This text is the second of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the first and thirdreports.
First World Art Market Conference Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976 New School of Social Research, New York
Not only is art alive, it is thriving, was the assessment given by some of the nation’s foremost museum officials, art dealers, and artists to some four hundred persons at the first World Art Market Conference over the weekend. “Far from being less pertinent, the fine arts and the art museum will become more important,” Director Thomas P. F. Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum of Art declared.
“If the art museum does harness the contemporary tools, techniques, and aesthetics of the very best aspects of communications, it can go beyond art education, art appreciation, and art history and can become the broadest and most powerful communicator in visual history,” Hoving continued. “This will most assuredly be the next great epoch of the art museum.
However, Director Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim Museum said it will be possible only if museums get enough money to make acquisitions. They are made now, he added, mostly through borrowing, trading, and begging.
One panel disagreed about the extent of artistic creativity, while another attributed the slump in the art market following the booming 1960s to a return to realistic prices. “I can say the market is on a solid trend now,” John Marlon, president of the prestigious Sotheby Parke Bernet auction house, reported at the New School for Social Research, which sponsored the conference with the ARTnewsletter periodical.
Speaking of a surge of art interest in the South, dealer Louis Goldenberg, president of Wildenstein & Co., said he was “very, very surprised” at the growing number in the last half-year of private individuals’ buying art destined just for museums. “The market, the future for those museums, is absolutely enormous,” Clyde Newhouse, president of the Art Dealers Association of America, added.
In another panel discussion, there was accord on New York City as the world’s art capital. But the prominent dealers who participated—among them New York’s Leo Castelli, Chicago’s Richard Gray, Houston’s Meredith Long, and Boston’s Portia Harcus—debated whether it was an art collecting center as well. “Where are the new collectors, then?” Castelli demanded. “Well, there aren’t any. They are mostly elsewhere.” Countered dealer André Emmerich of Manhattan and Zurich: “I think there still are collectors around, perhaps not as spectacularly as there once were.”
As for new movements in art, Lawrence Rubin, codirector of M. Knoedler & Co., said, “It may very well be that the creation of art in the ’70s is slower, less dramatic.” It would not be the first time, he continued, that creation was at a pause. “The reason the ’70s look slower, it’s because they are slower,” Rubin said. Said Ruth Braunstein, director of San Francisco’s Quay Gallery, today’s artists “will emerge as strong a group as [those which] came out of the ’50s and ’60s.”
Other panelists included artists Robert Indiana and Deborah Remington, plus George A. LeMaistre, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), who foresaw an expanding, profitable role for banks in financing art.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Malcolm N. Carter, “Art Market Booming, Dealers Say” was published in the Morning Record, a newspaper based in Meriden-Wallingford, Connecticut, on November 1, 1976. The article was distributed nationwide through the Associated Press and appeared in numerous other dailies with headlines such as “Experts Feel Art Thriving,” “Conference Concludes Art Is Alive and Thriving,” and “World Art Conference Paints Rosy Picture.”
This text is the first of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the second and thirdreports.
First World Art Market Conference
Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976
New School of Social Research, New York
Rereading this report [from Lynden B. Miller] in 1990, the notion of a “Last World Art Market Conference” comes to mind—what to do while the value of your collection bottoms out. Of course all this took place at the onset of gold fever, when it did not do to admit, at least in public, that one might indeed “speculate in art.”
Speakers: Thomas Hoving, Milton Esterow, Thomas Messer, Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Ruth Braunstein, others, dealers
Billed as “The First World Art Market Conference,” coproduced by the New School and ARTnewsletter—a biweekly hot-tip dispenser that you can pick up for a mere $60 a year—the show was, as John Everett, president of the New School, said in his opening remarks, about the “business of art.” It appeared to be mostly a media event. The press was given the three front rows, fussed over with TLC. Some four hundred others, dealers, and collectors from around the country, and a few artists hoping to learn about “business,” paid $200 each to see and hear the superstars of the art market. Those expecting a clear view of the crystal ball—specific investment advice—were disappointed. But they got lots of encouragement and word that the art market is very good these days.
After the “welcoming continental breakfast,” Everett told us there’s money “itching” to be spent in art. Next, Milton Esterow, publisher of ARTnewsletter and ARTnews, cosponsor, and comoderator, earnestly assured us that those who make money on art buy for aesthetic reasons only—that you can’t make money speculating on art. Then we got down to the serious business of trying to find out how to do just that.
Keynote speaker Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bounded onstage for a rapid-fire delivery of his optimistic view of the future of museums, now changing, he said, from passive displayers of art to active educators and conservators of art and culture (thus, not surprisingly, making a case for many of his own controversial changes at the Met).
Then the august directors of such institutions as Wildenstein, Parke Bernet, and Christie’s sedately discussed trends in art-buying around the world, with an emphasis on pre-twentieth-century painting and sculpture and other art objects of increasing rarity, which, they agreed, will become even more expensive. Despite several years’ slump, it seems there is still a lot of money around for art, particularly in the US Southwest, Europe, and, more recently, Iran and the oil-producing countries. Esterow tried manfully to elicit some inside information on specific items or periods for investment, but to no avail.
The dealers Leo Castelli (left) and Ivan Karp (center) with Andy Warhol in 1966 (photograph by Sam Falk/New York Times)
After lunch, Thomas Messer [of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum] spoke wittily of the museum director’s difficulties in maintaining the excellence of a collection without money, and his efforts to get same.
The 2:30 PM panel discussion—with Leo Castelli, André Emmerich, Lawrence Rubin, and Ivan Karp of New York; Portia Harcus of Harcus-Krakow, Boston; Ruth Braunstein of Quay Gallery, San Francisco; Richard Gray of Gray Gallery, Chicago; and Meredith Long of Meredith Long & Co., Houston—was considerably livelier than the morning’s, and of greater interest to contemporary artists.
