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.
Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim
Friday, February 2, 1979
67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, Monroe Room, Washington, DC
Moderator: William R. Dunlap
Panelists: John Alexander, John Canaday, William Christenberry, Larry Edwards, Jim Roche, and James Surls
Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Southern Rim” Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11
John Canaday, for those of you too young to remember, used to be senior art critic on the New York Times, and hence, some felt, the most powerful art critic in the country. I remember a Sunday column of his about a woman in the art department of Appalachian [State] University who had put together an exhibition so fine that he praised it unstintingly. This was particularly impressive to a New Yorker because at the time the very name of the university conjured up an isolated pocket of insularity where it was hardly expected art would be taught, let alone exhibited—and abstract art at that. Canaday’s Appalachian connection appeared again at College Art [Association], as we saw him on the panel, “Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim.” (The title came from an earlier conference of the same name.)
Moderator William R. Dunlap of Appalachian [State] University acted like a suave cosmopolitan—that is, until he exhibited all the worst characteristics the rest of the country might attribute to New Yorkers. He was rude, egotistical, insulting, arrogant, uncaring, and crude. He also made a great show of swilling bourbon from a prominently displayed bottle. Typical of this Southern gentleman’s behavior was his reply to Elsa Fine’s question from the floor about the absence of women, or even one good ol’ girl, on the panel with the good ol’ boys. It was OK, Dunlap said, because there were two homosexuals on the panel.
Having arrived late, I missed the opening presentation of slides, but I was in time to hear John Alexander entertain the audience with anecdotes from the past year which he had spent traveling the country in the role of famous artist, accepting recognition and success. He declared himself on the side of minority artists (Chicanos) but definitely against New York lady art critics with briefcases. (One had spent no more than three minutes scanning his show before writing a several-page magazine article.) He was bemused by Lions Club audiences who, in Lions Club tradition, roared approval of his witticisms rather than applauding. His other adventures ranged the country both sociologically and geographically. Alexander enchanted the CAA audience in general, the women less so.
James Surls, apparently the only member of the panel concerned with human values, was generous in crediting the Dallas Women’s Co-op with opening up the art scene there. They did all the work, he said—politicking, letter writing, and the rest—that made it possible to exhibit art in Dallas outside the museum. He said he himself “rode in on the coat tails.”
Discussion continued as, by and large, a series of rambling non sequiturs. Members of the audience seemed to feel compelled to make statements themselves, like at a revival meeting, and their random statements, usually irrelevant to the discussion, prompted other remotely connected observations. One item surfacing in this manner was the moderator’s statement that New York had “closed down for young artists.” He attributed that to Marcia Tucker’s departure from the Whitney. (Maybe it was the bourbon.)
This profundity was followed by an editor of Art Voices South—an expensively glossy magazine dedicated to praise of Southern artists—who got to his feet in the audience to say that the magazine covers twenty-two Southern states and is trying to attract an audience not accustomed to going to galleries. The panel responded very warmly to this and the subject of regional art came up—whether the South was producing any, whether any Southern state had ever produced any. Washington, DC, got some credit here, specifically the Washington Color School, but that was quickly dismissed by a panelist—Canaday perhaps—as a “suburban” expression of New York Abstract Expressionism.
Well, things just moved along. Soon Alexander spoke in recognition of the people of Iran—he felt they should be honored for “standing up and getting rid of a cancerous tyrant.” (This was the week of street riots in Iran.) Dunlap even managed an insulting joke on the subject. Then Margaret Gorove, chairperson of the art department at the University of Mississippi—and former teacher of moderator Dunlap—got to her feet to say, first, that a proper grad of Ole Miss would have kept the bottle in a paper bag, and second, to describe the very real problems of women artists in the South. She pointed out that, as is well known, women do well in blind-juried shows but aren’t included in invitationals, not having had the exposure or experience.
Moderator Dunlap’s response to this serious and impassioned statement was, “Let me say, I love your hair, and the color of your dress.” Gorove, resigned, even gentle, replied, “You haven’t changed a bit.” Dunlap then felt it necessary to go on record with, “I make no apology for the sexual make-up of this panel.”
Alexander added quickly that he himself is concerned with the problems of women artists and is aware of prejudice against them and minorities. But, he claimed, the previous night’s panel. “Modern Art and Economics,” had been “all big names, all men, and no one brought the issue up there.” Aggrieved at what he saw as discrimination against the Southern panel, Alexander wanted to pursue the topic. “I recommend we continue and go for the throat” (which throat he didn’t say).
Surls mentioned that, having found the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston without a director, curator, or scheduled exhibition, he had grabbed the free slot to do a show of one hundred Texas artists (Fire!). He may have intended to say women as well as men were included, but never got to it, because next came Robert Pincus-Witten from the audience.
Bitingly sarcastic about Art Voices South’s self-congratulatory tone and self-serving ways, Pincus-Witten said that “without a critical voice for the Southern Rim you’ll be back on this panel continuing this conversation for the rest of your lives.” Only the development of a critical voice can bring Southern artists recognition from the rest of the country, he said.
Canaday didn’t see it that way. “American art would have been better off without all the known critics,” said the former known critic. He quoted from an essay by Harold Rosenberg: “Artists are faced with a wall of opinion—a formulated taste dictating the direction of art.” Canaday advised us that “what is really needed is a buying public for the arts.” (An exemplary opinion, certainly.)
Next it was Irving Sandler’s turn. Sandler said from the audience that there was “more energy, more wit in this panel” than any he had heard in New York. That seemed like a good time to leave.
In Terms Of count: unknown.
Source
Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Appalachian Connection” was originally published in Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 120–21. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
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.
“Language is forced on art,” quipped the artist Rachel Harrison to an audience member during the Q&A session of this event. “We’re just throwing words at art all the time. Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy? It might. It employs a lot of people.” Such is Harrison’s self-consciously funny and cynicism-free outlook for giving titles to her works. That outlook is also a good way to understand her art practice over the last twenty years. I lost track of how many times I chuckled to myself during this hour-long talk.
Harrison attached funny stories to a few of her works. A gallery goer stole a Baby Phat handbag fastened to one sculpture, and friends told her that someone had ruffled the blonde wig topping another. “What is that desire, not to mess with hair but to mess with artworks?” Harrison asked during her lecture. “Because I get that sometimes.” The way Harrison recounted taking the photograph she uses for Marilyn with Wall (2004–ongoing) characterized an Andy Warhol museum archivist as a sketchy street drug dealer.1 Yet irony plays no role in her practice: “I work too hard to be ironic,” she told another attendee.
