Art Questions

Installation view of #class, at Winkleman Gallery
Sculptor and performance artist Dominique Mazeaud recently proposed on her blog a "second round of 'Les Magiciens de la Terre,' an exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989, that asked one hundred artists to define art along with showing their work." Mazeaud, however, throws a curve ball: "I would simply change the question and ask artists to offer a definition of 'what is the spiritual in art.'"

Defining the spiritual in art is no mean task. The curators of Mazeaud's proposed show would likely receive as many different responses to the question as there were artists participating. Contemporary spirituality, after all, is understood to be an individual quality or experience. But a diverse field of responses doesn't make the question any less interesting, and I agree with Mazeaud that such an exhibition would be exciting and insightful, especially in light of recently reinvigorated conversations about the role of art, artists, and the art market.

Presently, at the Winkleman Gallery, artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida offer a platform for this conversation. They've created a temporary "think tank" for "guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors, and anyone else who would like to participate to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system." I readily admit that I'm more interested in talking philosophy and "ultimate meaning" than I am in discussing practical approaches to the contemporary art market, and I believe that my charitable sales model implicitly announces my ambivalence about (and proposes a viable alternative to) our day's dominant system. That said, only naive artists truly believe that contemporary art can exist completely disconnected from the market (while still finding an audience).

Unfortunately, I arrived late to James Leonard's performance piece on Thursday night (thanks to the snowfall some news sensationalists dubbed "the snowicane"), and I had a conflict that kept me from attending the presentation by Barry Hoggard and James Wagner last night, but I hope to make at least a few more of the sessions that Dalton and Powhida have lined up. You can view the calendar at the exhibition/think tank blog, Hashtagclass."

Image credit: ripped from the Winkleman Gallery website

Holland Cotter's Unknowns

I enjoyed reading "The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!," Holland Cotter's sometimes scathing New York Times farewell to contemporary art's reckless past decade. Cotter describes the art world as a "full-service marketing industry [built] on the corporate model," and he sees art schools as a branch of this money-hungry industry. In his estimation, critics, curators and other art world operators are "public relations specialists who provide timely updates on what desirable means." With these stark observations in mind, Cotter asserts that "a financial scouring can only be good for American art."

"The Boom Is Over" likely raised the ire of many artists and dealers. A commenter on Edward Winkleman's blog characterized Cotter as "out of touch" and guilty of perpetuating a "fabled myth," and I wouldn't be surprised if more online dismissals and condemnations of Cotter's article appear in coming days. That's a shame. I don't believe that the article is intended to titillate or to offend.

Cotter's description of our prodigal art world brings to mind artist and critic Robert Morgan's caution not to mistake glamour for substantive beauty.

"Beauty is not glamour. Most of what the...art world has to offer is glamour. Glamour, like the art world itself, is a highly fickle and commercially driven enterprise that contributes to...the 'humdrum.' It appears and disappears...No one ever catches up to glamour."

Because I call on Morgan's rather romantic position, some readers will immediately decide that, like Cotter, I'm guilty of perpetuating a myth. If so, it is a vital myth. The beauty that Morgan exalts is complicated and profound. I have in mind philosopher poet John O'Donohue's conception of beauty.

"Beauty induces atmosphere and spirit: wonder, delicious turbulence, love, longing and a trembling delight....Beauty inhabits the cutting edge of creativity - mediating between the known and the unknown, light and darkness, masculine and feminine, visible and invisible, chaos and meaning, sound and silence, self and others."

O'Donohue defines a soulful beauty, a beauty that springs from generous attempts to be and to belong.

Although many of the artworks offered for sale at art fairs or on auction blocks are born of beautiful striving, art fairs and auctions are never, themselves, beautiful. And because fairs and auctions are the events most representative of the contemporary art world, Cotter's harsh language seems reasonable. He's right; "during the present decade [art] has become a diminished thing."

I sense that Cotter wants the Times article, a dismal record of a profligate art world, to serve as license for artists, dealers, curators and critics (Cotter's own tribe) to ruminate on their standing. He hopes that the result of that rumination would be an open-hearted embrace of the artist's vital social role (and the art world's part in facilitating that). It is edification, above all, that interests Cotter.

"With markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education? Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in in-extremis environments, i.e. real life?...Such changes would require new ways of thinking and writing about art, so critics would need to go back to school, miss a few parties and hit the books and the Internet....[If] there is a crisis, it is not a crisis of power; it's a crisis of knowledge. Simply put, we don't know enough..."

Amen.

