contemporary monkey

Art, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t pretend to know boundaries. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t find them if it had night-vision goggles, taped up with sonar-enhanced earplugs, connected to Scoville Chili Pepper Heat Index tongue extensions.  The common law of physics that applies to everything else we know, anything within the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, is just a bothersome, trifling annoyance for art.  Art doesn’t adhere to science, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t bother listening to it.  Or does it?

The other world, Science Inc., seems to play the game nicely.  The unambiguous world of science throws off a division of itself called Theoretical Physics.  Scientists who are Theoretical Physicists are the comedians of their dull, pragmatic, un-humorous industry.  Forget what you hear about popular stage comedians, these wacky revolutionaries are truly our comic geniuses.  They think of bizarre realities, and try to interpret what life would be like inside this unconventional city.  What’s the distance of the British coastline?  Infinite, say theoretical scientist, because the more you magnify the rough edges, the more undiscovered gaps will appear.  How about days with 25 hours instead of the earthbound, rotationally stuck, 24 hours we usually complain about not having enough of.  We could simply ignore the bothersome planetary rotation thing and make up our own arbitrary rules and abide by a new, albeit flaky, order.  We’d get to see fireworks in the middle of the day.

the art of science

Sean Carroll is one such Theoretical Physicist at California Institute of Technology.  What he thinks about, he admits, isn’t science, and some of it isn’t even theory.  It’s just a different direction in which to take the messy business of reality.  His new book, “From Eternity to Here” wonders why it is that we can remember the past, but can’t remember the future.  In space, we can go up or down, left or right, forward and backward, but time is a dimension with a one way street.  The arrow of time, despite what Hollywood tells us, goes only forward.  It never moves toward yesterday.  Even heavies like Newton and Galileo wondered this, and suggested that we could remember the future, if we only knew everything there was to know.  In theory, the events in our half-baked, unhinged blue marble of a planet could be determined because we’d know fully why things happen in the order that they do.  Say you lose your wallet every twelve years.  You’d plan on carrying no money and credit cards in your wallet on the day you were due for a shocker.  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a shocker because you would have been prepared for it.  Oh this damned warping of space-time is so confusing!  Someone get Michael J. Fox on the phone.

But you see what I mean about the art of science.  Science at least gives the sinister “other” a go.  A close example from the Art Camp is Anne Truitt, who creates minimalist sculpture.  To sum up her work in a brutish and not very kind phrase, think of very colourful, tall-as-a-woman, square-ish, wooden posts.  Art Forum claims that photographs don’t do the pieces justice, but as I try not to listen to the pretension of Art Forum, I’ve included one of her pieces here.  Art Forum also warns of danger when categorizing Truitt’s style as Minimalist, because, well, categories are for doormats like the scientists, and not for the gallant artist. They don’t like leaving their safe houses, these artists.  Struggling onward into the wooly world of science, however, is Anne Truitt’s concept of life as a sculpture.  Not a life as a sculptor, but that which sculpting begets - the mysterious 3D spawn of artistic invention.

pillars of the community

One morning, while standing in the front room of her house, probably wondering, as all artists do, just what the hell she was thinking graduating with an art degree, Truitt was focused on passing shadows as the sun continued its formidable and inevitable slipping into sunrise.  To paraphrase Truitt’s quote from Art Forum, it is we people, as sculptures, who stand firm, while the sun continues forward.  In that sense, we disarm time; and while we’re not subject to it, we are illuminated by it.

OK, a neat trick, you’re thinking, and we should applaud the metaphysical breakthrough for art in escaping its earthly white cube, and into the chilling cosmos of scientific law.  Scientifically speaking, of course, what she said is not true, but it lends itself to thoughtful poetry, and certainly useful to Truitt as a devisor of art.  You can imagine that a stationary person waiting patiently for a bus, might notice more of life, and therefore time passing, than someone running for that same bus, falling down, spilling a double latte on themselves, with the stationary person not helping at all by laughing loudly.  By the way, this didn’t really happen to me anytime, ever.

“A Brief History of Curating” is a title recently published in 2008 containing interviews with about a dozen so-called legendary 20th century curators.  Strangely, all were born between 1919 and 1943, making them 65 to 89 years old at time of publishing.  If they’re still alive.  The interviewing happened between 1996 and 2008, but the fact is that nearly all could be considered curators for the mid-20th century.  So a brief history, it isn’t; unless you consider the 1990’s onward a vacant lot of contemporary art curatorship.

brief...and narrow

What struck me about reading the curators’ memoirs, was the anonymity of so many artists.  While a great deal of well-known modern artists were included in these long-ago shows, many more, long-forgotten names were included as well.  I hadn’t heard of 75% of the artists mentioned.  I think this reflects just how splintered the art world is.  In many other aspects of our lives, we can all name a top ten of some industry, or popular culture like music, film, literature, etc.  Visual artists are truly living the Warholian experience by being, at best, famous for a very short time.

