproportionately among the institutions that use “predatory lending schemes,” Fusco declared, and the top debtor schools are for-profit institutions. Schools that teach software and web design are “massive factories with debt schemes built into them,” she remarked, and the situation has become intolerable and oppressive. Her information was confusing, since she didn’t explain what these schemes are. Besides, for-profit institutions such as the nationwide chain of Art Institutes or places like Full Sail University teach marketable skills in lucrative creative areas such as web development, video games, and film production.5 Their graduates are hardly knocking on the doors of Chelsea galleries. Fusco left me wanting to know how SCAD and SAIC, which are nonprofit institutions, compare to the for-profits.
In Fusco’s experience, students are battling their parents over money for a collegiate art-school education, and parents are selling property, taking a second mortgage on their homes, and draining their retirement funds to pay for it all. At the same time, schools offer country-club experiences, with lavish dormitories and student centers—not to mention new buildings by starchitects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry—to supposedly impress wealthy parents to fork over cash. Paying for such expansions, Fusco said, is higher tuition.
During the first audience Q&A, an older man recommended that artists “show up” and “be weird.” Why even go to art school, he asked, suggesting that we get rid of the middleman and hook up students with working artists through apprenticeships. “That’s the medieval way,” Fusco responded, which “can become free labor for a long time.” Another attendee, the writer Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, wanted to know how we might let parents know about debt in advance. I asked Fusco if she knew how much effort today’s students make to find nonloan funding for their education? What about student complacency regarding tuition increases, questioned another person. Fusco did not have adequate answers. We are at a point when the outrage is over, Fusco had said earlier, and organizing should begin. But the only solution she offered was going to free schools like the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and “others in Los Angeles,” as if these groups offer something comparable to a degree from an accredited institution. It’s disappointing if Bruce High Quality is the only alternative pedagogical project that she knows by name. Fusco can find a rich history of both current and discontinued alternative pedagogical institutions indexed by the TEACHABLE FILE and use Google to discover newer projects making headlines.6
Proliferation of Degrees
The proliferation of degrees at art schools isn’t an expansion of choices, Fusco argued, but an opportunity for schools to procure more students and dispense degrees without providing marketable skills (e.g., fabrication, installation, canvas stretching, and finding your way around a woodshop). Indeed, any subscriber to the Art and Education email list can vouch for the mushrooming of art-degree programs in discourse-based areas such as, for example, the MA in art, education, and community practice at New York University, the MA in social design at Maryland Institute College of Art, or the MA in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.7 Talkers who don’t make things don’t last long, Fusco warned, even though she acknowledged that she’s a talker artist herself.
It’s more expensive for a school to maintain a glassblowing or ceramics studio, Fusco said, than to provide space for students doing social practice and, in her words, “transdisciplinary design.” While I generally agree with Fusco—it seems likely that programs for socially engaged art, which have multiplied in recent years as the genre gained visibility and respect, are less expensive to operate than programs in studio art—I can’t help but think that academic institutions are places where significant changes in how artists interact with the world take place. While initially frivolous sounding, these new degrees may evolve into progressive incubators for careers that haven’t yet grown mainstream roots. On the other hand, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment in an experimental, emerging field worth the risk?
Art School Administration
Fusco stated that art schools increasingly operate in a corporate manner, a glib remark evoking the evil ways of vulgar capitalism. Yet pundits have proposed the same thing for ALL of higher education for years, if not decades, and the tedious concept of university-as-business becomes superfluous when considering that any institution that ignores balancing income and expenses will simply not survive. Continuing her blanket dismissals, Fusco claimed that art schools confuse students by promoting themselves as research centers for knowledge production, when in fact these institutions are trade schools focused on technical training. (Didn’t she say earlier that students aren’t being taught usable skills?) “There is no concept of research in trade school,” Fuso said, apparently comparing studying art to vocational training in refrigeration or plumbing. Her line of thought might have served a purpose if she had identified the BFA or the MFA as her target, or even specified the culprits of her critique.
Image illustrating “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns,” Coco Fusco’s article from Modern Painters
Art schools devise ways to make the precarious employment of teachers permanent, Fusco continued, saying “It’s way beyond adjuncts now.” In fact, she stated that 90 percent of faculty members at art schools are adjuncts, without providing a source for this figure. “Those contracts have wonderful names,” she joked, “like visiting professor, visiting associate adjunct whatever, the titles go on and on, but the bottom line is that this is about the permanence of impermanence.” Adjunctification is indeed a huge problem across academia and especially in the visual arts. The three art capitals of America—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—boast a larger supply of artists, Fusco reported, and therefore teaching is a rough way for them to make a living. She floated the idea of living and working in Kansas City or Iowa City, in Dallas or Houston, but didn’t seem to take that seriously.
A decline in full-time professors, Fusco went on, has adversely affected faculty governance. In addition to being poorly paid, she said, adjuncts lack a political voice within the institution and must placate students and not rock the boat—“it’s about hanging on.” Professional development has also suffered, which has led to teachers using thirty-five-year-old syllabi. “No one should be allowed to do that,” she fumed. Artists are the hardest adjuncts hit, since part-timers in design and architecture usually have day jobs, which affects their political outlook on precarious labor. “They don’t want more obligations,” Fusco said, so it’s hard to win their support for change. Art schools, she told us, employ students in positions where other institutions, such as MIT, have a support staff of unionized professionals. While a federally subsidized work/study program is certainly beneficial for students, I can imagine that not having properly trained people running the darkroom or the print shop to be frustrating.
Because art schools face a dearth of applications from the US and a high turnover of students after one year, Fusco claimed, schools don’t have enough students—that is to say, they don’t have enough students to justify the expense of the legions of administrators who manage the pupils. Therefore an influx of foreigners has populated programs at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and CalArts. “Where am I, in Singapore?” she joked at the sea of yellow faces in art schools today. That comment sounded xenophobic, if not racist.
Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion
The seduction strategies that recruit students are real, Fusco said, and people aren’t told the truth before entering school—which is that most artists will not make it. (Who are these recruiters?) The lure for the Columbia MFA program in recent years, she said, is that an unidentified department head told students in private conversations that they’ll be rich before they finish school or they’ll hang out with famous art-world people who will help them find money. Fusco also argued that glamorous precarious workers—described by the journalist Riva Seth as “highly educated, skilled professionals who frequently are well compensated but nonetheless lack the security, social benefits or established career trajectories traditionally associated with their professions”—have an illusion of independence.8 Yet the media spin on successful young artists, she warned, fails to acknowledge that artworks bought by collectors who speculate are typically priced less than $10,000 each—hardly a get-rick-quick scheme. Of course, during her talk Fusco assumed—almost arrogantly so—that market success in the commercial art world is the solitary goal of those attending MFA programs. Throughout her talk she avoided discussing any other reason why artists might better themselves through education, leaving no room for other career pursuits.
