Archive for the ‘art world’ tag
Notes of a schvitzer…
Shower now? I suppose so.
Boom, it’s New York Summer – with the New York dust and pollen on the attack. Grace Jones is telling me she just feels contempt when I cry. So part of me is transported all the way back to the early eighties before I could afford air conditioning, and drank quarts of Ballantine Ale on ruins of the Christopher Street Pier. Now the weather is making think of saying good bye to my hair, and the decongestants are giving me the slightest of headaches.
It’s remarkable how this past few weeks have meant so many contacts with people from different parts of my life. Shows what happens when you go out and look at art. Thursday night I went down to LaMama La Galleria to see a group show organized by VisualAIDS, which includes work by some great people including David Cannon Dashiell, who was one of the first people in San Francisco to support my work, and was a remarkable, complex queer artist. For the third time in a week the vibe was low key, familial and interesting, without a lot of the empty grasping that seems to pervade so many shows I’ve seen lately in more “mainstream” venues.
June is supposed to be the month where the main events of the art season are over, timed to coincide with the spring auctions. What I’m seeing is that this year things are just getting interesting.
Tags: art world, friends, heat, summerRelated posts
Introducing the rantlet…
Listening to Grace singing “Bullshit”, if singing is really the right word for it. Doesn’t matter: I still love her. There’s a whole degree of “I’m bat-shit crazy, now and for eternity” in her whole career that I just have to admire.
I’m suffering from the inverse of the usual web rhetoric inflation impulse; every time I think to comment on something I pull back from really letting rip, stopped by {1}the prospect of having to reason out an entire argument in the slender minutes I’ve given over to writing and {2}an unwillingness to to contribute to the cartoon violence of online utterance, where every emotion must be at the highest pitch in order to be heard, resulting in much heat but little light.
But I can’t tamp down always, so here are a few sanity preserving rantlets: utterly unreasonable, barely considered argument flavored bits.
1.I’m sick of transparency, shading and gradients as the dominant style in user interface design. I want my computer screen to be plain and flat and beautiful like a Paul Rand page. Stop making everything look like cough drops you geeks.
2. It was turning to Satan that doomed Haiti, Pat Robertson? Really??? I’m mocking god right now, when do I get my earthquake? Art Clokey just died. Was god mad at him too? Geology is not Theology.
3.Obama has been proceeding with the Dem party playbook vis-a-vis queer people: make nice sounds during the campaign, once in office, hire people with little fanfare, and publicly distance yourself from any legislative or executive action. Treat em like crap a bit to show you’re a centerist. Explain that the time isn’t right for plainspoken advocacy. Delay until the second term and then forget about it. It’s not surprising to me, but it is tiring in it’s banality. I believe he’s a smart guy, but he’s pulled some dick moves.
4.Big time NYC art dealer Jeffrey Deitch has been appointed director of LAMoCA. Is this a good or bad thing? Should art dealers be Museum Directors? People point to his “good taste”. He’s a nice guy, I’ve always gotten along with him, and he owns an early piece of mine. But this is a lazy hire: his “taste” is irrelevant, since Directors don’t directly decide what hangs in Museums, curators and accessions committees do. Directors basically manage the Board of Trustees and beg other rich folks for money. Not so very different from what art dealers do. So it’s not such a big stretch, but I call it lazy because it’s one more surrender of cultural life and infrastructure to market success. It’s like electing Bloomberg mayor. It reinforcement of the idea that museums should be trophy halls for big game collectors. Sure they can be that, but why not try to think of them as something else? People worry about his conflict of interest issues, which is laughable in the context of overwhelming market reverence through out most of the museum world. Here’s one of MoCA’s biggest problems: they can’t figure out why any one should go there. And Deitch won’t be able to fix that with business savvy. It’s a class issue.
OK, that last was a bit long for a rantlet. BUT AT LEAST IT’S OFF MY CHEST. (whoops, must remember to turn on my caps lock earlier next time)
Tags: anger, art world, computer, daily photo, design, obama, politics, rantletRelated posts
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, readingRelated posts
In response…
A friend wrote me a letter and after thinking about it for a while I decided that I wanted to respond to it here. He consented graciously to me reprinting it:
hi Nayland, I hope you’re enjoying your travels. Can you answer me this? How do I keep the faith when everyone tells me my work is great and yet I can’t land a NY gallery? I know it’s the worst time in history, but it’s been years..(and my Boston gallery just closed) I met with my buddy J the other day and told her that my Armory experience left me thinking that the “art” of art these days lies in the facade that hides that fact that all art is a spectacle. The armory show just felt like a wave of junk for rich people and that all the art lost the importance of effecting cultural change or critically examining it. There just didn’t seem to be any impact, or discussion, or reflection.. I’m really losing it.