But I think that Cotter should have included an addendum. Speaking in generalities can be valuable, but the excess and superficiality of the art world's recent history hasn't tainted all artists, dealers, curators and critics. Certainly, there are "thousands of groomed-for-success [art school] graduates" who have made contemporary art into something "proliferating but languishing," but there are also, as ever, many individuals pushing toward O'Donohue's complicated beauty. Some admirable artists and dealers experienced great success in the boom market of the late nineties and oughties. Perhaps they wouldn't have flourished without the opportunities afforded them by the fattened industry? Artists have always had an uneasy relationship with commodity, and there's little sense in championing lean times over relative abundance.

We're now living through an socio-economic upheaval that is quite nearly global. Such rapid and widespread change should, as Cotter expects, force a significant number of artists to conscientiously reexamine their ideals. But let's not delude ourselves. The opportunity for reflection and mindful action wasn't precluded by the excesses and superficialities of boom time. Although some artists, dealers, curators, critics and hangers-on acted improperly because the environment encouraged bad behavior, most did so because they wanted to. So even as I cheer Cotter's call for us to "[imagine] the unknown and the unknowable," to raise up "new ways of thinking and writing about art," and to see artists blazing unexpected paths, I remind myself that the burden of proof falls foremost on the individual.

Image credit: ripped from Daily Serving

Flapping Wings

On the whole, I've been rather hopeful for the last two years. But perhaps it was naive of me to believe that the First World was at last recognizing the western model of political and economic "progress" as an undemocratic, globalized burden? Is it not clear that super-capitalism punishes, starves and buries the less fortunate "lower" classes along with the "lesser" species? Do the present-day "winners" not understand that, eventually, when the structural interior is rotted out, the upper echelon will come crashing down?

A friend gave me a copy of the Time Magazine Style & Design Supplement last week. I wish that I hadn't read it; the supplement's articles have only contributed to my intensifying skepticism of and despair for the art market.

Consider, for example, Karen Katz, Neva Hall, and Ann Stordahl, so-called "power players" at Neiman Marcus. Kristina Zimbalist, one of the supplement's writers, calls the three women "Magical Thinkers" because they've "orchestrated America's current luxury boom, lifting the consumer ever higher."

"And the world is primed for what Neiman Marcus president and CEO Katz calls 'high luxury'; the number of households worth more than $5 million is greater than ever before...'It's even more luxurious, more unique, harder to get. We want to sit at the top of the luxury mountain,' [Katz] says. 'We're pushing higher, to find that even rarer air.'"

The attitudes of people like Katz are irredeemable...and awfully depressing.

Publications like the Time Style & Design Supplement prove my optimism misguided; we are not yet recognizing the gravity of our trespasses. Even as wealthy dilettantes bemoan the tenuous station of the polar bear, they celebrate news of the "Global Luxury Survey: China, India, Russia," another article included in the Time supplement.

"Ask any seasoned luxury-goods executives what excites them most about the future of the category, and they will undoubtedly launch into a lengthy discourse on emerging markets. For some, China holds the most promise, with its double-digit yearly growth and the expectation that it will surpass the U.S. in luxury-goods consumption by 2015...In this, the first installment of a four-part series, Time measures the affluent consumer's appetite for luxury brands in these exciting markets."

China? Russia? Regular readers of ArtNews and other industry glossies know that these "market opportunities" aren't far from the minds of art world movers and shakers. The art world is, after all, just another arm of the global luxury market.

When Edward Winkleman argued recently, in his post, "Blinded by Blood Lust," that good art can coexist with a strong market, I didn't find fault with his assertion. Yet I'm troubled by the pain that radiates outward from a thriving market. Dealers and artists may not be directly assaulting the environment or the poverty stricken, but they're happily trading in bloody money, and all the while identifying themselves as "liberal," "progressive" and "caring."

As Edward contends, the "art market death watch cheerleaders" - I include myself in their ranks - are deluded if they cheer because they believe that "we'd have better or more interesting art if only" the market collapsed. I hope that most of them, like me, are instead cheering for change (for alternatives). The thriving art market is one more indication that our species, propelled by the west's thoughtless economic imperatives, is in a frightening position, every bit as tenuous as that of brother polar bear.

A successful man that I know, someone affiliated with the art world, recently purchased a watch for $11,500. This acquisition disturbs me for two reasons. First, even a limited awareness of the social and ecological ravages of luxury markets should discourage an educated individual from making such a purchase. Second, I was forced to acknowledge that his buying the watch is essentially no different from his buying a painting.

The watch wasn't encrusted with diamonds; outwardly, it didn't even look particularly expensive. If you didn't know the brand, you'd likely mistake it for an inexpensive model and make. It's a status symbol and, as such, is designed to be recognized only by other people of status. Considering the watch, I concluded that it (like the bought-and-sold artworks in Chelsea) is an artifact of contemporary "high luxury," a branded investment that is grafted to the market, useful only as a wealth signifier.

