This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.
Museums and Present-Day Art Friday, February 2, 1979 67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, International Center, Washington, DC
Moderator: Hilton Kramer, Art Critic, New York Times Panelists: William Lieberman, Museum of Modern Art; and Martin Friedman, Director, Walker Art Center
Abby Goell, “Museums and Present-Day Art,” Women Artists News 4, no. 10 (April 1979): 2
Since the original title of this panel was “Museums and the Reality Principle,” the artist-listener might have expected an adrenal in-rousing discourse on exhibition politics, how artists are chosen or ignored, the manipulations of trustees, the perfidy of curators and their lovers, etc. Instead, the Reality Principle at issue quite reasonably concerned the costs of running a museum, the problems of attracting a broad public, and how, having done so, not to go broke being popular. Hilton Kramer described the task of a museum over the past thirty years as changed, from an agency showing classics of modern art to an institution whose function is also to introduce new and emerging artists and movements.
Martin Friedman said the total exhibition program must be constructed to build a pattern of shows that are “ongoing reportages of art.” A museum must never schedule a series of one-artist shows, he maintained, but alternate single artists with classical modernism and diverse media. He sees “crucial examples” from the past as essential to intelligent shows of classical modernism (such as Cubism, Futurism, or the Cézanne show); these examples are then reinterpreted in the light of today’s taste.
Friedman noted that there are several museum audiences: first, the continuing audience in the habit of museum-going; second, the specialized audience drawn to certain media such as photography, design, or architecture; and third, the first-time audience, brought by the publicity for a special show, such as King Tut. Even though museums plan shows they think have ongoing significance, he said, the Reality Principle does not allow them to ignore the fact of these separate audiences.
Kramer asked the others how seriously “box office” considerations affect choice of museum shows. William Lieberman (the most soigné, detached, and ironic of the three) said box office has become more important, “because more corporations are funding the shows and they see popularity as the yardstick of success.” MoMA doesn’t have the money today to do shows without large-audience appeal. And, “titles are important for shows.” Friedman, who was conscious of speaking to an audience of, after all, CAA members, insisted, “We cannot limit programming to the popular.”
A member of the audience, referring to Kramer’s article about art museums run as businesses, asked him, “What about the businessman as top director, over the curator?” Kramer responded by paraphrasing Alan Shestack of Yale’s statement that every decision made in a museum, including the collection of garbage, is an aesthetic decision.1
Lieberman thought the divided leadership running the Metropolitan Museum seemed to be working, but Friedman objected, declaring that the chief officer of a museum must absolutely be a scholar and art historian, and that the core of a museum must be “artistic.” Artists and art historians, he said, “are not necessarily financial morons.” However, Friedman conceded that very large museums involved in big investment funds and city politics would be exceptions to the rule of scholars.
Kramer finds museum trustees failing in their responsibilities today. They ought to worry more, not less, he said. He also suggested that trustees prefer financial types at the helm because it’s less work for them when the administration belongs to the “world of money” rather than scholarship. He pointed out drily that we should view with alarm the fact that America’s leading universities, publishing houses, and newspapers are now run by “administrators,” not scholars, men of letters [sic], or journalists. We should not let museums go the same way, he said.
The panel then took up the question of corporate support, and what that means to new artists. Lieberman conceded that it’s very hard to raise funds to show contemporary work. Most corporations prefer art of the past. It’s safer, attracts a larger audience, and causes less controversy. The British Council, he pointed out, gives MoMA funds to show, not just any artists, but British artists, and the few private donors left are nervous about the new and unknown.
All three panelists pointed out several times that art is a commodity, vying for the leisure time of audiences in competition with movies, theater, and sports, and that the need to attract mass audiences brings unending new problems.
To a question from the floor about the profitability of MoMA’s Cézanne show, Lieberman said MoMA loses $2 for each person who walks in and buys a ticket. The extra attendance at a show like Cézanne is offset by the expense of extra guards and other personnel. In fact, MoMA closes one day a week to save money. He agreed that boards of trustees today still view themselves as a “club” of art sponsors, but that museums get public money and must justify their activities to the community at large.
Kramer asked to what extent this affects aesthetic decisions. Or, as one audience member put it, “Isn’t this concern for the mass audience making the art museum a media event, rather than an art event?” Friedman conceded that this was largely so, but said he hoped to find ways to solve the problem. One answer might be to schedule a “younger artist” show at the same time as a Cézanne blockbuster to catch the larger audience.
The panel also addressed questions of catalogue expenses [and] the trend toward elaborate labeling, extended graphics, and long cassettes, and acknowledged the difficulty of looking at art along with so many other people at the popular hours—in short, educational “overkill.” Popularity of the museum experience could carry the seeds of its own destruction, and newer artists might one day have no place to show. Friedman saw university museums and alternative spaces as a possible answer for lesser-known artists.
The panel ended all too briskly just as this last topic ripened for discussion, participants having to catch their planes to continue their appointed rounds. One thing is certain: artists may rise and fall and rise again, but the institutionalization of art is here to stay.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
1 Alan Shestack was director of the Yale University Gallery of Art from 1971 to 1985, after starting work there as a curator in 1967.
Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.
Step One
Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.
One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.
Step Two
Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2
Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)
Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.
Step Three
Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.
Step Four
Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?
Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Step Five
Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.
Step Six
The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?
A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.
After Steps
The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
In Terms Of count: 0.
1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”
2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.
Tehching Hsieh Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Artists at the Institute
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House, New York
Tehching Hsieh speaks at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Tehching Hsieh created among the most radical, strenuous, and bizarre bodies of work in all of art history. Only prisoners with life sentences or captured soldiers could ever relate to the parameters Hsieh set for himself for his five One Year Performances, which he described in chronological order during his lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts. Prisoners of crime or war rarely elect to put themselves in a position that isolated themselves, mentally and physically, for long periods of time.
Speaking broken English in a thick Asian accent, Hsieh told his life story as an artist. Born and raised in Taiwan, he “jumped ship” in Philadelphia on July 13, 1974, while serving with the Taiwanese Merchant Marine (and after his compulsory three-year military service). Hsieh headed for New York, where he lived for fourteen years as an illegal immigrant as he tried to establish himself in the downtown art scene. In fact, he even made an artwork resembling a US Immigration Service “wanted poster” four years after surreptitiously slipping into the country.
For his first One Year Performance (1978–79), also known as Cage Piece, Hsieh (using the first name Sam) built a mock jail cell, about one hundred square feet, in his TriBeCa loft, where he lived without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for an entire year.1 After reading the brief explanation of the piece from the digital image of a typewritten manuscript projected onscreen, Hsieh explained how he rationalized his cramped quarters: “Space—I try to create bigger…. I try to make so this corner become my home. Opposite corner become outside. So every day I can go out, take a walk, and come home.” He held visiting hours, but not many people came to visit this human zoo. For his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, he reconstructed the cell, which was displayed with documentation of the project.2
Presenting his career chronologically, Hsieh described the second One Year Performance (1980–81), also known as Time Clock Piece, in which the artist set a goal to punch a time clock on the hour, every hour, for 365 consecutive days. Hsieh screened a video of the film he made at the time—a six-and-a-half-minute succession of single 16mm film frames taken every time he punched the clock. As the hours and days progressed, the hair on Hsieh’s shaved head grew out, and he looked considerably tired toward the end. What struck me the most was how Hsieh just stood there, in the silent room at the institute, with an expressionless look on his face, blinking occasionally as he watched the rapidly changing stills of himself from thirty-five years ago.
