In Terms Of

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  • In Defense of Democracy

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

    Chantal Mouffe, intellectual activist (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 9.

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

    Read

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

  • The Social Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Mark Eber works the crowd

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 5.

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

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

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

    Read

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

  • Hitting Rock Bottom

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

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

    History of Art Fairs

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

    Golden Years

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

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

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

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

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

    Brick and Mortar Spaces

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

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

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

    Financial Speculation

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

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

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

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

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

    Possible Solutions (Again)

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 3.

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

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

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

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

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

    Read

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

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

  • Curatorial Assistance

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

    Michelle Grabner counts the beans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

    Dan Byers discusses biennial politics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

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

    Franklin Sirmans on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Market Is the Moment

    How the Marketplace Gives Form to Art
    Friday, December 6, 1985
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This serious-humorous examination of the art and craft of art marketing clearly engaged the panelists, who frequently all talked at once, as well as the audience, which laughed and applauded, and asked some questions, not because it didn’t know the answers, but because it did. Ronald Feldman rendered a wicked riff on how the art market, nefariously, operates. But Leon Golub, self-styled “old timer,” who ought to have been the most cynical of the lot, hinted at possible “substance,” or other mysterious factors that defy market manipulation, or even analysis.

    And let the record show that the woman in the audience who asked if anyone besides Women Artists News ever looked into which artists got reviewed, and why, was not known to us—although we’re glad she noticed.

    Moderator: Lynn Zelevansky
    Panelists: Dara Birnbaum, Ronald Feldman, Leon Golub, Richard Kostelanetz, and Amy Newman

    Moderator Lynn Zelevansky introduced panelists as follows: Ronald Feldman, codirector of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery in New York since 1971; Dara Birnbaum, artist and independent producer, the only video artist in the Carnegie International; Leon Golub, well-known painter; Richard Kostelanetz, essayist, anthologist, and multidisciplinary artist engaged in the worlds of both literature and fine arts; and Amy Newman, managing editor of ARTnews.

    Lynn Zelevansky: The question “How the Market Gives Form to Art” is one I ask not at all cynically. I think it’s the question of the ’80s and a difficult one to answer. My premise is that the drastic change in the art market over the last twenty years has effected a change in the condition of the artist as modernism defined it, that is, as outsider. The artist’s life is still difficult, the speculative nature of his or her work remains the same, generating insecurity and so providing a continuum with earlier times. However, today, opportunities are far more numerous than they were two decades ago and this seems to have reduced the artist’s identification with the marginal.

    In a period like this one, which is basically tolerant of all kinds of different styles, things like pink hair are vestigial references to antibourgeois lifestyles, rather than a real affiliation with marginality. The adoption of more conventional material values must affect the form of 1980s art, just as the artist’s oppositional stance impacted on the form of earlier work. Today, references to comics, movies, and cartoons ally current art with mainstream culture, rather than functioning as social commentary, or denoting an anti-high-art position as they might have in the past. Another example of contemporary art’s alliance with the mainstream is the reemergence of large painting, an emphatically material form of art, as a central issue of the art world at the beginning of the Reagan era.

    I assume that the huge growth in the marketplace influences all of us, regardless of our values or the form of our work.

    Amy Newman: I think the issue is to a certain extent specious, for two main reasons. First, artists have always produced for a market of one sort or another. Nearly without exception, art aspires to a condition of creating an impact, whether commercial or ideological. I don’t think the marketplace for ideas is any less tyrannical than the financial market. Just as many people are willing to be corrupted for reasons of moral, ideological, and philosophical influence and stature, [many] are willing to be corrupted for financial reasons. How extraordinarily rare is the artist, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one, who works without concern for whether the work is recognized or discussed, even if he or she doesn’t care whether it’s sold.

    The second reason I think the issue is specious is that for art to be interesting, the work must have something to do with its historical moment—distill or crystalize, reflect or reject, embrace or expose it. The presence of one of these facets doesn’t necessarily make the art good, but the absence makes it vapid. And today, certainly in the West, the market is the moment. The culture is surely permeated with conditions of the marketplace, as the fourteenth century was conditioned by belief in the power of religion, and the sixteenth century by belief in the power of man, and the nineteenth century by belief in the power of science.

    That said, certain factors are troubling about this relationship and I do have some random thoughts on the issue. Our culture, and increasingly that of the rest of the world, revolves around information, image, and effect. This is what the marketplace trades in and what consumers consume today, even more than tangible goods. And this is why, with the frequently (but not always) ingenuous collaboration of the media, the market is so all-pervasive, and why I consider the market is the moment.

    We hear frequent complaints that information, image, and effect can be conveyed and purveyed with very little substance, but “substance” is a [tricky] concept in this context. Does it have any meaning beyond a certain nostalgia? Substance has profoundly different meanings in different eras, and we’re now in a different era. What we can perhaps say is that “substance” in some way confronts the questions of the human condition, and that is in fact what the best contemporary art still does—precisely when it is shaped in some way by the marketplace.

    Certainly the rampant insecurity of taste and the nefarious atmosphere of financial speculation that characterize the market moment can be devastating and abusing to the artist’s ego. We sometimes forget when we talk about abstractions of the marketplace that we’re talking about people, and I guess the audience does frequently have unfair, heroic expectations for artists. [But] we all have to face moral dilemmas and make moral decisions, no matter what profession we’re in.

    What the marketplace is giving shape to is not the physical aspects of art, as frequently happened in previous eras, or not as much, but the more general conception of art. Art has become a generic catchall term. It has never before subsumed so many different forms and ambitions…. Today we erase almost all distinctions of purpose and ambition and that [affects] the function of the market.

    Creativity goes along in its myriad ways, as it always has, with different ambitions as to psychological profundity, cultural profundity, humor, decorativeness, ability to communicate, ability to intervene in contemporary life. The market tries to erase all distinctions. The leveling is certainly also an outgrowth of the ’60s and ’70s challenge to so-called fine art, which should have been and in many ways was a very valuable and beneficial process.

    The challenge to rigid definitions opened a wide spectrum of experience to a new level of contemplation. [It also] had not only the effect of making alternative investigations and manifestations more meaningful; contradictions of the original impulse made them more valuable…. We found that the status quo of the market culture was more powerful than the challenge. So while it’s certainly true, as Carter Ratcliff says, that the market is instrumental in forming the image of the artist, and that has to do with celebrity and fashion and speculation, we also can say that many of today’s serious artists do have an adversarial position to the prevailing mainstream culture—the market—in that they are trying to reassert the distinctions among kinds of goals and ambitions.

    Kruger, Holzer, Borofsky, Haring, Scharf, Greenblat, Salle, Longo, Clemente—they’re not all aiming for the same place in our minds and our lives, as much as the market would like to purvey them all as an homogenous product.

    Leon Golub: The art market depends on glamor and scarcity, particularly today. The two work together—you can almost identify one with the other. Scarcity means that if someone wants to collect something, he or she is told there aren’t too many of them. “This is a prime optic of a prime artist, and you may have to wait in order to get it.” But scarcity makes us avid. We want it. If there’s too much of something, we don’t need it. Glamor is the same thing, because glamor says that some people have it and some people don’t.

    Certain old-fashioned romantic artists [projected] talent or genius, but today we depend on glamor. So artists outshine movie stars…. They become, more than movie stars, people to get to know, to associate with. There are artist groupies for that gold dust, which is sprinkled on them in a psychological sense. I once tried to call Roy Lichtenstein about a project and I got the wrong number. I said, “Is this Roy Lichtenstein’s home?” and the woman said, “I wish it was!”

    This is not necessarily a new phenomenon…. Art was taken up by the popes and the Medici—and they gave it glamor, too. Art was extremely glamorous in the Renaissance. And that aristocratic aura, that notion of serving public power at the highest level, is translated into the peculiar forms of our day.

    But art has always served power. Whether you serve the Roman emperor, or the church, you’re still serving power. Image-makers make the kind of pictures, signs, and symbols that are called for. If they get out of line, they won’t get commissions…. Most artists eventually fall into line.

