In Terms Of

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  • Nice Guys Finish

    A Talk with the Critics: Ben Davis, Carol Kino, Andrew Russeth, and Benjamin Sutton in Conversation with Sharon Louden
    Wednesday, September 23, 2015
    New York Academy of Art, Wilkinson Hall, New York

    The journalist Carol Kino (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Two years ago I stopped attending panels of art critics discussing the state of the field, mainly because the subjects such events would cover could easily be predicted: (1) money, and how there is little to be made writing about art; (2) a perceived loss of power in the art world, ceded to dealers, curators, and collectors; and (3) the differences between writing for print and online publications. Speakers overwhelmingly wrung their hands over problems that have existed for decades. The numbing repetition—I can’t even.

    I almost skipped this “Talk with the Critics” panel, part of a series moderated by the artist Sharon Louden on professional-development issues for MFA students, for fear of more of the same.1 But I was familiar with and respect the work of the four New York–based participants—Ben Davis, national art critic for Artnet News; Carol Kino, a journalist for the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers and magazines; Andrew Russeth, co–executive editor of ARTnews; and Benjamin Sutton, metro editor at Hyperallergic—and decided to give it a shot.2 The level of discourse was reasonable and pedestrian. That’s not surprising, considering Louden’s focus for the series is to demystify the work and approachability of critics for the academy’s graduate students. What follows are summaries of the major topics.

    Why Write Criticism?

    In college Russeth attempted to make art, unsuccessfully, so he studied art history. After studying with Rosalind Krauss, who “was a force of nature … [who] really made the stakes seem very high,” Russeth became attracted to what he perceived as the glamor of art criticism, deferring a halfhearted interest in law school. Sutton covered film, theater, and art for his school paper, and Kino came from a similar background—wanting to write about culture. Falling in with an art crowd in New York, she discovered she had a good eye. Davis, who studied cultural theory and philosophy in school, was introduced to the art world via Rachel K. Ward’s ill-fated group exhibition Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport, where he met the artist and writer Walter Robinson, who invited Davis to work for Artnet Magazine, which he edited. Artforum had deceived Davis into thinking that art was a place for ideas: “The art world is where important ideas go to die,” he joked.

    Andrew Russeth on the left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What Do You Look For?

    For Sutton, the lure to write about the big show was stronger when he was younger; now he finds it more rewarding, for example, to travel to out-of-the-way places and spend more time with fewer shows. Russeth aims to reset the balances where critical consensus is skewed or wrong, and also “to get people’s eyeballs on something new.” As a journalist, Kino looks for a good story, often on current events with “some meaty sociopolitical aspect.” “I look for a sense of contemporaneity,” Davis said, which he sometimes finds in older art, which can become relevant again.

    How Do You Find New Things?

    Louden tried to get a conversation going about Instagram, but the four critics had other ideas. “People drop casual comments at dinner parties,” Kino said; she also depends on friends who are artists and publicists. “The artists always know,” Russeth affirmed, identifying younger, plugged-in dealers and even collectors as those offering good recommendations. Davis rephrased the question to uncover the panel’s not-so-hidden motive: “How do you get written about?” Instead of boilerplate invitations, Davis said, write something personal, like “You may like my work for this reason.” Kino advised artists to time their pitches right for a publication—which may publish a review while an exhibition is still on view, or months later. She hesitates to carrying on correspondence with artists who don’t have galleries, or whose work isn’t appropriate for galleries, because her outlets are not interested in covering unusual situations. Sutton, who wades through press materials daily, recommended that prospective artists contact him by email, not phone or Facebook. Rather than brownnose with critics, Russeth said, he advocated artists to “start a gang,” reiterating an idea from Dave Hickey. “The best way to do it is to have a big group … have curator friends, have artist friends, have writer friends,” all of who can promote your work to others.3

    Can Critics and Artists Be Friends?

    Russeth has no problem with it, though unfavorable writing can lead to disappointment. Sutton finds it inevitable that artists and critics form relationships and views the separation between them to be old fashioned. Kino reminded us that an even older school—dating to the 1950s—fraternized comfortably. Davis cautioned against losing the balance between insight and embeddedness; he also recognized that “an honest review” in intimate art scenes outside New York “would mean severing all these relationships.” And then: “I don’t have a hard and fast rule except to be honest about it, if you’re writing about someone who you have knowledge of.” Regarding Robert Morris’s personal relationship with Krauss, Davis said, “A lot of art history formed by people who knew each other very intimately. You’d be foolish to overlook that as a source.”