Tehching Hsieh watches himself on film (photograph by Christopher Howard)
For his third One Year Performance (1981–82), Hsieh—now using his real first name, Tehching—spent the entire year without entering an indoor space. Almost. The New York City police detained him briefly, and a video clip of Outdoor Piece that Hsieh showed included footage from the day when cops dragged him into the station house after a vagrancy arrest. Again, Hsieh’s face was expressionless as he watched his younger self, screaming hysterically.
The fourth One Year Performance (1983–84) was subtitled Art/Life or Rope Piece. For the project, Hsieh tied himself to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano, with an eight-foot-long rope. “She like to do meditation, but I don’t quite … feeling,” he joked as he showed a photograph—one of several hundred taken during the span of the performance—of a grumpy-looking next to an absorbed Montano. While Hsieh didn’t hold a job for his first three pieces, he did construction work during the fourth to make a little money, and he traveled with Montano to Philadelphia, where she taught. Many of their conversations were audiotaped, Hsieh said, flashing an image of ordinary cassettes sealed in plastic cases—intended never to be heard. Like the previous pieces, the artist never described what it was like in the midst of the performance, providing us only with basic facts—and limited ones at that. What was, for example, the significance of the start and end date of July 4?
The fifth One Year Performance (1985–86), in which Hsieh did not see, talk, or read about art, but “just go in life,” preceded the sixth, called Thirteen Year Plan or Earth, which lasted from his thirty-sixth to his forty-ninth birthday. From December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999, Hsieh stated that he would make art but not show it. He tried to “disappear” in Alaska but only made it as far as Seattle, working the same kind of jobs he did in New York when fresh off the boat. (He also sold his early paintings for $500,000 and bought a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that housed a residency program for artists.) A poster for each project is the only documentation we have of how Hsieh spent his time. Onscreen he showed digital renditions of his desired retrospective, a timeline of his work in eighteen equally size rooms, one for each year of his performances. In his proposed exhibition, visitors would walk through and become aware their own personal time, thinking about their own life experiences.
Tehching Hsieh presented a diagram of his ideal retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During the audience Q&A, an audience member asked Hsieh which performance had the strongest impact for him? Hsieh skirted the question, explicating further his concept of separating “art time” and “life time,” the latter of which happens between performances, and of thinking about present time. “I don’t want people to see my work as document,” he said, considering the documentation as the proverbial tip of an iceberg.
One audience member quizzed the artist about his reconstruction of Cage Piece at MoMA—some folks get really hung up on originals and re-creations—but what is more interesting to me is if that performance can be restaged under the same conditions. Ten years ago Marina Abramović covered five classic works of 1960s and 1970s performance art—by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman—in Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during the first iteration of Performa, the New York–based biennial of performance art. Can you imagine her or anyone else punching a time clock every hour for a year or staying outdoors for 365 days? Even if someone were crazy enough to redo Cage Piece, that person’s experience would be completely different that Hsieh’s.
A thoughtful attendee asked Hsieh how he first conceived time as his medium, so Hsieh started from the beginning. Reminiscing about his early days in Taiwan, “I’m very good for abstract painting,” he laughed, “express my emotion.” After college friends who had traveled to the West described Conceptual art to him, he experimented on his own, including a jump from a second-floor window (a la Yves Klein) and exposing one hundred newspapers that were laid on the ground with paint. In New York Hsieh worked as a dishwasher from 1974 to 1978, an experience he considered a “four year wasting time experience,” during which he thought about life. “I don’t go looking for it,” he explained his realization. “I already in the situation. I just repeat wasting time one more year. I will catch it. I just create a form. I did it in a cage.” Hsieh deems himself to be best at wasting time, a time of freedom during which “freethinking” can happen. “Life is difficult, but you’re still freethinking.”
Hsieh avoided confirming the audience’s interpretations of his work: fear and bureaucracy as form, the legal medium, and so on. Instead, he responded, “I’m more like caveman.” Hsieh’s work may concern Zen Buddhism, the penal system, and political asylum, and the artist is content to let others elucidate its meaning. Critics and historians have done a good job. Colby Chamberlain recently wrote: “By pledging to imprison himself in his studio, or to punch a time-clock at hourly intervals, or to stay outdoors, Hsieh imposed on his own body strictures that reverberated with wider regimes of control: incarceration, labor, homelessness (and, perhaps, in the case of his collaboration with Linda Montano, marriage).”3 And six years ago, Roberta Smith assessed Hsieh’s succession of performances: “For ‘Cage Piece’ Mr. Hsieh deprived himself of nearly all contact with the world. In the next four pieces he eliminated, in succession, concentration, shelter, privacy and finally art itself. In each case he altered the nature of time radically for himself and, retrospectively, us.”4 She is right—he made this work, putting himself through these strenuous activities, so we don’t have to. And neither does he: Hsieh more or less retired from making art on January 1, 2000, after concluding the Thirteen Year Plan.
Has Success Spoiled the American Art World? February 19, 1987 College Art Association, 75th Annual Conference Marriott Hotel, Salon E, Boston, MA
The title question of this panel is the sort that rarely gets asked unless the answer is meant to be yes—and the answer for this one did seem to be “Yes, but….” Yes or no, the panel articulated feelings about “success” that had ripened in the ’80s.
Moderator: Hilton Kramer
Panelists: William Bailey, Sylvia Mangold, Sidney Tillim, and Robert Pincus-Witten
The most talked-about art writing of 1987 College Art Association week was Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile of Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum. Hilton Kramer, introducing “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?,” explained how Malcolm found Sischy not “profilable” and so profiled instead a “Cook’s tour of the seamy aspects of the world [Sischy] is obliged to move in.” We, apparently more accustomed than Kramer to the ways and means of artists, thought the scene sounded like just folks and began to wonder anew about Kramer’s sense of the fitness of things.
From there he segued into a depiction of the runaway art world of the last five to ten years—the proliferation of art critics, the inflation of indifferent art, and the turning of art into a commodity for the moneyed middle class.
Kramer traced the blame for the decade’s art sickness to his years at the New York Times. Something happened in the ’70s art world that was expressed by his editors: the burning question asked every week at editorial meetings was “What’s New?” But, as Kramer saw it, the impetus for this question, and what changed American journalism, was New York magazine. It was New York that advised readers each week where to buy the ten best hamburgers, see the ten best exhibitions, find the ten best artists, discover the ten newest movements.
So Kramer’s editor at the Times wanted to know what was new that week in art. The high point of his career at the Times was the week he answered that “no new trend was discernible in the last seven days,” and the editor asked, “Is that a trend?”
Kramer advised his audience to resist sentimentalizing the “old art world,” reminding us that those now-famous artists were impoverished at the time, had no public, only hostile and ignorant response (if any), no solo exhibitions until they were 40 or 50 years old, and sold at outrageously low prices. Was the American art world a finer place in the “good old days,” he asked, when Willem de Kooning didn’t have an exhibition until he was 42 and Milton Avery sold his paintings for $50?