    The avant-garde was able to move the struggle away from the political and social aspects, which got mixed up in the nineteenth century, into another sphere, the so-called autonomous sphere. You could be allowed an aesthetic transgression, even if you were not allowed a political, social, or public transgression. [Think of] the history of Courbet or against the history of an artist who changes the sense of form. Not that the change of the sense of form doesn’t have political aspects as well, but it’s more abstracted. Which is why we have abstract art….

    Under modernism, you get all kinds of accruals and additions, from technology, for example, TV, telephones, film, photography, satellites. These change imaging. All these accruals bounce against each other, which is part of the atomization. You get a kind of open-ended market, which does permit a certain kind of—a word a lot of people don’t like—pluralism….

    You can take different aspects of the modern world, whereas in the medieval period, the world was one direction and developed more or less in a vertical or linear fashion. So the market today is a special kind of market, but the conditions of control and power are still there. [T]hese accruals have weights, entropy; they all disperse at the same time. All this is going on, and may even give you some elbow room.

    Ronald Feldman: I have two sets of slides to show two aspects of the marketplace. First, the work of a particular artist. I will read criticism he has had over the years to show the conflicting nature of art opinion and the incredible perversity of the marketplace. The artist is Joseph Beuys.

    Quote: “It would be strenuous to explain to museum goers that Abbie Hoffman was the most brilliant performance artist of the ’60s and ’70s and it is equally difficult to explain the similar genius of Joseph Beuys.”

    Another reviewer: “If there were an American artist as political as Beuys in his activities, would an American museum turn over almost its entire exhibition space to him or her? I doubt it.”

    Another declared a Beuys show the “worst European modern master retrospective,” saying, “Beuys is in the business of selling himself. He really doesn’t do anything. So his career boils down to public relations, but he has no point of view to express.

    Another quote: “But when all that is said, Joseph Beuys is at the very least a valuable absurdity in a world that is locked into the status quo. As an artist, as a performer, as a politician, and as an irreducible individual, he has tried all his life long to extend our notion of what it means to be a human being.”

    Another quote: “Nobody who understands any contemporary science, politics, or aesthetics, for that matter, could see in Joseph Beuys’s proposal for an integration of art, sciences, and politics, as his program for the free international university demands, anything more than simpleminded utopian drivel lacking elementary political and educational practicality.”

    Audience: Was that [inaudible]?

    Feldman: No, that was Benjamin Buchloh…. But if you were reading these, and didn’t know anything [else], you’d be in a lot of trouble in the marketplace.

    The next set of slides has to do with corporate sponsorship of the arts. This is a brochure the Metropolitan Museum provides for corporations to encourage them to sponsor shows in the museum. Some quotes from this brochure:

    Many public-relations opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions, and services. These can often provide a creative and cost-effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where international, governmental, or consumer relations may be of fundamental concern.

    David Rockefeller says, “Involvement in the arts can give direct and tangible benefits. It can build better customer relations, a readier acceptance of company products, and a superior appraisal of their quality.”

    Herb Schmertz, chairman of Mobil: “We believe our involvement with PBS has persuaded an important segment of our society to look at Mobil in a new light, to be more open minded when we speak out on issues.”

    Tom Messer at the Guggenheim said, “You approach corporations with projects you believe are acceptable in the first place. These tend to be the safer projects. The avant-garde stance of museums is somewhat weakened by the need to seek outside funding.”

    [This is a picture of] the Whitney Museum and ITT in bed together. Tom Armstrong said about the Ellsworth Kelly show: “American businesses are calking themselves into new reasons for supporting the arts….” Here’s George Washington of Philip Morris: “We are in an unpopular industry. While our support of the arts is not directed toward that problem, it has given us a better image in the financial and general community than had we not done this.”

    These are two different cross currents in the marketplace, quite a diverse and exciting place.

    Dara Birnbaum: At the recent Carnegie International, not only was I the only video artist, I was one of only four women—and probably the only person there without a gallery…. I represent the position of many people in my peer group making an attempt to get out of the gallery system, to reach a larger public.

    I did a video show, Wonder Woman, of totally popular imagery, and put it in the window of [a commercial space]…. After 1979, it was shown in the first film and video room at P.S.1…. This was the opening at the Mudd Club, ’79 to ’80. The Mudd Club was one of the first places to open up to video. For a year, a group of us had an independent space there, to sit upstairs and talk about video. It gave you a very local feeling for a medium usually transported out of your hands almost immediately after you’ve created your statement…. The Mudd Club was one of the places where this art [reached the public].

    This is Grand Central Station. In 1980, ten artists were commissioned, other people being like Jenny Holzer, to do works in the station waiting room. [At the time] it was very difficult for people in video arts to exhibit in museums or any kind of art spaces. The galleries were not really supportive except Castelli Sonnabend. Museum funding for these works had been cut. [You had to] become your own package deal. You had to make a work that, no matter where it was, the statement still read, that, like a trade show, could be put up anywhere, At Documenta 7, again, I was the only video installation…. Here’s the Art Institute of Chicago 74th American Art Exhibition. Mine is the only video work inside the show—at least in a partly connected space, a cul de sac. Usually it’s completely shut off, in an independent room with the separate designation “Film” or “Video,” rather than saying it still belongs to the arts.

    [But] at the ICA in Boston, for the first time, video was displayed on the upper floor, taking over the space, unheard of before. Another display, twenty-one different installations of video work, was at the Stedelijk in 1984, the first time a major world museum opened up to the public the language involved in a new form of art making.

    The intentions of my peer group, working either electronically or through music, are to make art as a purposeful challenge to mainstream culture…. This is the Whitney Biennial this past year, the first time a video installation was allowed out in the open on the fourth floor. This is the 1985 Carnegie International Exposition that just opened in Pittsburgh, again the only video in the show allowed out in the open, so the vocabulary can be associated with the other forms of work.

    Richard Kostelanetz: There’s a difference between literature marketing and visual-arts marketing—visual arts is retail, and literature is wholesale…. When you take a work to a dealer, he knows his regular customers. He’ll make a calculation [about marketing] that is obviously kind of subtle. When you bring work to a publisher, all he knows is bookstore managers—the bookstore managers sell books. And this means lots of differences.

    First of all, art is sold [one at a time] and reviews criticize it. Reviews sell literature because they publicize it to ten thousand to one hundred thousand customers. Art is basically sold to individual rich people who can afford to pay for large units. Literature is sold to the masses…. The thing about contemporary visual art is that very little sells; it’s remarkable that it sells at all, which makes the operation of selling visual arts in our time very naïve…. So the major phenomenon of contemporary art in our time is the development of an extravagant market. Second is the development of an unprecedented support system for artists who don’t sell. They live on jobs and grants….

    Another development of the past two decades is the increasing gap between the commercial world and the noncommercial world. Particularly in literature, we have commercial presses and small presses. And the small press is a cultural entity whose particular function is to do what the commercial press doesn’t do—but also to continue literature, which has been abandoned by commercial presses in favor of best sellers. The same thing happened in music, with the record companies getting more and more commercial…. So [people set up] alternative music spaces, like the Kitchen. I think you get this in visual art as well….

    It was traditionally thought that if someone succeeded in the noncommercial world, he would jump into the commercial world. The gap has become so great that, in literature and music, I can think of only two people who have made that leap in the past decade—Philip Glass in music and Walter Abish in literature. So we have not just the development of that which is commercial, but [also the] development of institutions and a means of dissemination of that which is not commercial.

    [I]t’s really hard to sell out nowadays, in part because the gap between commercial art and art is so great…. And because of selling ten thousand versus selling one, eccentricity is far more cultivated in the retail [visual] arts.

    Zelevansky: I think I was misunderstood by both you and Amy. I never used the term selling out. I was interested in what Amy said, that the marketplace is the moment, and there’s no way somebody, whether they’re rebelling against it or not, can fail in some way to reflect that fact. I can’t imagine taking the position that the marketplace does not give form to art.