Karp, in flame-red open-necked shirt and black leather jacket, a well-calculated contrast to the banker’s attire of his colleagues, began with a lament on the dearth of big-spending collectors while a wealth of exciting new art fails to sell, which brought howls of laughter and appreciation from the audience. Rubin, of Knoedler Gallery, and Emmerich said they found no exciting new art beating down their doors. There was also disagreement about the number of collectors, but it was clear from the discussion that there is a lot of money and art activity in what Castelli, with a wave of his hand toward the out-of-towners, referred to as “the provinces.” He said he himself is looking for “stars, not activity.”
Ms. Braunstein noted that the New York dealers on the panel, except for Karp, are the “establishment,” so that perhaps little exciting new work comes to them. She said she finds much thrilling new work with new materials. She also asked Esterow why there were so few women participating, which drew applause from the audience, particularly the press section, which was predominantly female. Esterow was ready for that: “25 percent of art dealers are women; two out of eight panelists equals 25 percent.” (However he wasn’t quite so careful introducing the panel, having named first all the men in order down the table, and then the two women seated among them. It also bears noting that no woman artist was mentioned by name in the entire day, though Karp did use the phrase “his or her artistic temperament” to indicate that the artist is of two possible sexes.)
The dealers seemed to agree that their major function is educational, as big sales are few and far between. All day there were pious protests from speakers that one would not, heaven forbid, speculate in art. Castelli finally reminded his fellow dealers that such folk do exist.
The discussions would all have been more relevant and informative if moderators Esterow and Donald Goddard, managing editor of ARTnews, had asked better questions, or been more alert and articulate, or allowed some exchange with the audience. Nevertheless, Castelli’s reminiscences of the ’60s, when he was a kingmaker, were colorful; Rubin’s and Emmerich’s snobbery was piquant; Karp was hilarious, irreverent, and delightful, as when describing the “Hirshhorn Waltz”—an embrace from Mr. H. at the conclusion of a bargaining session. (All agreed that Joseph Hirshhorn was a keen bargainer.)
What did the audience, exceeding in numbers [greater than] the sponsors’ fondest hopes, get for their tax-deductible $200? A simulated leather portfolio, suitably inscribed, crammed with promotional material for the New School and Parsons (now part of the New School), literature about New York City museums, advance copies of ARTnews, and, of course, ARTnewsletter, which, begun one year ago, circulates to one thousand dealers and collectors. A catered buffet, where perhaps the concrete information about investments and the market not coughed up by panelists and speakers was exchanged off the record. And a glimpse of the movers and shakers of the art market world.
What did the sponsors get? $80,000 less costs. A lot of promotion with collectors and dealers, and, potentially, in forty-three organs of the press. Confirmation that there is indeed a lot of money “itching” to be spent on art, although perhaps not much in New York as there used to be. And proof that there are a lot of people itching to make money off the people making money off art.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Lynden B. Miller, “Speculate in Art? Not Us!” was originally published as “Art Business at the New School: World Art Market Conference” in Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 7 (January 1977): 1, 4; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 47–48. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
The paper [by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy] excerpted below, an explanation of how to “make a market in a living artist’s work,” was a highlight of the [“What Price Art?”] conference. Further details appear in Ronald Feldman’s truth-in-jest advice later in the year.
The art world in 1985 at Mr. Chow (photograph by Michael Halsband)
Art is a conveyer of status, a vocabulary of power. Men and women of wealth and influence, after they have acquired their money and power, need signs and symbols of their importance. Collecting art is often a way to gain entry into a desired social stratum….
How do dealers “make a market” in a living artist’s work? With virtually any new painting commanding an entry gallery price of $1,200 to $2,550 (sculpture begins a bit higher), there are price thresholds that a new or unrecognized artist must break through as he or she goes up the ladder. Assuming the dealer truly believes in the quality of the work, he [sic] must publicize this belief through exhibitions, critical reviews, word-of-mouth….
Dealers try to get their artists’ work seen by museum curators [and get] well-known, serious collectors to buy. Many galleries will only release works by certain artists to certain collectors, recognizing the Doppler effect of those collections. These collectors are also likely to be on museum boards and to encourage recognition of artists they favor at those institutions. Ten percent or 20 percent discounts [or more] off quoted prices to valued customers are common. (I have heard it rumored that some sales are made at up to 80 percent off quoted gallery prices.) Sales to museums at far-below-market prices will permit the dealer to jack up subsequent prices. The aura of market activity can also enhance an artist’s reputation and build market interest. There is a high risk-high reward factor…. Collectors respond to the idea of buying a hot young artist’s work at prices which will escalate rapidly. The idea of investing in contemporary art is rather new, and one which reputable dealers claim they do not use as a sales tool. But the media attention given such artists makes that kind of hard sell almost unnecessary, since speculation becomes a tacit factor in everyone’s mind.
About three years ago, I noticed a brand new painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat hung in the loft of a famous artist. He said, “This time I wanted to get in at the beginning. I’m tired of seeing the collectors make all the profits.” In three years, Basquiat’s prices have risen precipitously. Sales to major collectors also build an artist’s image and thus allow his prices to rise. Once an artist’s reputation is established, the auction house may play a part. Sales at auction are not only important exposure … they publicly ratify prices. Dealers have been known to put up a work at auction and buy it back themselves simply to establish a price…. If works are “bought in” (i.e., do not reach their reserve price), a certain superficial credibility of price still remains to the public at large. However, savvy collectors who follow auctions closely may then consider a picture “burned,” thus making it harder to sell subsequently….
