In Terms Of

Tag: Art market

  • End of Bohemianism

    Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?
    February 19, 1987
    College Art Association, 75th Annual Conference
    Marriott Hotel, Salon E, Boston, MA

    The title question of this panel is the sort that rarely gets asked unless the answer is meant to be yes—and the answer for this one did seem to be “Yes, but….” Yes or no, the panel articulated feelings about “success” that had ripened in the ’80s.

    Moderator: Hilton Kramer
    Panelists: William Bailey, Sylvia Mangold, Sidney Tillim, and Robert Pincus-Witten

    The most talked-about art writing of 1987 College Art Association week was Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile of Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum. Hilton Kramer, introducing “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?,” explained how Malcolm found Sischy not “profilable” and so profiled instead a “Cook’s tour of the seamy aspects of the world [Sischy] is obliged to move in.” We, apparently more accustomed than Kramer to the ways and means of artists, thought the scene sounded like just folks and began to wonder anew about Kramer’s sense of the fitness of things.

    From there he segued into a depiction of the runaway art world of the last five to ten years—the proliferation of art critics, the inflation of indifferent art, and the turning of art into a commodity for the moneyed middle class.

    Kramer traced the blame for the decade’s art sickness to his years at the New York Times. Something happened in the ’70s art world that was expressed by his editors: the burning question asked every week at editorial meetings was “What’s New?” But, as Kramer saw it, the impetus for this question, and what changed American journalism, was New York magazine. It was New York that advised readers each week where to buy the ten best hamburgers, see the ten best exhibitions, find the ten best artists, discover the ten newest movements.

    So Kramer’s editor at the Times wanted to know what was new that week in art. The high point of his career at the Times was the week he answered that “no new trend was discernible in the last seven days,” and the editor asked, “Is that a trend?”

    Kramer advised his audience to resist sentimentalizing the “old art world,” reminding us that those now-famous artists were impoverished at the time, had no public, only hostile and ignorant response (if any), no solo exhibitions until they were 40 or 50 years old, and sold at outrageously low prices. Was the American art world a finer place in the “good old days,” he asked, when Willem de Kooning didn’t have an exhibition until he was 42 and Milton Avery sold his paintings for $50?

    William Bailey had pondered the question “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?” and was prepared to say “Yes, in the sense of a spoiled child.” Then, with carefully weighed words, he added that the problems of the art world emanate not from success but from a sense of failure. As the successful get more successful, the unsuccessful get, in comparison, even more unsuccessful. The gap between them widens, rending the art community. Bailey also disdainfully likened today’s success for artists to the success of rock stars and movie stars. (But why not? We have lived to see moments when even women artists were mobbed by fans at openings. We’d like more—more famous women artists, more mob scenes.)

    Bailey said that when he started out, “art” was what came from Europe; he himself had no expectations of “success.” He made the point that most painters today still live marginally and under increasingly difficult conditions, especially in New York. The community of artists has broken up; it is no longer possible even to share poverty. Bailey knows young and old artists who have never had the kind of success heaped today on the art world’s darlings but are instead involved in the daily conflicts of the studio and haunted by a sense of failure. The talk now in SoHo is only about money, while at the old shrines (museums) curators are preoccupied with enticing the fun people, as though to a disco. Bailey asked if all this “presages the decline of the West.” However, it was reassuring to have him tell us this is not just New York, but all over.

    Sylvia Mangold, the only woman on the panel (added, we understand, as token, at the insistence of Natalie Charkow, chair of the conference studio sessions), said success means money. She enjoys being able to live off her art. Though she lives apart from the New York world of careerism, she still faces her own problems in the studio.

    In preparation for the panel, Mangold had read Suzi Gablik’s Has Modernism Failed? and works by Willa Cather. From Cather she came away with the reassurance that success is never as interesting as the struggle (though there might be some argument on that from the strugglers), and that every artist needs to find some motivation other than money. Money brings problems, Mangold observed, expressing her certainty that most artists she knows care more about their work than about making money. But sensitive, gentle Sylvia, doubtless selected because of her friendship with the moderator and the knowledge that she wouldn’t make trouble, was no match for those macho image-makers on the platform—though one wished it were otherwise. A scrappy hard-hitting woman puncturing some of the blather would have been refreshing.

    If Sidney Tillim had some gift as a raconteur, his garrulous drawn-out tales might have been more appreciated. He, too, assured us, in case we didn’t know, that most artists don’t work just for the money, and that he, personally, doesn’t have enough of it. He, too, harked back to the art world of thirty years ago. Asking himself “Why am I here?” (at the panel), he concluded it was for his career. Tillim resumed writing some four years ago, after a lapse of fourteen years, because he wasn’t showing. “I just couldn’t get a dealer.” He was surprised when an article he wrote, “The View from Past 50,” got an enormous response, mostly from people under 30. Then, in an attempt to share his thoughts on the subject, he launched into a soliloquy, “The Art World Today Is Like Baseball,” an extraordinarily boring ramble on his life-long interest in baseball, which may of course have been less boring to a person with a life-long interest in baseball.1

    The passive among us grabbed forty winks, the decision-makers got up and left; the masochists toughed it out. Finally back to the subject at hand, Tillim proposed to document changes in the art world, as, for instance, the evolution of the Whitney Museum of American Art from humble beginnings on Eighth Street to MoMA’s backyard to Madison Avenue and its present postmodernist imbroglio. These changes, showing the movement of money and upward mobility, have occurred, he said, not just in art but throughout modern culture. Then, before relinquishing the mic, Tillim got in yet another personal anecdote. He had sought advice from Robert Pincus-Witten about how to approach the art magazines. His first submitted article was rejected (by an unspecified publication). He next decided to approach Betsy Baker, an old friend who happens to be editor of Art in America. His call was fielded by a young man who asked what he wanted to talk to her about, explaining that it was necessary to “prioritize topics.” Tillim’s topic evidently didn’t make it to the top ten because he didn’t get through. Next he approached Artforum, where he finally got published. Running into Baker at a later date, he described his failure to reach her. She told him, “Next time just say you’re returning my call.”

    Robert Pincus-Witten was introduced by Kramer as “the kid” but admitted to being not much younger than the others present. My neighbor whispered to me that she’d been in his class at art school and they were the same age: 52. Pincus-Witten, simultaneously arch, pleasant, and snide, smiled and demolished all previous nonsense. The basic situation has not changed, he said. All artists want as much as they can get and good-looking lovers, and always have. But this has no effect on art. For example, “Has success spoiled Hilton Kramer?” No, Pincus-Witten assured us. “Whatever he does is not affected by his being a successful man.” Reading from a column by Kramer, he quoted statements about the lack of talent among this year’s famous—David Salle, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and company—can’t draw, can’t paint, etc. He added that success is very revelatory of character; in fact, you can’t tell what a person is until they get what they want.

    Kramer then shifted the discussion to museums and their keepers, describing the enormous pressure on curators and directors to be first with the new stars and to beat the Europeans to it. Mangold questioned who holds the power, and Pincus-Witten said power is in the hands of those who make the newest art—small groups acting in concert. This led to a diatribe against the gang of four: Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, and Mary Boone (speaker unidentified by now-sleepy reporter). Kramer tossed in the fact that MoMA is an ailing museum and no longer representative, quoting Harold Rosenberg’s phrase about “the herd of independent minds.” Everyone, Kramer explained, thinks they’re making “independent decisions,” but they turn out to be identical with all the others.

    Mangold said she found the volume of art being produced frightening, but another panelist reassured her that two kinds of business will surely prosper—storage and conservation.

    Assorted Quotes and Choice Lines from the Panel

    Pincus-Witten: Agnes Martin’s withdrawal can be seen as a strategy for self-promotion.

    Bailey: Critics don’t see very well; that’s part of today’s problem. There is the question of how well Picasso draws and how badly Salle draws. [Bailey added that he regretted having to speak ill of another artist but was driven to it.]

    Kramer: The problem with Salle isn’t that he doesn’t draw well, but that he draws.

    Pincus-Witten: Although we think of certain galleries as central emporia for significant artists, art actually moves into the world as a function of stylistics. Hype doesn’t sell art, stylistics does. Work enters the marketplace because it sells itself, and that’s what the consumer wants. Significant collections are made up of works bought by people who don’t have to have things “sold” to them.