    The contemporary Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What’s Up with Listicles?

    Louden identified lists, such as “6 of Our Favorite Hamburger-Themed Artworks for National Burger Day” and “14 Young Power Players Set to Become the New Art World Aristocracy,” as a recent trend in art writing. The format, Davis claimed, is cheap to produce and does well—much better than reviews of small shows in Bushwick. The BuzzFeedification of discourse has spawned the entertainment article about art, he said, adding that it’s new to have an audience “amused by art.” While ARTnews publishes intelligent lists, Russeth revealed that the well-researched article gets an audience over time. Sutton argued that a well-written listicle can be informative.

    What Are the Issues in Painting?

    The audience Q&A started with an inquiry about contemporary painting. Russeth singled out a couple of schools in play—the networked painting of R. H. Quaytman and postinternet art—and told us he has to argue for painting’s relevance when writing about the medium. (Really, still?)  Sutton seeks what looks new or demonstrates a variation, break, or improvement in any medium, and Kino digs for personal stories and avoids theoretical discussion.

    From the crowd, the art historian and critic Irving Sandler—who began writing in the 1950s and was friends with many Abstract Expressionists—pressed the issue further. Davis ducked the question to ask his own: “What is art?” Kino placed the burden on artists, while Sutton stressed the need to pay attention to art scenes outside New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Online publications such as Burnaway and Pelican Bomb do that well, he said. (Louden added Bmore Art.) Russeth argued that criticism can be a tool to counteract obscene amounts of money circulating in the art world, and also to upend male white dominance.

    What Do You Love and Hate in Writing?

    Sutton likes writing about art that he doesn’t get initially, that gives him a new perspective. Kino hates an opinionated reviewer’s personality coming through strongly. “I like original ideas, plainly stated—that’s pretty boring,” Davis said, noting that his monthly roundup of art writing for Artnet News demonstrates his interests—though I notice that he recently sought recommendations for the list on social media. Russeth loves criticism that lays it on the line—he wants opinion, writers coming out swinging and being risk takers. “That’s what leads to better art,” he declared.

    Benjamin Sutton on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    What about Trends and Brands?

    Figurative art has roared back over the past ten to fifteen years, Russeth pronounced, partly because critics and historians have broadened their view. “People like Joan Semmel, Martin Wong, Philip Pearlstein—I mean, they’ve never looked better, right?” He explained, “It’s no longer necessarily a zero sum game, which when I read art history, it kind of feels like it once was.” For Davis, “contemporary” has eclipsed terms like postmodern or pluralism, an issue he explored in his 2013 book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. When teaching painters, video makers, and performance artists, he observed, “The question, implicitly, that’s there, without being proposed, is, what are we all learning that’s the same?” Instead of having a unifying theory of it all, Davis detects a herd mentality in galleries, where “consensus about what was competent” has replaced “consensus about what was good and bad.”

    Sutton has witnessed an acceleration of branding in culture, when fashion crosses over into the hip, cool art world. The fast-fashion retailer H&M, he said, collaborated with Jeff Koons last year to produce a handbag. (Don’t forget about Takashi Murakami’s popular monogram bags for Louis Vuitton.) Taking a long view, Davis connected the early-nineteenth-century Romantic view of the artist with the Industrial Revolution. By the late 1990s, he sketched out, the fashion industry had evolved from producing couture for the few to cranking out ready-to-wear clothes for the masses, with designers producing sunglasses, cosmetics, and perfume. Huge conglomerates now use art to recapture high fashion’s exclusivity. “The whole point is that there’s a tension” between art and fashion, Davis concluded, not a synthesis.

    What’s Your Definition of Art?

    Russeth said that art, at its best, is a protected field to talk about things you can’t talk about elsewhere, in a safer and fuller way. He left out “through objects and images.” Sutton agreed but emphasized that art is not protected because it is permissive. Davis noted that art is a general term for excellence—an advertisement can be so good that it is art—so what is fine art? The tradition, the museum and gallery culture, and economically (a person with control over his or her labor). Earlier Kino had passed the microphone to Davis but got it back, saying “You know it when you see it.” She added that art constantly redefines what is art.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 I spoke on a “Talk with the Critics” panel with Hrag Vartanian and Lily Wei in November 2013.

    2 Sutton was my editor at the L Magazine in 2011–12.

    3 Russeth misattributed the quote, slightly. Here is Hickey: “That’s why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: ‘You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.’” What Russeth left out was the final step: “Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it.” Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos,” Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 152.