Because the “value” of a new work is in fact so much a matter of opinion, those who wish to participate in the game soon discover that becoming an insider, i.e., having access to the informal as well as the formal network of information about the art, is crucial…. In the oddest way, works of art achieve value because certain individuals in certain sectors of the system decide they are valuable, but much of what goes on goes on behind the scenes…. An artist whose production is very small or who shuns the publicity machine [may not achieve] “brand name” status. [Yet] in the long run … mediocre pieces bring mediocre prices and great works bring ever-greater prices.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat (photograph by Michael Halsband)
Another market factor is the “auction ring.” A group of dealers interested in the same material agree not to bid against one another, assigning one to bid unopposed. After the sale they reauction the things among themselves. [This] is strictly illegal. But, when done skillfully, it is almost impossible to uncover. Auctions have also been manipulated in another way. Dealers bid up prices of their own artists even if they themselves have to buy the work. Then they call claim the auction price as ratifier of prices in the gallery. Or it may be arranged in advance to have people (assigned to go up to a certain price) bid on a work, thus pushing up the price.
In recent years, auction houses have attracted a much wider public, often competing with the dealer for the collector’s dollars, so that antagonisms between the two have surfaced. Large advertising budgets, increasing media publicity, glossy catalogues, and an aura of theatrical glamour attract high rollers to the auction rooms (recently refurbished) of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. [R]ecord-breaking prices are touted widely, while heavily bought-in sales are played down whenever possible. Auction houses have learned how to use the tools of modern marketing. Michael Thomas, a former investment banker, in a column about the forthcoming Sotheby’s sale of pictures owned by the late Florence Gould, [wrote that] “advance publicity would have us believe that the equivalent of the Jeu de Paume or the Phillips Collection are being disgorged at auction, but by and large … the pictures are pretty and accessible, just the kind of thing with which rich Arabs like to decorate their Home County mansions.”
The combination of hype to create demand that takes advantage of ignorant, cash-heavy, status-hungry consumers of art is hardly a new one, though it may operate more widely and efficiently than in the days of Joseph Duveen and Bernard Berenson. Policies of full disclosure for critics, scholars, and curators (to reveal any vested interest in art they write about or curate) and for dealers and auction houses might go a long way towards correcting the abuses of the art market as we know it. Meanwhile, caveat emptor remains sound advice.
In Terms Of count: 0.
Source
Written by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, “What Price Art? A Market of Mirrors” was originally published within Cynthia Navaretta’s “Conference: What Price Art?” in Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 5; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 237–38. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
What Price Art? The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future Friday, April 26, 1985 New York University, Graduate School of Business Administration, New York
Another ’80s workshop on spinning art into gold—and as motley a collection of speakers as one could imagine, even on such a fey topic. As it happens, my community and I recently had dealings with one of them—the representative from the Port Authority—only instead of “Arts as an Industry,” she detailed why our historic district should be trashed for the benefit of the Port Authority. That report, with figures and measurements and citations, was, as we proved in court, a complete fiction, but it served the purposes of those receiving it and became fact. Such diddling is of course hardly news in city politics—or in business and real estate either, as we see increasingly in the papers these days. But in art? Let’s just say the figures here sound official, for what that’s worth, but don’t bet the farm.
On the other hand, at least from my limited experience, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy’s rundown on the workings of the art market can be taken as a marvel of acute reporting. That is, you’ll love it—and relish the hindsight.
Cochairs: Kenneth Friedman, publisher of The Art Economist; and Oscar Ornati, professor of management, New York University
Speakers: Noel Steinberger, Rosemary Scanlon, William Baumol, Michael Montias, A. D. Coleman, Dick Higgins, Ed McGuire, Martin Ackerman, Marshall Kogan, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, and John Czepiel
Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4.
Titled “What Price Art,” and provocatively subtitled “The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future,” the conference promised to explore the economics of the visual arts market, with practical details on costs and price structure provided by “national experts in economics, finance, law, public policy, art and journalism.”
Noel Steinberger, vice president of marketing at Sotheby’s, the world’s oldest auction firm, identified key players in the art game as the media, banks, auction houses, and galleries (notice omission of the artist).
Rosemary Scanlon, a discussant and chief economist of the New York–New Jersey Port Authority, described her recent study, The Arts as an Industry, made to determine value and economic impact of cultural industries (including theater, dance, music, film, television, and visitors to New York City, but not the city’s art sales or art inventory) on the metropolitan area. Her “conservative” estimate was $5.6 billion. Although hard data is lacking, worldwide transactions in the visual art market are estimated at over $25 billion annually.
Scanlon’s presentation was followed by floor discussion of the art customer. The important role of the press was briefly touched on as “shaping tastes and spending habits.” Recent studies estimate the number of US art critics at over 2,500; Art in America has counted more than 2,600 critics among its own subscribers. Assuming an equal number might not read AiA could bring the total number of art critics to more than 5,000.
Dr. William Baumol, professor of economics at Princeton University, and a collector himself, described the art market as an “imperfect market,” i.e., not behaving in a predictable manner, as financial markets sometimes do not. Therefore, he said, “there is no rational way to assign value or to invest” (except, of course, on an aesthetic level). Price information, he said, is beside the point. An unidentified speaker contradicted him on that claim, asserting that price information is “needed for literacy and curiosity.” Baumol added that “the elasticity of supply” is zero for deceased artists and “the holder of a single piece of art has a monopoly on that item,” so the supply of art is fixed.
Michael Montias, professor of economics at Yale University, rejected the inelasticity theory, claiming existence of a “large supply of paintings on walls, in attics, and museum basements.” New interests (and rising prices) in specific periods cause hitherto unknown works to surface.
Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 5.
A. D. Coleman, photography critic, added that values change, using as example that van Gogh’s painting (auctioned the previous evening for $9.9 million) was no longer what van Gogh had painted; it has since been certified as a work of art.
Dick Higgins, writer and artist, noted that “art is one of the only commodities routinely produced at a loss.”
Ed McGuire added, “The artist does not profit by art, galleries do, museums do, and the collector who uses it as a tax shelter does.”
