How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Mon May 20, 2013 11:58 pm

Project Willow wrote:It all must be done I suppose.



The cursive script lends such a nice feel to the presentation. Neatness counts!
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Tue May 21, 2013 1:33 am

Notice the difference between the videos, the woman is ordered about, high art-like, the man in the following, well you get my drift.



I don't know why I posted these, wish I hadn't. Had been meaning to post the following, if not for the article but its comments.

...............
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-cm-debate-art-market-quality-20130516,0,6394757.story
Debating the art market as the best judge of quality
By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

May 16, 2013, 11:15 a.m.

On May 24 at China's Hong Kong Convention Center an outfit called Intelligence Squared will host a formal debate during the debut of the newest spinoff of the Art Basel franchise of international art fairs. The motion under consideration will be: "The Market Is the Best Judge of Art's Quality."

Honest. That's the topic for debate. I figure the program harbors two, maybe three minutes of chat -- tops.

The panel is a retread of a 2011 program held at London's Saatchi Gallery. (You can watch that one on YouTube.)

But the short retort to the market-based judgment is: Nope. The longer answer is: Bernard Buffet.

You've never heard of him? In the 1950s the savior of the School of Paris rocketed to fame and fortune and became the Next Big Thing -- until he wasn't. Since then plenty of superstar market-darlings were once hot, then not -- and vice versa. Make your own list. The cultural landscape is littered with painters and sculptors seduced, abandoned or just plain ignored by the profit-driven markets, regardless of artistic depth.

Never mind the ordinary vagaries of supply and demand, which transform market prices -- whether for Picasso, pork bellies or Cabbage Patch dolls -- into the distorted reflections of a fun-house mirror. The market is just a shopping mall; it judges what's best for the market -- what sells. Which is fine by me.

A cynic might even wonder why decisions on cultural values would be entrusted to the faceless financial elites responsible for the recent crashing of the economy, throwing millions into turmoil. And then there's the matter of young artists coming out of burgeoning art schools with massive debt, just like their non-artist peers: They need to pay back loans somehow, which creates enormous pressure on their work, which feeds into the market maw, which ... you get the idea.

So the art market is a judge of quality, just like Mom and cousin Fred are, but hardly the best judge.

There's a simpler explanation as to why collectors and dealers aren't the ones deciding who, finally, are the important artists. (Nor, for that matter, do curators, critics or the general public.) It's because artists do. Artists decide who is worth paying attention to among their cohorts.

They do it by picking up indirectly from modern culture's unconscious -- or flat-out stealing from the best. What we call quality is largely a factor of the breadth, depth and longevity of excitement artists harbor for other artists' work. Art comes from art. It doesn't come from Goldman Sachs.

Scheduled to speak in favor of the debate's market motion at the new Hong Kong art fair are Amy Cappellazzo of Christie's auction house and longtime art investment advisor and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Speaking against the market as arbiter of the best are Matthew Collings and Rirkrit Tiravanija -- both artists.

Pick your vested interests. Debate over.


Comments


MaryAnnaPomonis at 3:04 PM May 18, 2013
Well it should be an interesting debate because all around the table are insiders who directly benefit from their social and market connections. The main issue I have is the idea of quality itself. I have an uncomfortable relationship with the idea that social organizations determine quality. There are so many class struggles going on constantly that determine official notions of quality. Really what the debate is about is the narrative didactic that stands next to art and qualifies is cost and existence. That didactic includes things like the school the artist went to and their friendships and familial connections. Very few artists today emerge full faced outside of these systems. Artists themselves invest heavily in art schools and we (artists) qualify that investment by supporting the alumni of our schools. I don't think artists determine quality or the market, I think the only valid qualifier is time and a kind of social forgetting that allows the objects to emerge as beings in an of themselves that either resonate with us or not.

Traditionalist at 6:25 AM May 18, 2013
I agree with your assessment that the market is only useful as a measure of marketability, and that marketability--i.e. popularity--is not a measure of quality. Otherwise, Disneyland and sporting events would have to be considered higher quality than opera, etc.
I disagree with you, however, that artists are necessarily the best judges. I think the best judges of quality are informed connoisseurs, which today are few and far between. The hegemony of unilluminating deconstructivist art "scholarship" over the past 40 years has greatly impoverished the supply of people capable of enjoying works of art from the standpoint of quality, unfortunately.
"Trendiness" is never a measure of quality, for works of art, or for scholarship.

poomakmak at 8:16 PM May 16, 2013
"Art comes from art" you say and "Artists decide who is worth paying attention to among their cohorts" To the first point, would you say, e.g. "money comes from money," "the law comes from law," "mommy comes from mommy," etc? To the second statement, how do artists decide? And can their decisions ever matter by comparison to the enormous social protection rackets that are part and parcel of art--the reviewing processes, the institutional collecting processes, the use of discourse to substantiate--and delegitimize--art? Is the career of, say, Tracy Emins anything but a useful media function--to "open" art to new audiences ("nasty girls"), including art for the excluded, the previously unrecognized, etc? Your lack of social understanding is breathtaking.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Thu May 23, 2013 12:08 am

If one must get caught up in any one side of the "game", might as well have some fun.