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  • Language Is a Virus

    Spring with Dora Budor and Chrissie Iles
    Tuesday, September 8, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Dora Budor reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    This conversation between the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor, whose science-fiction-inspired installation Spring was on view in the Swiss Institute’s basement, and Chrissie Iles, a film curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, lasted only forty-five minutes. To some in the audience, it felt like an eternity. While the discussion started out informative—Iles sketched out a history of science fiction from its nineteenth-century origins in literature to its adoption by cinema in the twentieth—it slid steadily into unintelligibility. By the end of the event, Budor and Iles had made hash of potentially exciting topics, among them the relationship of human bodies to technology and the impact of computer-generated imagery (CGI) on perception, with maddeningly convoluted and directionless statements. It wasn’t pretty.

    It was funny, though, pitiably and perversely so. At one point Budor was expounding on the director David Cronenberg’s notion of cinematic bodies being or behaving like a virus, which he probably borrowed from William S. Burroughs, who described written language as a virus. “If you look at the virus, it’s just doing its job,” Budor insisted. “It’s just trying to live its life.” Cronenberg was among the many names she dropped; others were the German doctor and designer Fritz Kahn, the film theorists Darko Suvin and Donna Haraway, the artists Martha Rosler and Robert Smithson, the philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek, the interdisciplinary artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and Nam June Paik, and the filmmakers Aki Kaurismäki and Andrei Tarkovsky. Budor seemed more eager to cite other people’s ideas than to develop her own thoughts on art, film, and philosophy—to the extent that I wondered if all the theory she had absorbed has, like a virus, taken over her mind.

    For much of the talk, Budor and Iles read from, and based their comments on, written documents on the table in front of them. At times they seemed to be talking at each other. When the speakers went off script, they lost the plot entirely. Here is Budor toward the end of the conversation:

    In cinema [Žižek is] saying nothing is spontaneous and natural of human desire, that our desires are artificial, and instead of giving us what we want, the cinema teaches us, or tell us, how to desire. Desire in this way … inscribes itself onto reality and becomes another sort of protrusion or a wound of reality, and that’s where the art of cinema comes. It’s consisting of an arousing desire of playing it back.

    Just after that, Iles asked Budor something about eroticized machines, to which the artist responded: “Cronenberg always plays with this idea that something is protruding the body and creating another type of desire, another type of desire that might not yet exist,” which somehow relates to the cyborgization of the body. Iles had her own ideas: “Our experience of light—absorption of it, acceptance of it—is much higher than it was even ten years ago,” she astutely observed. “There’s also different ways in which light, be it intellectual or otherwise, has a very proper relation to the city, to architecture, and therefore different ways in which the body is constituted through that cyborgian relationship to technology and energy and, um….”

    Budor could not be stopped. Thinking of Kaurismäki’s description of analogue cinema being light and digital cinema being pure electricity, she announced:

    The electricity and how the intensity of the screen, the intensity of the light that you mentioned, has rose up so we can tend to consume more light, and there is way more entropy caused by that. So, what are the things which make cinema alive? This idea of pressing play or starting the machine—which will run, which will use electricity, which will use light to make something alive—is in a way very similar to all of our environments, of the light that is in this room, the hot water that we drink. The flows of energy are pretty much similar wherever you look, either in the fictional world or in reality. And the environments which we have created and animated, environments are created in a way looking at our bodies, so we can program the world around us to—in a similar way of the industrial palace functions—to program the world around us to actually correspond to the flows in our bodies.

    How did we get here? In her introductory remarks, Iles argued that failed political revolutions in Europe during the long nineteenth century caused people to imagine better, more humane worlds, first expressed through literature and then cinema. Time travel comes from an ideal, utopic way of thinking, Iles contended, and so we get things like H. G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Zemeckis’s blockbuster film Back to the Future (1985). Not everything Iles said made sense. The popularity of science fiction, she told us, hot in the 1950s, declined significantly in the 1970s, and rose in the 1980s. If that’s true, how does she account for major films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), Sleeper (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)? It was as if nothing between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982) had any impact on culture. To her credit, Iles cited “climate science fiction” as a new genre about cataclysmic changes to Earth—no aliens or monsters there.

