In Terms Of

Tag: Maryland Institute College of Art

  • Art School Confidential

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cost of the Ticket

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

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

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

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

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

    Proliferation of Degrees

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

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

    Art School Administration

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

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

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

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

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

    Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion

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

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

    Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read

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

  • Alice Aycock, Storm Chaser

    Alice Aycock: On Her Work
    Tuesday, November 11, 2014
    Evening Lecture Series
    New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, New York

    Alice Aycock, Cyclone Twist, 2013, painted aluminum, 27 x 14½ x 13½ ft. Temporary installation on Park Avenue in New York (artwork © Alice Aycock)

    “Tornadic, whirling movement is something I’ve been involved in right now,” said Alice Aycock. “I’m not really into peaceful things.” This New York–based artist, who turns sixty-eight on November 20, said she trusts turbulence, not balanced or harmonious things, which is typical of her recent work, in particular Park Avenue Paper Chase, a series of seven sculptures on view in the median of an Upper East Side thoroughfare from March to July 2014. During her lecture at the New York Studio School, she talked about this work, her approach to art making, and more to a surprisingly half-full room of rapt listeners. (The audience was mostly middle aged and elderly—where were all the kids?) Aycock is positive, confident, and self-assured despite the precarious nature of the public-art commissions for which she regularly applies.

    Aycock began the talk by reciting a condensed version of “The Aleph,” a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, but with her own twists: “I’ve changed it to say the things I want to say.” For her, the story exemplifies how Borges compares himself to Dante, his touchstone artist, as both an admirer and a competitor. Borges wanted to be as good as—or better than—the medieval Italian poet. The story also emphasizes the “tear,” which Aycock described as a breakthrough (in literature, visual art, or whatever) that pushes the discourse forward and creates a new thought. Creating such tears has been her goal throughout her career. She didn’t indicate that she has succeeded in making a tear—Aycock is a terrific but not highly influential artist—but her relentless pursuit of the tear is commendable.1

    Alice Aycock at the podium (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Aycock aims to make an image in her work, not specific but generic. A seed image, she called it. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (1994–2000), she gave as an example, offers a precise image: the shape of a dog created from twisted, inflated latex. Further, she pursues a state of becoming and transforming in her work, and not settling down. A recent outdoor work for the University of Cincinnati Medical Science Building in Ohio, Super Twister (2013), is meant to evoke tornados and whirlpools, and another, Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (2005–7) in Nashville, Tennessee, took its inspiration from the bridges and trusses on the Cumberland Riverfront.

    The artist described her process: working mostly through competitions, she researches images of phenomena online; develops a design for a sculpture on the computer, with an assistant; finalizes the image; makes a pitch (to a municipality, business, or school); and, if accepted, builds the work. At certain points she employs a structural engineer to ensure her idea can be realized. “I would rather dream up these things and not construction manage,” Aycock lamented, but she does so anyway. She also explained that she plays with and ruminates on a work’s design digitally—there are no maquettes or working drawings. Once she finalizes a piece on the screen—it’s done.

    Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, ca .1517–18, pen and black ink with wash, 16.2 x 20.3 cm. Royal Collection Trust (artwork in the public domain)

    Returning to a discussion on her influences, Aycock said that “Leonardo was my Dante, in a certain way,” pointing to his series of deluge drawings in particular. She admires the Renaissance artist’s curiosity: “There’s nothing that’s taboo [for him]. There’s nothing he won’t think about.” Another touchstone work is Vladimir Tatlin’s architectural designs for the unbuilt Monument to the Third International (1919–20). “I love every time I see it remade,” she said. Later in the talk she described recent visits to eighteenth-century astronomical observatories: the Jantar Mantar in Delhi (1724) and in Jaipur (1727–34). These scientific structures, Aycock explained, allowed an stargazers to find a certain celestial bodies during particular times of year, but the Rajput king who commissioned their construction had actually wanted to know his fortune. Here, she continued, we have an interface between rational/science and desire/magic, which is also among her artistic pursuits.

    The artist described important themes in her work, such as her longstanding interest in wind. Her first show, at 112 Greene Street in SoHo, featured Sand/Fans (1971). The piece recently sold at an art fair in Dubai, she noted, forty years after its initial appearance. Fashion is another influence, especially ruffles, lace, high collars, and petticoats. Rollercoasters are a third interest: she grew up near Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, which has the Super Duper Looper. The visual qualities of war strategy intrigues Aycock, as well as the idea that you plan so extensively only to see the fight erupt into chaos. These various qualities—including tornadoes, turbines, and a “small origami dress”—came together in Park Avenue Paper Chase, for which she created a visual narrative that progressed from East 52nd to 66th Street. “The wind creates forms,” she said of the painted aluminum and fiberglass works, “and also scatters them.”