Then the topic of whether or not art business and art galleries are profitable, or doing better than in previous years, was tossed around for a while. The editor of City Business quoted a dealer as saying, “A good dealer is one who breaks even and puts in his basement what he thinks will increase in value.” The director of the Berry-Hill Gallery dismissed this as nonsense, saying “any serious gallery” does very well financially.
Martin Ackerman, attorney, addressed tax policies and changes in tax law by which the Internal Revenue Code says, in effect, that “in death the work of an artist is valued at appreciated retail value, but in life it is valued at the cost of material. This, obviously, has caused artists and their estates to liquidate or even destroy large portions of their work to avoid these unwarranted and unfair tax burdens.”
With allowable tax deductions for donations of art restricted to “adjusted costs,” museums report drastic reductions in gifts from artists. The Whitney received 142 works in 1969 and 17 (of which 13 were prints) in 1970; MoMA received 47 in 1969, none in 1970. Although art collectors have not yet lost the privilege of this contribution, they frequently encounter hostile questioning by the IRS as to “fair market value.” (Ackerman believes this stems from a probably well-founded IRS belief that all contributions are overvalued.)
Marshall Cogan, chief executive officer of GFI/Knoll Industries and noted collector, mentioned the amazing growth in museum attendance since the ’70s. He also pointed out that 875,000 people earned over one million dollars in 1985, suggesting that, as income rises, the value of art rises too. Cogan’s recommendation to collectors was to buy “the most extraordinary piece of work available.” He saw a decline in good works of art, attributing current “extreme increases in price” to this scarcity.
John Czepiel, associate professor of marketing at New York University, quoted something he had read: “It ain’t art unless you have the urge to possess it.”
Kenneth Friedman, cochair of the conference, summed up: “The art market is poised on the edge of profound change. This is a market moving from its cottage industry phase into something radically different. All other factors in the economy being equal, I predict that the dollar volume of the art market will increase at a rate far better than inflation during the next decade. If this is so, we’re going to need—and we’re going to see—studies in everything from client service by art dealers to credit financing for consumers, from information services, to investment opportunities in the art industry.”
Perhaps, however, the clearest indicator of art’s new financial status is simply this conference itself. New York University’s School of Business hosted a conference on “art.” Footing all bills, it invited press, dealers, consultants, lawyers, collectors, and bankers to attend as its guests—but no artists.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “The Art Talk That Ate New York” was originally published as “Conference: What Price Art?” in Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4–5; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 236–37. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
This essay is the third of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, fourth, and fifth texts.
The Retrospective Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
For artists, the solo exhibition reigns supreme. For curators, it’s the group show. From major events such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Whitney Biennial to curator-driven institutions like the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Witte de With in Rotterdam, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the authorial curator’s name has typically transcended the artworks on view (or so the story goes). While the art-publishing industry ceaselessly cranks out new books on curatorial issues—nearly always an edited, multiauthored tome—few critical studies have considered the theory and practice of showing the work of a single artist, which is perhaps the bread and butter of art museums worldwide. For the second session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” titled “The Retrospective,” one panelist presented a brief investigation into the history of the solo exhibition while two more offered case studies on atypical exhibitions of a contemporary artist.
Exhibitions are generally categorized as solo, group, and collection, explained João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation in Portugal, and scholars have typically historicized the group show. He cited key studies such as Ian Dunlop’s classic The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art (1972) and Bruce Altshuler’s massive two-book set, Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (2008) and Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 2: 1962–2002 (2013), as providing concise histories of the form.1 For curators, Ribas said, group exhibitions contribute to economies of reputation and curatorial prestige. Nevertheless, the “one-man show,” he acknowledged, has formats, methodologies, and conventions of its own: chronology, biography, connoisseurship, evaluation, and mediation (e.g., the purity of the artist’s voice, curatorial self-effacement). Ribas didn’t discuss collection shows, though I imagine that museum handbooks and guidebooks follow a conventional scholarly logic of highlighting the greatest hits of an institution.
Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855, oil on canvas, 142 × 235 in (artwork in the public domain)
Ribas’s preliminary research into the history of solo exhibitions started with Nathaniel Hone, an Irish artist who independently presented a satirical painting called The Pictorial Conjuror after the work’s rejection from the Royal Academy’s annual exposition in London in 1775. Ribas pinpointed the names of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists who had important solo and single-painting shows in public and private locations: John Singleton Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, among others. William Blake’s solo showing in 1809 had a visual and theoretical system, Ribas said, and Joshua Reynolds’s 1813 exhibition in London was organized for general symmetry and an overall pleasing effect. Further, Ribas noted that James Abbott McNeill Whistler designed interiors for his paintings and Paul Signac had formulated ideas about the ideal display of his work.
Various nineteenth-century accounts described one-person exhibitions as commercial and career advancing, which was certainly true of Gustave Courbet, whom Ribas said purposefully identified a solo presentation of his work—housed in a temporary structure near the official Exposition Universelle of 1855, which featured more of his paintings—as an “exhibition,” not an “exposition,” to enhance the term’s arrogant commercial connotation. (The Painter’s Studio, pictured above, was among the highlights of Courbet’s independently produced exhibition, which he called The Pavilion of Realism.) Ribas reported that other sales tactics involved concepts of a good picture and the importance of an artist’s late work. He also mentioned how a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work in Beijing in 1985 was highly influential to Chinese artists.
Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald)
Lewis Kachur, an art historian at Kean University and the author of the excellent book Displaying the Marvelous (2001), discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s “un-retrospective” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011–12, which Kachur characterized as a witty engagement with the career survey. The Italian artist was horrified, Kachur said, when the Guggenheim offered him a show. Cattelan proposed an all-or-nothing gambit: the museum had to display every work he has ever made. Despite his usurping of the curatorial role—the selection of objects would already be determined—the museum’s senior curator Nancy Spector agreed to the novel format. The show, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, had no chronology, theme, or choice: “It’s everything, it’s all,” Kachur said.
