MadSilence

The best thing that could happen

04 Mar 2009 4 Comments

by madsilence in Art, art criticism, Art History, Life, Thoughts

Harold Cotter’s recent New York Times article addresses the impact of the economic decline upon the contemporary art world.   The article’s title sums it up best:  The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!

Here’s a synopsis of the author’s key points:

1. The contemporary art world experienced an economic boom over the past 10 years: More art, growing sales, higher demand, exploding prices, more galleries and auctions.
2. American art suffered and was diminished by an art market built upon consumerism, greed and self-interest. The quality of art has declined, a diminishment Cotter attributes to “playing to the market”.
3. The boom is over. There will be less of everything.
4. The boom is over.  The art world can be rebuilt.

It’s depressing to accept that the art world suffers with the same failings that have infected world-wide culture and brought about the recent economic decline:  Greed, gluttony, self-indulgence, and excess.  But why should the art world and its denizens be insulated from global sins?  It’s very much a 20th century conceit that the art world is special, that artists are different from us ordinary folk.

While Cotter addresses the American art world, Alice O’Keeffe, former arts editor for the New Statesman, shares Cotter’s sentiments when speaking of the British art world.  Her verdict on the cultural scene is stark:  “Artists, like the rest of us, have been corrupted by money-worship.”

[T]he arts ha[ve] become the “creative industries”.  Like bankers and stockbrokers, artists [are] expected to prop up the wobbly edifice of consumer capitalism, to generate profit, attract tourists…

The contemporary visual art scene has been the most slavishly money-serving, catering as it has done exclusively to the rich.  As the buyers often know little about art, there has been no rational connection between the quality of the work and its price tag.

My prize for artist of the era goes, I’m afraid, to Damien Hirst: the diamond skull seems more iconic and prescient with each passing day. At the other end of the spectrum, Banksy managed for a while to challenge the art market from the outside, creating works that were accessible to all and, supposedly, unsaleable – but the market got him in the end.

While O’Keeffe and Cotter both agree that the art world faces difficult times, Cotter gives us reason to hope and a blueprint for positive change.  The American chooses to believe that the recent crisis may be the best thing for the art world: as the “recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game.”

What will change, and how can these changes revitalize American art?  Cotter has some ideas.

Art education. Cotter argues for changes in fine arts education:

Art schools can change too. The present goal of studio programs (and of ever more specialized art history programs) seems to be to narrow talent to a sharp point that can push its way aggressively into the competitive arena. But with markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education?

Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very different than it does today.

Art as a profession. Artists may have to change their expectations:

It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

The art industry. Cotter argues for changes in the art industry:

Artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again.”

Art criticism. Of course,

Such changes would require new ways of thinking and writing about art, so critics will need to go back to school, miss a few parties and hit the books and the Internet. Debate about a “crisis in criticism” gets batted around the art world periodically, suggesting nostalgia for old-style traffic-cop tastemakers like Clement Greenberg who invented movements and managed careers. But if there is a crisis, it is not a crisis of power; it’s a crisis of knowledge. Simply put, we don’t know enough, about the past or about any cultures other than our own.

Cotter forecasts “many changes for art and artists in the years ahead.”  Two major  challenges:

• The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture.

• Artists and the art world will struggle with the definition of art, whether “the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art,” or if the artist’s job is not merely to create buyable objects, but to carve out “a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise.”

“Artists — and teachers, and critics — [must] jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace.”

Cotter highlights the role of the artist in resurrecting the art world.  And while artists certainly serve a pivotal role, I believe his prescription ignores an important player:  the viewing public. 

The American public must be educated to understand and value the fine, decorative and performing arts, and to support artists.  And not because the arts have economic value.  The value of art goes beyond economics, touching upon what is means to be human, to live fully, to be creative. 

Tell us what you think:

• Is the contemporary art world sick?
• Have Cotter and O’Keeffe correctly diagnosed the illness?
• Can the cure be found with the artists?  The viewing public?  Society in general?

~MadSilence