    Now a question to the panel: how do you create a market for an artist’s work?

    Feldman: I don’t know—I’m waiting for the Mary Boone book. [Laughter, applause] Actually, I could give you a lot of ways. First, you have to pick a very nice art form: painting would be number one, absolute top-of-the-list. Paint! If one of my kids [were] going to be an architect, I’d say don’t do that strange thing. Paint! (Well, I wouldn’t say that, but I would say paint.) What you have to do is paint something really kind of attractive aesthetically right off the bat. It can be strange, but it should be really nice looking. It shouldn’t be too, too big, because then it can’t get into the museum. When you’re a little more known, you can make really big things—they’ll find room. To market that work, as a strategy, one should have a few sold-out shows. Before they open is the best way, really, but even during would be good. Or even after, you can state that that happened. Even if it didn’t. That word “out” is really good. When dolls are hard to get, they can run into thousands of dollars. If you sell out ten to twelve paintings, that’s peanuts really—but big news in the art world.

    Secondly, in order to sell out, one should pepper the art world with paintings at very low prices that no one quite knows what price they were sold for. But a high price is told to the public! That also helps—a lot of PR that this sold out at “x” high price. It’s not true, but it helps a lot.

    Newman: In other words, people think other people paid more?

    Feldman: Yes. Very good strategy. Let them get on the waiting list.

    Newman: You get one person to say, yes I paid…?

    Feldman: You don’t have to lie, just [say] this is the price and everything is sold out! Nobody really quite asks, did they pay what I’m paying. The best thing, then, would be to have a waiting list. Scarcity is really good. A sold-out show gives the glamor and the scarcity at one time. If you can do that a few times in a row, that’s really good. Another aspect would be to find some critics that really, genuinely like the work. They may be misguided, they may be correct, but they really have to like it, and they really have to want to plug it. Then you have to get some curators to decide they want to have it, that they really like it, or stampede [them] into liking it.

    Panel: How often does this happen in your business?

    Feldman: Not to me! I can make it for any artist here if you want to just follow some simple rules. I don’t know how to make it if you make anything strange. I know how to live with you and show the work; but I don’t know how to make it for you.

    The art has to be in a form that sells. I can’t stress that enough. One of my artists is now painting and I am absolutely overjoyed, because I know that I can sell it, and both of us can have a little money…. I don’t push them to paint. They paint because that naturally becomes the form they’ve chosen—thank god!

    But recently I spoke to a New York curator, very high up, very important—who for years has been playing this cat and mouse game with me, like, I really would like to know about all your artists, and how important they are, and what they’re about. I’d like you to set up a slide show and I could come down and look at everything at one time…. So one day I made a phone call and asked, if the art I show you is not stretched or a little difficult to store or curate or put on the wall, or you have to worry about the temperature a little more, or whatever, do you want to see it, can you curate it, can you collect it? Oh no, of course not! We didn’t make the slide presentation.

    And that fact does not change. So when Dara said, it was the first time

    this way, that’s very important. Of course, that doesn’t mean she sold it.

    Golub: I don’t think you can tell anybody how to make it in the marketplace. I’ve been in the art world a long time, I’m an old timer, and I still don’t know how the art world works. I try to be very analytical [but] I can never figure out what’s corruption and what’s not corruption. I know what I like and don’t like, although I’m often unsure about that, too. You made a comment about Mary Boone. Of course she’s very successful. But she’s riding a bronco, she’s not riding a horse. And she doesn’t know herself, I would guess, when she’s going to get thrown off. [Meanwhile, other people are] saying, if I could only I get to Ron Feldman!

    I was just told about a show in a very well known gallery. The show sold out. A man I know very well had a show at that same gallery not long ago and sold nothing. What made the difference? I can’t figure it out.

    Feldman: I wouldn’t want you to confuse “how to make it” by a formula, in certain steps, with really making it because your art is terrific. I personally don’t equate being famous and in many art museums and collections, and [having] private collectors stampeding [to collect work], with really making it, really being talented, really being what I would consider successful, whether that gets commercial recognition or not.

    Zelevansky: Amy, how important are the magazines? How powerful are they in selling artwork?

    Newman: I think magazines are, um….

    Golub: Crucial.

    Kostelanetz: In comparison to literature they are inconsequential.

    Newman: They’re important because they get the ideas in the work out. I don’t think that necessarily influences what sells. I think what influences what sells is what other people are buying. There’s a kind of snowball effect and I don’t think that starts with the magazines. In fact I think the magazines are the coattails, because if someone is selling, then the magazines put that person on the cover.

    The problem that has stymied me the most is reproducibility. You reproduce art that can be reproduced in a magazine. There are very strict limits to what comes across. Where you have twenty artists and can reproduce five works, you don’t choose something very delicate, pale, subtle, or conceptual, or a certain kind of manipulated photography. You can’t have sort of a vague blur on the page. The only way around that is to have art magazines that don’t run pictures. That’s unfortunate, but it is sort of pure.

    Golub: I would think that given good-quality reproductions and sufficient attention to paper, there’s almost nothing that can’t be reproduced. But there are always questions of the relative importance of people in the back of one’s mind. I don’t think the criteria are technical. If you have a big enough page, you can reproduce anything.

    Feldman: As far as strategy is concerned, Amy is right. As far as being right, Leon is right.

    Newman: There’s one thing I want to add—the influence magazine or newspaper critics have, I think, is not based on the magazine or newspaper. It’s based on the reputation the critic has built up. I don’t think that simply by reviewing for a magazine you have the power to make or break an artist’s career. I don’t think those reviews and articles have that kind of importance. But if a critic has built up an independent reputation and been intelligent and consistently written about artists that people agree have emerged as significant voices, then I think the critic has a certain amount of power.

    Kostelanetz: I can think of only one way reviews function in selling art, and that’s if someone has to justify a purchase. When I tour universities, and I go to the art museum and see a Philip Pearlstein, I know there’s only one way that could happen. The curator wanted to buy it and he came up with the Hilton Kramer review from the New York Times and went to his board of directors with it, and between the curator and the subsidiary support of the review, they bought it.

    Zelevansky: Reviews are very important for artists applying for grants.

    Golub: It’s more crucial than that. I’d say there are one hundred people who are important to artists—collectors, critics, museum people. They all have a shifting relation to each other; they all have certain tensions of their own [and] different kinds of nervous dependencies…. Nobody has one hundred. If you have, say, 60 percent of this informed opinion behind you, you have a worldwide reputation. If you have 40 percent, you have a national reputation. If you have 20 percent, you have a New York reputation. If you have 5 percent, maybe a few people have heard of you. If you don’t have any of these people, you don’t exist—except to your friends.

    What this means is that influential people out there, artists too, are determining the course of events. Now these people are not so sure in their own mind. They watch each other. Collectors watch collectors. Collectors watch dealers. Critics watch other critics. They’re always ready either to jump on a new ship or leave a sinking ship. And everybody does it, just the way I do…. In the middle of all this, the agency that influences people are the critics. They influence the people who influence the people.

    Kostelanetz: The New York Times theater critic can make or break a Broadway production with that wholesale audience. The New York Times art critic cannot break a production….

    Golub: You know why? They have devalued themselves. When Kramer and [John] Russell run off in a kind of generalized way they devalue themselves, but they still have a very powerful influence.

    Kostelanetz: Is there any example of a critic demolishing an artist’s reputation?

    Newman: No.

    Golub: I’m not going to name them, but there are artists I know who have been attacked publicly who had a very strong reputation in the ’70s and who have suffered from it. It doesn’t mean they don’t have support, but part of the aura around them has been dissolved.

    Newman: I think what we’re talking about is the marketplace of ideas, and I do believe critics have a lot of influence there, but I don’t think they have that kind of influence in the financial marketplace. If you have 4 or 5 percent of art-world-informed position behind you, that’s fine. I know artists nobody knows who are selling their work better than artists who get reviewed. They have their parents’ neighbors [and] doctor’s offices….  If you’re talking about the financial market, I don’t think critics have a lot of influence. They have influence in the exchange of ideas.