Take care,
O
O-
I’ve read this over a few times now trying to come up with an answer for you. Here’s the best I can do:
There are two different things going on here in what your asking. First you ask about not having a New York Gallery. And then you’re asking about art’s ability to effect change. Both of them are factors in “keeping the faith” as you put it. First I urge you to separate them.
Galleries are retail shops, plain and simple. They are stores and artists should treat them as such. So everyone tells you they like your band, why don’t you have a record deal? There could be a million specific reasons why but they boil down to this: No shopkeeper in New York has thought that they could make a buck selling your work. That’s all that it means. It doesn’t mean that there will never be a shopkeeper who thinks differently. It doesn’t mean that the previous ones have been right in their assessment. The idea that having representation in New York “means” something about your level of achievement as an artist is smoke and mirrors. Your achievements in your work should be the things that are evident to you when you look at what you’ve done. Ultimately it’s the only barometer that matters, because you are the person who spends the most time with the work, who lives the experience of making it.
If you get to experience being in the midst of the moment of creation, of exceeding what you thought was possible for yourself, you’ve already won. That is what we should be in the game for. That’s what’s really at stake in the life of an artist. Being able to get up and do that when ever we feel like it. It’s a thing all humans sense as being valuable, but very few have the courage to pursue for themselves. Because people sense that it’s important, and because we live in a market society, galleries take the form that they do. We sell the results of that communion to each other. But all of that market activity is secondary, like buying the plaster image of a saint to remind you of what a saintly life should be. Your real job as an artist is to live that life. I’ve had an inordinate amount of “success” in my life, and I wish I could tell you it had something to do with talent or smarts, but when I look at it it’s been pretty much random. I know smarter, more talented artists who haven’t done nearly as well.
So for the second part of your question: Your sense about art fairs is exactly right. It’s expensive to do those fairs, which are just like the CES fair or the E3 fair. When Sony buys a booth at the electronics fairs, they do so to showcase the stuff they think is going to sell the most. It’s an investment. Same for art fairs. People are laying out a lot of money and they need to make it back somewhere down the line. In previous years it was possible for galleries to delay their return: they could afford to put up a big installation because they were demonstrating that they had lots of money to throw around, that they didn’t need to make it back right away. They could afford to soft sell. They were selling people on the idea of associating themselves with someone who had so much money they didn’t have to think about money. These days it’s different. The mask is off. Everyone is worried about making their rent and their payroll for THIS MONTH, so they can’t afford to rent that square footage at the fair and not see some immediate return.
Where does that leave social activism? Or any engaged difficult idea you might care to name? Back where it usually is, in the hands of people who make and care about such things. Ask yourself: how often in history have shops and trade shows been the forums for social action and change? I don’t think we should expect them to be. We live in a time where the viability of brick and mortar retail is increasingly in question. Who knows what the next model for the distribution of art is going to look like? I do know this: the history of market success and the history of interesting ideas in art diverge more often than they connect. I grew up seeing an art world where that success immediately made your ideas suspect. You grew up seeing one where market failure meant a failure of idea as well. Each situation was fleeting and in the larger sense meaningless.
I think that the way art makes change is one consciousness at a time. It forces us to stop our usual patterns of processing information sometimes through causing us confusion, sometimes through pointing us to pleasure. It is through arguing for the inherent worth of a life lived with confusion or pleasure that art makes us re-think the world we live in. Because in those moments we are revealed to ourselves and others without pretense. We want those moments but we fear them as well, so we tame them, we cloak them in formulas and focus our attention on less threatening things like income levels and social squabbles. So much for change. Our real job is to be the guardians and cultivators of those moments where ever we find them.
Finally, how do we keep going? We do so by making a life that supports the work. And part of that is asking what the work needs. What it needs in terms of material support, as well as emotional support. Do you really need recognition, or response? It’s been my experience that response gets you a lot further. And the responses that have meant the most have been those from the people closest to me. Recognition is a lot easier for me to worry about however, because as I stated above, it’s random and utterly out of my control. So I don’t have to ask myself the inconvenient questions about what I’ve done to cultivate it. I’m safe in my powerlessness. With response I have to be willing to open myself up to people that I’m going to see again, and I’m going to have to give something in return. I’ll have obligations and I’ll be vulnerable to real people not abstractions. As a number of my friends can tell you, that’s not a space I navigate with much grace. It’s where I fuck up a lot. Which tells me that it’s the thing I need to do more of, it’s a thing that the work requires, just like fucking up drawing hands means that I need to draw more hands. That’s the gift that creativity gives us: the imperfections of our creations tells us what we need to work on next. Which is another way of saying which imperfect parts of ourselves we need to work on next.