    Installation view of Dora Budor’s exhibition Spring at the Swiss Institute

    The sci-fi overview framed the discussion of Budor’s installation, which consisted of four sculptures in a brightly lit room whose floors and walls were partially covered with some kind of blobby black resin (in fact, flexible polyurethane foam with black pigment). The discrete pieces, titled Our Children Will Have Yellow Eyes, What Kind of a Person Does This, Slow Ticking of the Callous Mind, and One Million Years of Feeling Nothing (all works 2015), meld steel pipes, latex prosthetics evoking an organic body, and an epoxy clay lattice network that looks like a circulatory or digestive system—they’re very strange. Each sculpture has a found object—a “screen-used miniature”—that appeared in three vintage science-fiction-type films: The Fifth Element (1997), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Batman Returns (1992).

    Budor defined her approach as “not of making works but making worlds.” But her art doesn’t come from her imagination—it comes from other sources. While the presence in her sculptures of these miniatures, which studios typically sell after using them and which make their rounds at trade convention shows, may impress fans of the movies, they act as excess cultural baggage for works that ought to stand on their own merits, triggering their own associations. I’ve only watched one of those three movies, so learning the origins of the miniatures soured the exhibition for me. Visual elements that had briefly been full of interpretative possibilities were suddenly foreclosed.

    To Iles, the “sinister black goo” covering the wall and floor—a work in itself, called Chinchorro People—represents a contamination. Budor named the piece for the several-millennia-old Chilean mummies that have succumbed to decomposition that one scientist reports is caused by microorganisms activated by global warming. (Budor also said the alien virus called the black cancer from the television show The X Files informs her work.) The mummies are actually turning into black goo. So it makes sense that Budor identified infection, the reanimation of the body, and the body combined with inanimate matter, as central tenants in her show. Iles interpreted the black goo psychoanalytically and symbolically, saying something about how its ambiguity represents a collective fear of the power of technology blurring boundaries. Going deeper, she argued that cities are huge machines that constitute the organic human body and its subjectivity (huh?), and that Budor’s sculptures reflect this cyborg nature. And going even deeper than that, the miniatures in Budor’s installation reverses the flatness of the film screen, Iles said because we look at these objects frontally, not yet manipulated by camera placement, which make the miniatures appear larger and more impressive—precisely the reason why they exist in the first place.

    Chrissie Iles reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Neither Iles nor Budor could sufficiently explain the importance of revealing the mechanisms of Hollywood cinema, when everyone knows that special effects are designed to simulate a plausible reality, whether that’s a painted backdrop or pointy ears or computer graphics. Or an Instagram filter. “We are getting used to looking at unnatural, composite bodies,” Iles stated, “and at the same time we want our bodies to become also more perfect.” Discussions of this sort have taken place for decades; the difference now—which is true for any present moment in time—is that we are closer than ever to a normalized cyborg or android body. Contact lenses and organ transplants once wowed people. Now paralyzed people can move computer cursors with their mind, and 3D printers can generate customized artificial limbs. That’s progress, right? Similarly, Budor found it earth-shattering that movie franchises create their own character universes: “It’s interesting when fiction kind of totally loses its history in a way,” she said, “and starts finding that history in itself.” The notion of continuity between movies, as well as canon-formation across films, books, animated series, and the like, isn’t terribly hard to grasp.

    If my recounting of Budor and Iles’s ideas above makes sense, it’s because I listened to the audio of the conversation twice, after hearing it firsthand at the Swiss Institute. I don’t think difficulties arise because the artist and curator operate at a much higher intellectual level than me; instead, they exist because neither of the speaker had the ability to communicate coherently, much less effectively. They presented what are probably ordinary ideas with overblown rhetoric, backed by obtuse extractions from other people’s theories, that seemed to alienate the audience. It was telling when the Q&A session yielded no inquiries from the audience. None at all.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

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    Swiss Institute, “Conversation: Spring with Dora Budor and Chrissie Iles” on Vimeo.

  • The Butcher, the Baker, the Exhibition Maker

    Theater of Exhibitions with Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann
    Wednesday, August 5, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Jens Hoffmann, Theater of Exhibitions (2015)

    Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).

    For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).

    Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).

    Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.

    Museums front and center (elevation illustrations by A Practice for Everyday Life)

    Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.

    Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.

    Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.

    In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.

    In Terms Of count: 4⅔.

  • The Meet Market

    Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age
    Tuesday, November 19, 2014
    The Art of Sex and Seduction
    French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, New York

    Gerard ter Borch the Younger, The Suitor’s Visit, ca. 1658, oil on canvas, 31½ x 29½ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    The internet was once the “meat market for the undatable,” said the journalist Erica Lumière. Now, meeting people online for dating and sex has nearly become completely normalized in American culture. Which is good news, especially for couples who no longer must make excuses for how they met—“at a party,” “through mutual friends,” or something of the sort—and just say “on OKCupid” without feeling ashamed. In fact, men and women older than fifty is the largest growing segment of online dating (and the market cornered by a company called Our Time).