    Kramer: The shift to Neo-Expressionism was the result of a strong sense by a new generation of what was missing in art; something more important than fashion and avarice, a sense that the vitality of art should be restored. Also, there are now so many artists, dealers, museums, curators, and collectors, that it’s tougher for an artist to get a serious review than to sell a picture.

    Unidentified: At least we are finally rid of the mythical bohemianism of the lonely painter living in isolation and neglect.

    Unanswered Questions from the Audience

    Are these phenomena of “success” aspects of some larger cultural decay? Does the success of young artists, like the success of young ballplayers, inspire other young artists? Who markets the artist?

    And Answered Questions

    Audience: Aren’t artists involved in object commodification, as opposed to writers or dancers?
    Kramer: There’s a whole new group of short-story writers similar to the Schnabels of our time.

    Audience: How does one achieve fame and fortune quickly?
    Answer: It’s easier if you start young.

    Audience: Would you prefer to be a successful Picasso or an unsuccessful van Gogh?
    Answer: One lived three times as long as the other.

    Audience [referring to the breakdown of the star system in Hollywood]: Can it happen in the art world?
    Kramer: We all liked it better when the movies had stars, but it’s not a true comparison.

    Gossip

    We heard that the panel originally included Robert Hughes and Alex Katz, with the expectation of a face-off between them. Hughes, it seems, had disparaged Katz in print, and Katz was furious. When Hughes cancelled his panel appearance for a trip to Australia promoting his latest book, Katz cancelled, too. The large sensation-hungry audience was disappointed.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Apparently painter Clyfford Still also had a lifelong interest in baseball and also drew analogies between art and baseball, which he shared with his students in California, but their response is not on record.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “End of Bohemianism” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 266–68. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Art School Confidential

    Creative Extraction: Why Are Art Schools at the Vanguard of Unreasonable Debt Burdens?
    Friday, December 5, 2014
    Momenta Art and Occupy Museums, Brooklyn, NY

    In March 2014, the economics journalist Catherine Rampell crunched numbers from an online US Department of Education tool that collected data on college costs. Her results were stunning. After “subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid” for private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, she determined that “seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are art schools or conservatories of some kind.”1 These included the familiar institutions: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the San Francisco Art Institute. What’s more, two others on her list—the New School and New York University—offer numerous degrees in the arts.2 Tuition and required fees for the top ten range from $36,032 to $42,882 a year—which doesn’t include room, board, and related nonacademic expenses. Keep in mind that these are undergraduate degrees—master’s and doctoral degrees run even higher.

    It’s no secret that the tuition for all kinds of schools has increased significantly over the last thirty years, and thousands of students take out huge government and private loans to cover their educational expenses. Those armed with BFAs are unlikely to make tons of money right out of the starting gate, as the familiar narrative goes. Yet we live in a time in which euphoric articles pronounce the MFA as the new MBA appear with alarming regularity.3 What should a young artist do?

    Coco Fusco finds art-school debt to be unreasonable (photograph by Tal Beery)

    Neither alleviating nor preventing student debt was the subject of an informal, passionate lecture by Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and visiting associate professor in comparative media studies and writing for 2014–15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking from her perch in the academic ivory tower, Fusco vented about the debt crisis, pointed fingers at numerous culprits, and found many sympathetic listeners. (She was a professor at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008—spending five years in the School of the Arts’ renowned MFA program—and following that was director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design from 2008 to 2013). Fusco was a “lone wolf in the wilderness” while teaching at Columbia during the boom Bush years, said Noah Fischer, a former student of hers and a founder of Occupy Museums, the group that sponsored her lecture and was participating in Momenta Art’s exhibition Work It Out.

    A year has passed since Modern Painters published Fusco’s essay “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns” in its December 2013 issue. For the article Fusco gathered anecdotal knowledge from conversations with students, arguing that debt influences the kind of art a person makes after graduation, that schools use recruiters, and that art theory influences students, for better or worse. While “Debating an MFA?” focused on expensive graduate programs, tonight’s forty-five-minute talk made few distinctions between bachelor’s and master’s degrees and interchangeably addressed art schools, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities. As a result, the targets of her accusations were confused, perhaps deliberately so for rhetorical effect, leaving me without a solid grasp of the problem. It felt like the mark in Three Card Monte.

    Cost of the Ticket

    The “cost of the ticket” for art school has risen significantly, Fusco said. The 1980s, when she earned her BA and MA, were different. “It’s not that we didn’t borrow money,” she explained. “We didn’t have to borrow as much.” Fusco ended up with “relatively little debt” from her undergraduate education and none for graduate school.4 Back then “school wasn’t the problem—school was the escape,” especially for those riding out tough economic times. Waitressing lunch shifts for four hours a day after first finishing school, Fusco said she was poor but had time for art, and even worked for other artists for free. Needless to say, few can afford this lifestyle today, at least not in New York.

    Design schools such as Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago figure disproportionately among the institutions that use “predatory lending schemes,” Fusco declared, and the top debtor schools are for-profit institutions. Schools that teach software and web design are “massive factories with debt schemes built into them,” she remarked, and the situation has become intolerable and oppressive. Her information was confusing, since she didn’t explain what these schemes are. Besides, for-profit institutions such as the nationwide chain of Art Institutes or places like Full Sail University teach marketable skills in lucrative creative areas such as web development, video games, and film production.5 Their graduates are hardly knocking on the doors of Chelsea galleries. Fusco left me wanting to know how SCAD and SAIC, which are nonprofit institutions, compare to the for-profits.

    In Fusco’s experience, students are battling their parents over money for a collegiate art-school education, and parents are selling property, taking a second mortgage on their homes, and draining their retirement funds to pay for it all. At the same time, schools offer country-club experiences, with lavish dormitories and student centers—not to mention new buildings by starchitects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry—to supposedly impress wealthy parents to fork over cash. Paying for such expansions, Fusco said, is higher tuition.

    The opening scene of Daniel Clowes’s exposé, Art School Confidential, based on his experiences at Pratt Institute in the 1980s (artwork © Daniel Clowes)

    During the first audience Q&A, an older man recommended that artists “show up” and “be weird.” Why even go to art school, he asked, suggesting that we get rid of the middleman and hook up students with working artists through apprenticeships. “That’s the medieval way,” Fusco responded, which “can become free labor for a long time.” Another attendee, the writer Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, wanted to know how we might let parents know about debt in advance. I asked Fusco if she knew how much effort today’s students make to find nonloan funding for their education? What about student complacency regarding tuition increases, questioned another person. Fusco did not have adequate answers. We are at a point when the outrage is over, Fusco had said earlier, and organizing should begin. But the only solution she offered was going to free schools like the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and “others in Los Angeles,” as if these groups offer something comparable to a degree from an accredited institution. It’s disappointing if Bruce High Quality is the only alternative pedagogical project that she knows by name. Fusco can find a rich history of both current and discontinued alternative pedagogical institutions indexed by the TEACHABLE FILE and use Google to discover newer projects making headlines.6

    Proliferation of Degrees

    The proliferation of degrees at art schools isn’t an expansion of choices, Fusco argued, but an opportunity for schools to procure more students and dispense degrees without providing marketable skills (e.g., fabrication, installation, canvas stretching, and finding your way around a woodshop). Indeed, any subscriber to the Art and Education email list can vouch for the mushrooming of art-degree programs in discourse-based areas such as, for example, the MA in art, education, and community practice at New York University, the MA in social design at Maryland Institute College of Art, or the MA in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.7 Talkers who don’t make things don’t last long, Fusco warned, even though she acknowledged that she’s a talker artist herself.

    It’s more expensive for a school to maintain a glassblowing or ceramics studio, Fusco said, than to provide space for students doing social practice and, in her words, “transdisciplinary design.” While I generally agree with Fusco—it seems likely that programs for socially engaged art, which have multiplied in recent years as the genre gained visibility and respect, are less expensive to operate than programs in studio art—I can’t help but think that academic institutions are places where significant changes in how artists interact with the world take place. While initially frivolous sounding, these new degrees may evolve into progressive incubators for careers that haven’t yet grown mainstream roots. On the other hand, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment in an experimental, emerging field worth the risk?