    Zelevansky: Most critics have to review what the publication is interested in. As a critic who did a lot of photography reviews, I can say there was a time suddenly you could not place photography….

    Audience: Who, besides Women Artists News, looks at who is reviewed? Where do those decisions get made?

    Newman: It’s different at all the magazines. At ARTnews I would generally assign critics to the gallery. If the critic didn’t think the show was worth reviewing, that stood; we didn’t try to get the show a good review, or get a review at all. If I sent someone to a show and they wrote a bad review, we printed the bad review.

    Audience: What about advertisers?

    Newman: It’s pretty well known which magazines have a policy [of reviewing advertisers].

    Audience: It’s well known in the trade….

    Newman: The magazines that [cater to advertisers] don’t have as good a reputation with the general public. They don’t have the same authority.

    Kostelanetz: Are you saying you can buy a review?

    Newman: Yes.

    Golub: You can get in one or two magazines, maybe. If you take a medium-sized ad and your gallery has done this for a while, then there’s a good chance you are in the swim and the shows will be reviewed. But you’re not necessarily buying a review. I don’t think you are.

    Audience: How do you measure what’s real and what’s just people giving their opinion?

    Golub: That’s the biggest question in the art world! If you read the history of American art from, say, Abstract Expressionism on, you get a certain picture from one critic or historian, and someone else may give a related picture, but [neither one] is necessarily true. What we see as “history” has been taken for granted because of usage. We’re told certain things and eventually we learn them. But there is such a thing as revisionism—the history of art can change….

    But instead of going from one thing to another, we have catastrophes. Pop art was a catastrophe for Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism was a catastrophe for so on and so forth…. The catastrophe interrupts the assumptions of artists that things are going to continue as they are. But how you get to that new point doesn’t come from paying off critics and reviewers.

    Birnbaum: This is taking a very mainstream course, for me at least. We’re really in very conservative times. Leon has now at least said things can change. But I haven’t heard any specifics. For example, publications such as Flash Art on an international level support certain art. It is nearly impossible as an independent to be reviewed by Flash Art. And if you don’t have a gallery it is next to absolutely impossible to get into Flash Art in a color photo print. Many times works—performance art, film, and video—that had their seedbed in the ’70s haven’t been able to continue in the mainstream of talk and articulation because they aren’t reproduced in any form; they’ve been suffocated. There are a few small incidences of change, but change hasn’t so far affected the dominant marketplace.

    When I first looked toward video art [at] Castelli Sonnabend, as a youngster hanging out in the gallery, I would hear meetings on how does one sell a video disk—and are there precedents in printmaking or photography or any mechanically reproducible form. There was this idea of production in a limited number. But video to me is like literature: it should be in unlimited number…. The reason I stayed in art making [despite having other] skills was because I felt art could be valid as a challenge inside society.

    At Castelli Sonnabend, selling video tapes, they found they couldn’t do a limited edition. Can an artist sign a video tape? Where? Does regular pen work? Can you write on video tape? It’ll ruin the deck you play it on….

    So eventually they had to make a very expensive-looking package and, in the case of Joseph Beuys, a lithograph by Beuys, signed by him, to market these tapes.

    Now a group of artists decided in the ’70s and ’80s not to go with that part of the market. So while I’m very glad I have tapes selling in the art market for two hundred, two hundred fifty dollars. You can buy them for a dollar ninety-five at Video Shack. The same tapes. I’m not saying it’s an answer, but it opens up issues.

    Golub: It works for you. You have developed a philosophy and a technique to get out to this kind of public.

    Birnbaum: Well, I’m one of those who has deliberately chosen a form of expression that leaves them outside the dominant marketplace.

    Audience [to Newman]: On what basis do you select a gallery or show for review?

    Newman: I see the show myself. (I used to see an enormous percentage of shows). Or, if I don’t see the show, [I select] based on the announcement, or something I know or [that] somebody told me. In other cities I rely exclusively on the critic in that city.

    Audience: Is it true that if a gallery or an artist took a full-page….

    Newman: Not at ARTnews.

    Audience: You say not at ARTnews, but that means somewhere else. Is it fair….

    Panel: What’s fair?

    Kostelanetz: A critical reputation is debased if it’s so obviously, blatantly for sale. But there’s more subtly for sale. For example, take the New York Times Book Review. I did an analysis where I discovered that the reviews were apportioned to publishers in direct proportion to how much advertising they took over a period of time.

    Golub: That was deliberate, you think?

    Feldman: You made this survey yourself? When?

    Koslelanetz: Yes, I made the survey. It’s published in a book of mine called The End of Intelligent Writing.1

    Newman: And was it reviewed in the Times?

    Kostelanetz: Yeah, sure. [Laughter] That’s a longer story.

    Golub: He ran a big ad!

    Kostelanetz: Their rationale is, we exist to review what’s in the bookstores, and we know what’s in the bookstores by what’s advertised in our pages! … Here’s a funny story. [An editor at the Book Review], whom I happen to know, told me, the art world’s all money. I said, Oh? When you put a book on the cover of your review, what does it sell? He said ten thousand copies. And that’s worth how much? Obviously a twenty-dollar book is worth two hundred grand gross. So I said there’s no way an art reviewer can sell two hundred grand of anything! That’s the nature of wholesale versus retail. Bookstores are much bigger business than art business.

    Feldman: But an art review appears after the exhibition is closed.

    Zelevansky: That doesn’t matter—it’s for the next exhibition.

    Kostelanetz: That’s still different from a book review when the book is in the stores.

    Golub: The New York Times comes out coincident with the exhibition when they do review something. And they do influence….

    Zelevansky: And the accrued prestige is definitely part of the package.

    Newman: But you’re suggesting that the work shouldn’t be talked about.

    Golub: Nobody’s 100 percent pure and nobody’s 100 percent corrupt…. Everybody tries to manipulate the situation to their advantage, one way or another.

    Audience: Reviews are an extremely sensitive issue for the artist because reviews are sometimes the only payment you get. You can go a long time on a review. [Applause] Dara mentioned showing video in an alternative situation … at Castelli and then at the Palladium and selling work at the Palladium and other clubs. I wonder whether you can take a work which involves thought and contemplation and put it just anywhere and expect it’s not going to change.

    Birnbaum: It depends on the work. I was one of the first people into the clubs and one of the first out of the clubs—because it didn’t suit the content I wanted to get across. Lately I’ve decided to go back into the clubs at chosen times, because there’s an audience there I wanted to address, and I wouldn’t be able to get to those people if I didn’t find a vehicle that had a certain kind of immediacy…. The people I’ve worked most closely with felt it essential to find temporary relief from the dominant marketplace, which had been highly, highly conservative.

    Kostelanetz: I have a question about selling photography. You saw it and now….

    Zelevansky: Now there’s no market. Photographers can make—it in an art-world context, but the photography community at this point can no longer promote photography. The reason they make it in an art-world context is that they make very large images in color, so they can be sold for a lot more money.

    Feldman: I’ve been on several panels [on this topic]. Every five years it convenes and appears in Print Collector’s Newsletter…. Some artists working with photography will not show in a straight photography gallery. It’s demeaning, or it’s craft, or too traditional. Others want to show or will show anywhere. This thinking is the fault of museums, because they’re curated by departments.

    Edited from tape.

    Post Script: In case anyone missed Feldman’s irony, as some seemed to, it should be added that his advice on “making it” was tongue-in-cheek, and that his reputation among artists for support of non-money-making, especially artists’ political, causes, is unsurpassed. However, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs may have taken his remarks at face value. One official, apparently hearing about hanky panky in the art world sufficiently in advance of an election to take forceful action, decreed that art, like other merchandise for sale in the city, must have all prices clearly marked. As the press played the story with great glee and keen appreciation of the ingenuousness (or disingenuousness) of the ruling, Ronald Feldman was among those singled out for several hundred dollars in fines—caught by an inspector without his prices posted. The regulation was subsequently contested. The denouement is not on record.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Now out of print. However, an abridged version, “The End” Appendix/“The End” Essentials (RK Editions, 1979), is still available.