William Bailey had pondered the question “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?” and was prepared to say “Yes, in the sense of a spoiled child.” Then, with carefully weighed words, he added that the problems of the art world emanate not from success but from a sense of failure. As the successful get more successful, the unsuccessful get, in comparison, even more unsuccessful. The gap between them widens, rending the art community. Bailey also disdainfully likened today’s success for artists to the success of rock stars and movie stars. (But why not? We have lived to see moments when even women artists were mobbed by fans at openings. We’d like more—more famous women artists, more mob scenes.)
Bailey said that when he started out, “art” was what came from Europe; he himself had no expectations of “success.” He made the point that most painters today still live marginally and under increasingly difficult conditions, especially in New York. The community of artists has broken up; it is no longer possible even to share poverty. Bailey knows young and old artists who have never had the kind of success heaped today on the art world’s darlings but are instead involved in the daily conflicts of the studio and haunted by a sense of failure. The talk now in SoHo is only about money, while at the old shrines (museums) curators are preoccupied with enticing the fun people, as though to a disco. Bailey asked if all this “presages the decline of the West.” However, it was reassuring to have him tell us this is not just New York, but all over.
Sylvia Mangold, the only woman on the panel (added, we understand, as token, at the insistence of Natalie Charkow, chair of the conference studio sessions), said success means money. She enjoys being able to live off her art. Though she lives apart from the New York world of careerism, she still faces her own problems in the studio.
In preparation for the panel, Mangold had read Suzi Gablik’s Has Modernism Failed? and works by Willa Cather. From Cather she came away with the reassurance that success is never as interesting as the struggle (though there might be some argument on that from the strugglers), and that every artist needs to find some motivation other than money. Money brings problems, Mangold observed, expressing her certainty that most artists she knows care more about their work than about making money. But sensitive, gentle Sylvia, doubtless selected because of her friendship with the moderator and the knowledge that she wouldn’t make trouble, was no match for those macho image-makers on the platform—though one wished it were otherwise. A scrappy hard-hitting woman puncturing some of the blather would have been refreshing.
If Sidney Tillim had some gift as a raconteur, his garrulous drawn-out tales might have been more appreciated. He, too, assured us, in case we didn’t know, that most artists don’t work just for the money, and that he, personally, doesn’t have enough of it. He, too, harked back to the art world of thirty years ago. Asking himself “Why am I here?” (at the panel), he concluded it was for his career. Tillim resumed writing some four years ago, after a lapse of fourteen years, because he wasn’t showing. “I just couldn’t get a dealer.” He was surprised when an article he wrote, “The View from Past 50,” got an enormous response, mostly from people under 30. Then, in an attempt to share his thoughts on the subject, he launched into a soliloquy, “The Art World Today Is Like Baseball,” an extraordinarily boring ramble on his life-long interest in baseball, which may of course have been less boring to a person with a life-long interest in baseball.1
The passive among us grabbed forty winks, the decision-makers got up and left; the masochists toughed it out. Finally back to the subject at hand, Tillim proposed to document changes in the art world, as, for instance, the evolution of the Whitney Museum of American Art from humble beginnings on Eighth Street to MoMA’s backyard to Madison Avenue and its present postmodernist imbroglio. These changes, showing the movement of money and upward mobility, have occurred, he said, not just in art but throughout modern culture. Then, before relinquishing the mic, Tillim got in yet another personal anecdote. He had sought advice from Robert Pincus-Witten about how to approach the art magazines. His first submitted article was rejected (by an unspecified publication). He next decided to approach Betsy Baker, an old friend who happens to be editor of Art in America. His call was fielded by a young man who asked what he wanted to talk to her about, explaining that it was necessary to “prioritize topics.” Tillim’s topic evidently didn’t make it to the top ten because he didn’t get through. Next he approached Artforum, where he finally got published. Running into Baker at a later date, he described his failure to reach her. She told him, “Next time just say you’re returning my call.”
Robert Pincus-Witten was introduced by Kramer as “the kid” but admitted to being not much younger than the others present. My neighbor whispered to me that she’d been in his class at art school and they were the same age: 52. Pincus-Witten, simultaneously arch, pleasant, and snide, smiled and demolished all previous nonsense. The basic situation has not changed, he said. All artists want as much as they can get and good-looking lovers, and always have. But this has no effect on art. For example, “Has success spoiled Hilton Kramer?” No, Pincus-Witten assured us. “Whatever he does is not affected by his being a successful man.” Reading from a column by Kramer, he quoted statements about the lack of talent among this year’s famous—David Salle, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and company—can’t draw, can’t paint, etc. He added that success is very revelatory of character; in fact, you can’t tell what a person is until they get what they want.
Kramer then shifted the discussion to museums and their keepers, describing the enormous pressure on curators and directors to be first with the new stars and to beat the Europeans to it. Mangold questioned who holds the power, and Pincus-Witten said power is in the hands of those who make the newest art—small groups acting in concert. This led to a diatribe against the gang of four: Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, and Mary Boone (speaker unidentified by now-sleepy reporter). Kramer tossed in the fact that MoMA is an ailing museum and no longer representative, quoting Harold Rosenberg’s phrase about “the herd of independent minds.” Everyone, Kramer explained, thinks they’re making “independent decisions,” but they turn out to be identical with all the others.
Mangold said she found the volume of art being produced frightening, but another panelist reassured her that two kinds of business will surely prosper—storage and conservation.
Assorted Quotes and Choice Lines from the Panel
Pincus-Witten:Agnes Martin’s withdrawal can be seen as a strategy for self-promotion.
Bailey: Critics don’t see very well; that’s part of today’s problem. There is the question of how well Picasso draws and how badly Salle draws. [Bailey added that he regretted having to speak ill of another artist but was driven to it.]
Kramer: The problem with Salle isn’t that he doesn’t draw well, but that he draws.
Pincus-Witten: Although we think of certain galleries as central emporia for significant artists, art actually moves into the world as a function of stylistics. Hype doesn’t sell art, stylistics does. Work enters the marketplace because it sells itself, and that’s what the consumer wants. Significant collections are made up of works bought by people who don’t have to have things “sold” to them.
Kramer: The shift to Neo-Expressionism was the result of a strong sense by a new generation of what was missing in art; something more important than fashion and avarice, a sense that the vitality of art should be restored. Also, there are now so many artists, dealers, museums, curators, and collectors, that it’s tougher for an artist to get a serious review than to sell a picture.
Unidentified: At least we are finally rid of the mythical bohemianism of the lonely painter living in isolation and neglect.
Unanswered Questions from the Audience
Are these phenomena of “success” aspects of some larger cultural decay? Does the success of young artists, like the success of young ballplayers, inspire other young artists? Who markets the artist?
And Answered Questions
Audience: Aren’t artists involved in object commodification, as opposed to writers or dancers? Kramer: There’s a whole new group of short-story writers similar to the Schnabels of our time.
Audience: How does one achieve fame and fortune quickly? Answer: It’s easier if you start young.