Harrison’s art practice is varied: mostly sculpture and installation but also photography, drawing, and writing. (Artforum has published a few great articles by her, on Andy Warhol’s Empire, Jeff Koons’s Bob Hope, and a parade organized by Paul McCarthy.) She isn’t yet known for a singular masterpiece, for which she could be inextricably linked, but her style is recognizable a mile away. A typical work is larger-than-life-sized, built from construction materials or polystyrene and slathered with cement and paint, with an extra prop or two—a bottle of Mr. Clean, a plastic figurine, or a framed photograph of a celebrity—fastened to it. Sometimes a sculpture rests on a plinth, a pair of milk crates, or a shipping dolly.
Tonight’s event paired Harrison with the music critic Greil Marcus, best known for writing the books Mystery Train (1975) and Lipstick Traces (1989). Marcus was funny, too, in his own way, as he read aloud a short introductory essay peppered with off-the-cuff observations. While in Paris, he visited an art exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry–designed building in Paris that “from the outside looks like a spaceship just about to take off.” Marcus circled Harrison’s Zombie Rothko (2011) round and round, taking in the bright orange hair of a plastic doll torso placed on the top of a craggy, painted blocky form. “What first might bring a laugh might turn disturbing,” he surmised. “What first might just throw you and not seem to hit is going to end up being the governing principle of the work.” And considering the ways she infuses pop culture—in particular a series of twenty colored-pencil drawings of the British singer Amy Winehouse carousing with characters from paintings by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Martin Kippenberger—he argued, “Not enough has been made of the way that Rachel’s work engages with the world that people actually live in…. That when you see it you’re seeing a distorted, funnier, more gripping version of the life that you actually lead.”
I am embarrassingly late to the Rachel Harrison party. My longstanding impression of her work was that the criticality vibe overpowers all other interpretations, including humor, which I certainly noticed but didn’t take seriously. After all, Greene Naftali, her gallery of eighteen years, shows Very Serious Art by Paul Chan, Michael Krebber, Bernadette Corporation, and others. Over the years I have dutifully seen Harrison’s head-scratching exhibitions—at Greene Naftali, in the Whitney Biennial, at the New Museum—but never considered it in depth, despite my editing an exhibition review of her work in 2005. For years I recognized the work’s shock value—you could never call it beautiful—but never acknowledged its smart value and its terrific sense of humor. To get a better sense of what her work is all about—this is the primary reason why I attended tonight’s event.
Rachel Harrison introduced the front side of Buddha with Wall (2004) as “Buddha Descending a Staircase” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
In a chronological artist’s talk, Harrison presented two principle themes in her work—walls and frames—and how her thinking has has shifted from the former to the latter. Indeed, since the early 1990s she has made use of Sheetrock and metal studs brought into the gallery or taken down existing gallery walls (but never removing them from the exhibition space). The title of Harrison’s first solo exhibition—Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?—came from a New York Times article on building codes after Hurricane Andrew; the show took place in an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Developing this interest in modular and provisional work, the artist filled a gallery with a maze constructed with rectangular sheets of cardboard (Perth Amboy, 2001). “People call this a labyrinth, but you’re not going to get lost,” she joked. For Marilyn with Wall, Harrison took down nonstructural gallery walls and set them aside. “You make more space by cutting up a wall, and you make more space for a body,” she explained, sort of. “And by having more bodies you can have more spaces.” She metaphorically attributes physical space to mental space and to thinking. Harrison notices how people walk through rooms and on the subway—she may be watching you.
After discussing a handful of museum and gallery exhibitions across Europe, Harrison tackled Three Young Framers, a solo outing at Regen Projects in Los Angeles this past summer. With wall studs leftover from shows by Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon, which the gallery saved for her, she demarcated rooms within the hangerlike building, not unlike Michael Asher’s 2008 show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Although her initial idea came from drawing outlines of the gallery’s floor plan on paper, using a ruler, Harrison confessed that she wanted to see the Asher exhibition again, and this was a way to do it. She finds sophisticated humor in his work, from the George Washington statue to the Santa Monica show.
During the conversation, Marcus saw “a scary, lifeless, maximum-security prison” in Three Young Framers, not a reference to Asher (who he may not know). No reviews of the show mentioned the prison angle, which Harrison chalked up to the herd mentality of art criticism. If the press release had mentioned jail, she noted, everyone would have zeroed in on that instead of Asher. There is no single meaning in your work, Marcus continued, adding something about how taking selfies imprisons actually imprisons the vain photographers. “Where they are,” he said, “is much less important than the fact that they are there.” Or maybe people just like documenting their life in photographs, like they’ve done for decades.
Harrison’s 2012 exhibition The Help comprised a handful of sculptures and the Amy Winehouse drawings, which Marcus found to be upsetting and nihilistic, distorted and angry, bitter and self-destructive. Seeing the pictures changed the way he perceives the British singer, who died of drug and alcohol–related causes in 2011. Harrison appreciates her music but did not previously follow her career. The subject of the drawings was chosen randomly, she said, from a magazine cover spotted in a supermarket checkout line—though celebrities certainly play an important role in her work. Harrison admires the way Winehouse turned herself into sculpture, into a pop icon, purely through invention: her hair, singing soul music, and having working-class origins. What if someone looking at the drawings knows very little about Winehouse? If one puts the singer in the wrong place, Harrison and Marcus concluded, we can rethink her career and how she got there instead of repeating platitudes.
Marcus saw the “scrapbook” exhibition Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which he did not find terribly interesting. Three artists (Harrison, Jennie Ottinger, and Jason Jägel) had work at the same museum in a separate exhibition, called You Know I’m No Good. That presentation, which included Harrison’s Winehouse drawings, was overwrought, disturbing, violent, and mutilated, according to Marcus, not unlike the disturbing images in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. There is agency in creative acts, Harrison avowed. Marcus agreed, arguing that pain is an expressive force.
Another audience member—it was the art historian Hal Foster—stated that most people understand Harrison’s work as collage and assemblage. He articulated a different perspective: “You don’t collage things; you collage views, viewpoints. It’s about putting subjects together, not objects together.” Although the same could be said for many artists, his observation is spot on. Harrison seemed pleased with it. She mentioned another description about her work, made by Foster, that she likes: “You take a bad thing and make it worse.”
In Terms Of count: 13.