Daniel Quinn's allegory of the airman, taken from his renowned novel "Ishmael," is pertinent to this discussion. Our civilization knows well that the laws of aerodynamics, physical realities that we had to identify in order to construct serviceable planes and helicopters, don't defy gravity. Quinn writes,

"There is no escaping [gravity], but there is a way of achieving the equivalent of flight - the equivalent of freedom of the air. In other words, it is possible to build a civilization that flies."

But before we understood aerodynamics, would be aviators built "pedal-driven contraptions with flapping wings, based on a mistaken understanding of avian flight."

"As the flight begins, all is well. Our would-be airman has been pushed off the edge of the cliff and is pedaling away, and the wings of his craft are flapping like crazy. He's feeling wonderful, ecstatic. He's experiencing the freedom of the air. What he doesn't realize, however, if that this craft is aerodynamically incapable of flight. It simply isn't in compliance with the laws that make flight possible - but he would laugh if you told him this. He's never heard of such laws, knows nothing about them. He would point at those flapping wings and say, 'See? Just like a bird!' Nevertheless, whatever he thinks, he's not in flight. He's an unsupported object falling toward the center of the earth...in free fall.

Fortunately - or, rather, unfortunately for our airman, he chose a very high cliff to launch his craft from. His disillusionment is a long way off in time and space...There he is in free fall, experiencing the exhilaration of what he takes to be flight...However, looking down into the valley has brought something else to his attention. He doesn't seem to be maintaining his altitude. In fact, the earth seems to be rising up toward him. Well, he's not very worried about that. After all, his flight has been a complete success up to now, and there's no reason why it shouldn't go on being a success. He just has to pedal a little harder, that's all."

As the extremes of wealth and poverty continue to grow at home and abroad, we point to our contraption's flapping wings, grin madly and pedal away.

The Time supplement tells readers that Russia's growing millionaire class has "[forgotten] about stealth wealth. The Russia luxury consumer wants to flaunt economic status." Of course they do. As the globe's upper 5% becomes increasingly burdened by a concentration of wealth, they will begin to in-fight, one-upping one another in ostentatious displays. The rest of us will suffer for it; governments will be bought and sold and human rights will be tread upon. So long as western culture continues to celebrate the individual over community, the economic pilots can keep pointing at their flapping wings...at least until we all slam into the valley floor.

Today, however, there seem to be more intrepid, deluded airmen than ever before. Priya Tanna, editor of Indian Vogue proudly relates the news: "At a very micro level, I think every Indian woman who is now financially independent is realizing the joys of guilt-free consumption. We are kind of moving from a 'we' culture to a 'me' culture." Oy, vey!

Why, then, am I a "death watch cheerleader"? Because no other species has acted this irresponsibly and survived. We are pushing the limits of natural law. I don't know if the poisonous labors of our hubris can be mended, but each of us, as citizens and moral animals, needs to make some significant, individual choices that will spill over, one hopes, into a renewed sense of community. For artists, these choices must affect how they eke out a living, and what sort of creative dialogue they are willing to participate in.

Again, I'm hoping to engender some sort of discussion about these ideas. I don't have any solutions jotted down.

Photo credit: unattributed picture of Damien Hirst's "For The Love of God"

Winkleman: "God or Me"

Well, once again I'm trumpeting a post over at Edward Winkleman. This one is personal and pertinent. The comments are rewarding, as well.

"God or Me: One of Us Might Have To Go"

Linkage

I don't have time to write much today, but I thought I would provide a few links, all of which merit a looksee. In case you're a reader from a particular camp, though, I've broken these down into three categories:

For the artsy-fartsy readers:

Read the latest Art Fag City post, a review of/reaction to last week's The Believer Event at P.S.1. I disagree with some of AFC's ideas - most vehemently with the notion that "there has never been a time where civilizations wanted to be reminded of their mortality" - but there is a lot of good grist for the mill in the post.

Also, check out Winkleman's post on purity in photography. The subject explodes in several directions, all of interest, in the Comments section. This is yet one more example of a Winkleman post turning into a enjoyable, insightful forum. Good stuff.

For the science mavens:

I highly recommend this post at Vitriolic Monkey. In it, Devo proposes a novel way to integrate Intelligent Design into our high school biology curriculum. His solution is sure to produce a why-didn't-I-think-of-that moment in any self-respecting science nerd.

And for the conservationists and environmentalists:

I encourage readers interested in debating the morality and ethics of hunting to visit Sphere. Tom Andersen writes about the hunting of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in Darien, Connecticut. He summarizes the correlative relationship between suburban sprawl and increasing deer populations, the connection of wealth and private landownership, and the often wide gap between sustainable practice and the average hunter's approach. All of this is a few short paragraphs!