In Terms Of

Tag: Artists Talk on Art

  • The Last Woman’s Panel?

    Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want?
    Monday, March 31, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Despite Barbara Zucker’s accusations of “boring” or maybe because of them—this was a lively event, and the two responses stirred things up a bit more. Perhaps now that we have lived another sixteen years, anyone of us would respond differently. For Zucker’s afterthoughts, expressed at, yes, another woman’s panel, also at A.I.R [Gallery], see the Afterword.1

    Moderator: Corinne Robins
    Panelists: Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Zucker, Nancy Spero, Phoebe Helman, Howardena Pindell, and Mary Beth Edelson

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 1.

    I think the best thing A.I.R. could do would be to have men. I hope there won’t be any more women’s panels and I hope this is the last one I’m on. You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected. They expect us to continue the way we are…. I don’t think feminism is the real world any more. The point was to get women artists taken seriously. Women still aren’t as equal as men, but I don’t think women’s galleries are helpful any more. I don’t think it helps to be in A.I.R.2

    —Barbara Zucker

    That statement came midway in a brisk discussion by six well-known women of the art world, speaking to a full house at the Soho Exhibition Center, an audience which included the video eye of Ingrid and Bob Wiegand, and a noticeable proportion of men.

    Moderator Corinne Robins began by noting that the six women artists “all benefited from the women’s movement, as every woman has. But what happens when ‘The Year of the Woman’ is over? Feminism is getting to be a tired issue to many people.” (Robins’s added, however, that “the abuses are still there.”)

    The six women showed slides of their work and described their artistic concerns, which could have been an evening in itself. The perception of six disparate and developed sensibilities was already a dense experience. The transition from Nancy Spero’s Body Count and Torture in Chile to “How much has the women’s movement influenced the direction of your painting?” was as difficult as Spero could have wished. But then the discussion swung into matters of practical, political and social concern, and the visual experience faded.

    Howardena Pindell: Without the women’s movement I wouldn’t have shown so soon. If I weren’t part of the gallery [A.I.R.], I don’t know if I’d be showing yet.

    Mary Beth Edelson: I was dealing with feminist subject matter before the movement, but I don’t think I understood why. Now I’m dealing in an overt way with feminist subject matter—pulled out and clarified by the movement.

    Phoebe Helman: I think the women’s movement, even though it was helpful in some ways, has nothing to do with my work. I haven’t been affected in the studio at all.

    Zucker: It’s much easier for the work to grow if it’s out there being shown….

    Nancy Spero: The feminist movement won’t fizzle out. We could never go back to the old standards. The new knowledge is too pervasive … it’s in our bones.

    Helman: It took outrageous things like dirty Tampax at the Whitney to get attention—then, hopefully, the pendulum swings.3

    Joyce Kozloff: I can’t imagine what my work or my life would be like if I hadn’t gone through the women’s movement. My work and the movement are very connected—they developed together. I see many feminist women whose work has grown, expressing their own growth and new confidence and sense of themselves as women.

    Robins: Some of the work in the Women Choose Women show [1973] struck me as very timid. Then those women got more exposure. That gave them the guts to take chances—to be less timid, no longer second-hand artists.

    Will there continue to be a need for A.I.R. and women’s galleries?

    Spero: Eventually there will be a reconciliation, but we still need outposts of independence.

    Edelson: I still see a need for A.I.R. and Soho 20, but we need to go on to another plateau. [U]ntil we integrate, we won’t have the main money and the main power.

    Helman: It’s a heterosexual world. There comes a time when this kind of support becomes a crutch.

    Spero: It’s not a heterosexual world. The art world is still male dominated. To join the system is to join the same old stuff. I’d still be excluded from commercial galleries…. There are still under 23 percent women in the Whitney Annual. We still talk about “good artists” according to male standards. Our standards for all artwork are male controlled.

    Robins: As a writer and reviewer, I have more chance to speak and write about women’s art because AI.R. and Soho 20 exist…. In 1973, as a critic, I thought Women Choose Women was a major disaster.

    Zucker: It’s time for a major museum to do a major show of women—not one started and paid for by the women—but started and paid for by the museum. [Quoting Vivian Gornick in the Village Voice]: “No one of us has the truth or the word or the only view or the only way….” It would be very comfortable for me to still be with A.I.R. I feel very fragile now. I left with great difficulty, but it was very important for me to leave.