1 Rachel Harrison said: “They’ll let you make an appointment, and you can go to Andy Warhol’s archives. And you just wear gloves, and they’ll let you touch everything. And there’s a can of hairspray, chewing gum, all the things you know about—fabulous things. And then I was about to leave and the guy was like, ‘Well, don’t you want to see it?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said ‘Everyone wants to see it.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Don’t you want to see the source material for Marilyn?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’” She ending up taking a 35mm photograph of the publicity still, partially veiled by a glassine sleeve. The image is a key part of a sculpture called Marilyn with Wall, which she has created several times since 2004.
The journalist Carol Kino (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Two years ago I stopped attending panels of art critics discussing the state of the field, mainly because the subjects such events would cover could easily be predicted: (1) money, and how there is little to be made writing about art; (2) a perceived loss of power in the art world, ceded to dealers, curators, and collectors; and (3) the differences between writing for print and online publications. Speakers overwhelmingly wrung their hands over problems that have existed for decades. The numbing repetition—I can’t even.
I almost skipped this “Talk with the Critics” panel, part of a series moderated by the artist Sharon Louden on professional-development issues for MFA students, for fear of more of the same.1 But I was familiar with and respect the work of the four New York–based participants—Ben Davis, national art critic for Artnet News; Carol Kino, a journalist for the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers and magazines; Andrew Russeth, co–executive editor of ARTnews; and Benjamin Sutton, metro editor at Hyperallergic—and decided to give it a shot.2 The level of discourse was reasonable and pedestrian. That’s not surprising, considering Louden’s focus for the series is to demystify the work and approachability of critics for the academy’s graduate students. What follows are summaries of the major topics.
Why Write Criticism?
In college Russeth attempted to make art, unsuccessfully, so he studied art history. After studying with Rosalind Krauss, who “was a force of nature … [who] really made the stakes seem very high,” Russeth became attracted to what he perceived as the glamor of art criticism, deferring a halfhearted interest in law school. Sutton covered film, theater, and art for his school paper, and Kino came from a similar background—wanting to write about culture. Falling in with an art crowd in New York, she discovered she had a good eye. Davis, who studied cultural theory and philosophy in school, was introduced to the art world via Rachel K. Ward’s ill-fated group exhibition Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport, where he met the artist and writer Walter Robinson, who invited Davis to work for Artnet Magazine, which he edited. Artforum had deceived Davis into thinking that art was a place for ideas: “The art world is where important ideas go to die,” he joked.
Andrew Russeth on the left (photograph by Christopher Howard)
What Do You Look For?
For Sutton, the lure to write about the big show was stronger when he was younger; now he finds it more rewarding, for example, to travel to out-of-the-way places and spend more time with fewer shows. Russeth aims to reset the balances where critical consensus is skewed or wrong, and also “to get people’s eyeballs on something new.” As a journalist, Kino looks for a good story, often on current events with “some meaty sociopolitical aspect.” “I look for a sense of contemporaneity,” Davis said, which he sometimes finds in older art, which can become relevant again.
How Do You Find New Things?
Louden tried to get a conversation going about Instagram, but the four critics had other ideas. “People drop casual comments at dinner parties,” Kino said; she also depends on friends who are artists and publicists. “The artists always know,” Russeth affirmed, identifying younger, plugged-in dealers and even collectors as those offering good recommendations. Davis rephrased the question to uncover the panel’s not-so-hidden motive: “How do you get written about?” Instead of boilerplate invitations, Davis said, write something personal, like “You may like my work for this reason.” Kino advised artists to time their pitches right for a publication—which may publish a review while an exhibition is still on view, or months later. She hesitates to carrying on correspondence with artists who don’t have galleries, or whose work isn’t appropriate for galleries, because her outlets are not interested in covering unusual situations. Sutton, who wades through press materials daily, recommended that prospective artists contact him by email, not phone or Facebook. Rather than brownnose with critics, Russeth said, he advocated artists to “start a gang,” reiterating an idea from Dave Hickey. “The best way to do it is to have a big group … have curator friends, have artist friends, have writer friends,” all of who can promote your work to others.3
Can Critics and Artists Be Friends?
Russeth has no problem with it, though unfavorable writing can lead to disappointment. Sutton finds it inevitable that artists and critics form relationships and views the separation between them to be old fashioned. Kino reminded us that an even older school—dating to the 1950s—fraternized comfortably. Davis cautioned against losing the balance between insight and embeddedness; he also recognized that “an honest review” in intimate art scenes outside New York “would mean severing all these relationships.” And then: “I don’t have a hard and fast rule except to be honest about it, if you’re writing about someone who you have knowledge of.” Regarding Robert Morris’s personal relationship with Krauss, Davis said, “A lot of art history formed by people who knew each other very intimately. You’d be foolish to overlook that as a source.”
The contemporary Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)
What’s Up with Listicles?
Louden identified lists, such as “6 of Our Favorite Hamburger-Themed Artworks for National Burger Day” and “14 Young Power Players Set to Become the New Art World Aristocracy,” as a recent trend in art writing. The format, Davis claimed, is cheap to produce and does well—much better than reviews of small shows in Bushwick. The BuzzFeedification of discourse has spawned the entertainment article about art, he said, adding that it’s new to have an audience “amused by art.” While ARTnews publishes intelligent lists, Russeth revealed that the well-researched article gets an audience over time. Sutton argued that a well-written listicle can be informative.
What Are the Issues in Painting?
The audience Q&A started with an inquiry about contemporary painting. Russeth singled out a couple of schools in play—the networked painting of R. H. Quaytman and postinternet art—and told us he has to argue for painting’s relevance when writing about the medium. (Really, still?) Sutton seeks what looks new or demonstrates a variation, break, or improvement in any medium, and Kino digs for personal stories and avoids theoretical discussion.
From the crowd, the art historian and critic Irving Sandler—who began writing in the 1950s and was friends with many Abstract Expressionists—pressed the issue further. Davis ducked the question to ask his own: “What is art?” Kino placed the burden on artists, while Sutton stressed the need to pay attention to art scenes outside New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Online publications such as Burnaway and Pelican Bomb do that well, he said. (Louden added Bmore Art.) Russeth argued that criticism can be a tool to counteract obscene amounts of money circulating in the art world, and also to upend male white dominance.
What Do You Love and Hate in Writing?
Sutton likes writing about art that he doesn’t get initially, that gives him a new perspective. Kino hates an opinionated reviewer’s personality coming through strongly. “I like original ideas, plainly stated—that’s pretty boring,” Davis said, noting that his monthly roundup of art writing for Artnet News demonstrates his interests—though I notice that he recently sought recommendations for the list on social media. Russeth loves criticism that lays it on the line—he wants opinion, writers coming out swinging and being risk takers. “That’s what leads to better art,” he declared.