During the 1970s, Fusco revealed, artists didn’t depend on the market: selling art was unusual and artists found cheap ways to live. Now those artists—whom she identified as male Conceptual artists teaching in higher education—aren’t the ones who can spread an awareness to students of the need for immediate financial returns after graduation. I’m not sure how that observation squares with her other comments. For example, Fusco said that some professor-artists connect their students to the market because that’s all they can offer as teachers. Art dealers visited CalArts in the 1980s to meet the students of Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, the “spiritual children of the Svengali types” as she put it. And during the 1990s, Fusco continued, dealers visited students at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University School of Art. It was certainly revealing that, according to the speaker’s anecdotes, the art market had begun invading MFA programs over thirty years ago, that it’s not surprising for gallery owners and collectors to pluck fresh talent from artists still in training.
Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art
If a young artist’s goal is to exhibit at galleries like Murray Guy or Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Fusco said, or to show in a booth at a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair, then he or she should consider attending expensive graduate schools. At Columbia, she disclosed, students specialize in networking, socializing, and drinking—and even complained to administrators when Fusco made them read and write. “Those students are like little barracudas,” she groused. “If they could kill me and get to my dealer, they would.”
Since “you’re paying $50,000 a year to be looked at before you even begin your career,” as Fusco claimed, should a prospective student attend a top art school or settle for an MFA program in the hinterlands of America, where he or she might earn a full ride? In the age of $120,000 art degrees, to borrow a slogan from the collective BFAMFAPHD, the latter option is the only sensible choice. Fusco named Arizona State University in Tempe and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as possibilities. For an artist interested in technology, she suggested heading to a school with the latest equipment, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and not to a boutique MFA program that specializes in seminars. I’ve heard that the University of California in Irvine and in Riverside, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale all offer generous packages to MFA students. Germany just made higher education free for anyone, Fusco pointed out, and students don’t even have to be citizens. If it’s actually true that “students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate,” as the critic and adjunct professor Jerry Saltz wrote, then attending a less-prestigious and less-expensive school—and consequently incurring little if any debt—before moving to New York (or wherever) to break into the commercial gallery scene makes a lot of sense.9 This artist will have hundreds of extra dollars a month for studio rent, art supplies, and food.
During the audience Q&A, the artist Kenneth Pietrobono, who like Noah Fischer is involved in Occupy Museums, declared that he turned down a spot in an MFA program at New York University because the cost of attending was too high, despite loan money being available. That was a wise decision. When faced with rising costs for art school and low expectations after graduation, prospective students must recognize that they are adults who are capable of conducting research, seeking counseling, and making their own decisions before accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loan money. They also must recognize the importance of saying no to unfavorable financial situations. But the fact remains that many artists have shackled themselves with huge amounts of debt, and that is a pity.
2 The tenth institution, Beacon College, is a small school in Florida “exclusively serving students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and other learning differences,” according to its homepage.
4 Fusco earned a BA in semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and a PhD in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2005).
7 It’s interesting that all three are MAs, not MFAs. Because these are not terminal degrees, their recipients will not be qualified to teach art at the college or university level.
Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization
Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.
Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.
Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.
Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle
W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”
The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.
The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.
W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.
Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets
Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?
I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.
Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age Tuesday, November 19, 2014
The Art of Sex and Seduction
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, New York
Gerard ter Borch the Younger, The Suitor’s Visit, ca. 1658, oil on canvas, 31½ x 29½ in. (artwork in the public domain)
The internet was once the “meat market for the undatable,” said the journalist Erica Lumière. Now, meeting people online for dating and sex has nearly become completely normalized in American culture. Which is good news, especially for couples who no longer must make excuses for how they met—“at a party,” “through mutual friends,” or something of the sort—and just say “on OKCupid” without feeling ashamed. In fact, men and women older than fifty is the largest growing segment of online dating (and the market cornered by a company called Our Time).
The three speakers on the panel “Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age,” hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and moderated by Lumière, offered their experiences as writers, researchers, and professors—and as advocates—and the ensuing discussion culminated in agreement over a moderate, thoughtful approach to modern romance that originates on the web.1
Swipe Right
Lumière began the conversation with a few statistics: one out of ten people have used a dating site or app; 66 percent of those users go on a date; and 23 percent of them have met a spouse or started a long-term relationship via the internet. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, praised the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet potential romantic partners, with large cities offering hundreds to thousands of people. But, he warned, a dating website is “only a good tool if you know how to use it.” Backed with statistics from Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey report, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher said that cognitive overload is the biggest problem and that users can become overwhelmed with choices, overweighing trivial aspects of a person’s looks, dress, interests, and personality, gleaned from a person’s profile, at the expense of finding common ground.2 Don’t use a check-off strategy, Reis and Fisher both recommended. My question is, does anyone consider those endless lists of favorite movies, bands, and books that people put in their profiles to be helpful criteria?
The experience Daniel Jones brought to the panel wasn’t scientific but literary—he is a writer and the editor of the New York Times column Modern Love, for which ordinary people contribute personal essays about their relationships. Dating sites put you in the driver’s seat, “looking for the ideal person,” he said, but you’re thrown into the sea with an “illusion of control.” Sometimes opposites—whether that’s differences in income, religion, politics, or smoking preferences—really do attract. In short, he advised, don’t be too strict with your imagined ideal.
The sexperts, from left: Daniel Jones, Hellen Fisher, and Harry Reis, with the moderator Erica Lumière at right
Fisher agreed: the algorithms work of dating websites work, but having a common background—which can be social values, good looks, or the same reproductive goals—is also important. “I don’t think they’re dating services.” Fisher continued. “I think they’re introducing services.” These websites are “changing courtship,” she said, “but [they’re] not changing love.”3 Connections happen in real life, Reis emphasized again. A prospective car buyer can read Consumer Reports cover to cover, his analogy went, but he or she must take a test drive before making a decision. Fisher nodded, stating that 35 percent of people fall in love “down the road,” not instantly, so patience is a virtue for anyone behind the wheel. There’s a joke about rocks songs about cars and girls in here somewhere.