    Source

    “The Market Is the Moment” was originally published in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 241–47. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Losing the Plot

    Is Contemporary Art History?
    Friday, February 28, 2014
    Mellon Research Initiative
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House

    If a bomb had dropped on the building at 1 East 78th Street in Manhattan, the world of modern and contemporary art history would have lost its most respected and erudite scholars. KIDDING! A bomb wouldn’t even have been necessary, as the speakers and audience members who gathered for a workshop called “Is Contemporary Art History” are perfectly capable of imploding on their own. The person behind the Twitter account @AtrophicParenchyma (and a few other attendees) chronicled the meltdown last Friday at New York University’s venerable Institute of Fine Arts, using the hashtag #ifacontemporary to expose the bloated mess that is academic art history—which isn’t to say that doing so is a difficult task.

    IFAcontemporaryA

    IFAcontemporaryB

    IFAcontemporaryC

    IFAcontemporaryD

    IFAcontemporaryE

    IFAcontemporaryF

    IFAcontemporaryG

    In Terms Of count: unknown (but the first eighty seconds of video below spits out the phrase three times, so proceed at your own risk).

    Watch

    Video from the workshop can be streamed.

  • The Trashy Place Is a Happy Place

    Quijote Talks presents Naomi Fry, “Make Them Choke on It”
    Tuesday, February 25, 2014
    School of Visual Arts, 132 West 21st Street, Sixth Floor, New York

    Naomi Fry

    A recent talk by the Brooklyn-based critic Naomi Fry was as wide ranging—one could even say scattered—as both her cultural interests and her curriculum vitae. “I always have to remind myself that I’m a writer,” she said, reflecting on her roles as a professor who teaches writing at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University and also as a copy editor for the New York Times. Like many critics Fry must do other things to earn a living, which creates a shaky self-perception. At a lecture for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in art criticism, she didn’t have a paper to read, just notes, and thus spoke off the cuff for a small crowd of students, alumni, sympathizers, and friends.

    Asked beforehand to talk about her challenges and successes, Fry began by discussing a favorite piece of writing, her contribution to the series “See Something Say Something,” published by the Brooklyn-based journal Paper Monument in 2012. This five-hundred-word essay examined a photograph, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980, of the emerging actor Nicollette Sheridan at age seventeen with her then-boyfriend, the television and pop-music heartthrob Leif Garrett. This “check out my young girlfriend” photo, as Fry called it, “encapsulates everything that’s been interesting to me, ever … ever.” It was quite a surprise to hear this coming from a critic who has published in top art publications like Frieze and Artforum and other important cultural forums, such as the London Review of Books, T Magazine, n+1, and the Comics Journal. In both the essay and the lecture, Fry teased out what intrigued her about the image, which I understood to be celebrities, television, literature, sex, music, interior decorating, and politics. Putting the serious subject matter aside, how did she gravitate toward such vapid and vulgar things?

    An image of Leif Garrett snuggling with Nicollette Sheridan, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980 (photograph © Brad Elterman)

    Born in Israel to left-leaning academic parents, Fry spent a significant amount of time in the United States and grew up with American popular culture. She was also an educational product of the 1990s, a time when, she said, William Shakespeare and chewing gum wrappers were worthy objects of scholarly attention, and when books, movies, and art formed the core of interdisciplinary studies. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University, Fry studied literature at the PhD level until 2007, and since then has always tried to throw references to nineteenth-century novels into her writing. D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser make appearances in her Paper Monument article, and Honoré de Balzac and Horatio Alger are name-dropped in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece. The latter essay, “‘Till They Choke on It’: On Wolf of Wall Street,” rages against Martin Scorsese’s newest, much-maligned film about “the disgusting people of Wall Street,” a project that many criticized as being complicit with the 1 percent. “I’m this incredibly angry, bitter Marxist,” she snarled, who has “psychological problems with morally repugnant artifacts” such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Harmony Korine’s debaucherous 2013 flick Spring Breakers.

    After leaving Johns Hopkins, Fry worked as a fact checker for the glossy celebrity magazine Us Weekly from 2007 to 2011 while indulging her passion for writing. “You’re dancing with the devil,” people told her—or did she tell herself that? (My notes from the lecture are unclear.) At the time Fry was happy that someone had employed her, so when someone at an art opening asked her if she felt guilty about the real-world consequences of working at the gossip rag, she went ballistic on him. “By the time you read Us Weekly, you’re already fucked,” she explained. “I don’t feel like I was feeding babies poison.” Conversely, the work gave her endless material with which to work. “The trashy place is my happy place,” she said.

    springbreakers
    The cast of Spring Breakers on the set

    An audience member asked her about writing a “deliberately negative” review. Fry responded by saying she can be negative about things backed by money and power—such as books and films produced by publishing houses and production studios—but would hesitate for an exhibition, as long as that artist was “sincerely trying,” she said. I would argue that the work of any artist takes not an insignificant amount of capital—from purchasing artist’s supplies to paying rent on a storefront space—but her point was taken. My larger concern was what the questioner meant by “deliberately,” which would indicate a critic purposefully and nefariously trashing an artist.

    Naomi Fry wears many hats (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The writing process is hard for Fry, but she has a routine, a unit system, in which she writes for forty-five-minute chunks of time. During this time she’s offline—no Facebook, no Instagram—and doesn’t get up or talk to anyone. Fry briefly acknowledge that people write for little or no money these days, which makes it hard for critics who, as she mentioned at the lecture’s beginning, were not born wealthy and did not marry rich. Did she have advice for current SVA students? “I couldn’t really come up with anything,” she conceded. What makes her hopeful? Fry admitted that although she might sound like a “middle school art teacher, I think about being creative. The work—I told you I was a Marxist.”

    An audience member called Fry “intrepid” after the critic told a brief story on how she started getting assignments despite being a former academic without the usual writing clips. “The more things you put in your sack,” she said, “the more it grows. Before you know it, you’ve got a really big sack.”

    In Terms Of count: 0 (nice).

  • Not So Disappearing Anymore

    Identity Politics: Then and Now
    Wednesday, February 12, 2014
    102nd Annual Conference, College Art Association, Hilton Chicago, Lake Erie Room, Chicago, IL

    Hamza Walker speaks, with Dieter Roelstraete (left) and Gregg Bordowitz (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Drop “identity politics” into any art-world conversation now and you’re likely to get an eye roll—“so unfashionable.” This wasn’t the case twenty years ago, a time when the art museum—whether showing controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe or hosting the contentious 1993 Whitney Biennial—was a primary battleground.

    With its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, identity politics addressed how a dominant culture abused, oppressed, and colonized other cultures, nearly always divided by race, sex, ethnicity, and class. Although often aligned with aesthetics, identity politics surpassed art to embrace solidarity movements of underprivileged populations and neglected communities of all kinds. Identity politics also became a punching bag for its detractors, who tended to gloss over the complexities of particular situations with the pejorative term “political correctness.” At least that’s how I understand it. Since I arrived to “Identity Politics: Then and Now” a few minutes late, I missed an introduction from a representative from the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, the group sponsoring the session.

    The session’s four participants passed the microphone for brief opening comments before a free-form conversation began. A senior curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, since 2011, Dieter Roelstraete identified himself as European, Old World, Catholic, and northern (he hails from Belgium) and also in relation to his critics. To one reviewer he is the museum’s “resident thinker”; to another he is cold and heartless.1 “It’s just a muscle,” he said of the heart, underplaying the huge importance of this blood-pumping, life-giving organ.