Audience: Would you prefer to be a successful Picasso or an unsuccessful van Gogh? Answer: One lived three times as long as the other.
Audience [referring to the breakdown of the star system in Hollywood]: Can it happen in the art world? Kramer: We all liked it better when the movies had stars, but it’s not a true comparison.
Gossip
We heard that the panel originally included Robert Hughes and Alex Katz, with the expectation of a face-off between them. Hughes, it seems, had disparaged Katz in print, and Katz was furious. When Hughes cancelled his panel appearance for a trip to Australia promoting his latest book, Katz cancelled, too. The large sensation-hungry audience was disappointed.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
1 Apparently painter Clyfford Still also had a lifelong interest in baseball and also drew analogies between art and baseball, which he shared with his students in California, but their response is not on record.
Source
Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “End of Bohemianism” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 266–68. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
The Relationship between Artists and Museums
Late 1986
Kouros Gallery, New York
Learning that John Bernard Myers, founder and former principal of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, had organized a panel discussion about relations between artists and museums—a topic of major significance in the art universe—and hoping, not necessarily for a revelation, but perhaps for some pointed commentary, we sent a reporter to the event. She was only faintly amused.
Speakers: David Bourdon, Richard Hennessy, Diane Kelder, Barbara Rose, and Marcia Tucker
The symposium on “The Relationships between Artists and Museums” was a formal display of sparring and volleying between five panelists, some of whom raised genuine questions. A few presented themselves as ideologues. Only the final speaker attempted answers.
A stiff academic history of the relationship between museums and artists by Diane Kelder, who quoted Goethe and claimed that Italy destroyed classicism, opened the event. Commencing an extrapolation of the didactic role of museums, Kelder lost her place (she was reading) and quickly closed, just damning the Whitney Museum’s conspicuous relations with corporations and the Morgan Library’s allowing Mobil Oil to sponsor Holbein exhibitions.
David Bourdon then addressed the overflow audience (mostly of women, mostly of stern and angry visage) and asked a crucial question. Do museums cause people to be artists? And, if so, how bad is the damage? His thesis was that because artists now have easy access to museum exhibitions, relations are casual. He also pointed out that some kind of money has to support the showcases of art. Large corporations, because of governmental tax structures, are logical sponsors. Of course, Bourdon allowed, there is an opinion behind the money, and the corporations want their tastes validated. And, since corporations are innately materialistic, greedy, and commercial, they will not readily accept difficult or controversial artists.
Barbara Rose floundered on the question of how an artist achieves visibility. By means of “museum patronage,” she decided, then discussed the moral obligations of art-world powers. Museums should not be in the business of certifying artists but should remain neutral, she said, then wrapped her argument into a dead end by repeating the cultural myth that artists are by nature introverted and melancholy (oh Vincent, lend us your ear!) and the belief that corporate backing of museum shows is so narrow and aggressive that most great talents would be passed over in any event.
After that black vision, Richard Hennessy, in the supporting role of token artist, explained with great flair that the first thing he did upon arriving in New York was to go to the Museum of Modern Art and that made him an artist. A successful artist, albeit hand-made by museum endorsement, he thought it was OK to be in league with the power structure of, behind, and around museums. This seemed a naïve and self-indulgent viewpoint, both compromised and trusting. It reminded me of farmers in the Midwest who endorse Ronald Reagan, while his direct influence is bringing about their economic demise.
However, Marcia Tucker was on the mark, advocating ways of manipulating corrupt museum power into a more positive result. “Of course there’s corruption. Of course museums favor dead artists like Holbein who provide a predictable, finite career. Of course corporations control museums and museums control aesthetic visibility.” But, Tucker added, there are working solutions that could benefit artist, corporation, and museum. She suggested that museums should have a variety of curatorial standards to expand the tunnel vision of corporate influence, and curators should speak without lying. Meanwhile, she maintains that museums and collectors can engage in truthful discussion of ideas and involve corporations without losing their integrity.
Panelists then wrestled with the obvious questions, managing, finally, a ray of hope and optimism.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Cathy Blackwell, “Dubious Relations” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 1 (February/March 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 263. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization
Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.
Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.
Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.
Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle
W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”
The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.
The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.
W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.
Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets
Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?
I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.
Curating Social Movements Tuesday, August 19, 2014
ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York
An Occupy Wall Street poster from 2011 by the artist Lalo Alcaraz
Weeks after the Occupy Movement started, in September 2011, museums began racing to collect the posters, flyers, and other materials from the protests. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History dispatched archivists from Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York sent representatives downtown, as reported by Artinfo, the Washington Times, and the New York Daily News. As an explanation, the Smithsonian released a statement on October 19 that read: “The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.” In an editorial for CNN published in November, Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, wrote, “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and ‘hippie.’” Academics, museums, and the media clearly recognized the importance of both Occupy and its visual culture in American history.
Though squatting in Zuccotti Park ended permanently by mid-November 2011, activists and artists kept the movement alive in myriad other ways. So did the institutions. In summer 2012, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco contextualized contemporary materials with those from the region’s storied past of political dissent in Occupy Bay Area. In spring 2013, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, organized Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today, an exhibition of posters and ephemera from Occupy, some of which were borrowed from the Smithsonian. In that same year, the Museum of Modern Art added the Occuprint Portfolio, consisting of thirty-one screen prints (including work by Molly Crabapple, John Emerson, and Katherine Ball) from the Booklyn Artists Alliance, to its permanent collection.
At the beginning of “Curating Social Movements,” the curator Ryan Wong claimed that the topic of curating social movements is underdiscussed. “Social-movement stuff,” he said, “falls through the cracks.” Wong rightly identified curators as political actors—negotiation among parties of various backgrounds and competing interests is implicit in the job. He also correctly proposed that examining the visual culture of social movements help us to better understand their history. But considering the kinds of activity mentioned above, Wong’s notion that “art institutions are threatened by this kind of work, these objects,” felt off the mark. Which institutions are threatened, and what exactly is the threat?
A view of “Curating Social Movements” at the ICI Curatorial Hub
Wong’s fellow panelist, the artist and activist Josh MacPhee, grew up as a punk-rock kid in Massachusetts, where he graduated from making flyers for bands to designing posters for housing struggles, bridging music and politics with cultural production. With Dara Greenwald, he organized Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now at Exit Art in 2008, an exhibition that served as a visual introduction to social movements around the world. (The show traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University a year later). MacPhee argued that the works of art, which were borrowed from eighty-two institutions, were integral to each movement’s political aspirations. Picking a bone with academia, he said that scholars tend to review what others have written (e.g., in journalistic accounts) and overlook the primary visual documents. I, too, find it odd that authors and historians could be so sloppy and wondered with scholars MacPhee had in mind.
MacPhee represented Interference Archive, a collectively run group that acquires and houses materials and objects from social movements from the 1960s to the present, stages exhibitions of them, and makes them available for study. Based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the archive offers public programming, workshops, and events in a social space—just like many other libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centers. With a hands-on policy, he said, Interference Archive is not a quiet library.