“Hi” Tech
Many have declared that technologyhaskilledromance. Jones recounted a story of a woman in Washington, DC, who Googled her date before meeting him. Because she “was able to excavate his entire personal life, and family life, all in advance of the date,” their conversation suffered from stunted communications and even led to an embarrassing mistake: she mentioned his sister before he said he had one. Yet 29 percent of internet users, Lumière stated, have looked up the person they are dating, or are going to date, online. Fisher had different statistics—38 percent of men and 53 percent of women have researched a date on Google and Facebook—and with safety and curiosity in mind and with different statistics said, “I don’t know why 100 percent don’t.” Besides, she explained, from hunter-gatherer era to the small towns of yore, many people already knew the family of the people with whom they might partner. This idea spurred Jones to assert that we’ve experienced a sea change of people dating strangers, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Dating strangers inherently creates suspicion, the panelists concurred, so it’s sensible that a person conduct research in advance. And no, it’s not stalking.
Technology doesn’t protect people from getting hurt, Jones said. Considering hookup culture (i.e., sex without commitment) in 2008, he observed that things go tragically wrong when the emotional involvement becomes imbalanced. There’s an understanding between partners when hooking up, he said, but “the rules aren’t posted in the dorm walls.” When hooking up, kids feel vulnerable but cannot act vulnerable. On the positive side, the panelists agreed noted that people’s sexual needs are being met this way, despite the anxiety hooking up might cause. Fisher even revealed that 35 percent of one night stands and 47 percent of friends with benefits turn into long-term relationships. The rules are developing now, she said, just like they were developing in other ways a hundred years ago. Later, during the Q&A, an audience member felt that hooking up takes time away from working on a core relationship, but Reis has observed that emotion flows plentifully in hookups, that “it’s following some different norms, to be sure,” and not necessarily a linear courtship progression. Jones, however, has witnessed people struggling with such arrangements but offered the idea that they’re practicing pieces of relationships. Sometimes dealing with a whole relationship while too young, he suggested, can damage a younger person.
Daniel Jones (left) offered his experience as a writer and editor
The panelists discussed long-distance relationships that develop online between people who have never met face to face. “It’s completely liberating,” Jones said, and “The flirtation is intense.” The risk for vulnerability is low, he continued, but foibles may develop, such as when one couple worked up to Skyping naked but still preferred typing to speaking. Another couple would fall asleep together online, Jones recalled, but the relationship failed after she drove from Missouri to New York. In real life they were bored by each other and could only get their emotional fix through their electronic devices. Lumière asked if these online relationships can work. “I would say ultimately not,” responded Reis, who again endorsed the primacy of flesh-and-blood connections.
Deception is built into technology, Jones said. Since people regularly fudge their income, height, weight, and age in their online profiles, he wondered, how should an honest person act when everyone else is enhancing their image? Others might think a person who genuinely lists himself as 45 year old is actually 50, or a 180-pound person actually weighs 200. “Lying and cheating are hardly new inventions,” responded Reis, and the opportunities to both cheat and detect cheating are relatively equal. “It’s a bit of an arms race,” he observed. Jones believes that Facebook helps reignite old flames, but often you’re seeing someone’s curated life, not their actual life, and therefore illusions can develop. What’s more, he said, you must work harder to block people from your life online. Fisher asserted the notion that if you’re not predisposed to cheat, you probably won’t cheat. Dating sites, she concluded, don’t change brain chemistry and personality. After a few weeks, Reis added, you generally know who a person is—unless he or she is a pathological liar.
It’s All Good?
One study, Lumière noted, found that internet marriages are three to four times more likely to end in divorce, but Reiss asserted the opposite: “The right science has not been done to answer that question.” People don’t sacrifice their career for a relationship anymore, he continued, which is a positive development, and women need not follow their partners around the country or be told where to attend graduate school. Further, people may now split up romantically and separate geographically but stay together emotionally, which Reis said could develop into a new kind of relationship. Ever ready with her statistics, Fisher stated that 81 percent of lifelong partners would marry the same person again, and 76 percent are still in love with him or her. Now we choose for ourselves, often later in life, and leave bad relationships more readily.
Harry Reis (center) encourages online daters to meet in person
Regarding genders, Reis claimed that the similarities between men and women overwhelm the differences. Thus, the perception that single men only want sex, that married men pretend to be single want sex, and that women seek long-term relationships isn’t accurate. Based on her figures, Fisher even proposed that men are more romantic, fall in love easier, suggest moving in together sooner, and want to introduce family members earlier. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, she added, after a romantic snub. Reis stated, again, that there’s no information you can put online that’s better than what you’ll learn from meeting in person. The better dating sites, he said, tell you who is in your geographic area.
The evening’s conversation completely avoided racial preferences, which were brought up in a 2013 report on interracial communications on a single Facebook-based dating site, Are You Interested. A few findings: black women are the least likely to be contacted, Asian women were the most pursued, and most women wrote to white men. OkCupid found similar results in 2009, including the fact that approximately two out of three whites prefer to date someone with the same skin color and racial background. And I don’t recollect a single mention by the panelists of issues affecting gays and lesbians. It’s inexplicable how the speakers—who were all white and straight—failed to widened their scope for a more inclusive discussion.
The panelists barely acknowledged accusations of emotional manipulation on social-media sites, which Facebook and OkCupid both faced earlier this year. And while the speakers discussed online communications between potential mates, they forgot to talk about the severe harassment of women by men—from sexually explicit written invitations to unwanted dick pics—which has become so widespread in the dating community that the aberrant behavior has become expected, in a way. Just ask the artist Anna Gensler, who draws caricatures of the men who contact her on Tinder with sexually explicit messages and publishes them, sometimes with collaged digital images but always showing the man with a hilariously small penis, on Tumblr and Instagram (as well as Granniepants.)
In Terms Of count: 5.
1 Tonight’s event was the third and final panel in the Art de Vivre: Talks series produced by the French Institute Alliance Française in conjunction with its gallery exhibition of fashion photographs by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, titled Seducing the Lens, and a film series.
2 Fisher is not only a research professor at the Center for Human Evolution Studies in Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology, she is also chief scientific advisor for Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, which colored her comments.
3 One trend Reis has noticed is that people prefer finding a good provider to finding love. The opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but because divorce is so prevalent, singles are suspicious of intense passion.
Fads in Art
November 1983
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product,” Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22
Although they may seem like opposites to the casual observer, Carter Ratcliff has some things in common with Hilton Kramer: both can talk and write marvelously about art-and-the-culture, and I’m probably not going to like the art either of them likes. This is, of course, not the Hilton Kramer of the postmodernism panel, the one who arrogantly slaps down a serious question, but the Kramer who fulminates so engagingly against the “advanced” political thinkers in art’s infrastructure that we applaud those shysters for inspiring him.