Benjamin Sutton on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)
What about Trends and Brands?
Figurative art has roared back over the past ten to fifteen years, Russeth pronounced, partly because critics and historians have broadened their view. “People like Joan Semmel, Martin Wong, Philip Pearlstein—I mean, they’ve never looked better, right?” He explained, “It’s no longer necessarily a zero sum game, which when I read art history, it kind of feels like it once was.” For Davis, “contemporary” has eclipsed terms like postmodern or pluralism, an issue he explored in his 2013 book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. When teaching painters, video makers, and performance artists, he observed, “The question, implicitly, that’s there, without being proposed, is, what are we all learning that’s the same?” Instead of having a unifying theory of it all, Davis detects a herd mentality in galleries, where “consensus about what was competent” has replaced “consensus about what was good and bad.”
Sutton has witnessed an acceleration of branding in culture, when fashion crosses over into the hip, cool art world. The fast-fashion retailer H&M, he said, collaborated with Jeff Koons last year to produce a handbag. (Don’t forget about Takashi Murakami’s popular monogram bags for Louis Vuitton.) Taking a long view, Davis connected the early-nineteenth-century Romantic view of the artist with the Industrial Revolution. By the late 1990s, he sketched out, the fashion industry had evolved from producing couture for the few to cranking out ready-to-wear clothes for the masses, with designers producing sunglasses, cosmetics, and perfume. Huge conglomerates now use art to recapture high fashion’s exclusivity. “The whole point is that there’s a tension” between art and fashion, Davis concluded, not a synthesis.
What’s Your Definition of Art?
Russeth said that art, at its best, is a protected field to talk about things you can’t talk about elsewhere, in a safer and fuller way. He left out “through objects and images.” Sutton agreed but emphasized that art is not protected because it is permissive. Davis noted that art is a general term for excellence—an advertisement can be so good that it is art—so what is fine art? The tradition, the museum and gallery culture, and economically (a person with control over his or her labor). Earlier Kino had passed the microphone to Davis but got it back, saying “You know it when you see it.” She added that art constantly redefines what is art.
In Terms Of count: 9.
1 I spoke on a “Talk with the Critics” panel with Hrag Vartanian and Lily Wei in November 2013.
2 Sutton was my editor at the L Magazine in 2011–12.
3 Russeth misattributed the quote, slightly. Here is Hickey: “That’s why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: ‘You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.’” What Russeth left out was the final step: “Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it.” Hickey, “Romancing the Looky-Loos,” Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 152.
Mostly written in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Robert BarryWednesday, March 11, 2015 Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture 205 Hudson Street Gallery, Hunter College, City University of New York, MFA Campus, New York
You know how lyrics from pop songs look trite and sometimes embarrassing when written down, but come alive convincingly when performed? It’s the same for artist’s talks. Some excel when presenting in public. If an artist is charismatic, unremarkable work becomes good and good work becomes great. The opposite is also true: interesting work can come across as ordinary.
The renowned first-generation Conceptualist Robert Barry is one of those artists whose work—which explores speech, memory, light, time, belief, anticipation, fragility, making connections, and states of flux and change—shines when interpretations are expanded on by others. It’s not that he’s inarticulate. Far from it—the artist speaks clearly, in a straightforward manner. But there was a lack of excitement to his reflections on a six-decade career during a lecture at the Hunter College Art Galleries, held in conjunction with the retrospective Robert Barry: All the things I know … 1962 to the present. His discussion about old and new works revealed no earthshaking revelations but offered plenty to remind you of the humanity behind the brainy work you read about in art-history books.
Born in the Bronx in 1936—and he still has the accent to prove it—Barry received two degrees at Hunter College, earning a BFA in 1957 and an MA in 1963.1 As a student, he took classes with the renowned scholar and curator William Rubin; the artist Robert Motherwell was his advisor. The art department was impressive: William Baziotes taught watercolor, Ray Parker taught oil painting, and Tony Smith taught in a three-piece suit. After Barry obtained his terminal degree, he was hired as a professor at Hunter by Eugene C. Goossen, an art critic, historian, and curator who was the department chair. Barry taught there from 1964 to 1979, a job he admitted made it easy for him to avoid producing art commodities to support his practice.
Robert Barry speaks to an audience at Hunter College (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Like many Conceptualists, Barry started out as a painter, and the exhibition’s oldest work is a painting of gridded red and black squares, a student piece from 1962. By the end of the decade, his attitude toward art changed, and he began working with ephemeral, invisible, and nonart materials, such as typewritten statements like “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 p.m.; June 15, 1969.” He also experimented with electromagnetic waves, with pieces that triggered metaphysical thoughts from scientific concepts. “The most powerful things in the world were invisible,” Barry said regarding Electromagnetic Energy Field (1968), which is “a battery-powered transmitter encased in a nondescript metal box [that] sends out waves of energy, filling the gallery space with an invisible, immeasurable, but nonetheless real force.”2 With a sound “kind of like a whistle,” Electromagnetic Energy Field was as large as its audible range. Carrier Wave (1968–69), Barry said, blots out all other signals in the area. The artist’s father, who was an electrical engineer (and a disk jockey in the 1940s, using his own equipment), made the radio-wave boxes for his son’s art projects.3 At the time, the artist revealed, a telekinetic institute operated near the 57th Street galleries in Manhattan where he first showed these pieces, so he knew he was in the right area.
“I used to call galleries ‘cemeteries,’” Barry said confidently, and several classic works examined art-world mechanics. When dealers contacted him for shows, he told them, “Well, right now I’m closing galleries.” His Closed Gallery (1969) was first done at Eugenia Butler’s space in Los Angeles, and also in Amsterdam and Turin. “Lock the door,” he joked. “Don’t let anybody in.” The public was notified of the negated exhibitions by postcard.
Before the lecture, the Hunter professor Joachim Pissarro discussed Robert Barry’s exhibition in the galleries; Robert Barry is on the far left (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Conceptual artists notoriously pillaged spheres of knowledge outside the domain of fine art. Barry noticed the beautiful Greek names of the noble gases, which are elements on the periodic table that rarely interact with other elements or change chemically. For one his best-known works, Inert Gas Series: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, from a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (1969), Barry purchased glass containers of these gases from a distributor that worked with schools and, with his dealer Seth Siegelaub, drove a rented Mercedes convertible into the Mohave Desert, where he laid the containers on newspaper and smashed them with a hammer. He smashed more bottles of gas at a Beverly Hills hotel. Siegelaub wanted to document things—these works are typically shown as typeset text and black-and-white photographs in frames—but Barry did not. Nearly fifty years later, the many cubic feet of neon, xenon, and other gases that he released are still floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, somewhere.