MacPhee offered seven ideas to distinguish cultural production, which I understood as useful materials for a particular purpose, from political art, a genre that operates in the world of so-called fine art. The first notion was autonomy. If I understand him correctly, the visual culture of social movements does not have autonomy—background information beyond a caption is needed for comprehending the full message of an image. To demonstrate, MacPhee showed a 1963 photograph by Charles Moore, depicting four American civil-rights activists sprayed by water hoses. The underlying significance to the image, not readily apparent, is not that these people are protestors, but that they’re protestors who are organized. I liked this point of view very much, but overall MacPhee’s logic regarding autonomy was unclear, since context is hugely critical for untangling the meaning of much contemporary art.
A Charles Moore photograph of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963
The social forms of cultural production (MacPhee’s second idea) are important. He also emphasized the movement as producer (idea three), for which creative roles are flexible—teachers become television broadcasters. He also pointed out how arpilleras quilts were smuggled from Chile through the Catholic Church to raise funds for resistance efforts against a dictatorship. The stakes of visual material from social movements (idea four) are also vital: what are the intended goals apart from the individual concern? Prints depicting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising (by Hong Sung-dam and others) illustrated what was banned from television because, MacPhee said, journalists couldn’t work the right angle and the American government forced CBS not to broadcast footage. (Since I am not familiar with this history, I’ll take his word for it.) At this point MacPhee noted how Independent Curators International had recently been caught in crossfire with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a country that, he noted, pays three to four times the regular fee for visiting speakers.1
Since upheaval generates cultural production, MacPhee identified cacophony as a fifth quality. In 1968 France, the Atelier Populaire generated thousands of revolutionary posters after protesters took over the equipment in the occupied École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He also mentioned a Nicaraguan artist “known for [his] Marlboro Man cowboy style,” whose images alluding to the wide-brimmed hat of the national hero Augusto César Sandino were adopted by the Sandinistas during the 1980s as a symbol of resistance. (Was Róger Pérez de la Rocha the name of this artist?)
The White Bike Plan in Amsterdam was organized by a counterculture group called Provo
Marginal ideas transform the world, which MacPhee called prefiguration (his sixth notion), referring to prefigurative politics, for which people imagine a better society before trying to realize it. The mid-1960s White Bike Plan in Amsterdam would have given free access to bicycles in the Dutch capital, he told us, but the CitiBike idea for New York was seized by sinister venture capitalists, just like portions of the code on which Twitter was built came from the open-sourced TXTMOB in 2004. It would be interesting to read a comparative analysis between the reception of the White Bike Plan and CitiBike—perhaps something has already been written?
Cataloger’s note from the Museum of Modern Art Library (photograph by Christopher Howard)
MacPhee’s seventh and final idea argued that the art of social movements does not fit comfortably in museums and archives. Instead, he claimed, it often stays within the common—which probably means with private individuals who I imagine do not think of themselves as collectors or archivists. He showed a snapshot of a ten-year-old note referencing an unidentified collection of posters deemed “not cool enough” for initial cataloging by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which demonstrated a worker’s delightful sense of humor when prioritizing his or her work. Museums and institutions with different missions, though, happily collect social-movement ephemera, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this review. Nevertheless, I wonder if the creators of political posters aspire to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—or to any institution that desires to preserve and present them—or if such fetishization is antithetical to revolution.
Wong organized Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive in 2013–14, presenting the work of numerous activists in the 1970s. Early on, Wong noticed that the movement did not have a Wikipedia page, and only a handful of academic books deal with the subject. “Google searches turn up little,” he said. His exhibition focused on the Basement Workshop in Chinatown, which he said was a place to talk, hang out, and make posters. Photographs from the era are banal but offer the energy of the moment, Wong said, which sounded like a contradiction to my ears. But no matter—this was the “first time,” he said, “where Asian Americans are controlling their own image.”
Ryan Wong talks about his exhibition Serve the People (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Serve the People incorporated diverse media: graphic works from the artist Tomie Arai; music from the folk record A Grain of Sand (1973) and by the jazz baritone saxophonist Fred Ho; copies of a newsletter called Getting Together; and posters for workshops, street fairs, and basic medical services; and more. The curator also included documentary photographs by Corky Lee of a Peter Yew protest against police brutality, during which twenty thousand people marched from Chinatown to City Hall. Wong said that didn’t know this kind of show was possible before [seeing] Signs of Change. When organizing Serve the People, Wong faced skeptics who asked him “Why now? Why you? What do you know about my history?” These are fair questions, but ones that a good curator will know how to answer.
Conversation during the audience Q&A covered measuring success, intergenerational communication, and exhibitions at Interference Archive, such as reconciling participant’s recollections against material evidence and maintaining community after a show ends. Though the two speakers didn’t offer a satisfactory answer to that last point—Wong even said that exhibitions “do violence” to the memories of the movement—it seems as if a good presentation should sufficiently inspire or agitate people to organize on their own (while including the institution, if they so choose). An exhibition space shouldn’t be relied on to be the only group that can effect social change.
Installation view of Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive
Interference Archive is staffed by volunteers, which come to the group out of desire. The organization minimizes hierarchy, MacPhee said, though he suggested that board members should be movement activists. He also said that 95 percent of funding comes from visitors via memberships, passing the jar at events, and selling works, which makes organizational sustainability an issue, especially regarding digital issues in archival work.
Digitization isn’t a solution to accessibility, MacPhee explained, noting the time, money, and labor that goes into the effort—not to mention the difficulties of conducting additional research, assessing impact, and giving materials proper frames of reference in the face of the internet’s decontextualizing force. It’s better to set up archives in other communities, he recommended, and Wong noted that cultural production for the Asian American Movement is spread across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Each city can build its own Interference Archive. Someone suggested forcing big museums to do this work, but anyone who has spent time in a nonprofit knows that even the most prominent institutions suffer from an overburdened workforce. There is hope: Interference Archive has a Born Digital Working Group assessing the situation of storing and facilitating the migration of electronic material for future accessibility. But alas, “There’s no funding stream for an archive,” MacPhee resigned.
An audience member asked about discernment when collecting objects, especially with movements whose political beliefs (such as white power or the Tea Party) may not align with the left-oriented Interference Archive. MacPhee said his group collects material from all kinds of movements and has accumulated right-wing stuff from what he called “counterintelligence” collections, not from the movements themselves. He explained that right-wing activists have typically favored television talk shows over printed matter—remember all those skinheads on Donahue and Geraldo? MacPhee clarified that even people on the left espouse violence, homophobia, and a naïve understanding of revolution.
“Are kids still doing this?” someone asked regarding cultural production for social movements. “Yes, all over the place,” MacPhee responded positively. That was good to hear.
Frances Stark on Robert Ryman
Monday, June 16, 2014
Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Dia:Chelsea, Dia Foundation for the Arts, New York
Frances Stark performs a lecture, maybe (photograph by Christopher Howard)
If I understand her convoluted comment-question correctly, an elderly woman in the audience wanted to know, during the Q&A session, if the speaker, Frances Stark, had just done a performance. Based on Stark’s zigzag lecture on her relationship to the artist Robert Ryman, I had wondered the same thing. For about an hour the Los Angeles–based artist covered a range of topics, which seems typical of her multidisciplinary practice that embraces expository and confessional writing as well as visual art in diverse media (drawing, collage, photography, video, and performance). By the end it became clear that Stark’s talk was among the most bewildering and cryptic that I’ve ever attended, and I can’t decide if my frustration is justified—that Stark meandered without having anything substantial to say—or if I just didn’t get it. For the record, the artist did not disclose to the audience that a performance had taken place.