    Art School Administration

    Fusco stated that art schools increasingly operate in a corporate manner, a glib remark evoking the evil ways of vulgar capitalism. Yet pundits have proposed the same thing for ALL of higher education for years, if not decades, and the tedious concept of university-as-business becomes superfluous when considering that any institution that ignores balancing income and expenses will simply not survive. Continuing her blanket dismissals, Fusco claimed that art schools confuse students by promoting themselves as research centers for knowledge production, when in fact these institutions are trade schools focused on technical training. (Didn’t she say earlier that students aren’t being taught usable skills?) “There is no concept of research in trade school,” Fuso said, apparently comparing studying art to vocational training in refrigeration or plumbing. Her line of thought might have served a purpose if she had identified the BFA or the MFA as her target, or even specified the culprits of her critique.

    Image illustrating “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns,” Coco Fusco’s article from Modern Painters

    Art schools devise ways to make the precarious employment of teachers permanent, Fusco continued, saying “It’s way beyond adjuncts now.” In fact, she stated that 90 percent of faculty members at art schools are adjuncts, without providing a source for this figure. “Those contracts have wonderful names,” she joked, “like visiting professor, visiting associate adjunct whatever, the titles go on and on, but the bottom line is that this is about the permanence of impermanence.” Adjunctification is indeed a huge problem across academia and especially in the visual arts. The three art capitals of America—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—boast a larger supply of artists, Fusco reported, and therefore teaching is a rough way for them to make a living. She floated the idea of living and working in Kansas City or Iowa City, in Dallas or Houston, but didn’t seem to take that seriously.

    A decline in full-time professors, Fusco went on, has adversely affected faculty governance. In addition to being poorly paid, she said, adjuncts lack a political voice within the institution and must placate students and not rock the boat—“it’s about hanging on.” Professional development has also suffered, which has led to teachers using thirty-five-year-old syllabi. “No one should be allowed to do that,” she fumed. Artists are the hardest adjuncts hit, since part-timers in design and architecture usually have day jobs, which affects their political outlook on precarious labor. “They don’t want more obligations,” Fusco said, so it’s hard to win their support for change. Art schools, she told us, employ students in positions where other institutions, such as MIT, have a support staff of unionized professionals. While a federally subsidized work/study program is certainly beneficial for students, I can imagine that not having properly trained people running the darkroom or the print shop to be frustrating.

    Because art schools face a dearth of applications from the US and a high turnover of students after one year, Fusco claimed, schools don’t have enough students—that is to say, they don’t have enough students to justify the expense of the legions of administrators who manage the pupils. Therefore an influx of foreigners has populated programs at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and CalArts. “Where am I, in Singapore?” she joked at the sea of yellow faces in art schools today. That comment sounded xenophobic, if not racist.

    Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion

    The seduction strategies that recruit students are real, Fusco said, and people aren’t told the truth before entering school—which is that most artists will not make it. (Who are these recruiters?) The lure for the Columbia MFA program in recent years, she said, is that an unidentified department head told students in private conversations that they’ll be rich before they finish school or they’ll hang out with famous art-world people who will help them find money. Fusco also argued that glamorous precarious workers—described by the journalist Riva Seth as “highly educated, skilled professionals who frequently are well compensated but nonetheless lack the security, social benefits or established career trajectories traditionally associated with their professions”—have an illusion of independence.8 Yet the media spin on successful young artists, she warned, fails to acknowledge that artworks bought by collectors who speculate are typically priced less than $10,000 each—hardly a get-rick-quick scheme. Of course, during her talk Fusco assumed—almost arrogantly so—that market success in the commercial art world is the solitary goal of those attending MFA programs. Throughout her talk she avoided discussing any other reason why artists might better themselves through education, leaving no room for other career pursuits.

    During the 1970s, Fusco revealed, artists didn’t depend on the market: selling art was unusual and artists found cheap ways to live. Now those artists—whom she identified as male Conceptual artists teaching in higher education—aren’t the ones who can spread an awareness to students of the need for immediate financial returns after graduation. I’m not sure how that observation squares with her other comments. For example, Fusco said that some professor-artists connect their students to the market because that’s all they can offer as teachers. Art dealers visited CalArts in the 1980s to meet the students of Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, the “spiritual children of the Svengali types” as she put it. And during the 1990s, Fusco continued, dealers visited students at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University School of Art. It was certainly revealing that, according to the speaker’s anecdotes, the art market had begun invading MFA programs over thirty years ago, that it’s not surprising for gallery owners and collectors to pluck fresh talent from artists still in training.

    Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art

    If a young artist’s goal is to exhibit at galleries like Murray Guy or Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Fusco said, or to show in a booth at a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair, then he or she should consider attending expensive graduate schools. At Columbia, she disclosed, students specialize in networking, socializing, and drinking—and even complained to administrators when Fusco made them read and write. “Those students are like little barracudas,” she groused. “If they could kill me and get to my dealer, they would.”

    Since “you’re paying $50,000 a year to be looked at before you even begin your career,” as Fusco claimed, should a prospective student attend a top art school or settle for an MFA program in the hinterlands of America, where he or she might earn a full ride? In the age of $120,000 art degrees, to borrow a slogan from the collective BFAMFAPHD, the latter option is the only sensible choice. Fusco named Arizona State University in Tempe and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as possibilities. For an artist interested in technology, she suggested heading to a school with the latest equipment, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and not to a boutique MFA program that specializes in seminars. I’ve heard that the University of California in Irvine and in Riverside, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale all offer generous packages to MFA students. Germany just made higher education free for anyone, Fusco pointed out, and students don’t even have to be citizens. If it’s actually true that “students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate,” as the critic and adjunct professor Jerry Saltz wrote, then attending a less-prestigious and less-expensive school—and consequently incurring little if any debt—before moving to New York (or wherever) to break into the commercial gallery scene makes a lot of sense.9 This artist will have hundreds of extra dollars a month for studio rent, art supplies, and food.

    During the audience Q&A, the artist Kenneth Pietrobono, who like Noah Fischer is involved in Occupy Museums, declared that he turned down a spot in an MFA program at New York University because the cost of attending was too high, despite loan money being available. That was a wise decision. When faced with rising costs for art school and low expectations after graduation, prospective students must recognize that they are adults who are capable of conducting research, seeking counseling, and making their own decisions before accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loan money. They also must recognize the importance of saying no to unfavorable financial situations. But the fact remains that many artists have shackled themselves with huge amounts of debt, and that is a pity.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Catherine Rampell, “The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country Are Art Schools, Not Ivies,” Washington Post, March 28, 2014.

    2 The tenth institution, Beacon College, is a small school in Florida “exclusively serving students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and other learning differences,” according to its homepage.

    3 See Steven Tepper, “Is an MFA the New MBA?,” Fast Company, March 23, 2013; Glenn Schaeffer, “Why the MFA Is the New MBA,” Vegas Seven, May 20, 2010; Katharine Bell, “The MFA Is the New MBA,” Harvard Business Review, April 14, 2008; Janet Rae-Dupree, “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain,” New York Times, April 6, 2008; Ronald Jones, “The Art Market,” Frieze 101 (September 2006). The concept of MFA=MBA was developed by the business writer and theorist Daniel H. Pink in his Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (New York: Warner Books, 2002) and popularized in the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

    4 Fusco earned a BA in semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and a PhD in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2005).

    5 The Art Institutes, for-profit schools owned by Education Management Corp that teach media and commercial art, not the fine art of painting and sculpture, have had their own legal problems. See David Halperin, “EDMC Professors and Students Speak: How Lobbyists and Goldman Sachs Ruined For-Profit Education,” Republic Report, September 24, 2012; and Chris Kirkham, “With Goldman’s Foray into Higher Education, a Predatory Pursuit of Students and Revenues,” Huffington Post, October 14, 2011.

    6 See Maggie Gray, “Creative Schools: The Artists Taking Art Education into Their Own Hands,” Apollo, September 10, 2014; and Ryan Gander, “Ryan Gander’s Plans for an Art School in Suffolk,” Apollo, September 10, 2014. These kinds of conversations and projects, however, have been taking place for years, if not decades.

    7 It’s interesting that all three are MAs, not MFAs. Because these are not terminal degrees, their recipients will not be qualified to teach art at the college or university level.