“Barry does not work with words; he communicates conditions.” So wrote the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard. One of these conditions, based on trust and agreement, is evident a class assignment for students that Barry sent to David Askevold at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1969:
The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.
It’s true—nobody is sure if the secret was revealed immediately, as one account goes, or forgotten, as goes another. In a way, misinformation is part of the piece. “I’m not even sure this is a piece,” Barry conceded. “It’s about the fragility of ideas…. It’s life. That’s what life is about.” Two older works received attention during tonight’s lecture: Robert Barry Presents Three Shows and a Review by Lucy R. Lippard (1971) and Marcus Piece (1970). For the former, Lippard wrote a short essay about Barry’s work that, with a collection of index cards that described other pieces she included in other exhibitions, formed a show at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Another text-based piece quoted the philosopher Herbert Marcuse: “A place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’” Barry’s strategy was “to plagiarize his idea and make art from it.”
Installation view of Robert Barry’s Red Cross (2008) at Yvon Lambert Gallery in 2009
Barry’s work since the 1970s has been more oblique: collections of words that are read out loud, drawn or stickered directly on walls, appear in paintings, are cast in acrylic, or projected onto the floor. The words he chooses typically express states of being and abstract actions—and he rarely employs nouns. In the Hunter College exhibition, Barry placed transparent vinyl letters on the windows facing Canal Street. His videos are likewise impressionistic, such as one he filmed on a train and in the Centre Pompidou–Metz in France. It’s easy to understand how critics and historians tend to focus on Barry’s early work, because his production from the last thirty years requires viewers to engage more, to be active participants in shaping meaning.
If I were conducting an interview with Barry, I would ask him about these more recent works, skipping over the 1960s stuff that many people know.4 But that is not what Max Weintraub, an adjunct professor at Hunter and the exhibition’s cocurator, did when he joined the artist onstage for a lackluster dialogue. Weintraub asked about topics already covered in Barry’s lecture, such as the mechanics of the art world, so maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. The professor asked an asinine question about blurred authorship of Three Shows and a Review: “Did it occur to you that [Lippard] was doing a Robert Barry?” “No,” the artist responded. Barry and Lippard had conversations, and her writing contribution was perfect. Weintraub did get Barry to talk more about the Closed Gallery pieces, including the one in Los Angeles that employed two old ladies from a telephone answering service in a little office on Sunset Boulevard.
Max Weinberg and Robert Barry talk (photograph by Christopher Howard)
An audience member asked about the difference between a serious work of Conceptual art and a joke—a great question but one left answered. Barry said he needed specific works to compare because he doesn’t like generalities. (The questioner did not give examples.) “‘Conceptual’ is a bad word,” another attendee commented. “Is there one you prefer?” “No,” Barry responded. There’s always something physical about art, he said, though using the term is a convenience and valuable because “you get into shows.” It is rare that an artist cites the benefits of labels and categories. Conceptual art is tangible in other ways. Barry urged artists in the audience that “you should get something for your labor” and “you can’t give it away.” He got over that attitude. His work is valuable.
In Terms Of count: 2.
1 According to a 2010 Archives of American Art interview with Robert Barry, what is now Lehman College in the Bronx was part of Hunter College.
3 Barry explained: “My dad gave me a hand, making up these little transmitters that sent out a signal. If you put one in the gallery, and also had a portable radio turned to that frequency, it gave off a whistle. I don’t think my dad had any idea how this connected to art or my drawing, but he had fun doing it.” Barry, quoted in Benjamin Genocchio, “A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art,” New York Times, November 30, 2003.
3 For criticism on his recent work, see my Artforum.com review of Barry’s 2009 exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York.
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.
Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)
A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.
The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.
Building and Expansion
Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.
The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.
Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.
Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”
Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.
From the Ground Up
Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1
Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.
Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.
Locations and Audience
While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?
Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”
Education and Experience
Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.
The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2
For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.
Concluding Thoughts
While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.
Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.
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.
In March 2014, the economics journalist Catherine Rampell crunched numbers from an online US Department of Education tool that collected data on college costs. Her results were stunning. After “subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid” for private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, she determined that “seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are art schools or conservatories of some kind.”1 These included the familiar institutions: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the San Francisco Art Institute. What’s more, two others on her list—the New School and New York University—offer numerous degrees in the arts.2 Tuition and required fees for the top ten range from $36,032 to $42,882 a year—which doesn’t include room, board, and related nonacademic expenses. Keep in mind that these are undergraduate degrees—master’s and doctoral degrees run even higher.
It’s no secret that the tuition for all kinds of schools has increased significantly over the last thirty years, and thousands of students take out huge government and private loans to cover their educational expenses. Those armed with BFAs are unlikely to make tons of money right out of the starting gate, as the familiar narrative goes. Yet we live in a time in which euphoric articles pronounce the MFA as the new MBA appear with alarming regularity.3 What should a young artist do?
Coco Fusco finds art-school debt to be unreasonable (photograph by Tal Beery)
Neither alleviating nor preventing student debt was the subject of an informal, passionate lecture by Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and visiting associate professor in comparative media studies and writing for 2014–15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking from her perch in the academic ivory tower, Fusco vented about the debt crisis, pointed fingers at numerous culprits, and found many sympathetic listeners. (She was a professor at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008—spending five years in the School of the Arts’ renowned MFA program—and following that was director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design from 2008 to 2013). Fusco was a “lone wolf in the wilderness” while teaching at Columbia during the boom Bush years, said Noah Fischer, a former student of hers and a founder of Occupy Museums, the group that sponsored her lecture and was participating in Momenta Art’s exhibition Work It Out.
A year has passed since Modern Painters published Fusco’s essay “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns” in its December 2013 issue. For the article Fusco gathered anecdotal knowledge from conversations with students, arguing that debt influences the kind of art a person makes after graduation, that schools use recruiters, and that art theory influences students, for better or worse. While “Debating an MFA?” focused on expensive graduate programs, tonight’s forty-five-minute talk made few distinctions between bachelor’s and master’s degrees and interchangeably addressed art schools, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities. As a result, the targets of her accusations were confused, perhaps deliberately so for rhetorical effect, leaving me without a solid grasp of the problem. It felt like the mark in Three Card Monte.