    Audience: The world is so sick, it seems to me our only hope is bastions of what we’d like it to be—don’t corrupt yourself with that other “reality.”

    Helman: Don’t talk about Utopia! Are you aware of the politics that went on with the Women Choose Women show? That was politics!

    Zucker: It takes a great toll on an artist to always have to do everything yourself, to schlepp, and call, and carry and photograph…. To survive, and do well, a gallery needs a lot of money. We got certain grants at A.I.R., but those were tokens.

    Robins: But that’s part of every cooperative gallery.

    Edelson: I like doing some of the work you object to, but I’d like to have someone do a little of it. I have a dealer too, but he makes so many incredible mistakes…. It’s nice to have a little control.

    Man in Audience: What is women’s art?

    Panel: Art done by a woman.

    Man: Renoir dealt with the subject of women. Is he a woman artist?

    Spero: That’s a male’s view. [W]omen are supposed to conform to his view. We want to see how we see ourselves.

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 2.

    My first comment is that, while the men never seemed to complain about the absence of women during all those years of “men only” galleries, many women found something missing in women’s galleries almost from the start. Is that because it’s a man’s world, or a basic difference in the needs of men and women?

    But the gallery in question, A.I.R., seems to have had a rather remarkable and nearly instantaneous success, considering that it is a cooperative and was initiated without “stars” or powerful patronage. It earned the respect and attention of the art world and the media from its inception and has had consistent review coverage that could be the envy of many a commercial gallery, let alone cooperative. Many of its artists have achieved prominence in the “establishment” and/or moved on from A.I.R. to “important” commercial galleries…. What do women want?

    As for feminism being a “tired issue”—American culture does use up and throwaway issues as rapidly as last week’s TV Guide. But feminism seems to have more than a few twists and turns left before subsiding into its long-prophesied demise.

    A Panelist’s Reply

    Panelist Kozloff wrote a rebuttal to panelist Zucker, which ran in the same issue as the panel report. Aside from reviewing the controversy, which was a most urgent one at the time, Kozloff’s commentary is interesting today for having forecast much art of the ‘80s.

    I felt pained to hear copanelist Barbara Zucker say that “women’s panels are boring,” “women’s shows are boring,” and “women’s galleries are boring.”

    Clearly feminism is not boring and women’s art is not boring—quite the contrary. Then why are these attitudes suddenly around? One reason is that the approaches to talking about and showing women’s art have become repetitious and unimaginative. Why is it that women artists are always expected to talk only about “Is There a Feminine/Feminist Sensibility?” or “Do Women Artists Want to Be Part of the System or Make Alternatives?”—with panels divided between those who say “yes” and those who say “no,” so there is no possibility for the development of ideas and theory?

    I have observed that women who have been through consciousness-raising and the political activities of the last five years have become strong, highly individualized artists. Their work reflects (in many different ways) a sense of personal and group identity. I see new kinds of imagery and content emerging: exploration of female sexuality, reflections on personal history, fresh approaches to materials, new concepts of space, a reexamination of the decorative (and the so-called decorative) arts, a reaching out toward non-Western sources and a nonpaternalistic attitude toward the “primitive,” direct political approaches to art making, and art which consciously parodies male stereotypes.

    These are all vital subjects and none of them precludes the others. What is exciting to me is the diversity of ways in which women’s art is emerging. We should not be confined to generalities and tired rhetoric. Let’s talk about the art and the ideas around the art.

    —Joyce Kozloff

    Letter to the Editor

    Over the years we received a number of angry letters-to-the-editor about such matters as having said a speaker was hard to understand or having run a cover cartoon in the style of a male artist. Therefore Zucker’s letter seemed only mildly contentious. In any event, we duly printed it—and my reply:

    Barbara Zucker, Judy Seigel, and Sylvia Sleigh, “Letters to the Editor: What Do Women Want?,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (December 1975): 2.

    I would like to clarify some points which were not accurately presented in the last issue of Women Artists News [“Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want”]. I was quoted by Judy Seigel as saying “You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected.” Out of context, it sounds absurd. I amplified the remark to explain that (in political circumstances) guerrilla tactics, or constantly changing actions, are often those which produce results. I also said that I feel Feminism in Art has become a safe harbor, not only for the artists themselves, but for those who criticize it, or, even more reprehensibly, dismiss it. It has become an easy, predictable target. I do not believe our strengths will be reinforced by staying in this polarized oasis. Rather, I feel one’s individual tenacity and visibility in the male and female world is more relevant.