    8 Riva Seth, “Give Precarious Workers a Chance,” Policy Options (September 2014).

    9 Jerry Saltz, “An M.F.A. Degree Is Too Expensive, and That’s Only the Start of the Problem,” Vulture, December 5, 2013.

    Read

    Corinna Kirsch, “No Remedies: Coco Fusco on the Ills of Art School,” Art F City, December 18, 2014.

  • Paying Artists, from MoMA to Momenta Art

    W.A.G.E.: How Creative Labor Should Be Compensated
    Thursday, December 11, 2014
    CUE Art Foundation
    Joan Mitchell Foundation, Art Education Center,     New York

    wagecueartfoundation
    Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization

    Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.

    Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.

    Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.

    wageintroduction
    Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle

    W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”

    The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.

    The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.

    W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.

    wagemissing
    Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets

    Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?

    I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.

    Watch

  • Art Image as Consumer Product

    Fads in Art
    November 1983
    New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

    Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product,” Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22

    Although they may seem like opposites to the casual observer, Carter Ratcliff has some things in common with Hilton Kramer: both can talk and write marvelously about art-and-the-culture, and I’m probably not going to like the art either of them likes. This is, of course, not the Hilton Kramer of the postmodernism panel, the one who arrogantly slaps down a serious question, but the Kramer who fulminates so engagingly against the “advanced” political thinkers in art’s infrastructure that we applaud those shysters for inspiring him.

    Carter Ratcliff, on the other hand, analyzes art’s moves from a more detached and, as a rule, more tolerant position. He nearly always sharpens our view of what we have only sensed or supplies an aspect we have entirely missed—in some cases the defining one. Here the focus is on “art image,” always an issue in modern art, now, Ratcliff says, a “junkie addiction.”

    Speaker: Carter Ratcliff

    Carter Ratcliff, art critic, author, and lecturer, spoke at the New Museum on “Fads in Art.” His diagnosis, delivered in a dryly clinical manner, depicted a horrendous condition with tinges of sin, damnation, and guilt. Art faddism is like a “junkie addiction” in which neurotic need meshes with the market forces of our consumer society, he said. Stressing neurosis as explanatory structure, he touched only briefly on economics that encourage such phenomena.

    “The endless need of the art faddist for a new style is like the need of a junkie for another high,” he said. The faddist has the junkie’s concentration on the next fix and functions in a shallow reductive way to this end. “Politics has turned into advertising and food marketing into image shopping…. It was wrongly thought that the art world was different. But it has succumbed to the metaphysical trading of art images. They have become a consumer product you can put in the market basket.” Moreover, “It is not necessary to buy a painting to do this.”

    Among Ratcliff’s other observations were the following:

    “The ways that people present themselves, certain atmospheres, are not just unpleasant but profoundly dubious. Art reflects this. Consumer extremism, defining oneself in terms of an image, is junkie faddist behavior. The image addict thinks fads are avant-garde, a way of knowing what’s going on so he can get ‘ahead of the game’ (a market term). This is what the Village Voice is all about, a weekly report on the state of fads, which have begun to refer to themselves, rather than the world future they’re supposed to be predicting. Movie and drama critics talk to each other through their columns.

    “Pop art shed a revealing light on images that tend to become objects of addiction in a consumer society…. ‘Fast evolution’ is [an] addiction to images of art. Fads are reductive and rescue the insecure personality from ambiguity and ambivalence, removing any sense of the passage of time…. To take oneself out of the context of the world is to remove oneself from the flow of history. Faddists on a fad high claim the justification that they’re in touch with the future. But fads have no predictive power other than to indicate the next fad in the many subcultures that cluster around. In the center of the faddist aura, meaning and value reside in rigid form.

    “There is an obsession with ‘the best.’ The way people construct the world, clothes, wine, home furnishings, all make consumerism a source of redemption and justification for lacking a strong sense of self. Fads are an addiction to glamor, the high of glamor, which relieves one of the necessity to be conscious of what one is doing. Glamor is directive, projecting desires about oneself.

    “In modern culture, art found itself adrift. Art is actualizing consciousness, defining the self. Serious art is a tissue of ambiguities—that’s what makes it great. To ‘worship’ is not to serve the authentic truth of a work of art. It can only be the object of a fad. The seeming dedication of the faddist to greatness becomes its destruction. Fads are not accidental. They are unconsciously intended to dampen and destroy the ambiguity and richness of meaning that give serious art its value.

    “People say, ‘Manet’s time is now,’ ‘Leon Golub’s time is now.’ Is Golub’s time Manet’s time? Will the next time be the next blockbuster show at the Met? The need to see Manet as the vehicle of some absolute value requires one to take him out of time. This saves one from all complexities, such as the upsetting one of comparing Manet with Fantin-Latour—if you think Manet is radical.

    Édouard Manet is the center of attention in Henri Fantin-Latour, A Studio at Les Batignolles, 1870, oil on canvas, 80.31 x 107.48 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    “There are other kinds of fads that can develop in the vicinity of art. Faddists rewrite the past in a reductive way, so that art history becomes the history of one artist. Thus the deification of Turner. The Minimalists saw only Piero della Francesca and referred to him in an intimate tone as ‘Piero,’ like ‘Frank, Chairman of the Board.’ In the late ’50s, people talked like de Kooning or Ted Berrigan talked. And around the offices of Artforum, people sounded like the Reader’s Digest’s ‘Building for World Power.’ Everyone was polysyllabic.

    “The unpleasant part is, we are all implicated. New fads work. We need them because they provide certainty for those who feel uncertain. The desire for authority is projected onto the image, where it is abstracted to the realm where nothing can question it.

    “In the ’60s, magazines focused on fads, because of the rigid style divisions in the art world. In this situation, artists must position themselves so they will be seen. Everybody, including critics, wants to get into the line of sight.

    “My favorite artists are marginal. This is not something trivial. Faddish feelings, insecure perceptions that judge so many to be marginal and only a few of dubious quality to be central, make the whole notion of ‘mainstream’ dubious. It is a bludgeoning word, a very cruel notion … flaunting oneself as being dedicated to images of absolute quality.

    “In a fad, seriousness is reduced to an image. I do make a distinction between kinds of seriousness. The fad is not grappling, coming to terms, pushing further, [avoiding] risks or confrontations. Something is awry. The art world is being flooded with inauthentic images.”

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    Source

    Written by Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product” was originally published in Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 225–26. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Hand Washers

    Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect
    Tuesday, September 16, 2014
    School of Visual Arts,     MA Curatorial Practice Department, New York

    Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?

    Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?

    The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”

    Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.

    Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.

    Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.

    Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.

    Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.

    Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”

    If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:

    The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.

    His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.

    Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”

    Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.

    Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3

    Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.

    Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.

    Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.

    Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.

    Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.

    The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.

    Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.

    An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?

    A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

    1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?

    2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.

    3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.

    4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.

    Read

    Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).

    Watch

  • Value Added

    The Idea of the Moral Imperative in Contemporary Art
    Friday, February 17, 1989
    77th Annual Conference    , College Art Association, Hilton San Francisco, Continental 7, 8, 9, San Francisco

    Future generations researching the good old days at College Art [Association’s Annual Conference] may take this panel for a distillation of its moment, as it casually splices ideals, philosophy, jargon, celebrity, and non sequitur with talk of art-as-money. We see also the intense longings, the search for uplift, the demands for salvation that are increasingly deposited in art. (The most interesting discussion of the panel addressed whether they belong there.)

    Nine years earlier, in what was for me one of the most poignant moments in this book, a student in the audience at a “postmodernism” panel told how artists were making art to oppose nuclear annihilation. A panelist then explained gently—very gently, given the ironic, even caustic, tone of the evening—that such real-world activism would in fact be the opposite of postmodernism in art. Now, at the “Moral Imperative” panel, a speaker tells us “a new link” has been established between postmodernism and ethics—but then fails to explain what that link might be, indeed, in some uncommonly elusive passages, seems to prove the opposite.

    Well, clearly there’s room for argument.

    Moderator: Mel Pekarsky

    Panelists: Amy Baker Sandback, John Baldessari, Luis Camnitzer, Suzi Gablik, Jeff Koons, Robert Storr

    The heartening part was that this high-sounding title, having nothing to do with how to get your work shown or reviewed, had possibly the biggest turnout of any session at this year’s College Art.