Such confusion shouldn’t be surprising, since the work of both artists often perplexes and befuddles, from Stark’s rambling online conversations turned into video to the oblique materialism of Ryman’s career-long exploration of the color white. Tonight she emphasized tenuous connections between her and Ryman, comparing, for instance, the square shape of his paintings to her Instagram feed. Throughout the event Stark read from her “Scared to Death” essay, published in an exhibition catalogue in 2001, which includes a brief, humorous comment on Ryman. Perhaps for this reason Dia invited her to speak on him for its Artists on Artists Lecture Series.
Robert Ryman guarding his own art (source of photograph not known)
In the passage Stark recounts the plot of a novel that takes place in a museum, in which a guard was a central character, and retells the story of when Ryman decided to become a painter while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1950s. “[H]is first ambition was not to be a cop but a musician,” Stark read aloud, “and now, of course, he is known for his paintings not for his style of guarding them.…”1 Three of her artist friends in California—Jason Meadows, Richard Hawkins, and Morgan Fisher—all “were enamored of Ryman’s paintings, and I, too, am enamored of Ryman’s paintings. I struggled to speak of this fascination with Ryman’s work, and, embarrassingly enough, found myself asking, Is this some kind of mysticism?”2
Stark’s stated aim tonight was to share, not to theorize, as well as to demonstrate overlaps and rhymes between her and Ryman. “That’s a concept I learned from Emily Dickinson at age fifteen,” she said. As a humanities student at San Francisco State University, where she studied art history, “I came to art as a reader,” Stark told us, “with aspirations to be a writer.” In the early 1990s she identified as a visual artist and attended graduate school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, though she felt that people favored her writing to her art as the decade commenced. As an MFA student Stark was exposed to Ryman after others had recommended him to her. At the time “the work didn’t turn the lights on,” but she eventually warmed up to it. After being asked to participate in an exhibition of favorite books, she recalled offering Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and a book about Ryman.
Stark’s narrative slipped in and out of consciousness, with seemingly unscripted observations based on her prepared digital slide show. One pair of images juxtaposed Henri Matisse’s Red Room (1908) with Studio View (1959), a black-and-white photograph that Ryman had painted red. Stark then dwelt on a 1964 Ryman painting next to a photograph of his studio and uttered something about their mutual project of “creating vehicles for methodical making,” but the synthesis of these pairings didn’t produce a clear meaning for me. The head-scratching continued when Stark announced that “people love people to stand in front of things and explain” before playing a recent video interview of herself, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art, on the screen behind her—but without any sound.
Perhaps Stark was suffering from a fatigue of speaking engagements. She admitted that she talked herself out in early May through participation on a panel on Sigmar Polke, who has a retrospective at MoMA, and at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, where she was paired with the technologist David Kravitz from Snapchat to create a new project. Her assessment of Polke’s work was that it looks like splooge and therefore resembles the universe. “Where is the artist in the universe, literally?” she asked before declaring, “Art is where you commune with the dead.”
The language of Frances Stark (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Stark talked about the role of artists as educators in a university, telling her students who say “I want to make a style and get famous” that, in stark contrast, “being an artist is to fall in love with another artist.” Paraphrasing Alighiero e Boetti, she identified the artist as both a shaman and showman, fake yet sincere. “The fake being in the service of the real,” she explained, “not as a sham but as an inescapable condition.” Stark concluded her lecture by adducing “fake texts” and “ghost texts”—if “Greeky Lorem Ipsum” isn’t the title of a work by Stark, then it should be—and remarked that “the mutter reveals something else that you can’t see.” If poetry is language free from utility, then Stark’s use of language is often free from meaning. I’m not sure if the non-sense of her Dia lecture was liberating or hindering, but the ride was bewildering.
In Terms Of count: 3.
1 Frances Stark, “Scared to Death,” in Painting at the Edge of the World, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 209.
Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014)
The legendary artist Robert Morris doesn’t often participate in live interviews, whether in public, in person, or on the phone, so a recent appearance by him at the New York Public Library was a rare treat. Indeed, as the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss noted at the outset, “Agreeing to speak is not something he does too freely.” But when Morris, Weiss, and the art historian Julia Robinson gathered in celebration of Weiss and Clare Davies’s new book, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the ensuing conversation was a frustrating affair.
How could such an experienced crew bungle this rare opportunity? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the articulate, soft-spoken Morris. Rather it was the disorganized and unprepared Weiss and Robinson, whose cluttered thoughts belied the sharp focus of the book. Weiss, a senior curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, fumbled with his faulty microphone for several minutes as the conversation began and demonstrated a serious “um” and “uh” problem throughout the event.1
What’s worse, though, is that he and Robinson, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at New York University, had great difficulty asking a simple, straightforward question, as both were plagued with the malaise of offering a garbled comment in place of a question. When a question finally did come out they immediately tried to answer it themselves, offering several possibilities before Morris could even respond. Furthermore, the pair constantly stumbled when describing and interpreting the images of the artist’s work projected on the screen behind them. This was all a pitiful shame considering Weiss’s excellent, insightful articles recently published in Artforum on the refabrication of Morris’s classic 1960s work and on the value of damaged and destroyed art objects through the lens of two recent exhibitions of them.2
Despite the obfuscating efforts of Weiss and Robinson, Morris told entertaining and informative stories about his early career, the period covered by Weiss’s book. The artist confirmed with Simone Forti, a dancer, choreographer, and his wife at the time (who was sitting in the front row of the audience), that they had arrived in New York in late 1960. Even though he had been painting through the late 1950s, Morris didn’t consider himself to be an artist during his initial time in New York, when he was studying art history at Hunter College. “I spent a lot of time reading,” he said. It was inexpensive to exist in Manhattan back then. Living in large lofts with no heat and hot water, Morris said he was poor but comfortable.
Julia Robinson gestures wildly at Robert Morris (photograph by Christopher Howard)
At Weiss’s prompting, Morris talked about the first two works he made in New York—Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Column—both created in January 1961. The former is a nearly 10-inch-cubed wooden container that encloses an audio recording of Morris building the work with carpentry tools. The latter was an eight-foot-tall rectangular box built with plywood salvaged from the street and stored uncomfortably in his room, whose ceiling reached only seven feet high. “This might have given me the idea of permuting this work,” he joked of the decision to re-create the piece several times from the lost or discarded original. A garbled comment-question from Weiss attempted to address the size of, and process involved in making, the two works, and the curator seemed astounded that Morris could simultaneously produce large and small works (and unrelated ones at that). “Just literally making them,” the curator gushed, “in and of itself, reflects a certain level of…” before trailing off.3 Did the two bodies of work intersect, the curator asked? “I never felt obliged to think much about the connection,” Morris responded, who went on to say something about the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s concepts regarding the self that was not picked up by Weiss. In fact, Morris’s deep knowledge of Western philosophy was an area that Weiss and Robinson should have fervently pursued but, sadly, did not.