The Bermuda Triangle of Art

by Carolina Miranda on May 21, 2013

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A general view of Wiliam Powhida’s new exhibition at the Charlie James Gallery in LA. (via cjamesgallery.com)

LOS ANGELES — When Marcel Duchamp submitted his signed urinal to a group exhibition in 1917, he certainly couldn’t have predicted that his decontextualized toilet would represent the dawn of an era in which everything and anything could be “art.” Take some mundane object or action, add word salad — et voilà, you have art. Manipulated photographs aren’t simply manipulated photographs. They are “visual statements that are at once documentary and fictional.”

A painter’s brush strokes don’t come together to form a picture, are textures that “function as proof of past operations.” And a piece of taxidermy isn’t just a stuffed animal. It’s “a state of apparent life premised on actual death.” In the Bermuda Triangle of Art, an object is never an object. It’s a physical vessel with which to deliver heaps of impenetrable prose — prose intended to convince some aspiring patron that the mound of detritus before him is pregnant with meaning (in addition to looking great over the couch).

Navigating this universe of intellectual gymnastics and 200,000 square-foot art fairs requires a good deal of studiousness and an excellent bullshit detector — traits that New York artist William Powhida possesses in spades. Powhida has spent his short career (he is only 37) deconstructing the power and money mechanics of the art world in intensely-detailed drawings and paintings that are part political cartoon, part stream-of consciousness rant. In an infamous 2009 collaboration with artist Jade Townsend, he portrayed the habitués of Art Basel Miami Beach in a steamy, stinking Hooverville.

That same year, an illustration he did for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail displayed the uncomfortably chummy connections between some New York galleries and Manhattan’s New Museum (and helped stir up a media shit storm). In 2011, in a solo show at Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, he diagrammed the social and professional links shared by the architects of the financial collapse. Now, in his latest solo show, on view at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, he pulls back the veil on the art-making process and its attendant verbiage.

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The notes for “A (really bad, bad) Neo-Expressionist Painting,” a type of work that is a staple in all commercial art spaces. This piece best channels Powhida’s acid humor: “Friday at 3:30 it was blank. At 5:30 it was on the floor while we drank beers.”

For this exhibit, Powhida enlisted the assistance of other artists and fabricators to produce works that embody the worst art market tropes, such as the shiny object, the cool minimalist tower, and the incredibly bad painting of a skull. Alongside each piece he has added his signature touch: a trompe l’oeil painting of a hand-written note that details the process, budget and reasoning behind each work, with plenty of smart aleck-y remarks stuffed in between.

The following rumination accompanies a single strip of pink neon affixed to the gallery wall:

“Art might value an invention (singular) but the market demands product (plural) and will accept endless minor variations on a single idea. We can pretty much do anything over and over again. This may be why art history is long, but not terribly deep, and why there is SO MUCH FUCKING NEON.”

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In “Some Asset Class (Digital) Paintings – Color Field,” Powhida plays with the thinking and methodology behind so much glossy digital work.

A trio of digitally-produced color-field, we learn, was crafted by running pieces of currency through some fancy filters on Photoshop — literally, money on the wall. A taxidermy of a coyote in a wooden crate draws comparisons to Damien Hirst and Joseph Beuys, and the observation that coyotes are like artists because “they are extremely territorial … and like to fight each other.” The tendency toward unpolished geometric abstraction — which Powhida refers to as “D.I.Y. Informalism” — is represented by three white, silver and pink canvases hammered together in bulky, asymmetrical shapes. The idea: “To play around with some studio junk and stuff from the hardware store to make a few awkward objects without thinking intuitively with feeling!”

http://hyperallergic.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/01-Minimalism.jpg
Eviscerating content-less work: a detail of Powhida’s notes from “A Post Minimalism,” in which he proposes creating a pleasing sculpture out of bar graphs documenting inequity. (click to enlarge)

This may sound like the world’s most overwrought art gag. And, certainly, there is no small irony in critiquing the creative numbness of the art market with pieces that will be sold on that very same market. But Powhida’s artistic spoofs are so spot on, and his critiques so incisive, it’s hard not to get sucked in by the whole exercise. The anonymous minimalist sculpture might as well be the anonymous minimalist sculpture found in countless corporate lobbies. The expressionistic painting of a skull seems destined for a one-night warehouse art party with DJs and Red Bull. It’s like every commercial gallery/art fair/Bushwick basement I’ve ever been to — with the benefit that the accompanying texts couldn’t be more engrossing or hilarious: “You realize people are going to like these,” it reads in the notes for the skull painting. “Fuck.”

Certainly, this taxonomy of clichés overlooks the breakthroughs that artists can and do have. Powhida has chosen to train his laser vision on a part of the art world that is more preoccupied with product than it is with ideas. Yet he hits on an essential truth about a culture that treats art like a financial commodity. Spend an afternoon wandering around the gleaming white-box spaces in Culver City, and you’ll find all of these clichés being served up for five, six, and seven figures. In Powhida’s hands, art world platitudes are mordantly funny. In Culver City, not so much.
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Here comes public art. Let the sarcasm begin.

Postby Allegro » Thu May 23, 2013 11:25 am

First, my offering.
Image

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COLUMN: Here comes public art, let the sarcasm begin
Tucker Mitchell Editor, Florence, South Carolina | Sunday, March 3, 2013 3:00 am

    IN A CAVE SOMEWHERE, WAY BACK WHEN – You can imagine the scene. Og has just finished off a mammoth rib and is fishing around beside the fire for something to do besides eat, sleep and take of bodily needs, when he notes a squishy bit of thick, dense soil – Carolina clay, or maybe Pluffmud, his descendants will one day call it – which he picks up and begins poking and squeezing. Soon he is bored and drifts off to sleep. The clay blob falls out of his limp hand and bounces into the fire.