    Jack Whitten, Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington), 1974, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 in. (artwork © Jack Whitten)

    Next was Hamza Walker, a curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, who described three recent exhibitions that could be understood as the progeny of identity politics. The curator of Blues for Smoke, Bennett Simpson, had initially proposed a rehanging of a permanent collection that would depose the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism from the modernist narrative; the blues, Walker continued, was a leitmotif to accomplish this. He also interpreted the exhibition as 1980s in spirit more than in object, which he contrasted with actual works from the decade in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, organized by Helen Molesworth. The third exhibition, Kellie Jones’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, examined the historical 1960s and 1970s, a time of the “disappearing black artist,” according to the photographer Dawoud Bey.2 Multiculturalism from the 1990s, Walker explained, had passed over older black artists—abstract painters in particular—in favor of upstart post-Conceptualists., which Now Dig This! aimed to correct. Now, he said, artists now are “not so disappearing anymore.”

    Gregg Bordowitz, an artist, activist, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said that identity politics today embrace transgender politics, that is, who you are and how others perceive you. Now, he said, we see a confounding or refusal of identity: “Identity is turned on and off like a faucet.” This fragmentation is different from the past, when the AIDS crisis—with which Bordowitz was involved—necessitated a single dominant position.

    Joan Kee, an attorney and art historian who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has observed a shift from choice to consent. Twenty years ago, she said, identity politics was preoccupied with laws about protection, denial, and exclusion, with disability and immigrant issues, and with the Equal Rights Amendment. A intentional disaffiliation with the nation-state was embraced by the nomad artist and curator in the 1990s, Kee continued, which I would argue was a lovely, feel-good myth that conveniently overlooked the harsh realities experienced by people living in abusive regimes. Now, she relayed, we are concerned about property, personal data, and the erosion of consent. She also brought up DNA fashioning and asked of the present moment: “What is the object of critique?”

    The panel’s moderator, Kirsten Swenson, an art historian at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, proposed a conversation about institutional role formation. “I practice being black at home,” joked Walker before declaring that today “the rhetoric doesn’t feel as defensive.” While I certainly agree, I couldn’t help but think of what hasn’t changed in the twenty-one years between Rodney King and Trayvon Martin.

    Hamza Walker continues to speak, with Gregg Bordowitz (center) and Joan Kee (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The discussion bounced around in productive, enlightening ways. Starting with the dandies of Charles Baudelaire, Bordowitz argued that choice is modern: to identify or disidentify, he said, is a bid for freedom. He also acknowledged how a person’s role changes from moment to moment, such as when, for example, he leaves the classroom and gets in line at Starbucks. Somehow I don’t think this what an artist like Ryan Trecartin, whose videos bend and contort identities into unrecognizable states, has in mind. Theorists assert that subjecthood is produced through structured, contextual encounters, something that Yvonne Rainer called “privileged” from her seat in the audience. Kee acknowledged that identity politics typically has a US-centric model, and Roelstraete admitted that the emphasis on economics in his current show, The Way of the Shovel, is North American.

    Bordowitz described how AIDS figured prominently in his art and activism over the last twenty-five years. Now he is concerned with “drugs in people’s bodies.” What does choice mean in different places, he asked, where having clean water is more crucial than obtaining advanced drugs? Walker was intrigued by how the artist Paul Chan negotiates art and activism. Like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial, no clear distinctions divide the two: “There’s peanut butter in my chocolate,” he said, “and chocolate in my peanut butter.” Walker considered the importance of mobilizing bodies, whether that’s Chan’s on-the-ground involvement with Voices of America in Iraq or the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s protestation of the US Navy’s longtime occupation of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico.

    Recognizing activism as art or vice versa is indeed an important topic that has been discussed passionately in recent years, most notably by the folks at Creative Time and A Blade of Grass. What is called social practice in the United States, Roelstraete said, is Relational Aesthetics in Europe. What about an asocial or antisocial practice, he muttered out loud, but the answer is painfully obvious: there isn’t an opposite of social practice, just different levels of engagement between art and viewers, or artists and other people. Roelstraete was quick to point out that European countries have ministries of culture, which take care of the public good, but in America artists become activists because of a governmental vacuum. Participation culture has thrived but painfully so, as the state becomes dismantled.

    Bordowitz complained about labels and reiterated his choice of the term “freedom” over “liberation.” He also gets irked when asked by his students about what makes a radical today. “Stop privileging ‘radicality’ as a term,” he implored. “People do radical things out of necessity.” Back in the day he was arrested, but now he writes poetry. It would be an “arrogant illusion,” he said, to consider his most radical work was when he went to jail. Roelstraete recalled that the French Realist painter and occasional revolutionary Gustave Courbet painted apples and fish while imprisoned for anti-Commune offenses. The Belgian curator nicely offered a simply stated observation: if people are still asking what radical is, there is still dissatisfaction in the world.

    Kee agreed with Bordowitz about the younger generation: “The same questions get asked over and over again.” Like Bordowitz’s pupils, her students want to know how artists can be radical now, but at the same time, she said, they shy away from discussions of identity politics. Issues of connoisseurship and quality, strangely enough, really get their blood pumping. If that’s misguided politics, then at least, one would hope, these students are resisting the authority of experts. In her classes, Kee takes a comparative look, using concrete examples such as Manuel Ocampo’s Untitled (Map of Los Angeles), a painting from 1987 that her class once discussed for three hours, to steer clear of complacency in the classroom. An audience member invariably asked why this is and what can we do about it. Kee blamed institutional repetition and intellectual laziness. Because we know the identity-politics canon, she lamented, we can repeat it.

    Manuel Ocampo, detail of Untitled (Map of Los Angeles), 1987, oil on canvas, 74½ x 67½ in. (artwork © Manuel Ocampo)

    An audience member sitting next to me who was a generation older than the panelists said that identity politics were actually liberal, not radical. People in the 1990s, she claimed, had misunderstood the 1970s. Further, she continued, identity politics in the US formed in collusion with the nation-state, a notion that opposed Kee’s view about disaffiliation. Although subjectivity and figuration in art had returned—as if these trends ever went away—the body’s appearance in Neoexpressionist painting usually meant something different that that in identity-politics art. Finally, she asked, what about feminism?

    Bordowitz questioned the authority who would say such a thing, arguing that identity politics in the 1990s was not a misunderstanding of the 1970s but rather a blossoming of the earlier decade’s ideas. Besides, there’s “no inherent, pure, and honest good of identity politics,” he reminded us. In fact, he suggested, identity politics had trouble gaining traction in certain academic circles. During the Socialists Scholars Conference in the 1990s, for instance, proposals of panels on gay and lesbian topics were either declined by the selection committee or, if accepted, had only three people in the audience.

    Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (2005)

    Roelstraete stated that gays and lesbians still face problems in Sochi and in Russia, among other places around the world, but Walker sees engagement more than frustration when considering diversity in mainstream American entertainment, citing James Franco’s weird white rapper in Spring Breakers and the interracial lesbian couple with a daughter on the television program Under the Dome. In academia, Walker wants people to look at the faculty numbers: “How many blacks are there in your department?” We must look at identity politics at the structural level, he urged, in addition to institutional atmosphere. He said this, with a sea of white faces behind me.

    An audience member asked about the choice of anonymity. It’s a double-edged sword, Kee responded. Are we aligned to the global, she asked, or do we disengaged or opt out? Roelstraete noted that artists work individually, not collectively, and that the art market doesn’t know what to do with things like Occupy and theories about the “multitude.” Smart curators like him should reject these commonly held attitudes that, with a little analysis, turn out to be false—they’re the type of “institutional repetition and intellectual laziness” that Kee resists. Bordowitz mentioned several collectives that have done interesting work, such the Bernadette Corporation and the Critical Art Ensemble, as well as collectively written novels and net art from the late 1990s. Is being anonymous a refusal, he wondered, or does it result from the lack of a better term to get at the problems?

    In Terms Of count: 26 (during a ninety-minute panel, no less).

    1 See Lori Waxman, “Compare and Contrast: Ceramics at the MCA,” Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2014; and Sam Worley, “The Way of the Shovel Could Dig a Little Deeper,” Chicago Reader, November 12, 2013. The latter complaint, however, was not levied at him but rather at his exhibitions.