    The seven works—commissioned by the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and funded by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and an unidentified German investor—are still for sale: “If you want one for your garden, I’d be happy to drop them off—tomorrow, in fact.” Later in the talk she hinted that the series didn’t turn a profit. Aycock said she loves to win competitions, to sell work, and get out of debt, but she makes art because she has to, to come to grips with what she doesn’t understand. She joked that Frank Stella always wins the commission when both artists compete for the same prize. Stella won’t talk to her, she joked, not even when riding together in an elevator. “If he could just say ‘Hey Alice, I won!’”

    Alice Aycock, Maelstrom, 2014, painted aluminum, 12 x 15½ x 67 ft. Temporary installation on Park Avenue in New York (artwork © Alice Aycock)

    Despite having recently erected outdoor sculpture all over the country, Aycock said, “If you do them on Park Avenue, you’re suddenly back in the game.” Her presence in Manhattan is understated, to say the least, even after Alice Aycock Drawing: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating, a two-museum retrospective that took place last year at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, which admittedly are not the highest-profile venues in the area.2 “I love New York,” she said, “but it’s a really hard town.” People will pay attention to you “maybe for five minutes, maybe for ten.”

    It’s certainly not easy when you’re making public art, an area in which even prominent artists such as Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, and Vito Acconci spent years struggling. She admitted that her work is placed in banal locations, such as schools, community center, and airports. Aycock recently faced a legal battle with the custodians of John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 1, which wanted to dismantle her work Star Sifter (1998). Despite getting press about the fight in spring 2012, the artist said, when the decision was to relocate and reconfigure the work, no article was written.3

    During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the difference between drawing on computer and by hand. “On some level I cannot draw,” Aycock conceded, recalling her “knee-jerk rejection of perspective” when she was younger. Besides, she said, her teachers had been Fluxus artists, so you know technique was thrown out the window. At New York University, however, she took a class in which students were instructed to draw in the style of particular artists. “I was okay at it,” she said but eventually fell in love with compositional systems.

    Aycock taught herself drawing in isometric projection, an architectural style that emphasizes scale, measurements, rules, and templates. Knowing precise measurements for her sculpture has helped her tremendously when ordering materials at the lumber store. In the mid-1990s, Aycock noticed that draftsmen began moving to computers, where a designer can enlarge or shrink an object, or rotate it, with tremendous ease. Adopting digital tools years ago, she can alter an image easily to “get exactly what I want.” Aycock never shows her shop drawings in exhibition, but instead makes hand-colored drawings for display, such as those in the Parrish Art Museum show, which covered 1984 to the present.[4] “I want the control back,” she said.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Aycock is a longtime professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, as well as at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, so her influence may be more pedagogical than aesthetic.

    2 The exhibition traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where it was on view from January to April 2014.

    3 See James Barron, “Arbitrator to Hear Artist’s Plea over Airport Sculpture,” New York Times, May 7, 2012; and James Barron, “At Kennedy Airport, an Artist Fights to Save Her Sculpture,” New York Times, April 23, 2012.

    4 The Grey Art Gallery showed her work from 1971 to 1984.

    Read

    Dennis Hollingsworth, “Alice Aycock Lecture at the NY Studio School,” Dennis Hollingsworth, November 12, 2014.

  • The Authorial Intent

    Public Art Fund Talk at the New School: Jeff Koons
    Wednesday, September 10, 2014
    New School, John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center, New York

    Jeff Koons discusses his Inflatables from the late 1970s (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Is it possible to be indifferent to Jeff Koons? For many years my attitude toward the artist’s work has been impassive and disinterested. It exists whether I like it or not and has some visual interest, but I’ve never cared enough to form an opinion beyond that. Among the most successful living artists, Koons is comparable to Jay Z or U2: a talented mainstream artist whose early output is considered groundbreaking but whose later works are noteworthy more for their high production values and their exorbitant, multimillion-dollar price tags than their aesthetic worth. Over the years Koons has managed to stay relevant, with critics and journalists dutifully covering his exhibitions and appearances, just as they would report on Bono’s activism and Hova’s exploits.

    A retrospective covering Koons’s entire career, organized by Scott Rothkopf, sits in the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 19, the final exhibition at the museum’s Upper East Side location before a move to the Meatpacking District. The exhibition was among the reasons for tonight’s sold-out talk at the New School. Dressed in a navy suit, a pale-blue open-collared shirt, and black dress shoes, Koons delivered an hour-long, well rehearsed lecture in which he presented himself as an animated but never overbearing orator, using a variety of hand gestures, movements, and poses that enhanced his spoken words. At one point he even crouched down to greet an imaginary dog. Woof!