    I wish to also bring to light a fact Seigel excluded from her discussion of A.I.R., which is that, as a cofounder of the gallery, I know quite well it did not have the “remarkable and nearly instantaneous success” it allegedly enjoys without one solid year of slavish preparatory ground work and devotion on the part of all twenty women who first comprised its stable. In other words, A.I.R. didn’t “happen,” it was “made.” I do not know what kind of effort women must now make in order to push for continued change and recognition. I do know that in comfortably pursuing the familiar, we talk only to ourselves.

    —Barbara Zucker

    Editor’s Reply

    “You get what you want by surprise, etc.,” doesn’t sound absurd to me, in or out of context. The amplifications Zucker supplies are, I think, implicit. It’s not possible to repeat a two-hour panel verbatim.

    As for her second point, I never meant, and doubt if the reader would think I meant, that A.I.R.’s success was unearned. I meant rather to admire a notable achievement. Obviously a project of this order, whether a gallery or a publication (even, for that matter, dinner-on-the-table), requires endless work, much of which never meets the eye.

    So far as I know, by what I consider the relevant standards, A.I.R. has had an exemplary success. My question was whether Zucker’s expectations for such an endeavor might not be unrealistic. My guess is that a mixed, or men-only gallery of similar provenance, would not have fared so well.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Judy Seigel, “Afterword,” in Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 323–25.

    2 Howardena Pindell, Mary Beth Edelson, and Nancy Spero were members of the women’s co-op gallery, A.I.R. Barbara Zucker was a former member. This statement of Zucker’s was a shocker at the time. It wasn’t just that A.I.R. was getting much attention. [See above.] The love affair between the women artist’s community and A.I.R. was still going strong—much of the sympathetic art world, male and female, convened regularly at A.I.R. panels and openings. In retrospect, Zucker’s remarks suggest that what she had in mind was a larger effect than, so far as I know, has been obtainable in a co-op, whatever its membership.

    3 Lucy Lippard noted in a subsequent letter to Women Artists News that those were clean tampons.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “The Last Woman’s Panel?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 6 (November 1975): 1–2, 5. Barbara Zucker’s letter and Seigel’s response were originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 7 (December 1975): 2. Both texts were reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 18–20. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • No More “X Over Y Equals Fog”

    What Artists Want from Critics / What Critics Expect from Criticism and from Artists
    Friday, November 17, 1978
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Moderator: Irving Sandler

    Panelists: Leon Golub, Philip Pearlstein, Jeff Perrone, Deborah Remington, Corinne Robins, and Barbara Zucker

    What do artists want from critics? Barbara Zucker answered for us all: “I want them to be my fairy godmother, champion my career, say I’m a genius, and stand behind me unequivocally.”

    Although she and others went on to discuss the importance of dialogue and the wonderful insights that artists might derive from criticism of their work, nothing rang as true as these opening remarks. Criticism may be literature, may even be “an art form,” as Jeff Perrone insisted, but for artists, criticism is chiefly survival. Good reviews mean sales, jobs, grants, and more shows. Bad reviews or no reviews mean oblivion.

    This was the conflict that ran through the entire evening, artists trying to build some safeguards into the practice of criticism, critics insisting on their right to self-expression.

    Philip Pearlstein and Leon Golub were the most outspoken about the unequal power relationship between artists and critics. Pearlstein has been crusading on the subject for some time now, and opened the discussion by reading his guidelines for art criticism, published in Art Journal (Winter 1977–78). An established artist, Pearlstein did not need to take such a controversial stand. and deserves the respect of all artists for doing so. (In a conversation after the panel, he noted that, although he didn’t want to seem paranoid, his exhibition shortly after the article was published was the least written about he’d had.)

    Pearlstein’s principal point is that an artist’s career is vulnerable to a critic’s power. Golub added that critics present ideas, but artists have no way of responding to or offsetting those ideas. Critics have access to the public; artists can only gain that access through pleasing critics, or curators and dealers. “The main problem the artist faces is how to get to the public,” said Golub.