As Cattelan “sweeps his work into the immediate present,” the overall effect of his oeuvre, which hung from the skylight down the center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, circumvented the individual contemplation of objects. Kachur enumerated various precedents of artists engaging the museum’s central atrium and surrounding architecture. Alexander Calder was the first to suspend work in the museum’s open space, in 1964, followed by various types of presentations by Jenny Holzer (1989), Dan Flavin (1992), Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1995), Nam June Paik (2000), Matthew Barney (2003), and Cai Guo-Qiang (2006). Cattelan claimed to have seen every show at the Guggenheim since 1993, when he moved to New York, and would have been aware of these installations. Kachur’s research into the subject, he admitted during the session’s Q&A, was limited to the published material on the exhibition—he hasn’t conducted visits to archives or interviews yet. Even so, the scholar’s trajectory looks promising.
Installation view of Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (photograph by Benoit Pailley)
Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, described her experiences planning a retrospective for Rosemarie Trockel. Allergic to the white box, this German artist prefers to show in institutions that challenge her. And because she values her studio time and wanted to spend less on exhibition administration, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos was conceived as a traveling show for multiple venues. Each iteration of the exhibition, though, did feature new and different elements. Cooke and Trockel elected to include art by her peers and objects important to the artist, as well as works by so-called outsider artists like James Castle, Manuel Montalvo, and Judith Scott. The Madrid show included eighteenth-century botanical drawings—and also their late-nineteenth-century transformations into exquisitely crafted glass objects—that all Spaniards know, Cooke said, just like they know the paintings of Diego Velázquez and El Greco.
The two also took field trips together and considered past work, unfinished projects, and new projects. They didn’t write a list or set of goals—at least not at first. The show, Cooke said, developed organically, in an associative way. Despite such close collaboration, Cooke relayed that Trockel did not want to be identified as a cocurator for the show, but the Reina Sofía’s website credits both women as organizers. When A Cosmos landed at the New Museum in New York in 2012, my strongest reaction was that the show looked heavily curated, which may relate to Cooke’s discussion of the art historian Svetlana Alpers’s concept of the “museum effect” and of the differences between visual distinction and cultural significance.
Lynne Cooke, Lewis Kachur, João Ribas, and Chelsea Haines survey the retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The audience Q&A, adeptly moderated by Chelsea Haines, a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, touched on concerns ranging from practical to absurd. Someone asked about a hypothetical exhibition that has neither artist nor curator, which Kachur called a “riderless horse.” Someone else brought up the idea of a curator’s “portfolio artist.” Sometimes our reception of individual artists, Ribas said, is shaped by their exhibitions, giving credit to Cooke’s past work with Hannah Darboven and to the 1960s dealer Richard Bellamy’s framing of his artists.
Prem Krishnamurthy: Double Agency Monday, March 31, 2014 Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, New York, NY
Prem Krishnamurthy
Prem Krishnamurthy’s talk “Double Agency” addressed the speaker’s two primary roles: a founder of the design firm Project Projects (with Adam Michaels) and the director and curator of P!—an interdisciplinary curatorial space that he described as a “mom-and-pop kunsthalle”—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Project Projects has a critical and conceptual relationship to graphic design, Krishnamurthy said, that includes curatorial and editorial roles. Challenging the traditional worker/client relationship, he aims to produce design that is porous rather than unidirectional, working with existing materials and ideas instead of starting each project with a blank slate. He also applies these ideas to exhibitions and public spaces to encourage agency and participation.
Krishnamurthy spoke in what he called a school context, which would leave historical and business matters aside and simplify his professional roles. He gave an overview of “Elective Affinities,” a design class that he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Mindful that teaching has a sole voice and that life diverges from the classroom model after graduation, Krishnamurthy experimented with different modes of collaboration with his students. For example, they used an Exquisite Corpse model in which one person worked on an assignment before handing it off to others to develop and complete. He also configured students into groups of two and groups of three during the semester before involving the whole class. For “Collective Collection,” a 2009 workshop at University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, he led a group of participants that activated unused space in the building. There he stepped back from his teaching role to become a producer and facilitator.
Prem Krishnamurthy collaborates with his audience (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The magazine Print allowed Project Projects to edit and design its January 2011 issue, and the firm settled on the theme of collaboration. Krishnamurthy and others took over the entire issue, assigning articles, hiring photographers, and designing the layout. In addition to producing an issue of a magazine, a form typically considered ephemeral, Krishnamurthy wanted to establish a community. To that end, Project Projects held a roundtable discussion about collaboration at Artists Space in October 2010, before which none of the thirteen participants—artists, designers, writers, fashion entrepreneurs, and more—had actually met. The idea, he said, was for the group to “drink a bottle of wine” and ruminate on what collaboration means.
An edited transcript of the Artists Space conversation runs through numerous pages in the issue, which also featured an unreleased typeface from a designer and several articles—on the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, the art collective Group Material, and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas—that would be normal content for an art journal but unexpected fare for a venerated design publication. An article from the Raqs Media Collective took the longest and was the most fraught, Krishnamurthy said, but when he finally received the text, it was amazing.
Krishnamurthy switched gears to discuss P!, a curatorial space that intentionally lacks a fixed identity and allows for many voices. The first exhibition, Process 01: Joy(2012), featured letterpress work by the legendary designer Karel Martens, who created P!’s first logo; a mural by Chauncey Hare, a self-taught photographer who left the art world in the 1980s to become a socially engaged occupational therapist; and a New York outpost of the artist Christine Hill’s Berlin-based Volksboutique. She chose to paint the floor in her signature red color, which remains to this day. The exhibition’s press release was distributed in English and Chinese, a decision made to engage two linguistic communities that straddle the Lower East Side and Chinatown.
Installation view of Process 01: Joy (2012) at P!