    The next morning Og awakes to discover that the lump of clay has hardened, the fire preserving the impressions made by his clumsy finger and opposable thumb.

    One thing leads to another, as it always has and always will. Og gathers more clay, pokes and squeezes it in new and interesting ways, and pretty soon there is a life-size statue of a humanoid in front of the cave for the whole clan to see and admire. Og calls it “Nog Log Gogg Og-Hog,” which roughly translates into “Man’s Inhumanity to Man.”

    “That not art, that stupid,” says Agog, a rival who has not yet mastered verbs.

    “Oh, yeah?” said Og.

    “Yeah,” says Agog.

    Clubs are drawn and a debate on the merits of public art ensues.

    This fanciful, but entirely plausible, story is offered as a cautionary tale as Florence heads down the public art highway.

    As part of the new downtown redevelopment project, a public art installation is planned for a key site on Dargan Street. Sources close the foundry – or wherever it is they make public art sculptures these days – report that the Downtown Development Corporation-sponsored piece will be big, in the shape of an undisclosed type of fruit, and might have a “kinetic” aspect. That last is art talk for, “watch out! It has moving parts!”

    Whether this is a good or bad thing is mostly subjective. Final opinions must be reserved until the actual installation, and, if precedent is any guide, maybe even long after it. Some public art, heck some art, grows on you.

    And some grows into you. You know, it gets under your skin.

    Pondering the dawn of public art in Florence reminds me of my days covering various aspects of the public art debate in Charlotte, where a city ordinance (I kid you not) designated that 1 percent of the price of any new public building had to go to a public art project associated with it. The point of this was to herald Charlotte’s arrival as a great city … to make some public artists rich.

    The most famous installation – it was the first big test of the ordinance – involved the new-old Charlotte Coliseum. That’s the one they built out near the airport in the mid-1980s, then tore down a few years ago when they figured it should have been downtown all along.

    Among the finalists for the coliseum’s public art was a green metal sculpture that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the old claymation character “Gumby.” The statue-to-be was quickly dubbed “Gumby” or “The Gumby” and local media jumped on the fun-poking bandwagon. Where is “Pokey?” (Gumby’s four-legged sidekick) they asked. One morning radio duo leapt to fame – you have probably heard of them – by asking if the “Gumby” statue would be anatomically correct, and other pertinent questions.

    Suffice to say that the Gumby was run out of town, replaced in the $300,000 (or so) public art derby by a 200-yard long strip of grass dotted with a half dozen or so giant boxwoods. People would have made fun of this, too, but it just looked like mediocre landscaping and hence, was hard to find.

    The Charlotte landscape is now covered in public art. My favorite is a statue of Queen Charlotte out at the airport that looks like her highness has just caught a large cannonball.

    If you saw it, you’d know what I mean.

    Florence is unlikely to engage in a public art on such a scale, but even with just one example public officials should be ready for an onslaught of sarcastic remarks and artistic parody. It’s possible you could even read some in this column.

    Apprised of this possibility recently, Mayor Stephen J. Wukela didn’t seem too bothered. He is not sure the coming installation will suit his personal tastes, but if it is the byproduct of at least a semi-public process (and it is), and if it does not offend except in an artistic way, then he’ll be fine with it. Let the criticism begin, he said.

    “If people are sitting around in coffee shops arguing about public art, then that’s probably a good thing,” Wukela said. “There are a lot worse things they could be arguing about.”

    Wise sentiment, your honor. But don’t say you weren’t warned.

    Tucker Mitchell is Regional Editor of the Morning News. Contact him at 843-317-7250, or by email at cmitchell@florencenews.com.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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“Art Without Artists?”

Postby Allegro » Sun Oct 06, 2013 2:41 am

For me, this was another difficult read with regard to art, although, vicariously felt; remembering the realm of the music performance standard today belongs to CEOs, not necessarily to concert performers.

Readers will see my highlights, which were added randomly. The more I highlighted, the more I felt them inconsequential to the whole of it.

_________________
Art Without Artists?
e-flux.com, Anton Vidokle

    It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for. Curators also court collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees, entertain corporate executives, and collaborate with the press, politicians, and government bureaucrats; in other words, they act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure of our society.

    A press release for a recent conference on curatorial practice (at which I originally presented this paper) portrayed the figure of the curator as a knowledgeable and transparent agent moving between cultures and disciplines—a cultural producer par excellence. Furthermore, it seemed to suggest that art has become a subgenre of “the Curatorial”:

      The conference “Cultures of the Curatorial” aims at positioning the Curatorial—a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions—within a transdisciplinary and transcultural context and exploring it as a genuine method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge. . . . Between art and science forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics have emerged which can be subsumed under the notion of the “Curatorial”—not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary.

    The necessity of going “beyond the making of exhibitions” should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.