    So, willy-nilly, the critic presents the artist to the public. Although most artists, on and off the panel, were of the opinion that critics with nothing good to say should just say nothing, Corinne Robins pointed out that this is not always possible. She differentiated between the short journalistic review, usually done on assignment, and the long critical article, which is more often the critic’s choice. “What are we supposed to do when we have to write about a show we don’t like?” she asked. “Differentiate carefully between opinion and fact and present the facts as fairly as possible,” said Pearlstein. The short review was disdained by all critics on the panel, but Pearlstein pointed out that it frequently is the only historical record of a show, particularly for a young artist.

    How does the artist get to the critic? Don’t call or send said one and all. And don’t expect us to come to your studio unless we already know and like your work. “Critics see lots of shows,” said Irving Sandler. “We hear about interesting things and then we go to see them.” (“Critics see with their ears,” mumbled a cynic near me.) Like love, these things are just supposed to happen. But as we women-who-are-artists and artists-who-are-women know, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes action to falling in love.

    Was there anything the panel could agree on? Everyone was down on nasty writing, on dense impenetrable prose (Deborah Remington called this “x over y = fog”), and everyone agreed on the necessity for a personal encounter with the work, rather than with photographs and press releases. But that was it. Critics discounted any feeling of power they might enjoy and claimed they were at the mercy of editors. Artists insisted they are at the mercy of critics. The artists wanted critics to listen to their ideas about their work. Perrone, who said he didn’t know any artists, any art history, or what happened in the ’50s, said, “There’s no need to talk, or listen, or go to artists’ studios.” Unfortunately, artists cannot so easily discount the work and ideas of critics.

    Some years ago, June Wayne made a succinct analysis of power relationships in the art world. “The artist is a woman,” she said, and detailed the ways in which artists, like women, must act through others, be devious and use flattery and other “feminine” wiles to survive. Although no such brilliant feminist analysis emerged from this panel, it was a good solid attempt to deal with the issues on at least the first of the three questions of the title, “What Artists Want from Critics.” The other two questions got lost in the shuffle and were never really answered.

    Letter to the Editor

    The following letter arrived in response to the report above:

    The positions I stated on “What Artists Want/What Critics Expect” are not even remotely recognizable in Patricia Mainardi’s writeup.

    Her review of the panel appears to make me a supporter of Philip Pearlstein’s “crusading” on the subject of art criticism. I do not subscribe to his position and made comments in precise opposition to it…. I tried to point out that the making of art and the criticism of art face (obviously) similar problems of definition and context in relation to how information today (which includes the look of art) is picked out and distributed. Mainardi missed (or ignored) all that.

    Pearlstein made a big point of accusing critics of blanketing out realist painting. This [is] far off the mark and an incorrect perception, particularly in his case….

    The crux or irony of the situation is this: Mainardi quotes Pearlstein as asking critics to “Differentiate carefully between opinion and fact and present the facts as fairly as possible.” But she is as irresponsible in reporting on the panel as the critics (unnamed) she and Pearlstein find wanting.

    —Leon Golub, Manhattan

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Patricia Mainardi, “No More ‘X Over Y Equals Fog’” was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 7 (January 1979). Leon Golub’s letter was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 8 (February 1979). Both texts were reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 108–9. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Next Question: Is Art Dead?

    Is Painting Dead?
    Friday, May 16, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This early painting panel was one of the best—real feeling on urgent issues expressed to an audience of peers. Today we may smile complacently at the title question. At the time, art’s higher authorities had declared painting dead and buried. Perhaps it was only some sense of a coming rebirth that gave painters courage to ask the question out loud. But when Nicholas Krushenick says “I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS!” we hear the voice of the votary since the Renaissance. (Will video artists some day say how they love clicking in that cassette and watching the little light come on?)

    One other note: artists reading this report in 1975 would have known that “The Article” referred to “The Painted Word,” an article by Tom Wolfe which had recently missed the point about painting in Harper’s Magazine. Shortly thereafter it was published as a book, achieving wide notoriety, if not acclaim. Today I had to think a moment to identify it.

