The Absent Polis of Contemporary Art
I was privileged to attend The Renaissance Weekend in Charleston just about a year ago (an event created in the '90s by some friends of the Clintons). The four-day marathon is structured as a series of panel discussions and round-robin meetings. The organizers put me on all of the arts panels, as expected. Most of us went to sessions on topics about which we knew very little when we were not speakers.
But I noticed that almost no one came to the various arts panels (1100 people were there), and began to conclude that the arts may have become simply irrelevant to most Americans. Listening to those of us art folks with a measure of detachment, I began to wonder what factors may have caused this nadir of interest (the majority of the subjects were on the visual arts). With a full-blown recession upon us, now may be a good time to assess where things have gone astray. That art is or should be a financial investment is the first idea that must go. Most art is not, and buying art for investment purposes equates it with any other equivalent commodity. It implies that it will be sold rather than nourished, thought about and enjoyed. The only reason to buy art remains because you want to live with it: it is an investment in yourself. We have certainly learned not to emulate the hedge fund manager (now semi-defunct). Buying art as status object rarely works, and it is time to retire the idea.
Contemporary art, which may be divided into varied subsets, lies at the root of the problem. The introduction of so-called 'new media' as a category unto itself (video, installation, performance, computer-esque anything) has been responsible for significant losses of audiences and membership in contemporary arts centers. These losses affect galleries and collecting per se. The preference for a 'product' (painting, drawing, print, sculpture, photograph etc.) remains strong in spite of ongoing attacks from lingering post-modernists holed up in American university art departments. The insistence on art as some representation of power relations, and/or its deconstruction of the tropes of race, gender, and class has become tiresome and tired, and irrelevant to many arts-interested people. Contemporary art's relationship to political correctness is near total; Americans are sick of politically correct stuff, and thus many stop going to art shows. Who can blame them? These ideologies come with a patronizing, hipper-than-thou, 'in' group mentality, itself a form of the elitism it purports to critique. Most art under the 'new media' rubric tends to be more about theory or technology per se than about art as defined pre-computer.
I define contemporary art as art made by any living artist, but once the words 'cutting-edge' are introduced, contemporary art begins to divide into subsets. The cutting-edge hipsters, then, presume that all other artwork (with the possible exception of photography, which crosses boundaries technologically and allows for an unusually high level of sophistry) as retrograde and merely decorative. No less a modern master than Henri Matisse declared one of art's primary purposes to be decoration, a word or idea which brings the highest praise in Japanese art. Postmodernism can play the cultural relativism game every which way, including an aesthetic bait-and-switch. If we combine new media and postmodernism, we end up right back at Duchamp's chess table, more intellectual poseur than accomplished artist (the urinal as found object was original, once).
The other extreme of the contemporary art scene became the decorator-driven blandscape: the sunset, the mountains, the ocean with the oranges, reds, purples, pinks in the sky: the romantic, if trite, definition of what became artwork in the suburbs. The word 'spiritual' was tagged onto this art as well. Many of us have called these artists 'the suburban flower ladies.' Artist studio buildings are full of them; the studios are often paid for by a working spouse. To the extent that the exurban McMansion homeowner wanted art at all, the over-reliance on the 'advice' of a decorator (Jack Boulton, 1970+ director of the Contemporary Art Center) trapped art into "that which matches the sofa". Contemporary art thus drifted to these two extremes. How all the differing subsets in contemporary art will approach the new classical realism in painting has yet to be determined. It is probable that the 'cutting edge' art folks will link it with the decorative, to noone's gain.
The art market fragmented, as well. There are too many places to look for it, and too many ways to buy it. The Pendleton Building in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati was converted into artists' studios in the early '90s, and the marketing idea of The Final Friday commenced, to great success. Studios are open every last Friday of the month, adding a social dimension to art-looking and the fusion of eroticism long associated with the physicality of the artist's studio. Other buildings in part of Greater Cincinnati copied the idea - First Friday in Covington, Last Thursday in O'Bryonville, etc. By regularly exhibiting and selling out of their studios, artists created new direct sales opportunities, but at the direct cost to dealers who, if they carry artwork by regional artists, must compete with the artists they represent. The sales advantage moved to the artist, as the gallery itself becomes obsolete. Non-profit art venues exude an aura of moral superiority; somehow the art they exhibit is perceived to be 'purer', as if living off grants is 'cleaner' than living off sales.
Toss in artists' and gallery websites, sales via the internet, including eBay, the plethora of auction houses, big and small, and last, the 'charity hook' - the benefit party for a charity which includes saleable artwork - and you have too many venues in which to purchase artwork. The conventional gallery may arguably have lost the most. Lately, area estates and neighborhood buildings are recycled into community and/or arts centers. Most of these varied spaces are not near enough to each other geographically, so that the idea of going to numerous openings on the same night has become less possible. When, for example, the Weston Art Gallery downtown, known for the excellence of its shows, sponsors 'open studio' evenings, it, too, competes with galleries if indirectly. An overdiffused marketplace is one where noone wins.
Then, there is that bugaboo marketing with the general adoption - nay, adoration of - corporate culture and the concurrent emphasis on marketing a product. Artists have found themselves (as have dealers) writing business plans, mission statements, and marketing plans. The artist is rarely a good networker, for better or worse. Business cards, brochures and pamphlets, websites, press releases (to what little remains of the area art press) all take time and effort away from the creative process of making the art. The obsession with youth culture and celebrity created the success of those artists with a particularly keen use of marketing a persona. Think Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Michael Scott. Their genius is in marketing, not art-making, and so they play at creating art-as-critique-of-consumer-culture as part of their marketing plan (thus Hirst is called "the bad boy of the world" by those in the know).
The artist as marketer (huckster?) probably enrages artists more than any other single phenomenon, as many are certain their work is superior to those mentioned and usually is, but they lack the old 'cult of personality' that the others created. Charm replaces talent, image dominates substance. Artists become entertainers, as art itself becomes entertainment. The blur of fine art and popular culture has veered too far into popular culture, with artists as celebrities.
During the past decade as well, we faced the peculiar phenomenon of artists trying to create 'spiritual' work to an entirely materialist culture, making a lot of art insufficiently noisy for the addled, attention deficit consumer. Artists also need to move away from identity politics as the culture may have already done so.
The Cincinnati Art Museum will exhibit paintings by area artist Jimmy Baker soon, and The Taft Museum will show paintings and drawings by Cincinnatian Emil Robinson. The Contemporary Arts Center has nodded to a few area artists as well (all postmodernists), but the large lot of talented artists here feel alienated and unwelcome at our major arts institutions. Regular discourse and dialogue between artists and institutions is nonexistent. The Contemporary Arts Center represents the worst of all these trends.
So the problem is not just the economy. The larger problem has been a money-driven culture buying expensive cars and electronic toys in lieu of art. Corporate culture is, indeed, product driven, and a work of art is not a product like toothpaste where the goal is to sell as many units of the same product as possible. Corporate marketing has also divvied us up into so many distinct demographic niches that there is no sense of a larger whole from which the subsets emerge.
The internal battles over what art is, and whether, for example, the cutting-edge crowd will (probably) refuse to accept this reemergence of classical realism as legitimate contemporary art, may be less the issue than the reformulation of society as a Polis, not a series of marketing niches. When the liberal arts replace the MBA, the arts will make a lively comeback. In the meantime, the frustration will increase, as the informed population, the core audience, finds other things to do and places to go. Once a place loses its audience, it is nearly impossible to get it back.