Carter Ratcliff, on the other hand, analyzes art’s moves from a more detached and, as a rule, more tolerant position. He nearly always sharpens our view of what we have only sensed or supplies an aspect we have entirely missed—in some cases the defining one. Here the focus is on “art image,” always an issue in modern art, now, Ratcliff says, a “junkie addiction.”
Speaker: Carter Ratcliff
Carter Ratcliff, art critic, author, and lecturer, spoke at the New Museum on “Fads in Art.” His diagnosis, delivered in a dryly clinical manner, depicted a horrendous condition with tinges of sin, damnation, and guilt. Art faddism is like a “junkie addiction” in which neurotic need meshes with the market forces of our consumer society, he said. Stressing neurosis as explanatory structure, he touched only briefly on economics that encourage such phenomena.
“The endless need of the art faddist for a new style is like the need of a junkie for another high,” he said. The faddist has the junkie’s concentration on the next fix and functions in a shallow reductive way to this end. “Politics has turned into advertising and food marketing into image shopping…. It was wrongly thought that the art world was different. But it has succumbed to the metaphysical trading of art images. They have become a consumer product you can put in the market basket.” Moreover, “It is not necessary to buy a painting to do this.”
Among Ratcliff’s other observations were the following:
“The ways that people present themselves, certain atmospheres, are not just unpleasant but profoundly dubious. Art reflects this. Consumer extremism, defining oneself in terms of an image, is junkie faddist behavior. The image addict thinks fads are avant-garde, a way of knowing what’s going on so he can get ‘ahead of the game’ (a market term). This is what the Village Voice is all about, a weekly report on the state of fads, which have begun to refer to themselves, rather than the world future they’re supposed to be predicting. Movie and drama critics talk to each other through their columns.
“Pop art shed a revealing light on images that tend to become objects of addiction in a consumer society…. ‘Fast evolution’ is [an] addiction to images of art. Fads are reductive and rescue the insecure personality from ambiguity and ambivalence, removing any sense of the passage of time…. To take oneself out of the context of the world is to remove oneself from the flow of history. Faddists on a fad high claim the justification that they’re in touch with the future. But fads have no predictive power other than to indicate the next fad in the many subcultures that cluster around. In the center of the faddist aura, meaning and value reside in rigid form.
“There is an obsession with ‘the best.’ The way people construct the world, clothes, wine, home furnishings, all make consumerism a source of redemption and justification for lacking a strong sense of self. Fads are an addiction to glamor, the high of glamor, which relieves one of the necessity to be conscious of what one is doing. Glamor is directive, projecting desires about oneself.
“In modern culture, art found itself adrift. Art is actualizing consciousness, defining the self. Serious art is a tissue of ambiguities—that’s what makes it great. To ‘worship’ is not to serve the authentic truth of a work of art. It can only be the object of a fad. The seeming dedication of the faddist to greatness becomes its destruction. Fads are not accidental. They are unconsciously intended to dampen and destroy the ambiguity and richness of meaning that give serious art its value.
“People say, ‘Manet’s time is now,’ ‘Leon Golub’s time is now.’ Is Golub’s time Manet’s time? Will the next time be the next blockbuster show at the Met? The need to see Manet as the vehicle of some absolute value requires one to take him out of time. This saves one from all complexities, such as the upsetting one of comparing Manet with Fantin-Latour—if you think Manet is radical.
Édouard Manet is the center of attention in Henri Fantin-Latour, A Studio at Les Batignolles, 1870, oil on canvas, 80.31 x 107.48 in. (artwork in the public domain)
“There are other kinds of fads that can develop in the vicinity of art. Faddists rewrite the past in a reductive way, so that art history becomes the history of one artist. Thus the deification of Turner. The Minimalists saw only Piero della Francesca and referred to him in an intimate tone as ‘Piero,’ like ‘Frank, Chairman of the Board.’ In the late ’50s, people talked like de Kooning or Ted Berrigan talked. And around the offices of Artforum, people sounded like the Reader’s Digest’s ‘Building for World Power.’ Everyone was polysyllabic.
“The unpleasant part is, we are all implicated. New fads work. We need them because they provide certainty for those who feel uncertain. The desire for authority is projected onto the image, where it is abstracted to the realm where nothing can question it.
“In the ’60s, magazines focused on fads, because of the rigid style divisions in the art world. In this situation, artists must position themselves so they will be seen. Everybody, including critics, wants to get into the line of sight.
“My favorite artists are marginal. This is not something trivial. Faddish feelings, insecure perceptions that judge so many to be marginal and only a few of dubious quality to be central, make the whole notion of ‘mainstream’ dubious. It is a bludgeoning word, a very cruel notion … flaunting oneself as being dedicated to images of absolute quality.
“In a fad, seriousness is reduced to an image. I do make a distinction between kinds of seriousness. The fad is not grappling, coming to terms, pushing further, [avoiding] risks or confrontations. Something is awry. The art world is being flooded with inauthentic images.”
In Terms Of count: 1.
Source
Written by Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product” was originally published in Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 225–26. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
In Terms Of is the proud recipient of a 2014 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, sponsored by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.
In its 2014 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $600,000 to twenty writers. Ranging from $6,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to self-published blogs.
Matthew Miller’s work for the past five years has primarily involved naturalistic representations of his own unusually shaped, closely shaved head, usually with a neutral, enigmatic expression on his face. The Brooklyn–based artist talked about his paintings—oils on wooden panels executed in a painstaking old-master style—in front of a tight crowd at a gallery with a long, unwieldy name, Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.
Miller stated that Can’t You See It, I Am One, his solo exhibition that is on view through December 21, was his first opportunity to do a show as a unit. This presentation, he said, has four propositions; they take the form of five untitled paintings from 2014 (one proposition comprises two highly similar works) that hang from the eastern wall of the gallery. He read from a short statement about the subject of his work, written a few years ago for the magazine Comment, that got the conversation rolling:
He isn’t looking at you. He’s looking at the picture-plane, the site of the methodological drama and the working space of painting. He is obligated to the spectatorial pretense of the portrait. The “black of portraiture” takes up the rest of the frame and, with its fact-of-the-surface application (a sign-painter’s), competes for presence. However, this black is cousin to the cinematic green-screen, or like the enchanting blackness of an open barn door at midday.1
“Oddly enough, I still stand by most of that,” Miller said.