    After thanking the Public Art Fund, which sponsored the talk as well as the sculpture Split-Rocker (2000), a large outdoor floral arrangement on view at Rockefeller Center during summer 2014, Koons talked about his upbringing and his understanding of and approach to public sculpture, the subject of this lecture. He first became aware of the genre through a childhood encounter with the statue of William Penn that stands atop Philadelphia’s City Hall building. Created by Alexander Calder’s grandfather, the work embodies, Koons said, a history of society’s values on a mystical scale. Art deals with issues of interior and exterior, he continued, that elicit emotional responses. Further, experience and emotion form the vocabulary of art, and to interact with public art in physical space is a “communal activity.”

    William Penn stands on top of City Hall (photograph by G. Widman for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation)

    Koons emphasized what he called the “unitative,” explained as something bigger than us but at the same time collectively shared. The York fairground in the artist’s Pennsylvanian hometown, founded ca. 1765, was the first fair in the United States, he said, and there he experienced games, visual stimulation, joy, pleasure, and terror—both as an individual and as a group with other fair goers. Fireworks, parade floats, and houses decorated with Christmas lights also inspire him, providing “excitement, awe, and wonder.” “Our governments,” Koons even said, “are a form of public sculpture.” If by this he means the socially engaged practice of argument and debate, with the elation of progress and success and the frustration of stagnation, then art is like not only politics but also science, business, religion, and myriad other things.

    Koons’s vacations were also formative experiences. As a kid he and his family visited Dolphin Land or Dolphin World in Florida (perhaps he meant the Miami Seaquarium), where he internalized the relationships between humans and animals. These relationships are evident—in some way or another—in his Antiquity 3 painting, which depicts a woman riding an inflatable dolphin. Recalling the aquatic-theme-park performances of jumping dolphins and such, Koons applied abstract ideas about the surface of the water versus going underneath to sculpture. Indeed, surface and depth are the core—if not the most important—qualities of Koons’s art.

    Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2009–11, oil on canvas, 102 x 138 in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    At this point Koons switched to autopilot, pulling ideas from the usual spiel he gives when discussing his own work, trotting out stock phrases about generosity, transcendence, perfection, communication, and sharing, like he most recently did on Charlie Rose and The Colbert Report. “As soon as things become public, there’s a sense of generosity,” Koons said. People share the transcendence created by art collectively, the artist explained, and there is no private experience. Deflating the importance of his artistic production, the artist said, “There’s not any art in that object,” which instead acts as a “transponder” for the art experience. Transponders, he noted, both send and receive. Later Koons said, “We don’t care about objects—we care about people.” I have no obligation to the object, he continued, but rather to the people and their trust. I wonder if he gives the same populist rap to the elite collectors who spend millions on his work.

    Koons traced the beginnings of his involvement in outdoor, public sculpture. His first foray was the stainless-steel Kiepenkerl (1987), made for that year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster in West Germany. The hot metal accidentally bent during the casting process, damaging the work in several places. Since there wasn’t enough time to redo the piece, the artist faced a grave decision: either pull out of the exhibition or attempt a hurried fix. “I went with the radical plastic surgery,” Koons said cheerfully, giving the punch line to this story for the umpteenth time.

    Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007 (photograph by Librado Romero for the New York Times)

    Koons described several more public artworks from the past twenty years, expressing amazement that Macy’s included a gigantic version of his mirrored inflatable Rabbit for its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007. He also revealed that he had been looking at Baroque and Rococo art when conceiving the monumental Puppy (1992), a large floral arrangement in the shape of a dog that appeared outside Rockefeller Center in summer 2000 (among other sites); he wanted to put those historical styles into a piece of his own. Issues that Koons grappled with for Puppy included biology, ephemerality, symmetry/asymmetry, and internal/external. Ultimately—and this was the highlight of the talk—Koons described Puppy as “a piece about control,” the kind of control a person exercises or relinquishes in his or her life. “It’s whether you want to serve or be served,” he said. This commentary evoked not only the “greed is good” mantra from the 1980s, but also the exercises and abuses of power in any political or economic dictatorship —all frightening stuff, even threatening. Here the menacing qualities of Koons’s seemingly happy, carefree art bare its fangs.

    Returning to formal and logistical issues, Koons professed that photographs of Split-Rocker typically show the piece in a pristine state, when it was first erected in early summer. Koons, however, intended the work to get “shaggy and chaotic” over time, which it had certainly done when I visited the work in mid-September. An unrealized outdoor work called Train, Koons explained, will feature a functioning, performing steam locomotive dangling from a crane. “It’s a metaphor for an individual” that huffs and puffs in a determined manner, he said, and the train experiences an “orgasmic moment” when it hits one hundred miles per hour. “To me, that’s William Penn,” he said, reiterating his themes of history, power, and the connection of an individual’s experience to something bigger.