    Moderator: Burt Chernow
    Panelists: Nicholas Krushenick, Stuart Shedletsky, Shirlann Smith, and Robert Wiegand

    Judy Seigel, “Is Painting Dead? Artists Talk on Art May 16,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3

    The subtitle of this panel, “Is Jerking Off Getting Out of Hand?,” could mean anything from, “Once you’ve seen one jerk-off in an art context, you’ve seen them all, so a painting renaissance is inevitable,” to “Painting itself is the equivalent of jerking off, so why paint?” In either case, if you’ve been waiting tensely for the verdict, the panelists agreed that painting is not now, nor is it likely in the foreseeable future to be dead. In fact, one assumes that the four painters convened exactly in order to reach that conclusion. It did, however, take them three-quarters of the evening to start to explain why.

    For openers, the now-infamous query was projected onto the screen: “Artforum wishes to ask you as a painter what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. [T]hose understood to be making the ‘inevitable next step’ now work with any material but paint….” A show of panelists’ slides with commentary by each was followed by talk of The Letter, The Article, The Critics, Other Painters, and The Situation.

    The Letter

    Shirlann Smith: It’s a love letter from Artforum—the kind you’d write at the end of a long marriage. But the language is so literary—intellectual, not words I’ve ever heard artists use.1

    Robert Wiegand: Is Artforum dead? They never had to fish before. They came on Bang! Bang!

    The Article

    Stuart Shedletsky: It’s a tantrum by an essentially literary person who doesn’t “get” art.

    Wiegand: There was a bit of truth on some levels and that made everybody a little uncomfortable, but he stretched it.

    Nicholas Krushenick: I have never been to a party at Ethel Scull’s.

    The Critics

    Krushenick: I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of honesty from Harold Rosenberg. He admitted the critic is finished. Greenberg [apologetic tone] has been a constant champion of die abstract idea in art.

    Shedletsky: The critics can tie up Brice Marden with Fragonard.

    Wiegand: Rosenberg said, “It may be time to abandon, not art, but art criticism, which has become little more than a shopping list.”

    Other Painters

    Burt Chernow: Who are the painters today that keep painting alive?

    Krushenick: Jasper Johns hasn’t given us a new image in years. (My wife will kill me for saying this.) Stella is still about making art, and I respect him tremendously for that, whether it succeeds or fails. A lot of people just give us bricks and bunny rabbits. Noland is still making a fantastic try at making art…. Richard Lindner, Alfred Jensen, Yrisarry, Jo Baer.

    Wiegand: D’Arcangelo, Chuck Hinman.

    Audience: I don’t hear any names of new people keeping painting alive.

    Wiegand: There doesn’t have to be something new every week.

    Shedletsky: Heroes don’t come along as often as Artforum would have us think. They change geniuses every week.

    Krushenick: Work today is all intellect, no passion. Anyway, all artists are not created equal.

    The Situation

    Chernow: Will new technology replace painting, or coexist?

    Wiegand: No one got excited when Rauschenberg got involved with dance. No one’s going to get excited when I get into video.

    Smith: There’s a tendency to want to perform, to go where the action is.

    Shedletsky: I sit in front of all those tapes and get terribly bored. I want to go home and watch television.

    Audience: If painting is dead, it’s dead in the colleges.

    Krushenick: On 50 percent of any given faculty you have this meatball who makes a (lousy) watercolor every two years. And he has an enormous amount of power.

    Audience Q&A

    Audience A: Is art dead?

    Audience B: That’s next week!

    Audience C: Art has never been more alive. It’s traveling in all directions. They’re waiting for that one direction, but we don’t have to offer it to them.

    Shedletsky: The impulse to make art is a very primal, basic human impulse, since the caves at Lascaux.

    Audience: Is the idea all important? Are the hands that produce the idea interchangeable, or does art lose in translation?

    Krushenick: They had assistants four hundred years ago. BUT I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS! I even stretch and prime the canvases myself. There’s a delicious, beautiful factor to running a brush across a surface. I don’t want to relegate that to someone else. If I did, I’d be standing around all day watching the schmuck.

    Shedletsky: Works of a certain type, for example, Judd’s, don’t suffer from fabrication. But you couldn’t imagine getting someone else to do a de Kooning.

    About here a bona fide screaming match between Krushenick and a fellow in the audience who seemed not to care for abstract art attested to the success of the panel and the vigor of feelings about art.

    Krushenick and Fellow: (Incoherent)

    Krushenick: Fuck you.

    Fellow: Your art lacks passion. It’s an intellectual color exercise. It’s like wrapping paper.