El Greco, Portrait of a Sculptor, 1576–78, oil on canvas, 37 x 34 in. (artwork in the public domain)
For this gallery talk he directed the audience’s attention to the largest work in the show, which shows the head and shirtless torso of a Caucasian man (Miller himself) standing next to a wooden beam, which has been chipped away by the chisel dangling from his right hand. The gallery’s press release compared the work to El Greco’s painting Portrait of a Sculptor (1576–78), which is said to depict Pompeo Leoni. A similar painting is Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martinez Montañés (ca. 1635), and you can probably find other canvases with a similar pose and conceit. It’s classic art history. (Similarly, another Miller work shows the artist with brush in hand, not unlike Judith Leyster’s famous self-portrait , one by Vincent van Gogh, and many others throughout the ages—only here Miller doesn’t actually depict himself painting anything.)
Unlike many old masters, Miller wasn’t commissioned to paint his works. Rather he made them on spec for gallery display, not unlike most contemporary artists. It makes you wonder why he would labor for so long to make something depicting himself, rather than what might be pleasing to an art collector. “I do this with a great sense of self-awareness,” Miller said of his practice “not just show you that”—meaning, I think, the representational aspects of the image—but also to “take apart components of self-portraiture.” What is his relationship to the painted subject? “It’s a me-and-it thing,” he said. “He’s always the artist.”
Surprisingly, Miller does not use a mirror while in the studio. “I just know how to paint this guy’s face,” he said, and tries not to stylize him. But because the facial expression is neutral, the artist said, it is “less legible” and “more complicated.” Indeed, it’s difficult to read the subject’s face, other than by eliminating expressions of affect—such as happiness, anger, or disgust—that are perceptibly implausible.
Matthew Miller on the level (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Miller aspires for a “painted plausibility” across his oeuvre, he said, and aims to sustain a persona, an idea a few audience members expanded on, tossing out descriptions such as iconic and archetypal. It might be more interesting, however, to think of the figure in Miller’s paintings not as elevated or ideal but rather as anonymous, a characteristic that makes the portrait specific or singular but unknown. After all, if you didn’t know these were self-portraits, you’d wonder why the artist produced five paintings of the same peculiar-looking person. When and how does Miller become less the artist and more just a guy in a picture?
Likeness and fidelity are important to Miller but not explicitly the point. For instance, the artist always leaves out the large, horseshoes-shaped scar on the right side of his actual head. Moreover, while comparing the five works at Pocket Utopia to images of earlier paintings, you plainly see how his treatment of the head and face changes from year to year, and not necessarily in a way that depicts the process or effects of aging. A Miller from 2014 differs from a Miller from 2012 or 2010.
Miller explained the painting’s background: he had set out to sculpt a self-portrait but failed. After making forty drawings of the abandoned carving, which was on view in the gallery, he embarked on the painting. Miller called the wood piece a “philosophical object,” describing it in the same way someone would describe a scholar’s rock.
An audience member asked about the “chiseled male body” in the image, comparing the human body to the carving, shaping, and molding of sculpture. Miller said there are “types that are empirically me” in his art but admitted that his younger brother modeled for the torso—the artist was uneasy about his own body for the painting. Later, while looking closely at the work, I noticed that the treatment of the chest is gauzy, while the hand and face are more naturalistically detailed. The block of wood is somewhere in between. The levels of verisimilitude vary and therefore are not evenly distributed in a composition, which is perhaps what Miller meant by his self-reflexive approach to self-portraiture.
The talk and discussion lasted about a half hour, during which Miller gave away few secrets. One intriguing statement he made concerned the sturdy black background in most of his works, an opaque but reflective darkness that he identified as theoretical, metaphorical, and symbolic space. That black background fluctuates between an airless space to infinite depth, introducing substantial mystery into his work and raising a screen onto which a viewer’s ideas can be projected.
In Terms Of count: 0.
1 Matthew Miller, “Untitled,” Comment, April 21, 2011.
“Tornadic, whirling movement is something I’ve been involved in right now,” said Alice Aycock. “I’m not really into peaceful things.” This New York–based artist, who turns sixty-eight on November 20, said she trusts turbulence, not balanced or harmonious things, which is typical of her recent work, in particular Park Avenue Paper Chase, a series of seven sculptures on view in the median of an Upper East Side thoroughfare from March to July 2014. During her lecture at the New York Studio School, she talked about this work, her approach to art making, and more to a surprisingly half-full room of rapt listeners. (The audience was mostly middle aged and elderly—where were all the kids?) Aycock is positive, confident, and self-assured despite the precarious nature of the public-art commissions for which she regularly applies.
Aycock began the talk by reciting a condensed version of “The Aleph,” a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, but with her own twists: “I’ve changed it to say the things I want to say.” For her, the story exemplifies how Borges compares himself to Dante, his touchstone artist, as both an admirer and a competitor. Borges wanted to be as good as—or better than—the medieval Italian poet. The story also emphasizes the “tear,” which Aycock described as a breakthrough (in literature, visual art, or whatever) that pushes the discourse forward and creates a new thought. Creating such tears has been her goal throughout her career. She didn’t indicate that she has succeeded in making a tear—Aycock is a terrific but not highly influential artist—but her relentless pursuit of the tear is commendable.1
Alice Aycock at the podium (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Aycock aims to make an image in her work, not specific but generic. A seed image, she called it. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (1994–2000), she gave as an example, offers a precise image: the shape of a dog created from twisted, inflated latex. Further, she pursues a state of becoming and transforming in her work, and not settling down. A recent outdoor work for the University of Cincinnati Medical Science Building in Ohio, Super Twister (2013), is meant to evoke tornados and whirlpools, and another, Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (2005–7) in Nashville, Tennessee, took its inspiration from the bridges and trusses on the Cumberland Riverfront.
The artist described her process: working mostly through competitions, she researches images of phenomena online; develops a design for a sculpture on the computer, with an assistant; finalizes the image; makes a pitch (to a municipality, business, or school); and, if accepted, builds the work. At certain points she employs a structural engineer to ensure her idea can be realized. “I would rather dream up these things and not construction manage,” Aycock lamented, but she does so anyway. She also explained that she plays with and ruminates on a work’s design digitally—there are no maquettes or working drawings. Once she finalizes a piece on the screen—it’s done.
Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, ca .1517–18, pen and black ink with wash, 16.2 x 20.3 cm. Royal Collection Trust (artwork in the public domain)
Returning to a discussion on her influences, Aycock said that “Leonardo was my Dante, in a certain way,” pointing to his series of deluge drawings in particular. She admires the Renaissance artist’s curiosity: “There’s nothing that’s taboo [for him]. There’s nothing he won’t think about.” Another touchstone work is Vladimir Tatlin’s architectural designs for the unbuilt Monument to the Third International(1919–20). “I love every time I see it remade,” she said. Later in the talk she described recent visits to eighteenth-century astronomical observatories: the Jantar Mantar in Delhi (1724) and in Jaipur (1727–34). These scientific structures, Aycock explained, allowed an stargazers to find a certain celestial bodies during particular times of year, but the Rajput king who commissioned their construction had actually wanted to know his fortune. Here, she continued, we have an interface between rational/science and desire/magic, which is also among her artistic pursuits.
The artist described important themes in her work, such as her longstanding interest in wind. Her first show, at 112 Greene Street in SoHo, featured Sand/Fans (1971). The piece recently sold at an art fair in Dubai, she noted, forty years after its initial appearance. Fashion is another influence, especially ruffles, lace, high collars, and petticoats. Rollercoasters are a third interest: she grew up near Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, which has the Super Duper Looper. The visual qualities of war strategy intrigues Aycock, as well as the idea that you plan so extensively only to see the fight erupt into chaos. These various qualities—including tornadoes, turbines, and a “small origami dress”—came together in Park Avenue Paper Chase, for which she created a visual narrative that progressed from East 52nd to 66th Street. “The wind creates forms,” she said of the painted aluminum and fiberglass works, “and also scatters them.”
The seven works—commissioned by the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and funded by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and an unidentified German investor—are still for sale: “If you want one for your garden, I’d be happy to drop them off—tomorrow, in fact.” Later in the talk she hinted that the series didn’t turn a profit. Aycock said she loves to win competitions, to sell work, and get out of debt, but she makes art because she has to, to come to grips with what she doesn’t understand. She joked that Frank Stella always wins the commission when both artists compete for the same prize. Stella won’t talk to her, she joked, not even when riding together in an elevator. “If he could just say ‘Hey Alice, I won!’”
Despite having recently erected outdoor sculpture all over the country, Aycock said, “If you do them on Park Avenue, you’re suddenly back in the game.” Her presence in Manhattan is understated, to say the least, even after Alice Aycock Drawing: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating, a two-museum retrospective that took place last year at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, which admittedly are not the highest-profile venues in the area.2 “I love New York,” she said, “but it’s a really hard town.” People will pay attention to you “maybe for five minutes, maybe for ten.”
It’s certainly not easy when you’re making public art, an area in which even prominent artists such as Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, and Vito Acconci spent years struggling. She admitted that her work is placed in banal locations, such as schools, community center, and airports. Aycock recently faced a legal battle with the custodians of John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 1, which wanted to dismantle her work Star Sifter (1998). Despite getting press about the fight in spring 2012, the artist said, when the decision was to relocate and reconfigure the work, no article was written.3
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the difference between drawing on computer and by hand. “On some level I cannot draw,” Aycock conceded, recalling her “knee-jerk rejection of perspective” when she was younger. Besides, she said, her teachers had been Fluxus artists, so you know technique was thrown out the window. At New York University, however, she took a class in which students were instructed to draw in the style of particular artists. “I was okay at it,” she said but eventually fell in love with compositional systems.
Aycock taught herself drawing in isometric projection, an architectural style that emphasizes scale, measurements, rules, and templates. Knowing precise measurements for her sculpture has helped her tremendously when ordering materials at the lumber store. In the mid-1990s, Aycock noticed that draftsmen began moving to computers, where a designer can enlarge or shrink an object, or rotate it, with tremendous ease. Adopting digital tools years ago, she can alter an image easily to “get exactly what I want.” Aycock never shows her shop drawings in exhibition, but instead makes hand-colored drawings for display, such as those in the Parrish Art Museum show, which covered 1984 to the present.[4] “I want the control back,” she said.
In Terms Of count: 0.
1 Aycock is a longtime professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, as well as at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, so her influence may be more pedagogical than aesthetic.
2 The exhibition traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where it was on view from January to April 2014.
Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?
Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?
The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”
Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.
Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.
Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.
Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.
Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.
Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”
If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:
The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.
His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.
Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”
Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.
Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3
Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.
Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.
Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.
Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.
Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.
The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.
Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.
An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?
A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.
In Terms Of count: 6.
1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?
2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.
3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.
4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.
Read
Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).
The Idea of the Moral Imperative in Contemporary Art
Friday, February 17, 1989
77th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Hilton San Francisco, Continental 7, 8, 9, San Francisco
Future generations researching the good old days at College Art [Association’s Annual Conference] may take this panel for a distillation of its moment, as it casually splices ideals, philosophy, jargon, celebrity, and non sequitur with talk of art-as-money. We see also the intense longings, the search for uplift, the demands for salvation that are increasingly deposited in art. (The most interesting discussion of the panel addressed whether they belong there.)
Nine years earlier, in what was for me one of the most poignant moments in this book, a student in the audience at a “postmodernism” panel told how artists were making art to oppose nuclear annihilation. A panelist then explained gently—very gently, given the ironic, even caustic, tone of the evening—that such real-world activism would in fact be the opposite of postmodernism in art. Now, at the “Moral Imperative” panel, a speaker tells us “a new link” has been established between postmodernism and ethics—but then fails to explain what that link might be, indeed, in some uncommonly elusive passages, seems to prove the opposite.
Well, clearly there’s room for argument.
Moderator: Mel Pekarsky
Panelists: Amy Baker Sandback, John Baldessari, Luis Camnitzer, Suzi Gablik, Jeff Koons, Robert Storr
The heartening part was that this high-sounding title, having nothing to do with how to get your work shown or reviewed, had possibly the biggest turnout of any session at this year’s College Art.
The words “art” and “morality” have been aimed at each other for a very long time, but never so much as now, and never with such broad multiple definitions of each. Both words are seen often in good and bad company in this postmodern, pluralist unsacred end of the twentieth century—or “McSacred,” as Peter Plagens has called it. And I wonder if either of these words had even the same meaning in, say, Rembrandt’s time; art’s meaning is now perhaps as multiple as its varieties, and the definitions of “moral” laid at art’s doorstep are equally myriad and provocative.
For example, Paul Goldberger discusses the “morality” of Michael Graves’s designs for the Whitney Museum addition in consideration of Marcel Breuer’s original (assumedly moral) structure.1
Names themselves—like Richard Serra, and in different ways Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Jesse Helms, too—are touchstones for any number of serious and complicated considerations.