    The three speakers on the panel “Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age,” hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and moderated by Lumière, offered their experiences as writers, researchers, and professors—and as advocates—and the ensuing discussion culminated in agreement over a moderate, thoughtful approach to modern romance that originates on the web.1

    Swipe Right

    Lumière began the conversation with a few statistics: one out of ten people have used a dating site or app; 66 percent of those users go on a date; and 23 percent of them have met a spouse or started a long-term relationship via the internet. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, praised the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet potential romantic partners, with large cities offering hundreds to thousands of people. But, he warned, a dating website is “only a good tool if you know how to use it.” Backed with statistics from Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey report, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher said that cognitive overload is the biggest problem and that users can become overwhelmed with choices, overweighing trivial aspects of a person’s looks, dress, interests, and personality, gleaned from a person’s profile, at the expense of finding common ground.2 Don’t use a check-off strategy, Reis and Fisher both recommended. My question is, does anyone consider those endless lists of favorite movies, bands, and books that people put in their profiles to be helpful criteria?

    The experience Daniel Jones brought to the panel wasn’t scientific but literary—he is a writer and the editor of the New York Times column Modern Love, for which ordinary people contribute personal essays about their relationships. Dating sites put you in the driver’s seat, “looking for the ideal person,” he said, but you’re thrown into the sea with an “illusion of control.” Sometimes opposites—whether that’s differences in income, religion, politics, or smoking preferences—really do attract. In short, he advised, don’t be too strict with your imagined ideal.

    The sexperts, from left: Daniel Jones, Hellen Fisher, and Harry Reis, with the moderator Erica Lumière at right

    Fisher agreed: the algorithms work of dating websites work, but having a common background—which can be social values, good looks, or the same reproductive goals—is also important. “I don’t think they’re dating services.” Fisher continued. “I think they’re introducing services.” These websites are “changing courtship,” she said, “but [they’re] not changing love.”3 Connections happen in real life, Reis emphasized again. A prospective car buyer can read Consumer Reports cover to cover, his analogy went, but he or she must take a test drive before making a decision. Fisher nodded, stating that 35 percent of people fall in love “down the road,” not instantly, so patience is a virtue for anyone behind the wheel. There’s a joke about rocks songs about cars and girls in here somewhere.

    “Hi” Tech

    Many have declared that technology has killed romance. Jones recounted a story of a woman in Washington, DC, who Googled her date before meeting him. Because she “was able to excavate his entire personal life, and family life, all in advance of the date,” their conversation suffered from stunted communications and even led to an embarrassing mistake: she mentioned his sister before he said he had one. Yet 29 percent of internet users, Lumière stated, have looked up the person they are dating, or are going to date, online. Fisher had different statistics—38 percent of men and 53 percent of women have researched a date on Google and Facebook—and with safety and curiosity in mind and with different statistics said, “I don’t know why 100 percent don’t.” Besides, she explained, from hunter-gatherer era to the small towns of yore, many people already knew the family of the people with whom they might partner. This idea spurred Jones to assert that we’ve experienced a sea change of people dating strangers, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Dating strangers inherently creates suspicion, the panelists concurred, so it’s sensible that a person conduct research in advance. And no, it’s not stalking.

    Technology doesn’t protect people from getting hurt, Jones said. Considering hookup culture (i.e., sex without commitment) in 2008, he observed that things go tragically wrong when the emotional involvement becomes imbalanced. There’s an understanding between partners when hooking up, he said, but “the rules aren’t posted in the dorm walls.” When hooking up, kids feel vulnerable but cannot act vulnerable. On the positive side, the panelists agreed noted that people’s sexual needs are being met this way, despite the anxiety hooking up might cause. Fisher even revealed that 35 percent of one night stands and 47 percent of friends with benefits turn into long-term relationships. The rules are developing now, she said, just like they were developing in other ways a hundred years ago. Later, during the Q&A, an audience member felt that hooking up takes time away from working on a core relationship, but Reis has observed that emotion flows plentifully in hookups, that “it’s following some different norms, to be sure,” and not necessarily a linear courtship progression. Jones, however, has witnessed people struggling with such arrangements but offered the idea that they’re practicing pieces of relationships. Sometimes dealing with a whole relationship while too young, he suggested, can damage a younger person.