    2 Dawoud Bey, “The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist,” Artnet Magazine, April 8, 2004.

    Read

    Jason Foumberg, “It Takes Practice,” Artforum.com, February 25, 2014.

  • Stick to Your Gunns

    In Conversation: Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele
    Thursday, January 30, 2014
    Brooklyn Museum, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Tim Gunn with suit and scissors

    When Tim Gunn was writing his first book, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style (2007), the designer Diane von Furstenberg told him to never lose his voice as an educator. Gunn, a fashion consultant and the cohost of the television program Project Runway, had been struggling with the assignment of writing a self-help, makeover-oriented book instead of a history of fashion, which he originally wanted to do. He hated books about dressing and body types. Gunn must have taken the advice he often gives to others—trust your gut and your instincts and know who you are—and he pulled through. In other words, he made it work.

    Mentoring and education describe not only Gunn’s role on Project Runway and its spinoff show, Under the Gunn; they also form the bedrock of his entire career. During a freewheeling conversation at the Brooklyn Museum with Valerie Steele, a pioneer of fashion studies, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the owner of a Akris handbag (which sat by her chair onstage), Gunn recalled how he arrived in New York in the early 1980s to teach at Parson’s School of Fashion. From then until 2007 he “wore a lot of hats,” he said, serving as a teacher, chair, and associate dean. Because the school’s administration didn’t want students to be influenced by anything—an inexplicable position in a highly diverse, interdisciplinary creative field—Parsons offered neither courses in fashion history nor classes in computer design until the late 1990s, when Gunn helped to rewrite the program’s curriculum and change the institutional culture, which hadn’t deviated much in over forty years. At the time, he noted, designers such as Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein had dominated American fashion. Adventurous students must have been starving to innovate, and Gunn helped them burst their seams.

    Steele asked Gunn how he liked the Jean-Paul Gaultier show at the Brooklyn Museum. Gunn delighted in the fine line between fashion and costume, the freaky mannequins, and the sensory enticement (which, he noted, stopped short of sensory assault). Gunn quizzed Steele about her most recent exhibition at the Museum at FIT, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, finding it surprising that no one had done a “gays in fashion” show before. Steele talked about the show’s website, Facebook page, and syllabi for audiences and then relayed a story about giving a talk in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she was told to not speak on gay propaganda. (Her son laughed, saying “You’ll be in jail next to Pussy Riot”; Steele will “hold out for vodka and caviar” instead of bread and water.) Gunn laughed, “If you’re [a man] in the fashion industry, I’m going to assume you’re gay unless told otherwise.” Steele had a full house for her talk in Russia.

    Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele (photograph by the Brooklyn Museum)

    Gunn and Steele’s conversation moved quickly. The rapport between Gunn and Steele was loose and friendly, as if they’ve known each other for years. Sometimes the jokes felt scripted, as if the conversation were taking place on a minimally rehearsed television talk show for which the two played both the host and the guest. Steele editorialized on the trouble of fast fashion: the speed at which trends move from the catwalk to retails stores such as H&M, Forever 21, and Zara. She also declared Fashion Week, during which high-end designers debut their collections, to be dated. Gunn agreed that the event, which is held multiple times a year around the world, is a “dusty anachronism.” Steele would love a turn toward slow fashion, like the trend of slow food, which takes advantage of regional and seasonal varieties of ingredients and their traditional preparation. Gunn noted that we don’t want junk but are still budget minded. After Steele complimented him on his suit, he recommended Suit Supply—“it sounds like Dress Barn,” he said, but is a Dutch company found throughout Europe that makes quality clothes (and that also just opened a store in SoHo).

    Scene from episode four of Under the Gunn

    Gunn begged the audience to watch Under the Gunn, which he described as “Project Runway meets The Voice with scissors,” in order to boost the lower-than-expected ratings. The program cast the latest batch of applicants from Project Runway, which is on hiatus due to the cohost Heidi Klum’s absence. “We have way more content for a one-hour show,” he said. His “world-class problem” is: “What story do you tell?” His advice for the emerging designers runs from warning them about the difficulties of creating menswear to not scrapping a project if something goes wrong. When you quit, he implored, “What have you learned?” Gunn encourages the participants to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution—which is worlds apart from how the art world fetishizes failure. Learning damage control, he urged, is essential.

    After about thirty minutes of conversation, Gunn and Steele answered prewritten questions from the audience, which covered Brooklyn as brand, three-dimensional printing technology for fashion, and fashion icons from the last ten to fifteen years.1 Steele said Daphne Guinness; Gunn picked Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, and Anne Hathaway. What has been the most transformative era in fashion? Gunn and Steele agreed on the 1960s right away. From Mad Men styles to paper dresses to vinyl to hippies, that decade, Steele informed us, was the most important for clothing. What country has the most captivating fashion? “France!” exclaimed Steele. “Come on, people!” Gunn agreed but declared “We owe great menswear to London.” And Naples, Steele added.

    Someone asked if we can bring back manufacturing to the United States. If that happens, Steele said, people should expect to pay more for those fashion, warning us that we won’t find those $30 jackets anymore. “We’ve created this problem,” Gunn said, blaming the culture of sales, which I took to mean high-low pricing strategies, where the original, sale, and clearance prices of a garment are considered in advance. He, too, would like to see a revitalized Garment District in Manhattan.

    Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele onstage

    Gunn acknowledged Parsons as his greatest success, and his most defining failure was the end of his long-term relationship in 1982. He was cheated on and dumped, experiences that saved his life and made him who he is today. A thoughtful question asked how young designers with limited resources can break into high fashion. “You know what’s harder?” Gunn mused. “Staying in.” He suggested that young designers work for another, more established designer—like Donna Karan worked for Anne Klein before her own career took off—to find opportunities and to learn about sourcing production, marketing, and buyers. Steele said that most failed designers are undercapitalized. The days when four clients could support a couture house, which happened in the 1920s, she said, are over. Gunn reminded us, “The fashion world is very unforgiving.” Adding to Gunn’s suggestion, Steele recommended that a young designer should find a “posse” to work with: a photographer, a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and the like, but stopped short of calling for collective labor practices.

    Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s (photograph by Felix Clay)

    Gunn called out retailers for moving in directions that would squeeze out designers. A store like Macy’s may eventually dissolve brand names, he predicted, and create a private label—it’s cheaper for a retailer to design, create, and sell clothes in house.2 The work of designers wouldn’t disappear from the department store, he continued, but would rent space in them. This latter idea resembles in part the model for art fairs, which typically rent space in convention centers and other large public venues for commercial events to individual galleries, who sell works from their stable of artists. Using Gunn’s forecast, it would not be inconceivable for art fairs to begin representing—or more specifically, selling the work of—artists, cutting out the middle-man dealers entirely, not unlike how Damien Hirst circumvented galleries and dealers to peddle his wares directly with the auction house Sotheby’s, in 2008.

    Unlike painting, sculpture, and photography, clothing designs cannot be copyrighted, which situates fashion designers in a precarious position in which knock-offs plague the high-end market. Advocating a Design Piracy Prohibition Act on Capitol Hill, Gunn believed, might help slow down fast fashion, preventing retail supply chains from replicating haute couture in down-market stores. Yet Americans are a nation of copiers, he said, borrowing looks from French styles through World War II. A bill would “grandfather out” all current design, such as von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses, but I’m not sure if he meant that iconic designs would fall under copyright or be released into the public domain. Another pressing issue, he continued, is counterfeits: a single Asian factory will manufacture a blue Liz Claiborne bag and ship it on the same boat to American as the same purse without the label, each having different destinations. Whether the problem is with trademarks or with identical products sold for radically different prices, he didn’t say. The art world also has issues with authenticity and reproduction that are too numerous to enumerate here.