    Chernow [calmly]: Do any of you ever sneak off into a room a do a little still life, or something?

    Krushenick: Figurative painting outsells abstract painting six to one. I turned from it and never looked back. I want to die with my finger on the pulse of the twenty-first century. In a strange way it’s the most delectable life style I’ve ever encountered. If you never get any success in your life, you could say on your deathbed, “I’ve had a wonderful life!”

    Conclusion

    Artforum can’t be dead because artists hate it so much and read it so much and painting can’t be dead because it gets reborn about every fifteen minutes.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 The full text of the letter appears below. The responses from artists were published in the September 1975 issue.

    Artforum wishes to ask you, as a painter, what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. It appears that painting has ceased to be the dominant artistic medium at the moment. And we assume that the debates between its two major ideologies, abstract and representational, have outlived their usefulness to the current scene. Our thinking here refers to the fact that neither side has triumphed over the other in a historical verdict to which both had appealed. On the contrary, those understood to be making “the next inevitable step” now work with any material but paint.

    1. How do you think this has affected the need to do painting today and the general morale in the field?

    2. What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?

    3. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why?

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Next Question: Is Art Dead?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 13–15. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Night of the Shamans

    This text is the second of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the first report.

    Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
    Friday, April 29, 1983
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    The event evoked another, allegorical commentary.

    Moderator: Craig Owens

    Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe

    Once upon a time in a constantly collapsing and re-rising city, the inhabitants made buildings with large spaces where people sweated to make things for others to sell. But one day they painted the spaces white and displayed mysterious and precious objects there. At last, on a night in spring, 1983, many people gathered in such a space to hear messages from shamans who made the precious objects. They worried about a tool producing these objects quickly and easily, and wondered if the new objects would be precious in the old way. So they gathered to DEFINE THE DIFFERENCE. On the walls were canvases with scenes of the Far West painted by a person with a new kind of organ transplant—50mm lenses permanently in both eyes.

    The shamans sat down on chairs on one side of a long skinny table with glasses of water on it and were lit by spotlights. The rest of the people sat on the floor on the other side of the table in the dark. A scribe who wrote important words about shamanism sat with the shamans and said the people on the floor were probably there to enjoy dissension between shamans who used brushes and those who used the new tool, but he was there to make peace and had personally picked these shamans to address the issues.

    However, the first shaman, an acclaimed user of the brush, hadn’t brought his magic objects with him, saying that, anyway, holy objects made with a brush were now meaningless, and even worse, decorative, but unscrupulous folks attributed false values to them so people who had lots of money but inadequate wardrobes would buy them and feel like emperors.

    The other shamans showed their precious objects and told of their powers, but no one could define the difference, because they had forgotten or never knew the old way of making something unique yet universal. Mostly they talked shaman shop talk and complained that there was too much of an abundance of their product and that they were saturated, alienated, repressed, politically “other,” and lost in multiplicity, while yearning for singularity or maybe irregularity and had a headache that night.

    Because of these feelings, they used images they just found lying around. They ripped off some and copied some onto canvas in a larger size. The one who did that was so demoralized he said he didn’t trust his intuition any more, which may have been why he didn’t make the copies himself, but hired others to do so. Learning that this fellow had helped himself to images, like fruit in the Garden of Eden (denying existence of originality and authorship), one hopeful questioner from the other side of the table asked if these were political acts. This might be a very brave and principled shaman who denied, not only authorship, but also ownership and the putting of price tags on holy objects. But that one was very silent about the authorship of his bank account.

    It turned out that all the shamans had, in one way or another, been using the new tool or its products. One modest shaman in rumpled Ivy League jacket and tie (although the evening was hot), who told in a low voice of changing photos into paintings and putting old shamans into new paintings of old paintings, had evidently seen Woody Allen frightening Susan Sontag. Another shaman harked back to the Russian Revolution. She advised that the propaganda of the culture should be turned against it and warned that in times of political repression people lose sight of the pleasures of multiplicity. She herself seemed to have suffered this loss because, although she uses the camera-tool and the printing-press-tool, her magical objects are nevertheless, one of a kind. She also stressed the importance of increasing the number of spectators with her kind of reproductive organs. The last shaman made no bones about it. He said he used the camera instead of a brush or a chisel. He thought he was good at helping his subjects show their fantasy or reality. And then he showed his work, which reflected his life: outrageous rock stars, men with magical erections, famous androgynous women, flower studies, and male members of the races embracing. Even a few children, although he admitted to not liking them. It wasn’t Rembrandt’s Saskia as Susanah, but there was an echo of the same process. “For whom do you do your work?” someone asked. Robert Mapplethorpe replied, “For the people I love.” And put his dark glasses back on.