    Daniel Jones (left) offered his experience as a writer and editor

    The panelists discussed long-distance relationships that develop online between people who have never met face to face. “It’s completely liberating,” Jones said, and “The flirtation is intense.” The risk for vulnerability is low, he continued, but foibles may develop, such as when one couple worked up to Skyping naked but still preferred typing to speaking. Another couple would fall asleep together online, Jones recalled, but the relationship failed after she drove from Missouri to New York. In real life they were bored by each other and could only get their emotional fix through their electronic devices. Lumière asked if these online relationships can work. “I would say ultimately not,” responded Reis, who again endorsed the primacy of flesh-and-blood connections.

    Deception is built into technology, Jones said. Since people regularly fudge their income, height, weight, and age in their online profiles, he wondered, how should an honest person act when everyone else is enhancing their image? Others might think a person who genuinely lists himself as 45 year old is actually 50, or a 180-pound person actually weighs 200. “Lying and cheating are hardly new inventions,” responded Reis, and the opportunities to both cheat and detect cheating are relatively equal. “It’s a bit of an arms race,” he observed. Jones believes that Facebook helps reignite old flames, but often you’re seeing someone’s curated life, not their actual life, and therefore illusions can develop. What’s more, he said, you must work harder to block people from your life online. Fisher asserted the notion that if you’re not predisposed to cheat, you probably won’t cheat. Dating sites, she concluded, don’t change brain chemistry and personality. After a few weeks, Reis added, you generally know who a person is—unless he or she is a pathological liar.

    It’s All Good?

    One study, Lumière noted, found that internet marriages are three to four times more likely to end in divorce, but Reiss asserted the opposite: “The right science has not been done to answer that question.” People don’t sacrifice their career for a relationship anymore, he continued, which is a positive development, and women need not follow their partners around the country or be told where to attend graduate school. Further, people may now split up romantically and separate geographically but stay together emotionally, which Reis said could develop into a new kind of relationship. Ever ready with her statistics, Fisher stated that 81 percent of lifelong partners would marry the same person again, and 76 percent are still in love with him or her. Now we choose for ourselves, often later in life, and leave bad relationships more readily.

    Harry Reis (center) encourages online daters to meet in person

    Regarding genders, Reis claimed that the similarities between men and women overwhelm the differences. Thus, the perception that single men only want sex, that married men pretend to be single want sex, and that women seek long-term relationships isn’t accurate. Based on her figures, Fisher even proposed that men are more romantic, fall in love easier, suggest moving in together sooner, and want to introduce family members earlier. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, she added, after a romantic snub. Reis stated, again, that there’s no information you can put online that’s better than what you’ll learn from meeting in person. The better dating sites, he said, tell you who is in your geographic area.

    The evening’s conversation completely avoided racial preferences, which were brought up in a 2013 report on interracial communications on a single Facebook-based dating site, Are You Interested. A few findings: black women are the least likely to be contacted, Asian women were the most pursued, and most women wrote to white men. OkCupid found similar results in 2009, including the fact that approximately two out of three whites prefer to date someone with the same skin color and racial background. And I don’t recollect a single mention by the panelists of issues affecting gays and lesbians. It’s inexplicable how the speakers—who were all white and straight—failed to widened their scope for a more inclusive discussion.

    Anna Gensler’s collage of Keith comprising drawing and smart phone screen shot, from November 24, 2014 (artwork © Anna Gensler)

    The panelists barely acknowledged accusations of emotional manipulation on social-media sites, which Facebook and OkCupid both faced earlier this year. And while the speakers discussed online communications between potential mates, they forgot to talk about the severe harassment of women by men—from sexually explicit written invitations to unwanted dick pics—which has become so widespread in the dating community that the aberrant behavior has become expected, in a way. Just ask the artist Anna Gensler, who draws caricatures of the men who contact her on Tinder with sexually explicit messages and publishes them, sometimes with collaged digital images but always showing the man with a hilariously small penis, on Tumblr and Instagram (as well as Granniepants.)

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 Tonight’s event was the third and final panel in the Art de Vivre: Talks series produced by the French Institute Alliance Française in conjunction with its gallery exhibition of fashion photographs by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, titled Seducing the Lens, and a film series.

    2 Fisher is not only a research professor at the Center for Human Evolution Studies in Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology, she is also chief scientific advisor for Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, which colored her comments.

    3 One trend Reis has noticed is that people prefer finding a good provider to finding love. The opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but because divorce is so prevalent, singles are suspicious of intense passion.

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