    1. Overreaching

    Curatorial practice is predicated upon the existence of artistic production and has a supporting role in its activity. While artists may well produce art in the absence of curators, if no art is being produced, curators of contemporary art, at least, are out of a job. For this reason, attempts to curatorially “produce” art and artists by the simple expedient of including them in a show often result in little more than a curatorial embarrassment, as in the famous case of Roger Buergel’s inclusion of celebrity chef Ferran Adrià in the last Documenta. While Adrià may indeed be a genius as a chef, his talent does not automatically turn his cooking into a new form of art, and neither did Buergel’s framing of it. As Buergel said shortly before the opening of the show:

      I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has succeeded in generating his own aesthetic which has become something very influential within the international scene. This is what I am interested in and not whether people consider it to be art or not. It is important to say that artistic intelligence doesn’t manifest itself in a particular medium, that art doesn’t have to be identified simply with photography, sculpture and painting etc., or with cooking in general; however, under certain conditions, it can become art.

    All true up to a point, but what is that point? What are these “certain circumstances” that Buergel alludes to, under which cooking can come to be considered art? Part of the reason why the transformation of cooking into art did not take place at Documenta is that Adrià’s cooking was not already anchored in the stream of commodities and careers constituted by the art system; in this regard it is interesting to note in comparison that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks and is still recognized as an artist, though in reality he is only an average cook. The extraordinary aspect of his cooking is not its quality as cooking, but rather its presentation by Tiravanija himself as an artist who cooks. It is important to distinguish between the artistic decision to include an activity within an artwork and the curatorial power to designate something as art or like art through its inclusion in an exhibition.

    Another example of how curatorial power can be distinguished from artistic authorship by its legislative authority over what takes place within the space of art could be seen in the last São Paulo Biennial. Whereas, in a kind of grand authorial gesture meant as a comment on the crisis of biennials, the curators first announced that the entire biennial would be devoid of art, the concept later changed, presumably when this gesture was found to discourage professional visitors from attending. The void became merely partial: only the second floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s biennial building was to remain empty, while the ground floor became a “public square,” “opening itself up as the ágora in the tradition of the Greek polis, a space for meetings, confrontations, frictions.” However, when a group of local graffiti artists decided to intervene and tag the second floor, the curators reacted in a punitive, institutional fashion by having one of them arrested and then testifying against her in court, leading to her being jailed with common criminals for nearly two months and eventually sentenced to four years’ probation.

    This incident again brings to mind the work of Tiravanija, who also encouraged indeterminate, open spaces. At an opening of one of his early exhibitions in New York in the early 1990s, a belligerent visitor picked up some of the raw eggs Tiravanija was intending to cook with, and proceeded to smash them against the gallery’s walls. But in this situation, no one was punished, or even asked to stop and leave. This negative action was allowed to run its course, just as any other activity in the space of Tiravanija’s artwork, and this person eventually stopped and left the gallery.

    Yet another example of such a tendency is the “Curating Degree Zero Archive,” a traveling exhibition of “curatorial research” designed as a kind of artistic installation. Conceived by curators, the exhibition circulates through a network of public art institutions largely run by curators. The issue is not whether curators should have archives or open them to others, or to what degree this is interesting or not; rather, the question concerns whether the people in charge of administering exhibitions of art should be using the spaces and funding available for art to exhibit their own reading lists, references, and sources as a kind of artwork. Even more ludicrous is the fact that the dissolution of the self-contained (autonomous) artwork is cited as a justification for supplanting the work of artists in the museum altogether, as shown on the website of this curatorial project:

      Archives have become an increasingly common practice in the art world since the 1960s. On the one hand, there are archives founded by artists or collectors; on the other, a more recent development, there are those founded by curators, who sought to make their collections of materials accessible and make their selection criteria public. That desire may have arisen from the dissolution of the notion of the self-contained artwork, which has been eclipsed by a contingent art object that makes a new form of cultural memory necessary and always contains a note of protest and a critique of museum practices.

    2. The Job

    Curatorial work is a profession, and people working in the field are not free agents but are rather employed to perform a task on behalf of an institution or a client. It’s a job, both for those affiliated with institutions and for so-called independent curators. With the job come institutional power, a degree of security, and a mandate for a certain range of activity, which may involve a certain sense of institutional authorship, but emphatically, to my mind, does not include artistic claim to the artwork on which this activity is predicated.

    While some artists occasionally do work as curators, it’s important to acknowledge that the relationship between artists and curators is structurally somewhat like the relationship between workforce and management: like the workers, most artists suspect that their “supervisors,” the curators, do not really understand the art, that they are controlling, egocentric, and ignorant, and are mismanaging the (art) factory and mistreating the producers (something like the scene from Godard’s sausage factory in Tout va bien). Yet there is real resentment out there, not very different from the feelings artists harbored towards art critics in the 1960s and ‘70s. Many artists—from extremely established artists to younger practitioners new to the field of artfeel that curatorial power and arrogance are out of control.

    For artists, precarious working conditions have been a reality for most of the history of modern and contemporary art. Artists have never benefitted from the kind of organization that many Fordist factory workers or other unionized laborers managed to achieve, and whose improved wages, hours, and working conditions improved the situation even in many non-unionized fields. Artists, in their capacity as artists, have always worked as independent producers, mostly without stipends, salaries, pensions, unemployment protection, or contracts.