The adventure of doing that is the only real reason I can think of to keep going.
Tags: art world, daily photo, making things, notes on practice, practicing artRelated posts
Click and come see me…
Steps had to be taken to protect the art in Union Square from the rain.
Some folks on my frlist have been migrating to dreamscape or dreamworks or whatever it is. Which is all well and good, they seem like a nice company and all, but I’m the owner of a permanent membership here at LJ (silly of me, I know) so it will be a while before I totally jump ship.
As a precaution during the “LJ is dying” scare of the early part of this year, I did start mirroring this blog over on WordPress.com, (of course if you’re reading this on WordPress you already know all this) and in the subsequent months I’ve started to learn more about how to use that site, so much so that I’m using it to resurrect some of the functions of my supposed official site, naylandblake.net. The formatting is boring, but I am happy about getting some more content up there
All of this is to say that I’ve updated a couple of the pages on that site: the upcoming exhibitions page, the upcoming lectures page, and the selected works page. Because I have stuff coming up y’all. In particular, you Seattle folks might want to check out the group show at Lawrimore.
Closer to home, on Monday May 11, I’m one of the honorees at this benefit. Please, if you have the cash to do it, come and dance and bowl!
Tags: art world, blogging, daily photo, new york in black and white, wordpressRelated posts
At the Armory Art Fair…
Still question month, yo…
From itsolivia “I have finally been thinking about grad school. How does one start feeling confident before applying? Is confidence the key sign to finally get off my butt and applying? Help me, Mr. Blake.”
The way to feel confident about applying is the same way to feel confident about doing anything: lather, rinse, repeat. Don’t just apply to one place – and don’t freak out at the prospect of not getting your first choice the first time out. If you’re dead set on one place, be willing to contemplate re-applying if it doesn’t work out right away. Many of the students I talk to look at waiting a year like it’s the end of the world, when in fact they could put that time to good use marshalling their financial resources and preparing themselves for what is a serious commitment. On the other hand, I would also say be willing to be surprised by a program that you may not have thought about right away: they may have better access to what you really need than the first place that comes to mind.
Confidence isn’t the key sign – and you shouldn’t wait for it in order to apply: it’s like waiting to be “inspired” to work. You get more work done by making work into a regular part of your day – so researching schools, making plans and writing essays should become a regular part of your day, and then when the deadlines come, it’s not a nail biter. Don’t worry about what the place is “looking for” either. Just try to give an accurate picture of who you are and what you’re like. Finally, have fun with it. I think it’s groovy that you’re thinking about it.
It’s still March!
You can still ask!
Related posts
A return to answering…
siokaos asks; “for an artist with no entrepreneurial spirit, how does one penetrate and deploy their material, when normal channels such as “art school” seems more of a career steps posing as a legitimate educational experience?”
A weighty question, if I parse it correctly. As I read it you are asking “How do I get people to know about what I do in a way that is different from the normal way?” Is that it? And then there’s the comment about “art school” which I’ll get to secondarily.
I think every artist has to separate the pleasures and perils of making things from the the life that those things have after they are made. And then they have to ask the question “What do I want to have happen to these things that I’ve made?” In answering that question, you begin ton to think about what kind of a career you want. There is no one prescribed path. The sharing of cultural ideas happens in a lot of different forums. For me is the willingness to engage in that moment fully that give it it’s importance, not the locale where it takes place. These days when I want to be inspired visually, I go to antique stores or look at the layered streets of New York, much more than I go to museums. So, when you say penetrate and deploy, you have to ask what kind of people you want to have that exchange with and then look at where they go to get their cultural fix. What are the forums you respect? What are the locations and communities you value? Deciding that can then give you ideas about how to become active in those forums.
Art schools prepare people to function in one limited kind of cultural community, just as music conservatories do. In that sense, “career step” and “legitimate educational experience” are one and the same: people are being trained for a profession and trained in the rituals and expectations of that profession as much as they are being trained in artistic technique. So if that is the community you want to reach, you are going to have a hard time if you don’t at least acquaint yourself with the norms of the locals. But there are plenty of other art communities that do not rest upon those norms and in fact reject them.