Curating a show is by nature a relatively anonymous production anyway.  Only a certain type of person, who might have heard about the show, who lives near the exhibition, and is alive during a one to three month time frame, is going to see it.  Of that very small group, how many people are going to appreciate it or understand it? (Let’s face it, artists aren’t the world’s best communicators.)  What percentage will just say it was complete rubbish.  I realize this isn’t a very optimistic deduction process, and the candid results from this type of analysis would preclude anyone from doing anything ever again.  Still, it seems that curating could do with a little broadening of its distribution.

The best exhibitions are ones that affect the greatest number of people, regardless of the message and sophistication of the audience.  Whether it’s crass, antagonistic, violent, sexy, or even easy, affecting a large number of people will always result in a changed behaviour in the world.  Affecting very few people, won’t.  It’s simple maths, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

One of the museums of Disney

That’s why I think the greatest curator of the 20th century is Walt Disney.  Walt, and his team, not only created their own art, but devised the exhibitions as well: animated films, books, TV shows, Disney World.  Disney even did his own voice-overs.  He was also heavily involved in art education, bequeathing 25% of his fortune to The California Institute of the Arts, which places him amongst heavy spenders like national public galleries and museums.   Disney arguably did more for art in the 20th century than any curator did in fine art.  Even by today’s standards of investment and spending, the Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami, with his KaiKai Kiki LLC company, pale in comparison.

More outrageousness from “Collecting Contemporary” by Adam Lindemann: a little game that galleries enjoy playing that involves some heavy handedness.  In the game of collecting, there’s usually an unwritten rule (although sometimes it’s actually written into a contract): when it comes time to sell a piece, the collector is obliged to give the gallery from which it was bought the first right of re-purchase before throwing it to the dogs at auction.  Galleries don’t like to see their stable of well-stocked artists find more money from auctions than if they just sold the art to another collector.  The fear is that the artist could just eliminate the gallery as an unnecessary middle man, and go straight to the auction house for a higher price.  Seems that the relationship between artist and gallery is this tenuous.  In fact, the British artist Damien Hirst performed this very act in September 2008 by going directly to auction - Sotheby’s - and surpassed the £62 million high estimate.  He’s only one artist (and the first), but the initial crack in the foundation has been scored.

I'm on me own now

The threat to a collector for not working with the gallery is very real.  If the gallery feels slighted, the collector’s name gets passed along to other galleries as someone who doesn’t deserve further sales.  For a limited supply of art, that’s a big thumping for the fawning collector.  Effectively, they’re black-balled, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s also illegal.

The venom of the gallery is understandable, but this is nothing new.  Real businesses operate with “unfaithful” customers all the time.  That’s why brand image is so important…and unique products and services.  Apple Computers know they may be selling to customers that could easily buy a PC - for less money even, but they don’t, because the product and service is deemed valuable than anything Microsoft could create.  The customer never feels a need to be permissive.

Finally, if a collector is obliged to approach the gallery first, doesn’t the gallery then have the responsibility to purchase the piece back if the auction price is lower than the original purchase price?  Why doesn’t it swing both ways?

Having access to artists because you say they’re important is not really a service.  At one point, middlemen do one of two things: they either make themselves a more valuable element in the equation, or they go away.

I’m reading a book called “Collecting Contemporary” at the moment, and it’s a rich source of the goings-on in the art industry.  Interviews with (mostly) collectors and dealers reveal the professional expectations of both, along with advice for new collectors in the contemporary world.  In many respects it’s filled with one-sided justifications of the various players in the market, but I’m finding it makes for great dramatic tension just the same.

After reading a few gallerists and dealers dish out advice for new collectors, I was left wondering if these same individuals are really necessary in the calculation of art appreciation.  If a collector is wealthy enough, and has very little confidence in their own desire for art, the argument could be made that a gallery or dealer would act as a “taste agent”.  Someone at the ready to provide a big dose of confidence.  The assumption, however, assumes that galleries have inside knowledge of what successful art looks like, and who the great artists of tomorrow will be.  If you’re like me, and you talk to your friends, they all say that most contemporary art is rubbish.  Someone in the gallery world is responsible for that large percentage of needless work, so why should galleries be believed?

Anyone who wishes to pursue art, however, can be just as good at it as any gallery, regardless of their art history background, especially given the vast amounts of online resources to any old contemporary monkey  Like you and me.  I reckon the most important trait of a gallery is simply their access to physical property for showing work.  Unless you’re someone with loads of money gone wasting, want to impress your friends at a dinner party in your Chelsea manor, and you really couldn’t be bothered making the whole art selection process,then maybe you need help.  For that reason you should just hire an expensive dealer to create a good collection for you.  Otherwise, just trust your instincts and dive in.