Another P! project was The Ceiling Should Be Green (2013), organized by Krishnamurthy and Ali Wong (also known as Kit Yi Wong) with a feng shui master known as Mr. Ye, who was charged with “circulating the energy” through a pleasing arrangement of artworks and objects. Permutation 03.x(2013) was a six-month-long exhibition and event series on copying and appropriation that served as a meeting place, a reading room, and an art gallery.
During the Q&A, Krishnamurthy emphasized not only a transparency in his methodology but also a resistance to conventions, such as avoiding the minimal signage and other visual codes of a contemporary art gallery. He compared the geographic location of P! to the overlapping metropolis in China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (2009), in which two cities occupy the same physical space in several places but remain strictly but irrationally distinct. In New York, Krishnamurthy said, pedestrians often pay attention to an art gallery’s storefront but “unsee” (to use a term from Miéville’s book) the Chinese characters in the window of the building next door.
In all of his work, Krishnamurthy seemed concerned with the conditions of interdisciplinary working, whether that’s organizing exhibitions as research for himself, creating innovative design for art biennials, or promoting the prescient visions of figures such as Brian O’Doherty, whom he claimed was not taken seriously as an artist forty years ago because he was both a critic and an artist (using the name Patrick Ireland). O’Doherty enabled those who came after him to earn respect in different roles, something Krishnamurthy accomplishes in spades.
On the Needs of Visual Artists: A Roundtable Monday, March 19, 2001 Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, Third Floor, New York, NY
On March 19, 2001, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and the Judith Rothschild Foundation cosponsored a roundtable discussion on the needs of visual artists. Irving Sandler and Robert Storr, members of the Artists Advisory Committee of the Sharpe Art Foundation, facilitated the discussion, which was hosted by Artists Space in New York. The event was also a follow-up to a discussion held on the same topic in 1988. Below is a short section on gentrification and real estate from the 2001 roundtable.
Real Estate: Living and Working
Artists get gentrified out of the neighborhoods they’ve rescued. Can real-estate professionals and activists be hired or made available to advise artists? Can mortgages or loans be made available to make ownership possible? Is the dispersal that gentrification creates necessarily bad, or can it be renewing?
Fred Wilson: Certainly housing is an important thing. I think one of the most stabilizing things for me was buying my loft. Having something of your own does mean a bit more longevity and more time for your work.
Alison Saar: Many artists still have convertible kitchens that they’re working out of. But, I think, especially for a sculptor it becomes more of an issue: you want your studio space to be accessible, but it usually can’t be in your neighborhood or in your home because other people just go berserk.
Bruce Pearson: About twenty years ago I moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Over a period of about ten years, more and more and more artists started moving into this neighborhood. And after I had been there for seventeen and a half years, having a nice affordable loft, the building got sold. I lost my loft. I couldn’t find a space in my neighborhood; it’s become a very popular neighborhood and the rents have just skyrocketed and a lot of artists that have been over there for many years are getting kicked out and they have no place to go. I had thought that you could always find an affordable new artists’ neighborhood, that there was always a community of younger artists starting up new neighborhoods. But during that time I found that there wasn’t; it was getting really scattered all over the place: Red Hook, Harlem, Queens. I was stuck into exile up in Greenpoint. There are a lot of buildings that are being threatened right now and it seems that the loft laws just aren’t strong enough. It will be really interesting to see if artists that have developed communities throughout the years could find some way to secure their situation when they do develop something.
Nancy Bowen: I had a loft in TriBeCa for many years, moved my studio to Williamsburg, which seemed like the middle of nowhere about eleven years ago, and I’m just now facing having to move out of that studio because it’s being developed for luxury living lofts.
At this point in my life I don’t want to move somewhere for a year or two years. So with a group of people I’m trying to get a long-term lease on a building or possibly buying one. But how do you go about doing all this? It’s all stuff I don’t know anything about—things like zoning issues and mortgages and legal issues. Clearly there are already people who know how to do all this. It would be great to have a clearinghouse of real-estate information for artists’ needs. It could be made available in one place that artists could come to and save a lot of time that doesn’t need to be spent in the real-estate business. This could be information added to the Hotline.
Also, it could be very helpful to somehow set up a way to help artists get mortgages, since we often don’t look financially good on paper.
Alexander Ross: What if an individual who was an organizer was paid for a period of time, a year, say, to go into a specific neighborhood, say Williamsburg, and figure out on a grassroots level the actual needs of the artists, and do the work of creating a new loft law there, or developing resources? Someone who was paid to devote time, because we need all the time we have to work on our work.
Janet Fish: If a group of artists found an empty building and wanted to convert it to work space—which doesn’t require all the kinds of things that you need for residential—they would probably not be able to get a loan from a bank. For a long time I had hoped that some foundation might turn up that would be willing to help in this way: if a group of artists made a presentation they could get a loan and then slowly pay it back, and that money could go to another group, and it could just sort of work around the country. It wouldn’t have to just be New York.
Alexander Ross: There should be some way that artists could stay permanently in the places that they carve out. The dispersal of culture in New York is a huge problem: if it gets spread too thin and people get pushed out too far, the energy and the vitality of the art scene is diminished. There should be some way that individual artists could get on the road to having a mortgage for their studio, and to actually own and be able to stay put in the location instead of being blown by the wind to one neighborhood and the next.
Bruce Pearson: Every generation of artists needs space to work. And they generally go to areas where they can find cheap large spaces or warehouse spaces. For a while it was SoHo, Chelsea, Tribeca, and then Williamsburg and now Greenpoint. And it seems like it is spreading like crazy now. I think that artist communities are just developing in a natural manner.
Irving Sandler: So we’re in a situation of dispersion and we’ve got to begin thinking of how, with this dispersion, we create communities again.
Bruce Pearson: Well, it’s really interesting because, right now, I don’t know where the community is. It seemed like it used to be that each generation was kind of localized. And now the real-estate market seems to have forced young artists all over, everywhere from Newark to Red Hook.