    Moderator Mel Pekarsky noted that:

    The words “art” and “morality” have been aimed at each other for a very long time, but never so much as now, and never with such broad multiple definitions of each. Both words are seen often in good and bad company in this postmodern, pluralist unsacred end of the twentieth century—or “McSacred,” as Peter Plagens has called it. And I wonder if either of these words had even the same meaning in, say, Rembrandt’s time; art’s meaning is now perhaps as multiple as its varieties, and the definitions of “moral” laid at art’s doorstep are equally myriad and provocative.

    For example, Paul Goldberger discusses the “morality” of Michael Graves’s designs for the Whitney Museum addition in consideration of Marcel Breuer’s original (assumedly moral) structure.1

    Names themselves—like Richard Serra, and in different ways Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Jesse Helms, too—are touchstones for any number of serious and complicated considerations.

    And the relationships between artist, critic, dealer, collector, patron—everyone in postmodern capitalism’s changed art world—have provoked shelves of articles and books on “art and money” and “art and business” [while] James Rosenquist says of art money: “it’s become like drug money.”

    Then, too, it seems fashionable to call the personal as well as aesthetic morality of the artist into question.… Cellini never had it so tough from Vasari!

    And the current relationships between the art community and the rest of humankind have frequently and rightfully been questioned…. Andrew Kagan writes of the “moral emptiness of [contemporary] art” and says, “But what is becoming increasingly disturbing is the tact that we have for so long lacked even the climate, the attitudes of high seriousness and commitment in art.”… Donald Kuspit considers the artist as activist, weighing “the human and political potential of activist art” to which many have indeed turned, while Alberto Moravia states categorically, “Art cannot politicize itself without committing suicide; in politics, terrorism is always anticultural, and in art, the avant-garde is always terrorist.”

    And William H. Gass in his essay “Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” subtitled “In Search of a Worthy No,” [says] “There is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did…. To live is to defend a form.… It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, every dance were danced in the dark. That would be a worthy no—but it will never be uttered.”

    This panel will begin with the premise that the first decision an artist makes when starting to work in this postmodern, pluralist end of the twentieth century is a moral one; that is, if you can paint whatever you want—since nobody cares what you paint or if you paint at all until you’re a commodity—the first decision is what to paint. This is diametrically opposed to premodern art, which was preceded by “need” and “commission” with the style usually universal and content preordained….

    To show that Abstract Expressionism had been a movement of moral strength and conviction, Pekarsky quoted Barnett Newman recalling the ’40s in the ’60s:

    We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.2

    Pekarsky then quoted John Baldessari as talking of “trying to get back to bedrock in his work, trying to strip away all the nonessential and thereby arrive at choice through this reductivist approach; choice, which seems such a fundamental issue of contemporary art. In his own work, Pekarsky said:

    I have “risked,” I suppose, a large number of embarrassing paintings in trying to arrive at an iconography I could believe in—and believe worth painting. In the process, format as well as form became a concern for a while, in addition to subject or content, and led me into an involvement with public art: trying to make art that belonged to everyone but was nobody’s property … to not make tradable objects; to play with the idea of large landscapes on walls in the real, urban landscape…. These concerns immersed me in the questions we’re here to discuss today.

    Then he quoted British sculptor William Turnbull on public sculpture commissions: “The problem with public sculpture is with the public, not with sculpture. The idea of designing a sculpture for a particular site, even if chosen oneself, seems to me a gross limitation on the sculptor’s freedom of action.”

    Pekarsky ended his introduction with, “If you can paint whatever you want, what do you paint? Does it matter? … If you can paint whatever you want, isn’t there implicit in your decision great power? … And no small byway—what should the critic be doing these days? What’s the critic’s responsibility, moral or otherwise? I have yet to see a critical program equal to facing the millennium with honor.”

    Amy Baker Sandback’s opening was not promising: “There’s no such thing as moral art, just moral artists. Words are only symbols for ideas, not fixtures of thought. Their powerful meanings are shaped by public and private perceptions and fine-tuned by considerations … more down-to-earth than the spiritual…. ‘Moral’ and ‘Art’ are both valid symbols of important contemporary concerns—the first has to do with the maker and the second with what is made.”

    Sandback said that [when] preparing for the panel she had consulted her dictionary. In the ten-volume New Century she found six columns of tiny print for the word moral. The words aesthetic and art took up one column, and imperative a quarter of a column. Moral was followed by morass, a swamp. Sandback concluded that “moral is a noun related to ethics, pertaining to right and wrong, manners and custom; to the mind as opposed to the physical; part of a truly developed healthy intellect.”

    She then said in a tone of great authority that she is “all for moral persons who happen to be artists, and for moral viewers,” which she and the audience seemed to feel was a valuable insight. However, she went on with a sharp, cogent, and honest (albeit unfashionable) commentary:

    The role of the contemporary artist as new-wave guru, and the perception that art making provides an inside track to a special truth denied the rest of humankind, is a dangerous role for all concerned. Artists are as flawed and sometimes as brilliant as academics, doctors, or bricklayers. No style is necessarily moral, no subject matter is necessarily correct, no political message or religious symbol necessarily renders great art. Piggybacking an aesthetic to a cause may indicate an important aspect of a personality or maybe marketing or simply a stylish ideological trick. Bad artists can produce masterpieces as well as the obverse. If morality is an imperative of art, how do you approach an erotic Shunga image of strange sexual contortion or the photographs of artists such as Mapplethorpe, Witkin, or any other sometimes disagreeable talent [or how do you enjoy] a lyrical Matisse knowing it was done during the Occupation?3 … I believe in art and its ability to make magic even when it’s ugly or anguished or performed as an intellectual exercise and even when it’s dumb and lovely. Morality is a judgment that serves no aesthetic purpose.”

    Sandback’s final comment was, “Being able to speak well of your work is good for business.”

    John Baldessari told an anecdote about running into Jeff Koons in New York and mentioning a profile on Koons in a recent Los Angeles Times, in which a critic who ordinarily writes on rock and roll criticized Koons’s work, applying different standards of morality to it than would be applied to music. Koons’s comment was, “Gee, you’d think she thought I was Mark Kostabi or somebody.” (The audience found this retort hilarious; it brought the house down—perhaps something about the word “Kostabi.”) Baldessari took this as evidence that “art is the last bastion of morality.”

    He continued, free-associating:

    When I think of morality I think of money. [T]here was a period when poster sizes got smaller until you just had little cards being mailed out with discreet type and you’d go into a gallery or museum and it would be hard to see the work, and, as Lucy Lippard has said, “It’s hard to read things on the wall when you’ve got a screaming baby under your arm.” Now they’re getting bigger again; people like to have stuff [posters]—stuff sells. Sculpture went from ephemeral materials in the ’60s and ’70s to where now everything is in bronze—it’s durable and can be handed down. Your investment is protected; it won’t disintegrate in twenty years.

    Art is now equated with money, and they all want to have all the news on art. You can’t even get into a panel anymore. Art is reaching a point where it may be interchangeable with money—art as a medium of exchange. [But] if art didn’t sell we wouldn’t worry about it so much. If Schnabel’s paintings didn’t sell, they might be more interesting. They are less serious because they sell for so much money. Anselm Kiefer seems to be very moral and serious, but with his prices going up, we start to question his seriousness. When money comes in, it starts to cast doubt. I had an argument in a New York bar with a friend who said, “Koons’s art caters to the lowest common denominator,” but [Koons] seems to perfectly reflect our culture. I’m very suspicious of anyone who tells anybody what kind of art they should do. An old dealer friend in Germany said art should have no message. I feel I should do what the culture needs, but I’m bored with the idea. I’m paralyzed in front of the question of what is the right art to do…. Do what one does best—like athletes. Find out what your weaknesses and strengths are and work on the strengths.

    Baldessari said with students he works on strengths and tells them to forget their weaknesses. He believes moral purpose is “using all the strengths you have.”

    Luis Camnitzer, an artist originally from Germany who has lived in Uruguay, said a friend, after reading the paper he was about to present, warned that it was very pious, but it was too late to change it:

    We live believing we are artists, but we are actually ethical beings sifting right from wrong. To survive ethically we need a political awareness to understand our environment…. Packaging is all. Thoughtless substitution can create the same havoc as when detergent is packaged as perfume. “Manipulation” of the viewer has negative connotations [so] we always avoid it when describing art processes, using euphemisms like “composition” and “design.” The shift of the action from ethics into aesthetics allows for the delusion that only those decisions pertaining to content have an ethical quality. [But] most of our art is socially muddled, even when it functions in the market. The explicit wish of most artists is to live off their art production, but they have mixed feelings regarding the question of money as unethical.

