In Terms Of

Tag: Ethics

  • 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.

  • Writing for Socially Engaged Art

    Christopher Howard, founder and chief critic for In Terms Of, delivered the following untitled talk on a panel at the 2014 Open Engagement conference. The discussion, which was moderated by Chelsea Haines and included presentations by Sandra de la Loza and Juliana Driever, looked at new directions in writing about social practice from diverse perspectives.

    Writing for Socially Engaged Art
    Friday, May 16, 2014
    Open A.I.R. Workshops
    2014 Open Engagement
    Queens Museum, New York City Building, Queens Museum Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York

    After being asked to participate on this panel, I wanted to know what kind of writing on socially engaged art is already out there. My conclusion is that there’s a lot of writing on socially engaged art out there. We have books devoted to the subject by Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, Pablo Helguera, Tom Finkelpearl, Nato Thompson, and Gregory Sholette, among others. We have essays by the above authors, as well as by Ben Davis, Steve Lambert, and Yates McKee. (Why so many men, I wonder?) They write on Project Row Houses, Theaster Gates, Suzanne Lacy, Tania Bruguera, Superflex, and the Yes Men, as well as projects sponsored by Creative Time, Art in Odd Places, and local and state arts councils across the country.

    Artists, writers, and curators discuss socially engaged art in Creative Time Reports and on several blogs hosted by the nonprofit organization A Blade of Grass. Over the past two months, the blog for Open Engagement has published daily responses to questions about social practice, and I’m sure we will read more about what happens at this three-day conference in the coming weeks, adding to the growing body of literature on socially engaged art.

    One could argue that participatory art probably generates more passionate debate than other form of art—although flipping through any art magazine or browsing any art blog would indicate otherwise. Traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video still grab the lion’s share of attention, and reviews of socially engaged art rarely appear in the reviews section proper.

    Still, socially engaged art is totally mainstream. Last fall, for example, Artforum magazine, generally accepted as the pinnacle of art writing, published several major essays, including “Limits of Control,” Felicity Scott’s text on Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (2012) and other immersive environments, followed by several pieces on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and a reassessment of Andrea Fraser’s untitled sex video from 2003, which isn’t quite social practice as we generally understand it but which embodies many of the same issues confronting the field.1

    A view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) at Forest Houses in Bronx, New York (photograph by the New York Observer)

    Last month ARTnews published major exposés on social practice, Carolina A. Miranda’s “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” and this month’s Art in America has a pair of essays on the genre: on the artist Pedro Reyes and three architectural firms that involve communities in their process. The academic journal October has published several of Bishop’s key essays and devoted its Fall 2012 issue to Occupy Wall Street. In the popular press, articles have been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and many other news websites that aren’t art-oriented.

    Considering all this activity, important questions arise: Are we content with the writing? Are we satisfied with the level of discourse? It depends on whom you ask. Many articles fret about documentation, about aesthetics, about experience, fussing over whether or not social practice is capital A art. Personally, I find such conversations to be uninteresting and unhelpful. My definition of art is elastic, expansive, and inclusive. Maybe I’m easy to please. But I fully recognize the need to keep having these conversations.

    In his 2013 essay, “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism,” published in e-flux Journal, Grant Kester addressed the anxiety over writing on participatory art:

    The result has been a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of this work, most of which entails variations of the same simplistic opposition between a naïve social art practice, associated with the evils of humanism or pastoral sentimentality, and a theoretically rigorous, politically sophisticated avant-garde artistic practice.

    Often the conversation revolves around the ethical and political position of the artist, and how much the artist seizes or relinquishes power. I’ve found too much finger pointing and hair splitting in this strain of writing, which can be intensely puritanical.

    So how do writers sort out the good from the bad, or the worthwhile from the inconsequential? Where does a critic—or a viewer or a participant—draw the line and evaluate a project? “Does it work?” offers one person. “Is it useful?” states another. These are two possible directions, but there are many more. A writer can discuss socially engaged art—or any form of art—through many lenses: the history of art, contemporaneous art practices, literature, music, politics, the social sciences, economics, religion—through anything, really, and that’s what great about art, and what’s fun writing about art. The only prescriptions I would suggest for a writer is: research your subject thoroughly, try to say something new, and always question received wisdom.

    In the same e-flux Journal article, Kester encouraged writers to take a long view of social practice. He described a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there…. When does the work begin and when does it end?”