    Then everyone went out onto the sidewalk where a loud argument had earlier made it hard to hear the proceedings, much of which had been mumbled, as if the shamans found it very hard to communicate.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Gladys Osterman, “Night of the Shamans” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 222–23. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Repainting the Battle Lines

    This text is the first of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the second report.

    Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
    Friday, April 29, 1983
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Richard Estes,
    Richard Estes, Diner, 1971, oil on canvas, 40⅛ x 50 in. (artwork © Richard Estes; photograph by Lee Stalsworth)

    As I recall the moment, Photo-Realist painting had become so well accepted it was passé; painting on photographs was still tacky, or anyway naughty, at least in New York—in the West or Southwest it was a regular style. But “discourse between painting and photography” was not yet so obvious and popular a topic as it soon became. (I was amazed, amazed, the other day to see Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf’s excellent book on the subject, in B. Dalton!)

    Having myself recently switched from painting to photography, and being then on the Program Committee of Artists Talk on Art, I thought a “Difference between Painting and Photography” panel would be timely, and began casting about for a brainy moderator. Someone suggested Craig Owens, who not only agreed cheerfully, but turned out to be a committee person’s dream, conjuring up an all-star cast on time, not just for the announcement, but for the event itself, without so much as a reminder.

    The panel Owens conjured up became one of those special SoHo events, measurably enhanced by the overflow gang on the sidewalk outside pounding on the plate-glass window. These were reportedly motorcyclist friends of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work, by the way, looked smashing in the evening’s format of slides projected onto a portable screen. I suppose it hardly needs to be added that nobody defined anything, let alone the difference, though since then I have heard others make a stab at it. (Ben Lifson presented a two-part theory at a photo conference in 1990. The part I remember was that the photograph has an absolutely even surface.) Another difference occurred to me that night: photographs probably mutate less in slides than do paintings.

    Carol Steinberg’s report, which came in “over the transom,” precisely and eloquently defined the ways discussants begged—or fogged—the issues.

    —Judy Seigel

    Moderator: Craig Owens

    Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe

    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 200
    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 2012, acrylic, colored pencil, and watercolor, 30 x 40 cm (artwork © Luca Del Baldo)

    Craig Owens, senior editor of Art in America, sat with the six panel members and spread his hands, butterflylike, cigarette dangling from the long fingers. We, seated on the floor of the crowded gallery, were, mercifully, not permitted to smoke, having squeezed in while others less fortunate clamored at the entrance and pressed against the window to see—an Artists Talk On Art panel!

    True, it was, at $1, a cheap Friday night and an interesting topic: “Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference.” Owens’s hands seemed to point to two points of view even while he hoped those who had come for the latest installment of the historical battle would be disappointed. They were there, he said, to “define difference,” not define or create false oppositions.

    Joseph Kosuth, in his perennial black outfit (is he making an unconscious statement about being in mourning, does black flatter his figure, or is it some kind of ’60s minimalist, conceptualist, artist’s statement?), read a tract about how the institutions of gallery, critic, market, etc., create what we think “art” means. He showed no slides, not to be arrogant, he said, but because those familiar with his work didn’t need to see them and those not might fall into that tendency people have of thinking they understand something after they’ve seen slides. No one told the audience he is a conceptualist. I guess he wasn’t on the side of painting or photography. Next, Jack Goldstein showed us a slide of his painting of a [Margaret] Bourke-White photograph of a Kremlin air raid. He jocularly read an interview and some comments on the dilemmas of quotation and authorship. He also said he was “not interested in Painting.”

    jackgoldsteinuntitled
    Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 132 in. (artwork © Estate of Jack Goldstein; photograph by Brian Wilcox)

    Sarah Charlesworth said she was “freaked out” that day about having to do the panel and that she would read to us from a letter she had written to a friend. She even began, “Dear Rudy,” but I was not convinced her friend really wanted to hear about the gap between the subjective/presence of oneself of painting and the objective/absence of self-presence of the other in photography, which I found difficult to hear and understand. She showed a slide of a photo of a photo of a photo which had been ripped up and some other manipulated photographs.