Changing and Stabilizing Women’s Art from the Curator’s View Monday, February 23, 1976 A.I.R. Monday Night Program A.I.R. Gallery, New York
Moderator: Mary Beth Edelson Panelists: Barbara Haskell and Marcia Tucker
Susan Manso, “Three Panels in Search of Their Subject” in Women Artists News 1, no. 10 (March 1976): 4
Back at A.I.R. again, there was at last an exception to panel chaos, perhaps because only two panelists, both of them Whitney curators, showed up. With Mary Beth Edelson moderating, their talk was focused. “Changing and Stabilizing Women’s Art from the Curator’s View” was the title, but discussion was about the woes of the curator.
Having asked that the curators be welcomed (this was not the night to attack the Whitney Bicentennial or museums in general), Edelson enumerated “areas of exploration” in gender art. But both curators swiftly scotched the notion, insisting that “really good art transcends all categories.” “I try,” said Marcia Tucker, “to look, not categorize. Analysis comes from staying with the work for a long time. There is no need to be self-conscious about women’s art, as we were in ’71. There’s enough out there—good, bad, and indifferent—to choose from.”
Both agreed that the women’s movement influenced the current open climate in art. Barbara Haskell thought, however, that this was simply one facet of a larger cultural shift, a turning inward reflected in everything from est to Jesus Freaks. “The personal integration of the individual is the new myth.”
On the poor representation of women in museum shows, Tucker said current shows still reflect the past. “When they do the decade of the ’70s, women will come into their own.”
As for the museum’s role and their own, neither curator was optimistic. “One thing this job provides you with is a certainty that you don’t get to see art,” said Tucker. She explained that curators are overwhelmed with extraneous work and are caught between the institution’s Big Business approach—the razzle-dazzle show—and the Art Experience [of] getting good work shown. She stressed that the museum must preserve its autonomy. When the eggs and Tampax hit the windows some years back, “it messed us up. I feel a deep despair, because we’re working for the same things that the artist wants, but we may not be able to work together.”1
The audience was unusually docile, perhaps because the speakers were both forthright, outspoken feminists. (Tucker dates her conversion to 1969—“like St. Pauline on the road to Damascus.”)
In Terms Of count: unknown.
1 Tucker refers to a protest of the 1970 Whitney Annual, which demanded that 50 percent of the chosen artists be women. A group of activists, which included Lucy Lippard, Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, and Faith Ringgold, scattered “bits of paper carrying their demands, uncooked white eggs, hard-boiled black eggs, Tampax, etc.” inside the museum. See Nancy Spero, “The Art of Getting to Equal,” in The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 368.
Source
Written by Susan Manso, “The Curator’s Lot” was originally published as “Three Panels in Search of Their Subject” in Women Artists News 1, no. 10 (March 1976): 1, 4; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992). In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
This essay is the second of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, third,fourth, and fifth texts.
Exhibiting Experiments Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
A view of Daniel Spoerri’s room in Dylaby
“Exhibiting Experiments,” the first session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” comprised two graduate students and a fresh PhD recipient and was moderated by Grant Johnson, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center. Each speaker presented research on a single case study: unrealized projects by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann and two group exhibitions from the 1960s, Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum and Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
First was Caitlin Burkhart, an artist and writer earning a master’s degree in curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, who spoke on “Dynamisch Labyrinth: Deconstructing the ‘White Cube’ through Dynamic Environments.” Her focus was Dylaby, a 1962 exhibition in Amsterdam in which the curator, Willem Sandberg, gave free reign to six artists—Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt—to create interactive room-sized installations. A designer and typographer by trade, Sandberg directed the Stedelijk from 1945 to 1963, and Dylaby was the last show he organized for the museum. De Saint Phalle’s room contained a shotgun for visitors to shoot bags of paint, for example, and Spoerri hung artworks from the permanent collection in a room designed at a ninety-degree angle. Rauschenberg’s room, Burkhardt noted, wasn’t interactive with visitors despite the kinetic nature of his sculptures.
Because the exhibition was laid out sequentially, with the final room being the only way to escape from the labyrinth (unless you retreated through the galleries backward), the audience was obliged to participate to some degree with each artist’s installation—a situation that resembles the “curatorial dictatorship” described by Boris Groys in his keynote address. On several occasions Burkhardt described the rooms as “disorientating,” but I imagine that viewers found them amusing and delightful. Szeemann was influenced by Dylaby, Burkhardt noted, so I look forward to learning more about how significant museum exhibitions during the 1960s have shaped the curatorial landscape of today.
Lucy Hunter recalls the exhibition Art by Telephone (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Lucy Hunter, a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, delivered a paper, “Static on the Line: Art by Telephone and Its Technocratic Dilemma,” that examined a 1969 exhibition in Chicago organized by Jan van der Marck, for which an international group of mostly Conceptual artists provided verbal descriptions of works that museum staffers would build or execute in the galleries. The Dutch-born curator, Hunter said, had purposefully minimized written and photographic documentation, and the catalogue took the form not of a book but rather a long-playing phonographic record that offered excerpts from artists’ phone calls.
In addition to art-historical facts, Hunter construed Art by Telephone through communications theory, using Claude E. Shannon’s diagram from a book called The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) as her theoretical crux. In that diagram, an information source transmits a message to a receiver, but sometimes that message was disrupted by what Shannon called noise. Hunter postulated that documentation was van der Marck’s noise but didn’t quite establish if the receiver was the curator, the fabricator, or the museum visitor, or if the destination was the transcription of the instructions or the galleries. I’m not suggesting that she devise a formula but instead clarify the stakeholders in the equations and why they matter. Hunter felt that van der Marck hadn’t sufficiently exploited the medium of the telephone itself—certainly a lost opportunity to make a complex curatorial statement—but admitted that he was interested in using hardware and software to create a “wholly verbal exchange.”