    Koons also returned to his biography, recalling the showroom of his father, who was an interior designer. The elder Koons had sold paintings by his young son in the store window, integrating them into arrangements of furniture and other household objects. “He gave me great confidence,” the artist said of his dad. Koons also gave a shout out to W. Bowdoin Davis Jr., his art-history professor at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, who revealed the many operations in play in art, such as psychology, religion, sociology, and symbolism.

    Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), 2013, plaster and glass, 128½ x 67 × 48⅝ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Koons revealed his Balloon Venus sculpture (2008–12) as a hermaphroditic fertility object and announced that the Gazing Ball series (2013) is among his favorite bodies of work. Coincidentally it was at that moment when I noticed the artist’s intense blue eyes as he showed images of several Gazing Balls. With an image of his oversized sculpture Play-Doh (1994–2014) hovering onscreen, Koons told us “I’m trying to make works you can’t have any judgment about.” If you make judgments,” he decreed, “you’re limiting yourself.” He advised his critics to “Open yourself up and keep everything in play.”

    The event organizers had collected written questions for Koons earlier in the lecture, and Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, read a selected few to the artist. Did Koons ever fear there was a time when he felt that his career was over, and what did he do? In his early years the artist admitted to going broke a couple times, leaving New York to live with his parents. But he came back to the city because, in his own words, “people want to be involved in dialogue. People depend on you.” I cannot imagine anyone taking that statement at face value.

    When has technology not kept up with your artistic vision, asked another question. Koons claimed he prefers not to use new technology, which implied an apprehension of his work being tied to a particular method or process or—worse—appearing dated. Yet as the Friday symposium “The Koons Effect Part 2” determined and as Michelle Kuo noted in her catalogue essay, the artist uses complex software and highly intricate three-dimensional modeling to fabricate his recent work. Some even say that his level of technological perfection is higher than is needed by the aerospace industry and the military. Again, Koon’s modest words can be readily dismissed.

    Jeff Koons on Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Someone wanted to know how Koons can manage his studio workers and still be creative? Acknowledging his longtime studio manager Gary McCraw, who sat in the audience, the artist said he is always walking through the studio, watching and educating his loyal workers. How loyal are they? The average tenure of an assistant, he pointed out, is nine years. In the end, tight organization and long-term stability give the artist his creative freedom. Another Q&A dealt with the white skin color of the porcelain figures in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). At the time, Koons replied, radical changes were happening to the performer’s body, and the Italian craftsman who fabricated the piece wanted to know “How am I supposed to make his nose?” when it was constantly changing in real life. Koons noted that porcelain was the “king’s material,” so he wanted Jackson to appear godlike, as in a pieta. Further, he said, the thick black outlines surrounding the singer and monkey’s eyes alluded to Egyptian art.

    How would aliens from the future interpret your work? “They’d see a lot of the world, from our day-to-day lives,” Koons responded, pointing to the archetypal, universal qualities from our present historical moment embedded into his art. To what do you owe your fame and commercial success? “My family,” he replied, as if giving an Academy Award acceptance speech. When he was child, Koons remembered becoming ecstatic when his parents told him he could draw better than his older sister, whose life, he perceived at the time, had until then been superlative to his in every way. I wondered what that sister is doing now. What don’t critics get about your work? Koons repeated the transponder argument and boasted that negative people aren’t “prepared” for his art and are “insecure.” While seemingly arrogant, this response isn’t so atypical for an artist, though many would probably not state it so baldly. Koons does receive a healthy amount of negative criticism, but it’s rare for an artist to be so untroubled by it. Koons’s attitude may serve as a model for other artists. Or not.

    Installation view of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, June 27–October 19, 2014 (artworks © Jeff Koons; photograph by Ronald Amstutz)

    I wish someone had asked about appropriation and copyright. Koons has been the subject of four lawsuits: he lost the first three on weak parody defenses but won the fourth with the transformation argument. The losing cases—Rogers v. Koons (1992), United Feature Syndicate v. Koons (1993), and Campbell v. Koons (1993)—each involved works from the Banality series: String of Puppies, Wild Boy and Puppy, and Ushering in Banality (all works 1988). The last, Blanch v. Koons (2006), focused on a photographer’s complaint that Koons used an image she took in a painting from his Easyfun-Ethereal series.

    Toward the end of the lecture Koons returned again and again to his aphorisms on affirmation, acceptance, participation, and mutual support. It was hard for him to go off script—I doubt that he can—and the audience questions picked for him were relatively tame. In many ways Koons speaks like a politician, like Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail. And like a politician Koons doesn’t offer truth or salvation but favorable, enthusiastic rhetoric about those things. He proposes a welcoming, populist frame of interpretation for his art, not to foreclose other people’s ideas but rather to make sure his intentions are being discussed. You can take his words at face value, scrutinize them, or dismiss his sermon, but you can’t deny that Koons is smartly shaping the reception of his work. After this talk I still felt indifferent toward his art but appreciated hearing about it from the source.

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