    Naturally there have been exceptions, such as the artists’ union in the USSR. However, it’s enough to read the letters of Rodchenko to realize that the union was more of a problem than a solution: it was an instrument of a totalitarian state, the ideology of which by that time excluded Rodchenko’s type of production. Consequently, he was unable to receive a pension and died in poverty. Meanwhile, at the center of the so-called “free world,” Mondrian also died in poverty in New York. Neither ideological structure provided much security for even the most accomplished artists.

    Before we attribute the rise in popularity or social relevance of curators since the 1990s to larger ideological, geopolitical, or economic shifts such as that from Fordism to Post-Fordism, let’s again consider the institution of art: it seems to me that this increase in social significance came partly from the declining power of art criticism, with curators assuming the agency of the critic in addition to their executive power in the museum. It may be argued that art critics did deserve to be marginalized for having vastly overreached at a certain point in the 1960s, when it seemed more culturally significant for a certain art critic such as Clement Greenberg to write about a work of art than for that work to have been made in the first place. But imagine the frustration of the artist who believes herself to be liberated from the tyranny of the critic only to discover that the situation has changed: rather than two competing powers—the critic and the curator, who could be played against each other—there is now only a single totalizing figure that she cannot bypass!

    Furthermore, are we sure that this curatorial gain does not bring a correspondingly diminished status for the artist? The nightmare scenario for artists is that the supervisors bypass the workers altogether and begin producing art themselves, or automate the process of art production to render artists redundant. For owners of the culture factorywhether state or privately ownedit would be rather convenient if artists, who are a historically disobedient group, could be replaced with a disciplined contingent trained to obey authority, and production costs slashed through the elimination of a large part of the labor force. In such a scenario the economic gain would be enormous, entailing the replacement of a group that holds the rights to their own production with one comprised of salaried employees.

    3. Curator as Producer

    Last year I was invited to speak at a conference in Philadelphia on “curatorial activism.” One of the participants spoke about her salaried directorship of a New York art institution as an activist practice. When I pointed out that people who are paid to go to a demonstration are not activists, but essentially hired bodies, the audience became visibly uncomfortable. But my point was less about money than why it is not enough these days to take on a challenging job, do it well, with real dedication and engagement, and take pride in that, without trying to upgrade its status by presenting it as activism, cultural production, or the production of art.

    In fact, the debate with regard to the boundary between curatorial practice and artistic production is one that curators are engaging in among themselves, as Michelle White makes clear in a recent conversation with fellow curator Nato Thompson:

      I also think that the term cultural producer, aside from the particular conditions of our moment, is a healthier or more honest way to articulate the contemporary role of the curator. It acknowledges the complexity of the collaboration that has to happen when something like an exhibition is organized or a project is carried out, which involves, as you said, a much more complex institutional web of financial as well as physical logistics from the relationship of collectors, patrons, boards of trustees to the possibilities of display space. It is certainly beyond the simple curator/artist dichotomy. But at the same time, in working on site-specific projects or exhibitions with living artists where collaboration is essential to produce meaning, I have found myself questioning the boundaries of my involvement in the aesthetic and conceptual production. So, I wonder, are there risks in assuming this more egalitarian position as producer?

    To respond to this question: yes, there are big risks for artists. As an artist, how do you exactly say no to the curator who invited you to participate in a show, but seems to want to credit herself as a collaborator or co-author, when you risk not being invited the next time? While perhaps politically and socially well-meaning, this type of approach runs the risk of making an unsolicited claim of co-authoring artists’ works commissioned by the curator. I really do not think that many artists feel that collaboration with a curator is essential to produce meaning. To my mind, this type of claim would be an extremely unwelcome and unwarranted intrusion, particularly if one keeps in mind that the figure claiming this share of authorship is not some underpaid art installer or intern researcher, but someone with the power to include, commission, or exclude artworks.

    Similarly, it seems to me that we should also be very careful to avoid assigning any kind of meta-artistic capacity to curatorial practice. While steps taken in this direction have often been made with good intentions, invoking the expansion of a more general category of “cultural practice,” they nevertheless carry with them the danger of lending credibility to something like a potential colonization of artistic practice by academia and a new class of cultural managers. If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist’s capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.

    If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use—rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the “freedom of art.”

    I suspect that it’s not coincidental that the rise of the “independent curator” has taken place alongside a pattern of increasing privatization over the past couple of decades in the cultural field. Curators and institutions of art, whose authority is in part derived from representing public interests and being responsible to the public, are increasingly becoming private agents guided largely by self-interest. For this reason they have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics, while still retaining a certain claim to objectivity in their evaluation of art and in their obligation to public address.

    It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled—and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environmentexhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics—through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth—rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination.

    4. Artist as Curator

    On the other hand, there is quite a history of artists making use of certain aspects of curatorial and organizational work in their practice by assuming the role of curator. At times this has been a response to the inadequacy of existing institutions, their hostility to artists, or their total absence—prompting the creation of many of the artist-run spaces of the 1970s—or as a response to a particular emergency, as with ACT UP and Gran Fury. As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer—a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.

    Likewise, what passed largely unnoticed in Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was Chan’s peculiar positioning of the artist in relation to the work: he did not write the play, direct it, or act in it. The set was essentially a city street. Chan’s artistic involvement consisted largely of spending many months teaching as a volunteer in a local college, building close relationships with local community groups and grassroots organizations—in other words, creating the conditions necessary for the production and reception of the play, while ensuring that part of the money raised for the project would go to local needs other than culture.