Robinson mumbled something about how the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making performed or demonstrated temporality and also literalized time. Painting was static then, she claimed, but process brought time back. This may have been a cue for Morris to describe his processed-based works from the 1950s, for which he spread a canvas on the floor and moved across it while sprawled on a short scaffold. “I was just using oil paint,” he said, “putting it on with my hands.” (Does this work still exist?) Robinson stated her interest in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the action painter as well as Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” She knows her book art history. “Activating work with time was a way out,” Morris said to appease Robinson. Because he didn’t resolve the issue of time, he quit making this work. Among other reasons, Pollock had succeeded where he had not. While Morris failed to recognize these paintings as performance, he did acknowledge a “temporal involvement.”
Weiss asked Morris if he had a series in mind when making Box and Column. Not yet, the artist replied. “The large works had a kind of apparent continuity … in form,” he continued, “whereas the small objects didn’t.” (Weiss and Davies’s book presumably gives the smaller pieces, which Weiss calls “object sculpture” but Morris identified as “process type objects,” that missing continuity.) Box for Standing—or was it Column?—was a leftover from a Forti performance. “I had this box,” Morris slyly recalled. “It kept getting in the way. I kept moving it around the studio. Finally I decided I would expropriate it and make a sculpture. It was really very easy because it was already there.” The works from the early 1960s “were much more contingent than they appear today,” he mused.4
Morris, Robinson, and Weiss talked about the avant-garde milieu in San Francisco and New York, which featured characters such as Forti, Anna Halprin, Henry Flynt, and LaMonte Young. Robinson simultaneously asked and told Morris about his own history—while offering her own interpretations of it—a strategy that resulted in a confused, fragmented chronology. Moving on, Morris told the story of when the radical composer John Cage visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he asked to listen to the entire three-and-a-half-hour recording of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Robinson commented to Morris: “Did you ever ask him later, ‘What the heck was that?’” Did she truly find it incredulous that Cage would want to listen to the complete tape?
Morris recollected several experimental dance performances in which he took part. For one Forti piece he pretended to be a rock. For another he was directed to remain on the floor (“Whatever happens,” Forti had told him, “you gotta lay flat on the floor”), while another performer, Robert Huot—a man twice Morris’s size—was instructed to tie him to the wall. “A battle occurred,” Morris declared, “and that was the movement…. A fight with a rope, two guys—I mean, there wasn’t any expression there at all, just defense and scratches and bumps.”
The conversation dragged when Robinson pressed Morris about the mysterious, nefarious controllers of a bifurcated Fluxus scene of artists, dancers, and musicians surrounding Young in New York. Morris admitted that he had written texts for the group that are not widely read because he pulled out of the scene. “I find it really hard to give a reason for that,” Morris mused. “I must have been feeling especially hostile.” Regarding the writing, he explained, “I was using language to make drawings.” The nature of this discussion wasn’t clear, but the three speakers seemed to be in the know. Maybe it was all just gossip.
“You became a pretty serious critic pretty fast,” Robinson noted. She also noticed a difference between Morris’s private writing in notebooks and his published words in the 1960s. “The need to go on record became important,” the artist said. And he liked doing it, even though he considered himself to be a lazy writer who didn’t produce articles often enough. In fact, his advisor at Hunter College, William Rubin, kept bugging him to finish his thesis on the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, even after the professor had left the school for a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. “I usually wrote about things after finishing a body of work,” Morris said.
Three views of Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000–25,000 BCE, limestone, 4¼ in. tall (artwork in the public domain)
Halfway through the conversation Morris loosened up, while Weiss and Robinson continued to grope erratically. The artist recalled the artist Ad Reinhardt’s famous class on Japanese art at Hunter, which he said didn’t follow typical chronological or geographic lines. Instead, Reinhardt showed slides from different eras, periods, and locations, saying “That’s classic. That’s baroque. That’s early classic.” Reinhardt would show “five hundred slides a night,” Morris remembered. When showing an image of the Venus of Willendorf, Reinhardt deadpanned “That’s really primitive.” A student exclaimed, “That’s not primitive—that’s pregnant!” The professor, Morris punchlined, did not reply. Morris also recalled that Reinhardt’s slides of monuments and artworks from foreign lands—once a year he traveled to another country, by himself—were frontal and bilateral. Many students, Morris said, declared these photographs so well taken that they depicted the actual sites better than seeing them in person.
In the early 1960s Morris worked in the Art Office of the New York Public Library, in room 313, where he answered mail, filed things, and used the card catalogue. It was during this time when he conceived of Card File (1962), while drinking coffee one day in the library. Weiss felt Card File is neglected, misrepresented, and singularly understood as a form of categorization—perhaps because we never can actually read the cards filed into it. (Weiss read a few of them aloud; his book publishes transcriptions of each one.) “It’s unending, theoretically,” Morris said of the work, but “it has a narrative.” It’s also, Robinson added, “indeterminate.”
Robert Morris speaks, as Simone Forti listens attentively (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The influence of narrative, Morris revealed, came from Marcel Duchamp, in particular the focus on text and language found in Robert Lebel’s 1959 book on the French-born artist.5 For Morris, Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) represents process—materials and their transformation—through a puerile story about the proverbial bride and nine bachelors, a metaphor, Morris said, of the Artist screwing Art to become Famous. Morris also admitted the influence of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) when creating works like Three Rulers (1962), for which he estimated imperial measurements by eye. The hand-drawn inch was intentionally a “mistake,” Morris said, claiming that Duchamp had become the “new standard of measurement” for artists.
The classic gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964, Morris said, “were competently made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhibitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some point there are no originals of these,” he noted. “There are only reproductions. Nobody [back then] wanted to hear that.” One time he sent assembly instructions for the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offended me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” These sculptures presented preexisting forms in the world, Morris explained, such as columns, benches, and gates; he also used materials other than wood. Although fiberglass works well for the curves of a boat, the artist said he was disappointed with the material’s response to edges, which became frayed. “It was a mistake” to use the material, he said, “but it has a certain quality that’s different from plywood.”
For a private exhibition at SurroundArt in Brooklyn in 2012 and a public exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Manhattan in 2014, Morris instructed fabricators to use quality woods such as walnut, cherry, oak, poplar, European beach, and maple when making replicas of older work—or in his words, “recent work that recollects earlier objects.” For example, Box for Standing went from pine in 1961 to walnut in 2011, and Wheels (2012), first made in 1963 with street lumber, was reconstructed in cherry wood at a slightly larger scale. These fabrications are obviously salable pieces for private collectors and museums, but Weiss and Robinson didn’t engage Morris about these cash cows. Instead, the artist offered an alternative view: “I have a compulsion to revisit some of these things.”