Claude E. Shannon’s general schematic of a general communications system
Hunter also presented intriguing details about corporate sponsorship of the museum during the 1960s, which should eventually find an appropriate place in her narrative. I’m curious to know how she would respond to Art by Telephone Recalled, a recent investigation of the 1969 exhibition by the French curators Sébastien Pluot and Fabien Vallos, who have restaged works from the original Art by Telephone in several venues, including the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York in 2012, might fit into her chronicle.
“Failure as a Poetic Dimension: Harald Szeemann’s Unrealized Projects” was the title of a presentation by Pietro Rigolo, who works for the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as the subject expert on a team processing the Szeemann’s archive and library. Rigolo discussed the curator’s Museum of Obsessions (1973) and other projects, such as one that would have explored the four elements. For fire, Szeemann would have presented materials on pyromaniacs and bonfires as well as Yves Klein’s fire paintings.
Pietro Rigolo realizes a paper on unrealized projects by Harald Szeeman (photograph by Christopher Howard)
I was intrigued that Rigolo found documentation of exhibitions that Szeemann had left off his CV, but several times during his talk he jumped from projects that took place, those in planning stages, and those which were sketches and ideas. Did Bachelor Machines, which took the male characters in the lower half of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) as its subject, manifest in physical form, or was La Mamma, an exhibition on the subject of motherhood that didn’t have any art, the project that didn’t happen? What was the comment about an exhibition of outsider art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1988? And did visitors to the World Expo 2000 come across Szeemann’s exploration of sex and the holy Christian trinity, with sections on prostitution, birth control, cross-dressing, and masturbation? There is not much difference, Rigolo said, between Szeemann’s thinking for realized and unrealized projects, but this talk would have been coherent with clear divisions among the two groups.
“Exhibiting Experiments” confirmed my past experiences with similar sessions of occasionally affectless speakers presenting early drafts of essays on topics needing more research and further narrative development. But these shortcomings, typical of emerging scholars responding to a call for papers, didn’t distract from the appealing subjects on which the three presenters spoke.
This essay is the first of five that reviews a recent conference at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the second, third,fourth, and fifth texts.
The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Boris Groys poses for photographs during his keynote address (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Boris Groys presented a keynote address called “The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk” to kick off a daylong conference, “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” that explored historical and contemporary approaches to organizing exhibitions. An interdisciplinary scholar and occasional curator, Groys is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. A few years back he wrote an excellent book called Art Power (2008).
Groys’s accent made it difficult for me to concentrate on his words, and he repeatedly chuckled at what seemed like minor disciplinary quibbles between himself and other theorists (hardly anyone laughed with him). Reading a prepared paper, he relayed that “the artist of the future must be radically indifferent,” according to the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner. He also boldly claimed that “dictatorship is a curatorial project” and that documentation of such projects invokes nostalgia for the ephemeral event. I think he also made a quick reference to the experience of watching live sports (that is, in a stadium or arena) without hearing the play-by-play analysis and color commentary from a radio or television broadcast.
Since Groys’s keynote contained significant chunks of a previously published essay, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” I was able to grasp several of his ideas afterward—and they are good ones.1 First he establishes that art museums traditionally removed works of art from the flow of time “to resist material destruction and historical oblivion,” which are precarious, unstable, and finite things that happen to humans or to things not saved in archives. Groys’s cumulative argument elaborates on Wagner’s notion of an author’s self-sacrifice in the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he likens to suicide, and how the kind of curatorial project popularized by the Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann—something Groys calls a “temporary curatorial dictatorship”—has displaced the traditional art display and transforms into a new Gesamtkunstwerk that returns to art its provisional status. An exhibition goes on view for two or three months, he said of the typical institutional calendar, and then is dismantled. The art museum has consequently responded, as written in the essay, by becoming “a stage for the flow of art events … which include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth.”
What’s novel about the précis is how Groys postulates that the internet doesn’t embody the flow of time but rather, with its innate characteristics of surveillance and traceability, halts that flow. The documentation of museum events, he argues, whether a catalogue, film, or website—or streaming video, as his keynote was broadcast live online—is absorbed into the artwork. (Oh, process.) One crucial function for art museums, Groys concludes in the essay, will be to provide a space for an encounter to both take place and be “thematized and critically theorized.” The published text expresses a few more good ideas, but I’m not sure how to understand my experience of listening to Groys speak—during which I took few written notes because of his illegibility—to the written documentation I read later and can more easily remember.
Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun using mirrors, light, and mist for The Weather Project (2003), which he said was the basis for exploring ideas about experience and mediation. Within two months the installation at Tate Modern in London had attracted more than one million visitors
After his talk Groys was joined by the art historian Claire Bishop for a brief conversation and audience Q&A. She pressed him to talk more about the “suicidal dictator,” but he deflected the question, instead focusing on linking important curators to political leaders. “When you speak about Szeemann,” he mused, “you talk about Caeser, Alexander the Great.” Is reenactment a form of documentation? No, Groys said to Bishop, marking the former as a kind of fiction that the latter lacks. Curiously, Bishop told Groys that his writing has a polemical quality but does not advocate or criticize, which may reflect the lack of a straightforward position on the entertainment-industrial complex described in his essay.
From his chair in the audience Dieter Roelstraete, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was pleased that Groys identified visitors as the most interesting objects in an exhibition (a statement absent from the published essay). What about wall labels, asked Roelstraete. What about exhibitions without visitors? “It’s good,” Groys smiled while regarding the second inquiry. With a show that no one sees, he suggested, the curator becomes a legend, which corresponds to his idea of the suicidal curator as discontinuous and immortal. Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center (and also one of three organizers of the conference), asked Groys if he had a similar term for the artist? The artist has the ability to subvert the curator, he responded obliquely, and also become a curator. I’m not sure Groys answered the question—perhaps he is saving his thoughts for another essay on the subject.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal 50 (December 2013). The author had presented the essay as a lecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, on November 8, 2013.