    This is a good approach that is typical of historians and certain kinds of journalists writing long-form articles, but not really the methods of critics, reporters, and bloggers, whose publications require fresh content daily. When writing about a work of socially engaged art, it’s important to talk to the artist, the participants, the passers-by, the institutional organizers, the funders—whoever might have been involved in or witnessed a project. Consult the published record. Consult as many sources as you can. Don’t just rely on your reactions.

    Participants in Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) in Brooklyn, New York (photograph by Nicola Goode)

    The history of art is far from static—it changes when new discoveries and connections are made. Moreover, a single review is a discrete piece of writing, never the final word, and one response at a given point in time. Would you get a sense of the 2014 Whitney Biennial if you just read one New York Times review and nothing else? Of course not. But read five, ten, twenty pieces—published over many months—and you’d get a good really sense of the reaction to the exhibition. The same goes for Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Stoop (2013) and Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, which generated many written responses in print and online. It would be fantastic if writers would return to Forest Houses in the South Bronx, where the monument was sited, and talk to people who had been there last summer. Or talk to the attendees who live elsewhere, or to Dia Art Foundation employees. I’m hopeful this will be done, and we’ll eventually get a better understanding of long-term implications of the work.

    I’ve been a practicing art critic in New York for ten years, reviewing exhibitions for print and online publications and also writing the occasional essay, but I haven’t written much on socially engaged art. Perhaps a parallel project is something that I’ve been engaged with for a few years.

    A self-published blog called In Terms Of publishes criticism of live speaking engagements such as lectures, panels, conversations, symposia, and the like, concentrating on events in New York City (but not exclusively). Public programs have existed for decades, yet the rapid increase of such events over the past ten years, as well as their standing in the art world, is astounding. An art exhibition today is inconceivable without an attendant calendar of events. Furthermore, live speaking engagements constitute a core part of the mission of libraries, bookstores, universities, and cultural centers. Since much contemporary art—not just social practice—depends on dialogue and conversation, the need for informed commentary on lectures and panels is tremendous but underdeveloped.

    In Terms Of has examined talks with a wide range of players: artists, art historians, curators, critics, and students, as well as scholars in the related disciplines of literature, philosophy, architecture, and design. One recent post examined the intersection of aesthetics and politics generated from a panel of artists and activists that was moderated by the author of a book called 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Another five-part series covered a one-day conference on curatorial authorship in art exhibitions, which featured historians, curators, and artists from around the United States. A third post explored the notion of critique in contemporary art through an analysis of a lecture by the installation artist Mika Tajima. Events outside the art world are also important: I’ve written about the contributors to an anthology of feminist comics, the author of a book that historicizes the Riot Grrrl movement, a former New York Times columnist on ethics, and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, as well as the occasional forays into economics, politics, and law.

    I consider texts in In Terms Of to be experimental, not in the avant-garde sense but rather because I’m drawing from multiple genres: basic reporting, investigative journalism, art criticism, newspaper editorials, polemical prose, book reviews, art-historical research, and so on. Most of the time I follow the chronological presentation of the speaker or panelists, but not always, and that’s one thing with which I constantly struggle. After attending an event and taking scrupulous notes, I conduct research and interject my own responses into the written narrative. If the event was recorded and the video posted online, I’ll watch parts or all of it.

    I don’t approach live speaking engagements as art and would have a good laugh if you tried to convince me that a panel is a “performance of language.” I have no problem, though, stating that the overall goal for In Terms Of is to publish “socially engaged writing.”

    What kind of writing do social-practice artists want, if they want it at all? Do they need a fatter CV and bigger portfolio to establish professional credentials for job applications? Do they need publicity that will help them get a grant to fund the next project? How about clips to show mom and dad to justify the frivolous and expensive master’s degree? It still feels good to see your name in print, right? In a larger sense, are social-practice artists looking for a silver-bullet treatise, a text that defines and validates their work, something like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” or Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”? You tell me.

    I would assume that any artist would want feedback on his or her work, something that acknowledges their effort and legitimizes their work. Not as approval—after all, an artist doesn’t work for his or her critics. But the work cannot exist by itself. It must be supported by an audience and by participants, through spoken and written words, through memories and feelings, with some level of intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic fulfillment. Will there be good writing about socially engaged art? Most emphatically yes. Will there be bad writing? Without a doubt. Will some writers miss the point? Sure, but others will get certainly get it.

    In Terms Of count: 0 (naturally).

    1 See the table of contents of the November 2013 issue of Artforum for links to the articles on Hirschhorn and Fraser.

  • Curatorial Assistance

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

    Michelle Grabner counts the beans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

    Dan Byers discusses biennial politics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

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

    Franklin Sirmans on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • First, Do No Harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 0.