Cost of the Ticket
The “cost of the ticket” for art school has risen significantly, Fusco said. The 1980s, when she earned her BA and MA, were different. “It’s not that we didn’t borrow money,” she explained. “We didn’t have to borrow as much.” Fusco ended up with “relatively little debt” from her undergraduate education and none for graduate school.4 Back then “school wasn’t the problem—school was the escape,” especially for those riding out tough economic times. Waitressing lunch shifts for four hours a day after first finishing school, Fusco said she was poor but had time for art, and even worked for other artists for free. Needless to say, few can afford this lifestyle today, at least not in New York.
Design schools such as Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago figure disproportionately among the institutions that use “predatory lending schemes,” Fusco declared, and the top debtor schools are for-profit institutions. Schools that teach software and web design are “massive factories with debt schemes built into them,” she remarked, and the situation has become intolerable and oppressive. Her information was confusing, since she didn’t explain what these schemes are. Besides, for-profit institutions such as the nationwide chain of Art Institutes or places like Full Sail University teach marketable skills in lucrative creative areas such as web development, video games, and film production.5 Their graduates are hardly knocking on the doors of Chelsea galleries. Fusco left me wanting to know how SCAD and SAIC, which are nonprofit institutions, compare to the for-profits.
In Fusco’s experience, students are battling their parents over money for a collegiate art-school education, and parents are selling property, taking a second mortgage on their homes, and draining their retirement funds to pay for it all. At the same time, schools offer country-club experiences, with lavish dormitories and student centers—not to mention new buildings by starchitects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry—to supposedly impress wealthy parents to fork over cash. Paying for such expansions, Fusco said, is higher tuition.
During the first audience Q&A, an older man recommended that artists “show up” and “be weird.” Why even go to art school, he asked, suggesting that we get rid of the middleman and hook up students with working artists through apprenticeships. “That’s the medieval way,” Fusco responded, which “can become free labor for a long time.” Another attendee, the writer Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, wanted to know how we might let parents know about debt in advance. I asked Fusco if she knew how much effort today’s students make to find nonloan funding for their education? What about student complacency regarding tuition increases, questioned another person. Fusco did not have adequate answers. We are at a point when the outrage is over, Fusco had said earlier, and organizing should begin. But the only solution she offered was going to free schools like the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and “others in Los Angeles,” as if these groups offer something comparable to a degree from an accredited institution. It’s disappointing if Bruce High Quality is the only alternative pedagogical project that she knows by name. Fusco can find a rich history of both current and discontinued alternative pedagogical institutions indexed by the TEACHABLE FILE and use Google to discover newer projects making headlines.6
Proliferation of Degrees
The proliferation of degrees at art schools isn’t an expansion of choices, Fusco argued, but an opportunity for schools to procure more students and dispense degrees without providing marketable skills (e.g., fabrication, installation, canvas stretching, and finding your way around a woodshop). Indeed, any subscriber to the Art and Education email list can vouch for the mushrooming of art-degree programs in discourse-based areas such as, for example, the MA in art, education, and community practice at New York University, the MA in social design at Maryland Institute College of Art, or the MA in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.7 Talkers who don’t make things don’t last long, Fusco warned, even though she acknowledged that she’s a talker artist herself.
It’s more expensive for a school to maintain a glassblowing or ceramics studio, Fusco said, than to provide space for students doing social practice and, in her words, “transdisciplinary design.” While I generally agree with Fusco—it seems likely that programs for socially engaged art, which have multiplied in recent years as the genre gained visibility and respect, are less expensive to operate than programs in studio art—I can’t help but think that academic institutions are places where significant changes in how artists interact with the world take place. While initially frivolous sounding, these new degrees may evolve into progressive incubators for careers that haven’t yet grown mainstream roots. On the other hand, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment in an experimental, emerging field worth the risk?
Art School Administration
Fusco stated that art schools increasingly operate in a corporate manner, a glib remark evoking the evil ways of vulgar capitalism. Yet pundits have proposed the same thing for ALL of higher education for years, if not decades, and the tedious concept of university-as-business becomes superfluous when considering that any institution that ignores balancing income and expenses will simply not survive. Continuing her blanket dismissals, Fusco claimed that art schools confuse students by promoting themselves as research centers for knowledge production, when in fact these institutions are trade schools focused on technical training. (Didn’t she say earlier that students aren’t being taught usable skills?) “There is no concept of research in trade school,” Fuso said, apparently comparing studying art to vocational training in refrigeration or plumbing. Her line of thought might have served a purpose if she had identified the BFA or the MFA as her target, or even specified the culprits of her critique.
Image illustrating “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns,” Coco Fusco’s article from Modern Painters
Art schools devise ways to make the precarious employment of teachers permanent, Fusco continued, saying “It’s way beyond adjuncts now.” In fact, she stated that 90 percent of faculty members at art schools are adjuncts, without providing a source for this figure. “Those contracts have wonderful names,” she joked, “like visiting professor, visiting associate adjunct whatever, the titles go on and on, but the bottom line is that this is about the permanence of impermanence.” Adjunctification is indeed a huge problem across academia and especially in the visual arts. The three art capitals of America—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—boast a larger supply of artists, Fusco reported, and therefore teaching is a rough way for them to make a living. She floated the idea of living and working in Kansas City or Iowa City, in Dallas or Houston, but didn’t seem to take that seriously.
A decline in full-time professors, Fusco went on, has adversely affected faculty governance. In addition to being poorly paid, she said, adjuncts lack a political voice within the institution and must placate students and not rock the boat—“it’s about hanging on.” Professional development has also suffered, which has led to teachers using thirty-five-year-old syllabi. “No one should be allowed to do that,” she fumed. Artists are the hardest adjuncts hit, since part-timers in design and architecture usually have day jobs, which affects their political outlook on precarious labor. “They don’t want more obligations,” Fusco said, so it’s hard to win their support for change. Art schools, she told us, employ students in positions where other institutions, such as MIT, have a support staff of unionized professionals. While a federally subsidized work/study program is certainly beneficial for students, I can imagine that not having properly trained people running the darkroom or the print shop to be frustrating.
Because art schools face a dearth of applications from the US and a high turnover of students after one year, Fusco claimed, schools don’t have enough students—that is to say, they don’t have enough students to justify the expense of the legions of administrators who manage the pupils. Therefore an influx of foreigners has populated programs at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and CalArts. “Where am I, in Singapore?” she joked at the sea of yellow faces in art schools today. That comment sounded xenophobic, if not racist.
Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion
The seduction strategies that recruit students are real, Fusco said, and people aren’t told the truth before entering school—which is that most artists will not make it. (Who are these recruiters?) The lure for the Columbia MFA program in recent years, she said, is that an unidentified department head told students in private conversations that they’ll be rich before they finish school or they’ll hang out with famous art-world people who will help them find money. Fusco also argued that glamorous precarious workers—described by the journalist Riva Seth as “highly educated, skilled professionals who frequently are well compensated but nonetheless lack the security, social benefits or established career trajectories traditionally associated with their professions”—have an illusion of independence.8 Yet the media spin on successful young artists, she warned, fails to acknowledge that artworks bought by collectors who speculate are typically priced less than $10,000 each—hardly a get-rick-quick scheme. Of course, during her talk Fusco assumed—almost arrogantly so—that market success in the commercial art world is the solitary goal of those attending MFA programs. Throughout her talk she avoided discussing any other reason why artists might better themselves through education, leaving no room for other career pursuits.
During the 1970s, Fusco revealed, artists didn’t depend on the market: selling art was unusual and artists found cheap ways to live. Now those artists—whom she identified as male Conceptual artists teaching in higher education—aren’t the ones who can spread an awareness to students of the need for immediate financial returns after graduation. I’m not sure how that observation squares with her other comments. For example, Fusco said that some professor-artists connect their students to the market because that’s all they can offer as teachers. Art dealers visited CalArts in the 1980s to meet the students of Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, the “spiritual children of the Svengali types” as she put it. And during the 1990s, Fusco continued, dealers visited students at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University School of Art. It was certainly revealing that, according to the speaker’s anecdotes, the art market had begun invading MFA programs over thirty years ago, that it’s not surprising for gallery owners and collectors to pluck fresh talent from artists still in training.
Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art
If a young artist’s goal is to exhibit at galleries like Murray Guy or Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Fusco said, or to show in a booth at a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair, then he or she should consider attending expensive graduate schools. At Columbia, she disclosed, students specialize in networking, socializing, and drinking—and even complained to administrators when Fusco made them read and write. “Those students are like little barracudas,” she groused. “If they could kill me and get to my dealer, they would.”
Since “you’re paying $50,000 a year to be looked at before you even begin your career,” as Fusco claimed, should a prospective student attend a top art school or settle for an MFA program in the hinterlands of America, where he or she might earn a full ride? In the age of $120,000 art degrees, to borrow a slogan from the collective BFAMFAPHD, the latter option is the only sensible choice. Fusco named Arizona State University in Tempe and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as possibilities. For an artist interested in technology, she suggested heading to a school with the latest equipment, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and not to a boutique MFA program that specializes in seminars. I’ve heard that the University of California in Irvine and in Riverside, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale all offer generous packages to MFA students. Germany just made higher education free for anyone, Fusco pointed out, and students don’t even have to be citizens. If it’s actually true that “students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate,” as the critic and adjunct professor Jerry Saltz wrote, then attending a less-prestigious and less-expensive school—and consequently incurring little if any debt—before moving to New York (or wherever) to break into the commercial gallery scene makes a lot of sense.9 This artist will have hundreds of extra dollars a month for studio rent, art supplies, and food.
During the audience Q&A, the artist Kenneth Pietrobono, who like Noah Fischer is involved in Occupy Museums, declared that he turned down a spot in an MFA program at New York University because the cost of attending was too high, despite loan money being available. That was a wise decision. When faced with rising costs for art school and low expectations after graduation, prospective students must recognize that they are adults who are capable of conducting research, seeking counseling, and making their own decisions before accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loan money. They also must recognize the importance of saying no to unfavorable financial situations. But the fact remains that many artists have shackled themselves with huge amounts of debt, and that is a pity.
2 The tenth institution, Beacon College, is a small school in Florida “exclusively serving students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and other learning differences,” according to its homepage.
4 Fusco earned a BA in semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and a PhD in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2005).
7 It’s interesting that all three are MAs, not MFAs. Because these are not terminal degrees, their recipients will not be qualified to teach art at the college or university level.
Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age Tuesday, November 19, 2014
The Art of Sex and Seduction
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, New York
Gerard ter Borch the Younger, The Suitor’s Visit, ca. 1658, oil on canvas, 31½ x 29½ in. (artwork in the public domain)
The internet was once the “meat market for the undatable,” said the journalist Erica Lumière. Now, meeting people online for dating and sex has nearly become completely normalized in American culture. Which is good news, especially for couples who no longer must make excuses for how they met—“at a party,” “through mutual friends,” or something of the sort—and just say “on OKCupid” without feeling ashamed. In fact, men and women older than fifty is the largest growing segment of online dating (and the market cornered by a company called Our Time).
The three speakers on the panel “Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age,” hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and moderated by Lumière, offered their experiences as writers, researchers, and professors—and as advocates—and the ensuing discussion culminated in agreement over a moderate, thoughtful approach to modern romance that originates on the web.1
Swipe Right
Lumière began the conversation with a few statistics: one out of ten people have used a dating site or app; 66 percent of those users go on a date; and 23 percent of them have met a spouse or started a long-term relationship via the internet. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, praised the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet potential romantic partners, with large cities offering hundreds to thousands of people. But, he warned, a dating website is “only a good tool if you know how to use it.” Backed with statistics from Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey report, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher said that cognitive overload is the biggest problem and that users can become overwhelmed with choices, overweighing trivial aspects of a person’s looks, dress, interests, and personality, gleaned from a person’s profile, at the expense of finding common ground.2 Don’t use a check-off strategy, Reis and Fisher both recommended. My question is, does anyone consider those endless lists of favorite movies, bands, and books that people put in their profiles to be helpful criteria?
The experience Daniel Jones brought to the panel wasn’t scientific but literary—he is a writer and the editor of the New York Times column Modern Love, for which ordinary people contribute personal essays about their relationships. Dating sites put you in the driver’s seat, “looking for the ideal person,” he said, but you’re thrown into the sea with an “illusion of control.” Sometimes opposites—whether that’s differences in income, religion, politics, or smoking preferences—really do attract. In short, he advised, don’t be too strict with your imagined ideal.
The sexperts, from left: Daniel Jones, Hellen Fisher, and Harry Reis, with the moderator Erica Lumière at right
Fisher agreed: the algorithms work of dating websites work, but having a common background—which can be social values, good looks, or the same reproductive goals—is also important. “I don’t think they’re dating services.” Fisher continued. “I think they’re introducing services.” These websites are “changing courtship,” she said, “but [they’re] not changing love.”3 Connections happen in real life, Reis emphasized again. A prospective car buyer can read Consumer Reports cover to cover, his analogy went, but he or she must take a test drive before making a decision. Fisher nodded, stating that 35 percent of people fall in love “down the road,” not instantly, so patience is a virtue for anyone behind the wheel. There’s a joke about rocks songs about cars and girls in here somewhere.