    1 During her introduction of the event Lisa Small, coordinating curator of The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, asked the audience to write their questions for the speakers on small cards, which were then collected and read to Gunn and Steele. Moderators who wish to upgrade the quality of their Q&A sessions—and eliminate the contribution of panel attendees who ramble for five or ten minutes before ending with the dreaded confession of “I guess that’s more of a comment than a question”—should begin this practice

    2 In an exact quote, Gunn said, “I predict that with a huge, gigantic store like Macy’s, you’re going to see all of the individual designer brands disappear, the whole place is going to be privately owned. It’ll all be designed internally and you will see the private brands return.” David Bologna, “Tim Gunn, Valerie Steele Together in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum,” Washington Square News, January 31, 2014.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Amy Affronti, “Tim Gunn and Superbowl Weekend,” Denim and Dots, February 5, 2014.

    Kristen Bateman, “Tim Gunn on Everything: Highlights of the Brooklyn Museum Talk,” Harper’s Bazaar, January 31, 2014.

    Maria Boblia, “Tim Gunn Promises His New Spinoff Show Will Get Better,” Fashionista, January 31, 2014.

    David Bologna, “Tim Gunn, Valerie Steele Together in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum,” Washington Square News, January 31, 2014.

    Zina Codita, “Jean Paul Gaultier Is ‘Frenchier Than French’,” QT Quoture, February 10, 2014.

    Alexis Morrison-Wynter, “In Conversation: A Conversation with Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele,” Caneva, February 6, 2014.

  • First, Do No Harm

    Randy Cohen: The Ethics of Being an Artist
    Thursday, October 10, 2013
    Professional Practices Series
    New York Academy of Art, New York, NY

    “Is it ethical for an artist to make work that sells?” was the first question asked of Randy Cohen, who responded by saying that terms like “sincerity” and “ethics” do not apply in aesthetic situations—you judge an artwork on its own merits. Drawing a distinction between creating good art and being a good (or bad) person, he argued that the racism and anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century authors shouldn’t discount the quality or importance of their novels. Cohen then asked the room, “Is it shameful to produce work that people enjoy?” If a person has an urge to make money, he mused, then art is a quirky field in which to earn a million.

    Cohen, who wrote “The Ethicist” column for the New York Times from 1999 to 2011 and the book Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything (2012), took a few questions from the conversation’s moderator, Sharon Louden, an artist and a faculty member at the New York Academy of Art, for a half hour before fielding queries from the audience, comprising mostly MFA students. An art-world outsider, Cohen drew from knowledge gained over his diverse career path, which includes writing for Late Night with David Letterman—he is usually credited as inventing the Top Ten List—during the 1980s and hosting a radio show, Person, Place, Thing, in which his guests, often celebrities, talk not about themselves but about something else that interests them.

    Randy Cohen talks with Sharon Louden (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Cohen went into the talk cold, specifically requesting that Louden withhold the topics of discussion. He handled the questions extremely well, and his responses were refreshingly atypical from the usual chatter regarding business and education in the arts. Cohen decreed it unethical for professors to accept gifts from students, even on graduation day, because doing so may establish a dubious precedent, “a way of doing things,” he said, in which intentions and responses are unclear. No more apples for the teacher!

    Can an artist sell work from his or her studio when represented by a gallery? Both artists and dealers have good arguments for and against the practice. Early in an artist’s career, dealers have power and can bully the artist, not unlike the music industry in the 1970s in which record companies took advantage of bands. These relationships concern power, Cohen said, not justice. But the right call usually comes down to what’s permissible according to the written agreement between both parties.

    Presuming an artist and dealer agree to split the sale of artwork fifty-fifty, is it ethical for a dealer to sell a work originally priced at $10,000 for $15,000 and then pay the artist the expected $5,000 instead of the higher $7,500? Again, he said, it depends on the written agreement, he said, though I believe that he hinted at the artist receiving his or her equal share of the sale. Can an artist or dealer sell a work to one person for $10,000 and offer a similar work to another person for twice that amount? Cohen found no fault in variable pricing, as airlines practice it on a daily basis. A smart buyer will ask what a work like this typically sells for. But if a buyer agreed to the seller’s asking price, there’s no harm.

    William Eggleston, Memphis (Tricycle), ca. 1969–70, medium uncertain, dimensions variable (artwork © William Eggleston)

    Balancing ethical obligations against legal responsibilities was an unexpected theme during the conversation, with the law often superseding ethical notions of right and wrong. For example, an artist sells a painting to Person A, and Person B wants the same work. Can the artist make an identical piece to sell to Person B? As an example, Cohen brought up recent litigation between the financier and collector Jonathan Sobel and the photographer William Eggleston, who sold one darkroom print of a limited edition to Sobel but later made a new edition of the same image at a larger size and printed it digitally. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in March 2013, according to the Art Newspaper, in favor of Eggleston. Apart from the court’s decision, it is “subjective and unmeasurable,” Cohen said, if the second work were similar, identical, or new. Does Balthus have a monopoly on cats and little girls, he speculated, referencing the recently opened exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I thought of Claude Monet’s twenty-five paintings of Haystacks and the thirty-plus Rouen Cathedral series found in museum collections across the world.

    Considering ethics in teaching, Cohen felt teachers have an obligation to tell students the truth, to deepen their understanding of a subject. Nevertheless, he has identified an ongoing tension between a solid education and giving good grades. Educators, he said, no longer fail students for fear of a lawsuits (presumably from parents). In art school, the “pernicious effect of grades” happens when a teacher all but requires his students to paint like him in order to pass the class. Prompted by Louden, Cohen talked about how teachers should provide realistic postgraduate expectations for students in MFA programs: “Here’s what art might offer when you get out,” he suggested they say. Further, teachers should address questions—in professional practices or more generally—that students did not know they needed to ask.

    An audience member asked, “If you inhabit an utterly corrupt society,” do you have an obligation to be ethical? Cohen brought up a recent scandal at Stuyvesant High School, a top-notch public school in Manhattan with an accelerated college-prep curriculum, in which cheaters make it difficult for honest students to compete. When the stakes for Ivy League admission are high, he seemed to say, sometimes it’s okay to bend the rules.

    An apple pie with a lattice upper crust (photograph by Dan Parsons and in the public domain)

    Should critics collect art? Cohen emphatically said no, and they should also refrain from writing about artists who they’ve seen naked or who invited them for dinner at their house. Writing about friends in whatever capacity, he said, will yield a skewed or uncontrollable perception. While I agree that knowing an artist may influence a critic’s perspective, I scarcely believe that the effect is ethically detrimental to the writing. Often knowing an artist personally, as a friend or as an acquaintance, can produce unique insight valuable to viewers and readers—which may not be an ethical dilemma since art criticism can be highly subjective. Critics should nevertheless refrain from accepting gifts from artist friends, Cohen said, whether the gift is a $50 pie from the bakery or one lovingly made at home. No apples for teachers and no apple pies for critics? Rats! The perceived problem of writing about artist friends needs closer examination, as important distinctions can be made between the appearance of a conflict of interest and an actual conflict of interest.

    Cohen’s approach to appropriation and copyright was less strict. “We have a narrow definition of plagiarism,” he said, “that protects commercial interests.” Yet it’s okay for him when the guitarist Eric Clapton lifts a lick from the blues man Robert Johnson. Whether it’s Led Zeppelin or Richard Prince, the practice of borrowing encourages artistic progress but often runs foul when the original creator fails to be credited or compensated. Certainly copyright laws in the United States are overburdened and outdated, but invoking the irresolutely defined word “transformative” as a cure-all solution obscures a complex, contentious issue. But tonight wasn’t the place for such a discussion.

    Throughout the conversation Cohen referenced his unusual career path. He attended California Institute of Arts in the 1970s for electronic music composition and knew David Salle, Eric Fischl, and other members of the CalArts Mafia. After finishing the degree, he realized that he couldn’t think musically or with sound—though he is proud of the score he composed for a Prell Shampoo commercial. From music to comedy to writing, Cohen’s living consisted of “stumbling from thing to thing.” He has experienced failure but time was never wasted. “You’re not paying attention,” he said, if you’d live your life in the same way if you could do it all over again. Cohen’s life changed tremendously over the years, but for every big break he got, fifty other options were unsuccessful.

    In Terms Of count: 0.