    Barbara Kruger spoke about the potential for creating feelings of richness or poverty in the spectator face-to-face with the artist’s image and the importance of understanding the politics of images, as well as her attempt to provide for a female art spectator. Her work consisted of photos with words collaged together, making political statements. I think one said, “You destroy what you perceive as different.”

    Mark Tansey showed his joke paintings. Each got a laugh from the audience, as with the National Geographic photoboat crew on the edge of a waterfall, entitled, Take One, or a woman lying in bed pointing a gun at a man pointing a camera at her, entitled Homage to Susan Sontag.

    marktansey
    Mark Tansey, On Photography (Homage to Susan Sontag), 1982, oil on canvas, 54 x 90 in. (artwork © Mark Tansey)

    Robert Mapplethorpe took off his dark glasses to tell us he really hadn’t prepared anything to say, just brought slides of his photographs, which he related more to sculpture than painting. The photos included Lisa Lyon (the bodybuilder) in the nude with graphite powder covering her body to emphasize its statuesqueness, portraits, a black guy who we were told could achieve erection at a moment’s notice, men embracing, children (whom he doesn’t particularly like, he said), flowers.

    The most wonderful commentary on the difference between painting and photography came unexpectedly from the audience, when Cynthia Mailman, whose works adorned the walls of the Soho20 Gallery, was moved to shout, “Don’t Touch My Painting!” as another member of the audience on her self/unconscious way out was about to put her hand through one of the paintings to support herself. As the audience laughed at the serendipity of the moment, Mailman became a bit defensive and added, “Mine are only one of a kind, you know.”

    robertmapplethorpe
    Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, ca. early 1980s (artwork © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)

    I couldn’t decide whether this was more fun than realizing that the woman across the room I’d been admiring all evening was probably Lisa Lyon, as she left in her sleeveless white mini-dress with her beautiful arm and leg muscles bulging out just a bit more than one is used to seeing on the average woman.

    Someone in the audience asked about the power of painters to paint what isn’t there. Mapplethorpe answered that, as a photographer, he feels his best work is that in which he sees what he hasn’t seen before.

    Another member of the audience began to explain his understanding that, in light of the panel, “aren’t painting and photography the same thing except for content?” Sarah Charlesworth assured him that form was content and Craig Owens cautioned not to go from one extreme to the other, that is, from saying they’re opposites to saying there’s no difference.

    Too late, I tremblingly raised my hand, shocked by this question, and burning with something to ask, if only I could figure out what it was, something, something about the process of painting—by its nature longer, with more potential for discovering relationships, meanings, ideas, feelings, images, subconscious meanderings, the way we perceive. Don’t most of us feel we must study a painting for longer than a photograph? How long do we study photographs, and for what purpose? Isn’t there some major difference between the act of painting and the act of photographing? And then, can we escape evaluating that difference, at least for ourselves?

    I don’t know. I don’t know. I almost didn’t dare to write this and I didn’t dare to ask so I had to write. These ideas need deep questions and deep answers. Where were the painters, process painters, painters who discover ideas through their painting, not start with a pre-fixed idea or image and paint it? Where were the paintings, real paintings, not slides of photos of paintings, of paintings of photos, photos of photos. Slides are photos. Form is content. The panel was weighted, the sides were uneven, and the difference was never defined.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Carol Steinberg, “Repainting the Battle Lines” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 221–22. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • The Market Is the Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Audience: Was that [inaudible]?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Panel: How often does this happen in your business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Newman: I think magazines are, um….

    Golub: Crucial.

    Kostelanetz: In comparison to literature they are inconsequential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Newman: No.

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

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

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

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

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

    Audience: What about advertisers?

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

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

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

    Kostelanetz: Are you saying you can buy a review?

    Newman: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Newman: Not at ARTnews.

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

    Panel: What’s fair?

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

    Golub: That was deliberate, you think?

    Feldman: You made this survey yourself? When?

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

    Newman: And was it reviewed in the Times?

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

    Golub: He ran a big ad!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Edited from tape.

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

    In Terms Of count: 0.

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

    Source

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