    I feel that whereas artists’ engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of art serves to open up the space of art and grant it increased agency, curatorial and institutional attempts to recontextualize their own activities as artistic—or generalize art into a form of cultural production—has the opposite effect: they shrink the space of art and reduce the agency of artists.

    An artist can aspire to a certain sovereignty, which today implies that in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production, its channels of circulation. Sometimes the production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself. This should not be confused with the job curators have and the work they do. As an artist, I would not attempt to propose a solution for curators; they themselves need to come up with ways of thinking and working that do not undercut the sovereignty of artists.

    ×
    © 2010 e-flux and the author
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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An Open Letter to AIGA

Postby Allegro » Fri Oct 25, 2013 9:15 am

An Open Letter to AIGA [American Institute of Graphic Arts]
Status Quo or Transformation? A False Choice
October 23, 2013

    Recently, AIGA sent members a slick brochure titled “Stimulating thinking about design. Giving designers voice.” It described AIGA’s mission and goals, strategies, and opportunities. It also posed a choice between either a “status quo” option or a “transformative” option. Members also received emails describing both options and asking them to “vote” for one.

    Let’s be honest here. “Status quo” versus “transformation” is not a neutral or balanced choice. The words are loaded. In George Lakoff’s terms, the argument is being “framed”—weighted toward one side. Who but a few old-timers would favor the “status quo?” Who doesn’t want transformation, especially where AIGA is concerned? This is nothing more than a false choice.

    But why is AIGA doing this? What’s actually going on here? The answer is simple. Some members of the staff and board want to sell the organization’s headquarters building in New York.

    In 1994, AIGA bought the building for $1.2 million. The organization did this primarily through member donations and fundraising. The money was raised through blood, sweat and tears, and it was a grand moment in the organization’s then 80-year history. The building gave AIGA a presence, a public gallery space, office space for both the AIGA National staff and the New York Chapter staff (who pay rent), space for an archive, a small library, and conference areas.

    Over the years the building proved to be a good investment, and while not perfect, it served the organization well. Every once in a while someone suggested selling the building in order to feel more cash rich, but this suggestion never really gained any traction.

    Until this year. In early 2013, Doug Powell, then National President, started canvassing a small number of former board members to inquire as whether they would support the building’s sale. With proceeds from the sale, AIGA might buy a new building, create an endowment, and fund a variety of activities.

    In the face of reports that AIGA had received an offer of over $20M for the building, talk of a possible sale grew more urgent. Some recognized that the existing space is not perfect, and that proceeds from a possible sale could potentially fund a better, more useable space. Others were less worried about the loss of the building but felt that selling the largest single financial asset of the organization without a sound financial plan in place to best protect the future of AIGA was not in the best interest of its members.

    Queries were made, and opinions shared. A groundswell seemed to grow with former National Presidents, long-term member advocates, AIGA medalists and the organization’s most loyal financial supporters weighing in with questions: “Why do we need to sell now?” “Is the organization in financial distress?” “Where is AIGA going to go?” “Are we going to rent or buy a new space?”

    All of these questions might be answered with a detailed strategic plan. Reassurances were made that one was forthcoming. In July, word came that AIGA’s national board had agreed to put the sale of the building on hold in order to address these questions and make sure there was a sound, strategic plan in place to justify any future sale.

    Well, evidently, no plans were put on hold. In fact, the opposite is true. Instead of a strategic plan, AIGA offers a sad parody of democracy where members are given a choice between a bright “transformative” future (somehow enabled — and only enabled — by the sale of the building) and the dreary world of the “status quo,” where an asset that has been steadily growing in value for 20 years is retained rather than sold off for some quick cash. The promised strategic plan turns out to be no more and no less than the marketing-speak and vague priorities set forth in the brochure calling for the preposterous vote. The fix is in.

    This is baffling and cynical. Didn’t we just agree to pause the sale? Weren’t we going to work together to craft next steps?

    Right now, executive director Richard Grefe and some members of the board of directors are pushing an agenda that puts the entire future of AIGA at risk. A building sale has nothing to do with the direction the AIGA takes. In 1994, members of AIGA got together and bought a building for $1.2 million that is now worth over $20 million. If we did that then, couldn’t we raise the money we need today through member philanthropy for whatever transformational activity we desire tomorrow?

    Over the last few years, AIGA has eliminated all published material, the annual 365 competition, the 50 Books/50 Covers competition, and the GAIN business conference. An archive was established at the Denver Art Museum that now consists of boxes on metal shelves, and no one knows where the money raised for that initiative has gone. There were more exhibitions, publications, symposiums on education, and critical writing published during the time we’ve had the building than at any other time in AIGA’s history. It is only in the last few years that these initiatives have all been summarily eliminated. Now the building in which so many of them were generated is in peril. In the proposed “transformational” scenario there is not a single initiative that is dependent on funds that could only be raised by selling the building. Any funding promises to local chapters are not clear. We wonder if these will ever come to fruition.

    In short, we believe the proposed choices outlining the future of AIGA are misguided, misinformed and manipulative, and should be regarded skeptically by our fellow members.

    We want you to know what’s going on with your organization. We urge you to reject this false choice. We urge you to vote against “transformation.” And, more than anything else, we urge you to demand that the AIGA board develop a real strategic plan before doing something as drastic and irrevocable as selling AIGA’s building. You can find the AIGA board and their email addresses here.