“Hi” Tech
Many have declared that technologyhaskilledromance. Jones recounted a story of a woman in Washington, DC, who Googled her date before meeting him. Because she “was able to excavate his entire personal life, and family life, all in advance of the date,” their conversation suffered from stunted communications and even led to an embarrassing mistake: she mentioned his sister before he said he had one. Yet 29 percent of internet users, Lumière stated, have looked up the person they are dating, or are going to date, online. Fisher had different statistics—38 percent of men and 53 percent of women have researched a date on Google and Facebook—and with safety and curiosity in mind and with different statistics said, “I don’t know why 100 percent don’t.” Besides, she explained, from hunter-gatherer era to the small towns of yore, many people already knew the family of the people with whom they might partner. This idea spurred Jones to assert that we’ve experienced a sea change of people dating strangers, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Dating strangers inherently creates suspicion, the panelists concurred, so it’s sensible that a person conduct research in advance. And no, it’s not stalking.
Technology doesn’t protect people from getting hurt, Jones said. Considering hookup culture (i.e., sex without commitment) in 2008, he observed that things go tragically wrong when the emotional involvement becomes imbalanced. There’s an understanding between partners when hooking up, he said, but “the rules aren’t posted in the dorm walls.” When hooking up, kids feel vulnerable but cannot act vulnerable. On the positive side, the panelists agreed noted that people’s sexual needs are being met this way, despite the anxiety hooking up might cause. Fisher even revealed that 35 percent of one night stands and 47 percent of friends with benefits turn into long-term relationships. The rules are developing now, she said, just like they were developing in other ways a hundred years ago. Later, during the Q&A, an audience member felt that hooking up takes time away from working on a core relationship, but Reis has observed that emotion flows plentifully in hookups, that “it’s following some different norms, to be sure,” and not necessarily a linear courtship progression. Jones, however, has witnessed people struggling with such arrangements but offered the idea that they’re practicing pieces of relationships. Sometimes dealing with a whole relationship while too young, he suggested, can damage a younger person.
Daniel Jones (left) offered his experience as a writer and editor
The panelists discussed long-distance relationships that develop online between people who have never met face to face. “It’s completely liberating,” Jones said, and “The flirtation is intense.” The risk for vulnerability is low, he continued, but foibles may develop, such as when one couple worked up to Skyping naked but still preferred typing to speaking. Another couple would fall asleep together online, Jones recalled, but the relationship failed after she drove from Missouri to New York. In real life they were bored by each other and could only get their emotional fix through their electronic devices. Lumière asked if these online relationships can work. “I would say ultimately not,” responded Reis, who again endorsed the primacy of flesh-and-blood connections.
Deception is built into technology, Jones said. Since people regularly fudge their income, height, weight, and age in their online profiles, he wondered, how should an honest person act when everyone else is enhancing their image? Others might think a person who genuinely lists himself as 45 year old is actually 50, or a 180-pound person actually weighs 200. “Lying and cheating are hardly new inventions,” responded Reis, and the opportunities to both cheat and detect cheating are relatively equal. “It’s a bit of an arms race,” he observed. Jones believes that Facebook helps reignite old flames, but often you’re seeing someone’s curated life, not their actual life, and therefore illusions can develop. What’s more, he said, you must work harder to block people from your life online. Fisher asserted the notion that if you’re not predisposed to cheat, you probably won’t cheat. Dating sites, she concluded, don’t change brain chemistry and personality. After a few weeks, Reis added, you generally know who a person is—unless he or she is a pathological liar.
It’s All Good?
One study, Lumière noted, found that internet marriages are three to four times more likely to end in divorce, but Reiss asserted the opposite: “The right science has not been done to answer that question.” People don’t sacrifice their career for a relationship anymore, he continued, which is a positive development, and women need not follow their partners around the country or be told where to attend graduate school. Further, people may now split up romantically and separate geographically but stay together emotionally, which Reis said could develop into a new kind of relationship. Ever ready with her statistics, Fisher stated that 81 percent of lifelong partners would marry the same person again, and 76 percent are still in love with him or her. Now we choose for ourselves, often later in life, and leave bad relationships more readily.
Harry Reis (center) encourages online daters to meet in person
Regarding genders, Reis claimed that the similarities between men and women overwhelm the differences. Thus, the perception that single men only want sex, that married men pretend to be single want sex, and that women seek long-term relationships isn’t accurate. Based on her figures, Fisher even proposed that men are more romantic, fall in love easier, suggest moving in together sooner, and want to introduce family members earlier. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, she added, after a romantic snub. Reis stated, again, that there’s no information you can put online that’s better than what you’ll learn from meeting in person. The better dating sites, he said, tell you who is in your geographic area.
The evening’s conversation completely avoided racial preferences, which were brought up in a 2013 report on interracial communications on a single Facebook-based dating site, Are You Interested. A few findings: black women are the least likely to be contacted, Asian women were the most pursued, and most women wrote to white men. OkCupid found similar results in 2009, including the fact that approximately two out of three whites prefer to date someone with the same skin color and racial background. And I don’t recollect a single mention by the panelists of issues affecting gays and lesbians. It’s inexplicable how the speakers—who were all white and straight—failed to widened their scope for a more inclusive discussion.
The panelists barely acknowledged accusations of emotional manipulation on social-media sites, which Facebook and OkCupid both faced earlier this year. And while the speakers discussed online communications between potential mates, they forgot to talk about the severe harassment of women by men—from sexually explicit written invitations to unwanted dick pics—which has become so widespread in the dating community that the aberrant behavior has become expected, in a way. Just ask the artist Anna Gensler, who draws caricatures of the men who contact her on Tinder with sexually explicit messages and publishes them, sometimes with collaged digital images but always showing the man with a hilariously small penis, on Tumblr and Instagram (as well as Granniepants.)
In Terms Of count: 5.
1 Tonight’s event was the third and final panel in the Art de Vivre: Talks series produced by the French Institute Alliance Française in conjunction with its gallery exhibition of fashion photographs by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, titled Seducing the Lens, and a film series.
2 Fisher is not only a research professor at the Center for Human Evolution Studies in Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology, she is also chief scientific advisor for Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, which colored her comments.
3 One trend Reis has noticed is that people prefer finding a good provider to finding love. The opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but because divorce is so prevalent, singles are suspicious of intense passion.