New York Art Strike, 1970
During the audience Q&A, a woman sitting behind me pestered Morris with several questions about Duchamp, which the artist answered with good nature. “Did Duchamp really smoke a cigar?” was the last one she got in before the library’s representative, Arezoo Moseni, judiciously cut her off. When an artist stood to lament (in a kind of calm hysteria) the state of the New York art world today—the dispersion of artistic centers, the lack of easy living, and finding a voice in an art world in which everything has seemingly been done—Morris recanted a story about the New York Art Strike, which took place outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 22, 1970, when approximately five hundred people sat on the steps to protest war, racism, and repression. After the ten-hour event ended, a few stragglers remained to clean up the steps. While sweeping up cigarette butts, the artist Carl Andre remarked to Morris, “You never know how good an artist you are, but you always know how good a sweeper you are.” Morris said that life was hard back then but leisurely so: you could see your friends and think about things. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the artist declared, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” It’s certainly unfortunate we don’t have that kind of time today. And although this story sidestepped the audience member’s concerns, Morris seemed to suggest that she work at her own pace and within her own competencies.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Similarly, speakers at any level of experience must simply get over their fear of amplification. Likewise, academics should be required to learn about microphones, projectors, and PowerPoint as an integral part of their jobs.
3 During this time Morris also made what he called performance switches. A fourth body of work was the set of boxy plywood structures first exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1964.
4 From the audience, Forti recalled that Morris had made two boxes; he only remembered making one.
5 Lebel’s book was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton in that same year. Duchamp’s notes from The Green Box were published in 1960.
What Price Art? The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future Friday, April 26, 1985 New York University, Graduate School of Business Administration, New York
Another ’80s workshop on spinning art into gold—and as motley a collection of speakers as one could imagine, even on such a fey topic. As it happens, my community and I recently had dealings with one of them—the representative from the Port Authority—only instead of “Arts as an Industry,” she detailed why our historic district should be trashed for the benefit of the Port Authority. That report, with figures and measurements and citations, was, as we proved in court, a complete fiction, but it served the purposes of those receiving it and became fact. Such diddling is of course hardly news in city politics—or in business and real estate either, as we see increasingly in the papers these days. But in art? Let’s just say the figures here sound official, for what that’s worth, but don’t bet the farm.
On the other hand, at least from my limited experience, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy’s rundown on the workings of the art market can be taken as a marvel of acute reporting. That is, you’ll love it—and relish the hindsight.
Cochairs: Kenneth Friedman, publisher of The Art Economist; and Oscar Ornati, professor of management, New York University
Speakers: Noel Steinberger, Rosemary Scanlon, William Baumol, Michael Montias, A. D. Coleman, Dick Higgins, Ed McGuire, Martin Ackerman, Marshall Kogan, Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, and John Czepiel
Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4.
Titled “What Price Art,” and provocatively subtitled “The Economics of Art: An Agenda for the Future,” the conference promised to explore the economics of the visual arts market, with practical details on costs and price structure provided by “national experts in economics, finance, law, public policy, art and journalism.”
Noel Steinberger, vice president of marketing at Sotheby’s, the world’s oldest auction firm, identified key players in the art game as the media, banks, auction houses, and galleries (notice omission of the artist).
Rosemary Scanlon, a discussant and chief economist of the New York–New Jersey Port Authority, described her recent study, The Arts as an Industry, made to determine value and economic impact of cultural industries (including theater, dance, music, film, television, and visitors to New York City, but not the city’s art sales or art inventory) on the metropolitan area. Her “conservative” estimate was $5.6 billion. Although hard data is lacking, worldwide transactions in the visual art market are estimated at over $25 billion annually.
Scanlon’s presentation was followed by floor discussion of the art customer. The important role of the press was briefly touched on as “shaping tastes and spending habits.” Recent studies estimate the number of US art critics at over 2,500; Art in America has counted more than 2,600 critics among its own subscribers. Assuming an equal number might not read AiA could bring the total number of art critics to more than 5,000.
Dr. William Baumol, professor of economics at Princeton University, and a collector himself, described the art market as an “imperfect market,” i.e., not behaving in a predictable manner, as financial markets sometimes do not. Therefore, he said, “there is no rational way to assign value or to invest” (except, of course, on an aesthetic level). Price information, he said, is beside the point. An unidentified speaker contradicted him on that claim, asserting that price information is “needed for literacy and curiosity.” Baumol added that “the elasticity of supply” is zero for deceased artists and “the holder of a single piece of art has a monopoly on that item,” so the supply of art is fixed.
Michael Montias, professor of economics at Yale University, rejected the inelasticity theory, claiming existence of a “large supply of paintings on walls, in attics, and museum basements.” New interests (and rising prices) in specific periods cause hitherto unknown works to surface.
Cynthia Navaretta, “Conference: What Price Art?” Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 5.
A. D. Coleman, photography critic, added that values change, using as example that van Gogh’s painting (auctioned the previous evening for $9.9 million) was no longer what van Gogh had painted; it has since been certified as a work of art.
Dick Higgins, writer and artist, noted that “art is one of the only commodities routinely produced at a loss.”
Ed McGuire added, “The artist does not profit by art, galleries do, museums do, and the collector who uses it as a tax shelter does.”
Then the topic of whether or not art business and art galleries are profitable, or doing better than in previous years, was tossed around for a while. The editor of City Business quoted a dealer as saying, “A good dealer is one who breaks even and puts in his basement what he thinks will increase in value.” The director of the Berry-Hill Gallery dismissed this as nonsense, saying “any serious gallery” does very well financially.
Martin Ackerman, attorney, addressed tax policies and changes in tax law by which the Internal Revenue Code says, in effect, that “in death the work of an artist is valued at appreciated retail value, but in life it is valued at the cost of material. This, obviously, has caused artists and their estates to liquidate or even destroy large portions of their work to avoid these unwarranted and unfair tax burdens.”
With allowable tax deductions for donations of art restricted to “adjusted costs,” museums report drastic reductions in gifts from artists. The Whitney received 142 works in 1969 and 17 (of which 13 were prints) in 1970; MoMA received 47 in 1969, none in 1970. Although art collectors have not yet lost the privilege of this contribution, they frequently encounter hostile questioning by the IRS as to “fair market value.” (Ackerman believes this stems from a probably well-founded IRS belief that all contributions are overvalued.)
Marshall Cogan, chief executive officer of GFI/Knoll Industries and noted collector, mentioned the amazing growth in museum attendance since the ’70s. He also pointed out that 875,000 people earned over one million dollars in 1985, suggesting that, as income rises, the value of art rises too. Cogan’s recommendation to collectors was to buy “the most extraordinary piece of work available.” He saw a decline in good works of art, attributing current “extreme increases in price” to this scarcity.
John Czepiel, associate professor of marketing at New York University, quoted something he had read: “It ain’t art unless you have the urge to possess it.”
Kenneth Friedman, cochair of the conference, summed up: “The art market is poised on the edge of profound change. This is a market moving from its cottage industry phase into something radically different. All other factors in the economy being equal, I predict that the dollar volume of the art market will increase at a rate far better than inflation during the next decade. If this is so, we’re going to need—and we’re going to see—studies in everything from client service by art dealers to credit financing for consumers, from information services, to investment opportunities in the art industry.”
Perhaps, however, the clearest indicator of art’s new financial status is simply this conference itself. New York University’s School of Business hosted a conference on “art.” Footing all bills, it invited press, dealers, consultants, lawyers, collectors, and bankers to attend as its guests—but no artists.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “The Art Talk That Ate New York” was originally published as “Conference: What Price Art?” in Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 4–5; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 236–37. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