    Michael Bierut, Past AIGA President and AIGA Medalist
    Hugh Dubberly, Past AIGA Board Member
    Steven Heller, Past AIGA Board Member and AIGA Medalist
    Kit Hinrichs, Past AIGA Board Member and AIGA Medalist
    Debbie Millman, Former AIGA President
    Noreen Morioka, Current AIGA LA President
    Anthony Russell, Past AIGA President
    Paula Scher, Past AIGA Board Member and AIGA Medalist
    Michael Vanderbyl, Former AIGA President and AIGA Medalist
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby MayDay » Fri Oct 25, 2013 10:53 pm

honored to be able to help assemble this little beauty at Art Outside last weekend:

My friends designed this, sent the design off to a mathmetician in New York for exact specs, fabricated it and took it to burning man (burning man provided funds for this :coolshades .
Art Outside shuns all corporate support & thrives on people power! Come join us in 2014! Artists, presenters, vendors, musicians, volunteers: ARTOUTSIDE.ORG

~Burn, Texas, Burn~
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Buy a Munch, Picasso or a handbag

Postby Allegro » Thu Nov 21, 2013 1:54 am

Highlights mine.

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Buy a Munch, Picasso or a handbag at an auction online
It’s not only classic works of fine art, but also handbags, sunglasses, vintage cars and clothing that are now going under the hammer of traditional auction houses online
The Telegraph, by Bridget Galton | 3:51PM BST 30 Sep 2013

    Buying an antique, painting or vintage chair at auction may be the world’s oldest – and quaintest – recycling scheme.

    But there’s nothing quaint or old about the way technology has breathed fresh air into the rarefied atmosphere of dusty auction rooms.

    The eBay generation, comfortable with bidding online for all manner of goods on the basis of just a photo, is taking the logical step of sourcing bigger ticket items from traditional auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Bonhams.

    And the houses have also caught on to the idea that the internet can radically extend their reach to potential buyers.

    Pontus Silfverstolpe, co-founder of Barnebys – an easy-to-search website listing more than 110,000 lots due weekly under the hammer – cites last year’s sale of Edvard Munch’s The Scream for $120 million as a watershed.

    “I think we have completely changed the auction market. Collecting all the items on sale at auction houses into one place and making it easy for anyone to find them has allowed people into what has previously been a pretty closed, exclusive world.

    “Online auctions have opened up a new market and it’s getting easier for anyone, anywhere in the world, to gain access.

    “Ten years ago, the huge problem was everyone wanted to see the item [physically] first, but the reputation has grown; it’s easier to get a condition report and to research an item online and people trust a serious auction house with good experts.

    “Now fine art sales have been revolutionised, with Picassos sold on the internet for millions of pounds.

    “For me it was amazing to see The Scream, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction, listed on Barnebys.”

    The shift towards buying art and antiques online is evident in the figures. According to a report by The European Fine Art Foundation, Sweden (where Barnebys launched in 2011) boosted its share of the €20.9 billion global market from 0.1 per cent to 1 per cent between 2011 and 2012.

    According to Mr Silfverstolpe, it’s not only Picassos but handbags, sunglasses, vintage cars and clothing that are now going under the hammer of traditional auction houses.

    “That’s a huge change from 20 or 30 years ago. Our generation is thinking about sustainability and buys vintage as much as new.”

    The site’s facility for customised searches and personalised email alerts on available items across the world has yielded heartwarming results.

    “A friend in Sweden typed in his family name at Barnebys and found a sculpture of his great-grandfather on sale at an auction house in Denmark and bought it.

    “An English couple had been given a set of glasses for their wedding but over the years some had broken and they had been looking for replacements for 20 years,” says Mr Silfverstolpe.

    “Two days after putting out a search alert on our site they found them at a small auction house in England and bought them.”

    Once you find an item, you bid directly through the auction house or via specialist bidding platforms.

    “I was at a Paris flea market recently with a friend looking for a particular lamp,” adds Mr Silfverstolpe. “He’d spent so much time on it, but I told him: ‘search our site and I bet you will find it’. And he did.”
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Money’s Triumph Over Art

Postby Allegro » Tue Dec 10, 2013 3:38 am

Mr. Perl has in his article directed attentions to the super rich, but I think you’re better served by replacing the super rich with another of Perl’s descriptors: the professional classes—impervious to correction, who characteristically hold first generation money.

Highlights mine. Links in original.

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The Super-Rich Are Ruining Art for the Rest of Us
New Republic, Jed Perl | Dec 4, 2013

    If you can believe all the hand-wringing and soul-searching these days among artists, art critics, and sundry other arts professionals, you’d imagine that nobody is really happy about the $142.4 million paid for a Francis Bacon triptych at Christie’s the other day—or the $58.4 million for a Jeff Koons at the same auction or the $104.5 million for a Warhol at Sotheby’s the following night. Those prices are as repellent as Leonardo DiCaprio’s baronial frat house shenanigans in the coming attractions for Martin Scorsese’s new tale of Gilded Age excess, The Wolf of Wall Street. Among the most revolting sports favored by the super-rich is the devaluation of any reasonable sense of value. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s some of the wealthiest members of society, the people who can’t believe in anything until it’s been monetized, are trashing one of our last hopes for transcendence. They don’t know the difference between avidity and avarice. Why drink an excellent $30 or $50 bottle of wine when you can pour a $500 or $1000 bottle down your throat? Why buy a magnificent $20,000 or $1 million painting when you can spend $50 or $100 million and really impress friends and enemies alike?