And the relationships between artist, critic, dealer, collector, patron—everyone in postmodern capitalism’s changed art world—have provoked shelves of articles and books on “art and money” and “art and business” [while] James Rosenquist says of art money: “it’s become like drug money.”
Then, too, it seems fashionable to call the personal as well as aesthetic morality of the artist into question.… Cellini never had it so tough from Vasari!
And the current relationships between the art community and the rest of humankind have frequently and rightfully been questioned…. Andrew Kagan writes of the “moral emptiness of [contemporary] art” and says, “But what is becoming increasingly disturbing is the tact that we have for so long lacked even the climate, the attitudes of high seriousness and commitment in art.”… Donald Kuspit considers the artist as activist, weighing “the human and political potential of activist art” to which many have indeed turned, while Alberto Moravia states categorically, “Art cannot politicize itself without committing suicide; in politics, terrorism is always anticultural, and in art, the avant-garde is always terrorist.”
And William H. Gass in his essay “Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” subtitled “In Search of a Worthy No,” [says] “There is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did…. To live is to defend a form.… It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, every dance were danced in the dark. That would be a worthy no—but it will never be uttered.”
This panel will begin with the premise that the first decision an artist makes when starting to work in this postmodern, pluralist end of the twentieth century is a moral one; that is, if you can paint whatever you want—since nobody cares what you paint or if you paint at all until you’re a commodity—the first decision is what to paint. This is diametrically opposed to premodern art, which was preceded by “need” and “commission” with the style usually universal and content preordained….
To show that Abstract Expressionism had been a movement of moral strength and conviction, Pekarsky quoted Barnett Newman recalling the ’40s in the ’60s:
We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.2
Pekarsky then quoted John Baldessari as talking of “trying to get back to bedrock in his work, trying to strip away all the nonessential and thereby arrive at choice through this reductivist approach; choice, which seems such a fundamental issue of contemporary art. In his own work, Pekarsky said:
I have “risked,” I suppose, a large number of embarrassing paintings in trying to arrive at an iconography I could believe in—and believe worth painting. In the process, format as well as form became a concern for a while, in addition to subject or content, and led me into an involvement with public art: trying to make art that belonged to everyone but was nobody’s property … to not make tradable objects; to play with the idea of large landscapes on walls in the real, urban landscape…. These concerns immersed me in the questions we’re here to discuss today.
Then he quoted British sculptor William Turnbull on public sculpture commissions: “The problem with public sculpture is with the public, not with sculpture. The idea of designing a sculpture for a particular site, even if chosen oneself, seems to me a gross limitation on the sculptor’s freedom of action.”
Pekarsky ended his introduction with, “If you can paint whatever you want, what do you paint? Does it matter? … If you can paint whatever you want, isn’t there implicit in your decision great power? … And no small byway—what should the critic be doing these days? What’s the critic’s responsibility, moral or otherwise? I have yet to see a critical program equal to facing the millennium with honor.”
Amy Baker Sandback’s opening was not promising: “There’s no such thing as moral art, just moral artists. Words are only symbols for ideas, not fixtures of thought. Their powerful meanings are shaped by public and private perceptions and fine-tuned by considerations … more down-to-earth than the spiritual…. ‘Moral’ and ‘Art’ are both valid symbols of important contemporary concerns—the first has to do with the maker and the second with what is made.”
Sandback said that [when] preparing for the panel she had consulted her dictionary. In the ten-volume New Century she found six columns of tiny print for the word moral. The words aesthetic and art took up one column, and imperative a quarter of a column. Moral was followed by morass, a swamp. Sandback concluded that “moral is a noun related to ethics, pertaining to right and wrong, manners and custom; to the mind as opposed to the physical; part of a truly developed healthy intellect.”
She then said in a tone of great authority that she is “all for moral persons who happen to be artists, and for moral viewers,” which she and the audience seemed to feel was a valuable insight. However, she went on with a sharp, cogent, and honest (albeit unfashionable) commentary:
The role of the contemporary artist as new-wave guru, and the perception that art making provides an inside track to a special truth denied the rest of humankind, is a dangerous role for all concerned. Artists are as flawed and sometimes as brilliant as academics, doctors, or bricklayers. No style is necessarily moral, no subject matter is necessarily correct, no political message or religious symbol necessarily renders great art. Piggybacking an aesthetic to a cause may indicate an important aspect of a personality or maybe marketing or simply a stylish ideological trick. Bad artists can produce masterpieces as well as the obverse. If morality is an imperative of art, how do you approach an erotic Shunga image of strange sexual contortion or the photographs of artists such as Mapplethorpe, Witkin, or any other sometimes disagreeable talent [or how do you enjoy] a lyrical Matisse knowing it was done during the Occupation?3 … I believe in art and its ability to make magic even when it’s ugly or anguished or performed as an intellectual exercise and even when it’s dumb and lovely. Morality is a judgment that serves no aesthetic purpose.”
Sandback’s final comment was, “Being able to speak well of your work is good for business.”
John Baldessari told an anecdote about running into Jeff Koons in New York and mentioning a profile on Koons in a recent Los Angeles Times, in which a critic who ordinarily writes on rock and roll criticized Koons’s work, applying different standards of morality to it than would be applied to music. Koons’s comment was, “Gee, you’d think she thought I was Mark Kostabi or somebody.” (The audience found this retort hilarious; it brought the house down—perhaps something about the word “Kostabi.”) Baldessari took this as evidence that “art is the last bastion of morality.”
He continued, free-associating:
When I think of morality I think of money. [T]here was a period when poster sizes got smaller until you just had little cards being mailed out with discreet type and you’d go into a gallery or museum and it would be hard to see the work, and, as Lucy Lippard has said, “It’s hard to read things on the wall when you’ve got a screaming baby under your arm.” Now they’re getting bigger again; people like to have stuff [posters]—stuff sells. Sculpture went from ephemeral materials in the ’60s and ’70s to where now everything is in bronze—it’s durable and can be handed down. Your investment is protected; it won’t disintegrate in twenty years.