    Lately a new link has been established between ethics and postmodernism. The postmodern label serves to co-opt and unify some artistic expressions. Postmodernism can be seen as a demoralization of some antiformalist tendencies, [a] replacement of some conservative contexts, and a reinternationalization of what threatens to become a nationalist fragmentation in art. Art is still far from being an ethical affair. We rarely challenge in depth the parameters which define art or the technical constraints offered by art history.

    Surely the “parameters which define art” are challenged six times a day by every MFA student in America. But this paper seems less “pious” than murky, or let’s say overly succinct, leaving us to wonder what “reinternationalization” does, what “the technical constraints of art history” are, how one would “challenge” them, in depth or not, how such technical constraints become moral issues, etc., etc., etc.

    Suzi Gablik said that as a critic in the late ’80s she is concerned with understanding our cultural myths and how they evolve, what it means to be a “successful” artist working in the world today, and whether the image that comes to mind is one we can support and believe in:

    Dominance and mastery are crucial to our notion of success…. The art industry is inseparable from the giant web of our cultural addictions to work, money, possessions, prestige, materialism, and technology. Unless efforts are made to reassess our relationship to the present framework and its practices, new patterns won’t take hold. Vested interests will ensure that they are maintained as before. If we want change, we need to evolve new ground rules for the future. The moral task before us is to identify which approaches to art make sense in today’s world, Aesthetics views art as something autonomous and separate, as socially nonfunctional, existing for its own sake, The best art is made for no good reason and is valuable for its own sake. Ortega y Gasset said, “A work of art is nothing but a work of art, a thing of no transcendency or consequence.” Once fully conscious of how we’ve been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of these cultural images and role models as personal ideals and the possibility then opens for actually modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.

    Gablik described the project of Dominique Mazeaud, an artist friend living in Santa Fe [called] The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River. Once a month she and other friends meet to clean pollution out of the river. Gablik showed slides of the work and read excerpts from a diary of the ongoing project. One entry records picking up as much as 103 pounds of broken glass in a single day; others ponder how the strange miscellany of objects finds its way into the river. The artist calls her journal entries her “riveries.”

    Gablik quoted Caroline Casey: “Nothing which is not socially and ecologically responsible will make it out of this decade alive.” [Gablik] concluded, “Moving away from the competitive modes of institutionalized aesthetics is one way of not perpetrating the dominator system. Forgoing its rites of production and consumption, its mythology of professionalism, and its power archetype of success, only then can we begin to evolve a different set of ground rules for the future. But the willingness to make this systems shift is the beginning of recovery.”

    Jeff Koons, who showed a history of his work from 1978 to the present, said there is a great shuffling and shifting of power now in the art world, but that he’s an optimist and believes things beneficial to humankind will be “absorbed into evolution” and “things that are negative will be destroyed.” Koons said he has always been “at the service of his art,” explaining that his work on Wall Street was to finance his art. White middle-class kids use art for social mobility as some ethnic groups use basketball for social mobility, he said, and, “just as basketball players become front men, so do artists.” Koons was very funny and appealing, despite intermittently feigning modesty and becoming sanctimonious over his slides.

    Robert Storr, a contributing editor to Art in America, started to paint because he needed a hobby, and found it was fun.4 He quoted Picasso that “the best art is always fiction,” adding that “the religion of art is not religion, the spirituality of art is not spirituality, the humanism of art is not humanism, and between those terms, in that negation, is the reasonable place to start.” As for morality:

    The consciousness of artifice is the one thing for which the artist is morally responsible, not to be a sucker for his/her own ideas and sincerity and not to ask anyone else to be one either…. Rather than commandments, I would put forth two propositions for the audience: never trust anybody who say he’s telling it straight from the shoulder [and] never trust a kidder.

    For the question period, Pekarsky gave the usual warning (“No manifestos, only questions”) but, beginning by recognizing his friends in the audience or those whose names he knew, he was rewarded mostly with manifestos. Then came questions like, “Can you maintain your morality in New York’s glitzy art world?” Gablik responded, “Transformation of one’s own consciousness and the place where that transformation is most important is New York, and anyone undergoing such a change should get to New York fast.”

    Another statement-question was, “Careerism is related to morality and Koons said on Wall Street he faced a daily handling of moral issues, and that he felt free when he left the business world for the art world, because it was free of those issues, and yet here we are discussing it.” The response to that was, “Careerism is meaningless until given meaning by the speaker,” which seemed to satisfy the questioner. Someone asked why the person “cleansing” the Rio Grande didn’t work with local governing agencies, such as environmental protection; another started with, “An artist is one who produces masterpieces.” That question and several others were rejected outright by the panelists, who said they couldn’t deal with them.

    Perhaps I’m the only one who found much of these talks (transcribed practically verbatim above) or their relation to the issues baffling. The standing-room-only audience was rapt throughout, and at conclusion couldn’t stop applauding.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 See Paul Goldberger, “The Whitney Paradox: To Add Is To Subtract,” New York Times, January 8, 1989.

    2 See Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Mathews,” in John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writing and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 287.

    3 Sandback could be referring to either the painter Jerome Witken or his twin brother, the photographer Joel Peter Witken.

    4 As of 1990, [Robert Storr was] curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Value Added” was originally published in Women Artists News 14, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1989); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 287–90. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Fun Fun Fun on the Infobahn

    The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions
    Sunday, May 11, 2014
    Frieze Talks 2014
    Frieze Projects, Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    Dana Schutz, Google, 2006, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    In her opening remarks for “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at the art fair Frieze New York, the panel’s moderator Orit Gat remarked that conversation about net neutrality has changed in recent years. Indeed, public awareness regarding the controlling forces behind the delivery infrastructure of the web has risen sharply after two pieces of federal legislation introduced in 2011—the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—failed to develop, along with the “internet blackout” protest on January 28, 2012, and the onslaught of related op-ed pieces over the last couple years.

    Reducing the information superhighway to fast and slow lanes would no doubt pave the way to chaos on the roads on which millions of ordinary Americans travel daily. We would witness terrible bottlenecks and breakdowns, insufferable congestion and gridlock, and relentless construction work and impossible detours. If the internet behemoths have their way, Gat warned, “you will stream Netflix faster than you read the New York Times, if Netflix chooses to pay for it.” And the start-ups, the nonprofits, and all those individually maintained websites would presumably stall into obscurity. I wonder, though, how significant net neutrality is for contemporary artists, especially those who work closely with digital media. Based on this panel discussion, the issue doesn’t seem that important, but related topics—such as how the corporatization of the internet affects artists and the definition of postinternet art—are of particular interest.

    Oblique view of “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Gat, a writer and editor for Rhizome and WdW Review, quickly gave a chronological history of the web as it intersected with digital art. While working at CERN in Switzerland, the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) in 1989. Internet art grew in the early 1990s, she continued, helped along when US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly expanded online access for many citizens and businesses. Artists have influenced the web’s look and feel as we know it today much more than we realize, Gat said, and that internet and postinternet art developed simultaneously. This makes sense—thinking about Web 2.0, you can’t theorize the massive influence of Facebook and OkCupid, which launched in 2004 and run at full steam today, without considering LiveJournal and the Makeout Club, both founded in 1999 (but now puttering along). Despite the term “post,” Gat insisted, there is no art after the internet. Rather, postinternet art is a product of, and a response to, the changing digital landscape.

    The first speaker was Gene McHugh, a writer and curator known for the blog Post Internet, who spoke biographically. The mainstream migration of people to the web, he said, took place in the late 1990s, when he was in high school. “I was an internet addict,” he said. “My identity was as much online as it was a body sitting there typing.” I was relieved McHugh advocated a synthetic view of a person’s relationship to digital culture, instead of trotting out the clichéd internet/IRL divide.