    These questions will not go away. And it is a little too easy to blame it all on the super-rich and the various counselors and courtiers who cheer them on at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Of course there’s nothing we can do about what Steven A. Cohen and Peter Brant choose to sell at the auctions or what Roman Abramovich and Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani choose to buy. But the total lack of embarrassment with which everybody involved conducts themselves must at least in part be blamed on an educated public that has become embarrassed about discussing—much less advocating for—anything that suggests a principle or standard of taste. While the professional people who worry about every $10,000 in their 401(k) may shake their heads at the stratospheric auction prices, they get a kick out of them, too—too much of a kick, I tend to think.

    The art world has become a fantasy object for the professional classes—and that’s a troubling turn of events, because art must be experienced concretely, immediately. Since the democratization of culture began in the nineteenth century, a rising middle class has seen in the arts a dazzling enrichment and complication of its own ideas and ideals—of its belief in fairness, seriousness, standards, transcendence. And now, with the middle class in disarray, art is no longer embraced as anything close to an ideal. Art is just another hope to be abandoned, along with the hope that your children might do better than you’ve done. In place of art as an ideal we have art as an idol. (Or art as an educational tool, by way of the numbingly utilitarian logic that if you learn to play Bach you will improve your math skills.) No wonder everybody is following not the art but the sky-high prices at the auction houses—and the parties at Art Basel Miami Beach, where the same dealers and collectors are gathering this week to play more or less the same games.

    Image
    ^ APOCALYPSE NOW | The Christopher Wool painting sold for $26.4 million at Christie’s on November 12.

    The super-rich are never embarrassed. What causes embarrassment in the art world today is the assertion of any value other than the almighty dollar. To argue that an artist whose work sells for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars is superior to an artist whose work sells for millions is to invite condescension if not outright ridicule. The relationship between culture and commerce is frozen, with commerce invariably the winner. It is a sign of the times that John Elderfield, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, has been consulting for the Gagosian Gallery. Whatever happened to the firewall that separated the long-term cultural thinking of the museums from the short-term commercial gains of the galleries? Isn’t anybody troubled by Elderfield’s organizing “Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985,” the show currently at Gagosian, not long after he organized a de Kooning retrospective at MoMA? Isn’t anybody embarrassed by Elderfield’s fulsome (and economically convenient) praise of the late works of an artist who many of the finest minds of his own generation believed had been in a steep artistic decline since 1960, if not a few years earlier? On the question of quality thoughtful people can surely disagree. I would have imagined, however, that the same thoughtful people would be deeply troubled by Elderfield’s willingness to turn MoMA’s prestige into Larry Gagosian’s financial advantage. The sad fact is that Gagosian’s de Kooning catalogue—with its full-cloth binding, tipped-in plates, over-the-top text, and lavish supporting illustrations of work by Rubens, Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian—is engineered to brook no disagreement. The super-rich have no problem with John Elderfield, you can be sure about that. They also have no problem with Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who next summer is dedicating nearly the museum’s entire Madison Avenue building to a Jeff Koons retrospective.

    Considering how ubiquitous Koons’s work has become in recent years, what possible curatorial or scholarly justification can there be for a retrospective? And what reason is there for Elderfield to become a consultant to the Gagosian Gallery? Aren’t the answers very simple? The cash registers are ringing and that’s the only music anybody any longer really hears in the art world. Among the lesser but still considerable prices achieved during auction week was $26.4 million for a painting by the mid-career artist Christopher Wool, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. The painting, Apocalypse Now, is one of Wool’s early word works, this one emblazoned with a line from the Francis Ford Coppola movie: “SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.” Just about the first thing you see in Wool’s Guggenheim retrospective is another word painting, Blue Fool, this one with nothing but the letters “F O O L” emblazoned in blue on a white ground. I like to imagine the fool is the person who paid $26.4 million for Wool’s Apocalypse Now. But of course if you believe that money talks and nobody walks—well, then I’m the fool for regarding Wool’s works as vacuous Dadaist signage. Blue Fool has been borrowed for the Guggenheim retrospective from a private collection. One thing is certain. Its value is climbing even as you read these words. In the art world as it is now, it’s difficult to convince most people that anything matters more than that.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Dec 10, 2013 2:01 pm

John Steppling wrote:[...] Sometimes I think, well, if it’s for sale, it is somehow infected. The fact that commodities reproduce these relations of exploitation can't be denied. The answer isn’t to abandon culture. The answer is to stop paying for it. Every year children of the rich or merely affluent trek to New York to find a career in some form of cultural activity. As curatorial assistants, magazine editorial assistants, or just as artists. They plug into the vast apparatus of cultural reproduction. And they play assigned roles as curators of institutional product.

So when the children of the underclass, in far fewer numbers, look to engage with the societal machine, they do so from another direction. Fewer are chosen. But if chosen even fewer refuse the anointed blessing of the corporate suits. I certainly blame nobody suffering under financial duress. Every one of us accepts money. There is no such thing as blood money. Its a tautology. All money is blood money. We are all caught.

[...]

http://john-steppling.com/cop-stories/
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