Art is now equated with money, and they all want to have all the news on art. You can’t even get into a panel anymore. Art is reaching a point where it may be interchangeable with money—art as a medium of exchange. [But] if art didn’t sell we wouldn’t worry about it so much. If Schnabel’s paintings didn’t sell, they might be more interesting. They are less serious because they sell for so much money. Anselm Kiefer seems to be very moral and serious, but with his prices going up, we start to question his seriousness. When money comes in, it starts to cast doubt. I had an argument in a New York bar with a friend who said, “Koons’s art caters to the lowest common denominator,” but [Koons] seems to perfectly reflect our culture. I’m very suspicious of anyone who tells anybody what kind of art they should do. An old dealer friend in Germany said art should have no message. I feel I should do what the culture needs, but I’m bored with the idea. I’m paralyzed in front of the question of what is the right art to do…. Do what one does best—like athletes. Find out what your weaknesses and strengths are and work on the strengths.
Baldessari said with students he works on strengths and tells them to forget their weaknesses. He believes moral purpose is “using all the strengths you have.”
Luis Camnitzer, an artist originally from Germany who has lived in Uruguay, said a friend, after reading the paper he was about to present, warned that it was very pious, but it was too late to change it:
We live believing we are artists, but we are actually ethical beings sifting right from wrong. To survive ethically we need a political awareness to understand our environment…. Packaging is all. Thoughtless substitution can create the same havoc as when detergent is packaged as perfume. “Manipulation” of the viewer has negative connotations [so] we always avoid it when describing art processes, using euphemisms like “composition” and “design.” The shift of the action from ethics into aesthetics allows for the delusion that only those decisions pertaining to content have an ethical quality. [But] most of our art is socially muddled, even when it functions in the market. The explicit wish of most artists is to live off their art production, but they have mixed feelings regarding the question of money as unethical.
Lately a new link has been established between ethics and postmodernism. The postmodern label serves to co-opt and unify some artistic expressions. Postmodernism can be seen as a demoralization of some antiformalist tendencies, [a] replacement of some conservative contexts, and a reinternationalization of what threatens to become a nationalist fragmentation in art. Art is still far from being an ethical affair. We rarely challenge in depth the parameters which define art or the technical constraints offered by art history.
Surely the “parameters which define art” are challenged six times a day by every MFA student in America. But this paper seems less “pious” than murky, or let’s say overly succinct, leaving us to wonder what “reinternationalization” does, what “the technical constraints of art history” are, how one would “challenge” them, in depth or not, how such technical constraints become moral issues, etc., etc., etc.
Suzi Gablik said that as a critic in the late ’80s she is concerned with understanding our cultural myths and how they evolve, what it means to be a “successful” artist working in the world today, and whether the image that comes to mind is one we can support and believe in:
Dominance and mastery are crucial to our notion of success…. The art industry is inseparable from the giant web of our cultural addictions to work, money, possessions, prestige, materialism, and technology. Unless efforts are made to reassess our relationship to the present framework and its practices, new patterns won’t take hold. Vested interests will ensure that they are maintained as before. If we want change, we need to evolve new ground rules for the future. The moral task before us is to identify which approaches to art make sense in today’s world, Aesthetics views art as something autonomous and separate, as socially nonfunctional, existing for its own sake, The best art is made for no good reason and is valuable for its own sake. Ortega y Gasset said, “A work of art is nothing but a work of art, a thing of no transcendency or consequence.” Once fully conscious of how we’ve been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of these cultural images and role models as personal ideals and the possibility then opens for actually modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.
Gablik described the project of Dominique Mazeaud, an artist friend living in Santa Fe [called] The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River. Once a month she and other friends meet to clean pollution out of the river. Gablik showed slides of the work and read excerpts from a diary of the ongoing project. One entry records picking up as much as 103 pounds of broken glass in a single day; others ponder how the strange miscellany of objects finds its way into the river. The artist calls her journal entries her “riveries.”
Gablik quoted Caroline Casey: “Nothing which is not socially and ecologically responsible will make it out of this decade alive.” [Gablik] concluded, “Moving away from the competitive modes of institutionalized aesthetics is one way of not perpetrating the dominator system. Forgoing its rites of production and consumption, its mythology of professionalism, and its power archetype of success, only then can we begin to evolve a different set of ground rules for the future. But the willingness to make this systems shift is the beginning of recovery.”
Jeff Koons, who showed a history of his work from 1978 to the present, said there is a great shuffling and shifting of power now in the art world, but that he’s an optimist and believes things beneficial to humankind will be “absorbed into evolution” and “things that are negative will be destroyed.” Koons said he has always been “at the service of his art,” explaining that his work on Wall Street was to finance his art. White middle-class kids use art for social mobility as some ethnic groups use basketball for social mobility, he said, and, “just as basketball players become front men, so do artists.” Koons was very funny and appealing, despite intermittently feigning modesty and becoming sanctimonious over his slides.
Robert Storr, a contributing editor to Art in America, started to paint because he needed a hobby, and found it was fun.4 He quoted Picasso that “the best art is always fiction,” adding that “the religion of art is not religion, the spirituality of art is not spirituality, the humanism of art is not humanism, and between those terms, in that negation, is the reasonable place to start.” As for morality:
The consciousness of artifice is the one thing for which the artist is morally responsible, not to be a sucker for his/her own ideas and sincerity and not to ask anyone else to be one either…. Rather than commandments, I would put forth two propositions for the audience: never trust anybody who say he’s telling it straight from the shoulder [and] never trust a kidder.
For the question period, Pekarsky gave the usual warning (“No manifestos, only questions”) but, beginning by recognizing his friends in the audience or those whose names he knew, he was rewarded mostly with manifestos. Then came questions like, “Can you maintain your morality in New York’s glitzy art world?” Gablik responded, “Transformation of one’s own consciousness and the place where that transformation is most important is New York, and anyone undergoing such a change should get to New York fast.”
Another statement-question was, “Careerism is related to morality and Koons said on Wall Street he faced a daily handling of moral issues, and that he felt free when he left the business world for the art world, because it was free of those issues, and yet here we are discussing it.” The response to that was, “Careerism is meaningless until given meaning by the speaker,” which seemed to satisfy the questioner. Someone asked why the person “cleansing” the Rio Grande didn’t work with local governing agencies, such as environmental protection; another started with, “An artist is one who produces masterpieces.” That question and several others were rejected outright by the panelists, who said they couldn’t deal with them.
Perhaps I’m the only one who found much of these talks (transcribed practically verbatim above) or their relation to the issues baffling. The standing-room-only audience was rapt throughout, and at conclusion couldn’t stop applauding.
2 See Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Mathews,” in John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writing and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 287.
3 Sandback could be referring to either the painter Jerome Witken or his twin brother, the photographer Joel Peter Witken.
4 As of 1990, [Robert Storr was] curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA.
Source
Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Value Added” was originally published in Women Artists News 14, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1989); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 287–90. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