    The cover of the print book edition of Gene McHugh’s Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (2011)

    McHugh intended Post Internet to explore and connect modes of digital production to modernism and the Pictures Generation—a pretentious approach, he admitted. Modernist terms, he came to realize as the project evolved, are not useful when describing the banal behavior of checking Gmail and social networks and watching cat videos. “The writing was rough, in retrospect,” he said, and also full of young fervor. For Post Internet McHugh deliberately chose the default blog settings, a kind of readymade design that he said created an awareness of the self-publication format. That sounds suspiciously like self-reflexive modernism, like Jean-Luc Godard foregrounding the act of making and watching films. The blog’s domain name contained a short string of numbers (122909a.com), and the posts contained only writing—no embedded links or photos.1 “It’s a certain way to approach the internet” that he said was characteristic of the late 2000s. “If you push it far into this banal realm, it works in an interesting way.”

    McHugh explained Guthrie Lonergan’s term “internet aware art” as meaning offline art made with the internet in mind, or art made with an eye toward how it will look online. Considering time as an element, McHugh theorized that multiauthor projects such as the Jogging and Dump.fm, as well as surfing clubs, can be understood as performance, since you can follow this activity online but in real time. He also identified Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith as artists exploring this kind of art in different ways.

    The second speaker, the artist and writer Tyler Coburn, wanted to define postinternet, and especially that nagging prefix “post.” Instead, he read a formal, polemical, and somewhat difficult-to-follow artist’s statement that addressed the art market and art history. “The current market for postinternet art,” Coburn claimed, “is nothing if not robust.” He was less optimistic about periodization, which constricts some artists and renders others illegible. I don’t, however, find it unreasonable to group together similar artists and their work for the sake of convenience, acknowledging, of course, that such categorization doesn’t always make sense at a granular level. As problematic as they might be, terms like Cubism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism simply work. As much the term postinternet makes its supporters anxious, it still allows them to slide their work into a relevant discourse.

    Regarding his own critical practice, Coburn firmly stated: “My work attempts to disenchant the dominant metaphors and mindsets at work in contemporary technology.” The reflexivity and opacity of digital infrastructure concern him greatly, as do finding a digital space outside Facebook and exploring emerging methods and practices, whatever those may be. He named Benjamin H. Bratton and Ann Hirsch as people doing critical work and cited his own project, I’m That Angel (2012–13), which took the form of a physical book and several readings inside data farms around the world, as another example.

    Readings of Tyler Coburn’s I’m That Angel at EvoSwitch in Haarlem, the Netherlands, took place June 6–7, 2013

    Christiane Paul, a professor and program director at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct curator of new media arts for the Whitney Museum of American Art, ran through highlights of a previous talk called “The Network Space,” which chronicles the transition from web 1.0 and web 2.0—in particular the move from publishing (e.g., personal websites) to participation and broadcasting (blogging)—through works of art. She mentioned Mark Napier’s browser mash-up Riot (1999/2000); Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces (2011), a fictitious dating website created from scraped Facebook profiles; projects such as Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam (1996–2003) and its commercially oriented spawn, lonelygirl15 (2006–8); and Aaron Koblin’s crowd-sourced drawings for The Sheep Market (2006).

    Shane Hope, Backdoor.Deathsys.exe Running Soon on a Death Cube Near You: Posted Two Thousand Sixty Whatever and Ever, 2007, oil on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (artwork © Shane Hope)

    According to Paul, “There’s nothing post in postinternet” art, which she described as work that is “deeply informed by networked technology” and is digitally aware but takes the form of material objects. Paul’s canon of postinternet artists includes Rafaël Rozendaal, Clement Valla, Petra Cortright, John Raffman, Evan Roth, and Katie Torn—artists who have emerged in the past few years. For me, some of the best work about the internet (using Paul’s formulation) came even earlier and often took offline forms. Seth Price’s ongoing explorations of digital distribution (since 2000), Adam McEwen’s drawings of text messages from a Nokia phone (ca. 2006–8?), Shane Hope’s rickety laptops built from painted wood scraps (2006) and his paintings of imaginary digital-device screens (2007), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s bizarre videos (2006–present), and even Dana Schutz’s Google (2006), where she sits in her studio entranced by the offerings of the almighty company’s Image Search—these artworks, made by fairly traditional and post-Conceptual artists (and not necessarily creators of digitally sophisticated forms), explore the condition of interacting with digital networks and technologies.2 On a side note, one of the most brilliant artworks of the George W. Bush era was Ramsay Stirling’s animated GIF, Enduring Freedom (2008).

    Anyway, postinternet art takes on a physical form, Paul reminded us, but whether or not a viewer understands the concept of the form (or its subject matter) is another issue. Like Gat before her, Paul noticed the increasing corporatization of the internet during the 1990s but, in slight contrast to Coburn’s celebration of sales of postinternet art, stated that the market for internet art hasn’t changed since the 1990s. How do these observations square with Rachel Greene, who ten years ago wrote that “as yet, there exists no viable or stable market for net art.”3 Furthermore, Paul vaguely described an antimarket attitude among postinternet artists, who are “savvier” in some undisclosed way. It’s not clear to me how artists working in the digital realm are making money—or not—based on these three assessments.

    Christiane Paul (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    The conversation among the panelists after their individual presentations progressed productively. McHugh argued that first-generation net artists, who had trained academically, were happy working in the margins, and that younger artists would have used paintbrushes, too, if they hadn’t grown up digital. Nevertheless, he said, those younger artists still want the white-cube experience.

    Gat complained that much digital art ends up looking the same, aggravated by the ubiquitous use of Facebook and products from Google (and Google Earth in particular). She wondered if artists are problematizing the operations of these corporations or are complicit with them. I sympathize with her wariness of the dependence on proprietary corporate platforms. If Tumblr, which allows people to use their own domain names for their microblog but doesn’t offer back-end programming access, pulled the plug tomorrow, the content for every site would likely disappear with it. Conversely, platforms are occasionally abandoned en masse by their users. Remember all those indie bands that created MySpace pages instead designing their own stand-alone websites? Well, they’re on Soundcloud and Bandcamp now, because that’s where the audience is. The question is, how much self-sufficiency should an artist relinquish to reach that audience? McHugh said that postinternet art aims for a larger audience beyond the art world. Paul doesn’t see Google taking over art with a nonexclusive right, and there are ways to combat marketing, such as, for example, by “liking” everything.

    I agree with Gat in that postinternet artists often produce consumer-friendly work which anyone can make, and that using a popular, deskilled digital process does make things homogenous. But Coburn reminded us that, whether it’s art that conforms to the New Aesthetic, a term used by the writer James Bridle to describe a certain kind of visuality, or automatic, personless photography taken by drones and satellites and affiliated with corporations and governments, this is how we view the world now. Besides, Paul added, it’s easy to argue that any style or moment can appear homogenous. For her it’s Abstract Expressionism, but for me the black-and-white photographs, typewritten texts, and maps of Conceptual art and Earthworks readily come to mind. While artists in the late 1960s were emulating science and industry—what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called the aesthetic of administration—postinternet artists are making user-end art, based not on programming and hand coding, skills the first generation of net artist learned, but rather on out-of-the-box applications. Postinternet artists—who Coburn proposed are targeting nonart audiences but needing art-world legitimation—want to have their cake and eat it too. Paul said that criticality comes from within the medium, an awkward position of which artists are aware. A curator (like herself) looks at both critical work and the stuff “riding the wave of flashiness.”

    The idea of audience intrigued me. I wondered how much contemporary digital art—especially the stuff using Google Maps or Twitter—would be interesting to your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What would highly skilled programmers and designers make of work by all the artists mentioned during this panel? Probably with the same kind of amusement that a 1970s Hollywood filmmaker would have when viewing early video art by William Wegman and Vito Acconci. Similarly, what kind of distinctions would contemporary programmers and designers make between an art-gallery video and an amateur YouTube clip? We’re now fully immersed in the world in which the gap between art and life has ceased to exist. Would avant-garde artists who championed that notion one hundred years ago be horrified or pleased with early-twenty-first-century practices?

    Tyler Coburn (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    An audience member had the same idea and queried the panelists about differences between avant-garde or critical artists and the general public when both use the same digital tools. The gap has collapsed, McHugh said, but artists are examining issues other than these products, such as the physical and environmental impact of cloud computing. But that is also an important topic for mainstream media, especially in states such as North Carolina, where Apple has built several solar-powered data farms. Paul said that while some artists produce interesting work from behind the curve, most of them are “by nature and statistically” ahead of the curve, waiting for the technologies to be invented for their use. Char Davies, she recalled, was a frustrated painter who in the 1980s helped create Softimage, a software application for three-dimensional image creation that was later acquired by Microsoft in the 1990s. That happened twenty years ago—which artists have done something like this recently?