So to sum up: How you alert people to what you do depends on who you are talking about, and what your desire is for the interaction after you’ve alerted them.
March remains question month. I’ll do my best to answer any thing you might ask, and you can ask it here
Tags: art school, art world, making art, notes on practice, Question MonthRelated posts
Just before…
Things getting underway at the dinner for the opening of Jasper Johns’ drawing show at my gallery.
Tags: art world, daily photo, Jasper JohnsRelated posts
Five more questions – courtesy of Thor
What, if anything, have you learned from your students, and/or the process of teaching?
Teaching continually confronts me with the dilemmas in my own process. When I talk to my students about their difficulties, their stopping places and moments of fear, I am able to see the similarities in my own situation. So from listening to the ways my students talk about what they do I have become a better reader of work. I’ve also learned not to spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not they like me. When I first started teaching I wanted to be every student’s best pal. That’s as bad as your parents trying to hang around with you all the time. Now I have better boundries around it all and it makes it easier for ervery one to relax.
What don’t you like about the art world? Are there frauds? Name names.
1. I don’t like the generalization “art world” as it lumps together many people who don’t neccisarily belong together : artists, certain writers, dealers, collectors, museum people, some notion of a public. We don’t talk about the “baseball world”. That being said, for purposes of answering the question I’ll talk about the group of people around the New York art market.
2. I don’t like assumed concensus, people who come to opinions without thinking about them. One of the galling things about being in the market is the unspoken assumption that everyone is on the same side.
3. I don’t like openings, which are really about people demonstrating to you that they showed up rather than anyone looking at the work in any real way. I go to very few, and when I have them I try to find some way to subvert them by doing a performance or something similar.
4. I don’t like the proliferation of prizes, art fairs and Biennials, for the same reason I dislike circuit parties.
5. I dislike the cult of youth that pervades the art world these days. It messes up my students, and it’s fair to say that art making is one of the things that you get better at the longer you do it. Do we want every field to have the emotional pitch of women’s gymnastics?
As for frauds; first let me say that I think it’s heartening that folks still worry about this. It means that on a deep level people want something important from art, given the way we have come to accept fraud in so many other fields as a matter of course. But in this case I think it’s hard to define fraud. On the part of artists I would say that there are failures, failures of nerve, imagination, growth, feeling. When someone tries to present these as not being faliures then I suppose you have a situation of fraud. For example, I think that for many years now David Salle has been treading water. His most recent show at Gagosian in New York was accompanied by an article in the New York Times that was full of praise for the development of the work. This I suppose was fradulent, in that it was intellectually dishonest. But when you try to talk about this as legal fraud you run up against a problem: who has been injured? The people who bought the pictures? The people who came to look at them? Also let me say that even if we could talk about fraud here the biggest art fraud in history could have gotten away with less in a life time than a VP at Enron could make off with in a week.
Here’s a clearer case: Thomas Kinkaide – the self proclaimed painter of light. Here is someone who has set up a huge business that traffics in asserted, simplified emotionality. It seems to me to be at its heart cynical and manipulitive of its audience on a level that Jeff Koons could only pretend to.
“me and my work”
“the types of work I enjoy”
“in terms of work”
“making work and seeing others make work”
Why not:
“me and my art”
“the types of art I enjoy”
“in terms of art”
“making art and seeing others make art”
Why this choice of words? Is this simply the vernacular from the “art world” that you’ve absorbed? What would Freud have to say about this? Discuss.
Two reasons: when I use “art” people tend to think only of my visual stuff, whereas I think of everything I do; sculpting, writing, teaching, lecturing, DJing, publishing, etc. as all being part of the same thing :”making work”. Secondly, “my art” just sounds too naff. I make things that make sense to me and then hopefully they will be useful for other folks as well. To the extent that they are then they become art.
Name some things that you personally “find really useful in a cultural sense.”
The plays of Richard Foreman – the books of Kathy Acker, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Delaney and Charles Dickens – the films of John Waters, Jack Smith and Terry Gilliam – the Music of Sun Ra, Patty Smith and the Velvet Underground – notebooks of Hokousai – the tattoos of Don Ed Hardy – the sock money – as a sculptor I wish I had invented it, and I still aspire to come up with something like it: a sculpture that just about anyone can make, that is ubiquitous and anonymous.
Who put the ram in the ramalamadingdong?
You know you did, dude.
Tags: art world, london, making things, meme, openings, practicing art, teaching, thor