    Another audience member linked the web’s founding in 1989 to the fall of communism and then asked about digital natives of technology and of “markets as the only way of organizing the world.” Is postinternet a condition, he wanted to know, and not a subgenre? “I would say absolutely, yes,” said Paul. “It’s not an art movement. It’s not an art genre.” She acknowledged that (art-historical) acceptance comes from the market, and that museums look to the market for validation. For her, artists and critical practitioners must therefore denaturalize the present condition and create suspicion, whatever that might be. McHugh wondered about the critical role of writers and curators, of articles and exhibitions. I’d say all of that is highly important to the development of both internet and postinternet art, which is still very much up in the cloud, I mean, in the air.

    In Terms Of count: 12.

    1 Funded in part by a grant from the Arts Writers Grant Program, Post Internet published regularly for most of 2010 but was then taken offline. McHugh’s collected posts can be read online or downloaded as a PDF for free, or purchased as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.

    2 For a superb essay on Schutz’s painting Google, see Steven Stern, “Image Search,” Frieze 106 (April 2007): 136–41.

    3 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 31.

    Listen

    Frieze Projects New York has posted an audio recording of this panel.

  • Can and Should Artists Group Together for Their Mutual Benefit?

    This text is the third of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and second reports.

    Can and Should Artists Group Together for Their Mutual Benefit?
    Monday, October 28, 1974
    New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York

    Moderator: Rubin L. Gorewitz

    Panelists: Susan Bush, Sandy Relis, and George Segal, artists; Barbara Nessim, illustrator; Ed Cramer, president, Broadcast Music; Joshua Cahn, former counsel, Artists Equity; and Robert Wade, general counsel, National Endowment for the Arts

    georgesegalscullportrait
    George Segal, Portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull, 1965, oil on canvas, plaster, and wood chair with cloth, 96 x 72 x 72 in. (artwork © George and Helen Segal Foundation)

    George Segal said a certain amount of “cruelty” in the art world is necessary for the making of good art, although one could reply that sufficient cruelty would exist in the art world even if artists got 15 percent residuals.

    Susan Bush, an organizer of the Boston Visual Artists Union, said Boston artists have done it, and, with totally open membership, now run the largest gallery in New England.

    Sandy Relis, board member of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, said artists don’t organize well. However, he noted that today we have allies—lawyers, accountants, and organizers—prepared to give time and energy to our cause.

    Unfortunately, the single issue of the 15 percent royalty was too narrow for nearly three and a half hours of talk, mostly by lawyers. Participation from the floor, which might have enlivened [the] proceedings, was not encouraged.

    The evening became more interesting when other ideas came up. For example, there was some discussion of the copyright law in New York State. Commercial artist Peter Max said his work has often been ripped off for reproduction and he has little recourse. Ed Cramer said artists should put the copyright sign (© or the word “copyright”), followed by year of publication, on any work in public exhibition and register it with Washington to gain protection of the reproduction law.

    Since so much of the vitality of the artists’ rights movement now comes from women’s groups, it was strange that no panelists represented the women artists’ view. Beyond that, residual rights is not an issue that will seriously concern many artists. Most of us have more immediate problems.

    The attendant publicity is raising public consciousness, however. Both Time magazine and Esquire have recently had major articles on artists’ rights. As Nathaniel Katz said, “Artists, like Mozart, are tired of coming in at the servants’ entrance.”

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Donna Marxer, this review appeared in Artworkers News 4, no. 8 (November 1974); and was reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 3. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Residual Rights—Can the Concept Be Implemented?

    This text is the second of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and third reports.

    Residual Rights—Can the Concept Be Implemented?
    Monday, October 28, 1974
    New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York

    Moderator: Gerald S. Hobbs, publisher, American Artist

    Panelists: Michael Botwinick, director, Brooklyn Museum; Martin Bressler, attorney; Herman Finkelstein, attorney, former general counsel, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); Rubin Gorewitz, financial consultant; Carl Zanger, attorney, Committee on the Arts; and Jeff London and James Rosenquist, artists

    Rubin Gorewitzartistsreservedrights, coauthor of an artists’ rights bill under study by Congress, noted that the mafia is now buying art for profit and that his bill would discourage them. He also said it would deter thieves. (This reporter doesn’t see how a thief would be prevented from selling to a secret buyer who wants the work only for himself. Moreover, work could still be held for ransom, a common purpose of art theft.) Gorewitz said the law would work well because it would be administered by the Internal Revenue Service.

    Herman Finkelstein cited ASCAP, which has been extremely effective in controlling royalties for composers. Gorewitz described a system of “follow-up” payments in Europe. Since the 1920s, France has had a droit de suite law, returning 3 percent on resale to the artist, whether prices go up or down. It apparently isn’t working too well, because the amount actually collected is very low compared to sales.

    Robert Projansky, lawyer and author of the best-known transfer agreement, was invited up from the floor. He disagreed with panelists about government policing. Government intervention in the arts would be damaging, he said, while a voluntary transfer agreement would be effective if most artists used it.

    Projansky pointed out that transfer agreements are used in real estate all the time, adding that artists could give up their royalty if they wished, keeping other provisions. He feels strongly that artists should maintain some control over their works after they are sold, even after their death. (The recent alteration of work in the David Smith estate by [his] executor Clement Greenberg makes a strong case for this point.)

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Donna Marxer, this review appeared in Artworkers News 4, no. 8 (November 1974); and was reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 3. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Residual Rights for the Visual Artist—Are They Desirable?

    This text is the first of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the second and third reports.

    Residual Rights for the Visual Artist—Are They Desirable?
    Monday, October 28, 1974
    New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York

    An array of worthies in and about the art world met at Loeb Student Center for three panels on the question of “rights” for the visual artist. The principal topic, the controversial 15 percent residual payment to the artist on resale of his or her work, is nothing new. However, last year’s historic Sotheby Parke Bernet auction dramatized the issue.

    That was when a Rauschenberg painting, originally bought by collector Robert Scull for $900, was resold by him for $95,000 [actually $85,000]. Rauschenberg was enraged, publicly scrapped with Scull [legend has it fisticuffs were exchanged], and, with his accountant Rubin Gorewitz (“the artist’s accountant”), formed a foundation and went to Washington to lobby for an artists’ rights bill.

    The public had been invited to hear the pros and cons discussed. According to a show of hands, the audience consisted of perhaps 85 percent artists; they came and went in large numbers during the marathon event.

    Moderator: S. Spencer Grin, publisher of the Saturday Review

    Panelists: Paula Cooper, Paula Cooper Gallery; Lawrence Fleischman, director, Kennedy Gallery; Robert Scull, collector; and Ron Gorchov, Nathaniel Katz, Jacob Landau, Peter Max, and Robert Rauschenberg, artists

    jasperjohns0through9drawing
    Robert Scull offered two works by Jasper Johns in the 1973 auction. Pictured here is Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1961, charcoal and pastel on paper,  54¼ x 41⅝ in. (artwork © Jasper Johns)

    The panel got off to a late start because Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Scull were still out to dinner—together.

    Then Lawrence Fleischman opened by objecting to the residual agreement, a not-unexpected position for a dealer. Artists would be more hurt than helped, he said; anyway, “90 percent of artworks go down in value.” Paula Cooper was in favor of the 15 percent, but pessimistic about implementation. She has one artist who uses the voluntary contract, but says she meets buyer opposition.

    Jacob Landau thought the only artists to benefit would be the ones who have already benefited from the art boom, the elite few. Rauschenberg was succinct. He was in favor, “and I don’t want to argue about it.” Scull, charming and soft-spoken, had apparently had a change of heart. He now favors some sort of royalty for the artist and said he doesn’t believe it will slow the art market.

    Landau felt it would. He sees a world depression coming [in] which little art will be sold. Rauschenberg countered, “No artist can afford that kind of pessimism.” As for size of the royalty, panelists either agreed on 15 percent or hedged, except Ron Gorchov, who insisted on 50 percent. “Fifteen percent is like a tip!”

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Donna Marxer, this review appeared in Artworkers News 4, no. 8 (November 1974); and was reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 2–3. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.