Deadline Hollywood

Deadline Hollywood
Blame Ovitz: When Art Started Imitating Hollywood
by NIKKI FINKE

Rising to the highest ranks of Hollywood professionally and socially is not enough for most entertainment moguls. They realize that to be taken seriously as major players, they have to hold sway in more than just one sphere of influence. The first big pond they almost always navigate is the art world. Unfortunately, their interest does not always spring from a deep and abiding love of fine art, but from their lust for another trapping of power. Many value paintings and sculpture in much the same way they value show biz properties: as a passionless commodity to conquer and control.

So it was with the once-unstoppable Michael Ovitz, who started acquiring art as he began attaining mogul status. Today he is one of the world’s top 200 collectors, along with six other Angelenos who made ARTnews magazine’s 15th-annual list this summer. True, David Geffen’s and Doug Cramer’s collections far surpass Ovitz’s, but his is better than Terry Semel’s and Jake Bloom’s. And that’s not even counting the giant Roy Lichtenstein in the lobby of the I.M. Pei–designed CAA building that Ovitz co-owns with ex-partners Ron Meyer and Bill Haber. (The famed Beverly Hills space, including the painting, will be put up for rent when CAA moves out next summer, more than ten years after Ovitz left the agency.) Ovitz was also the first Angeleno to be named to the coveted board of trustees at New York’s Museum of Modern Art after passing muster with legendary art collector David Rockefeller.

These feats usually take a lifetime to accomplish, or at least a billion-dollar net worth. Yet Ovitz did it in record time with only a hundred million to his name. But how? To date, no one has gone behind his collection to describe what he did to amass it early on. It’s a tale of ambition, greed and ego not only on his part but also on the part of those who did business with him. In the process, Ovitz helped change the art world for the worse by bringing the same ruthless tactics to SoHo and 57th Street that he’d used to rule Hollywood.

This story includes recollections from two dozen interview subjects, one of whom, famed gallery owner Leo Castelli, has since passed away. On Monday, I spoke with Ovitz, who would not go on the record to dispute any of the details contained here. He did indicate he’d forgotten about these and other incidents with some of the art world’s most famous names because they represented merely a few of the many transactions he conducted on a routine basis early on. He dealt with about three dozen art dealers and galleries in both Los Angeles and New York City while amassing his 1,000-plus collection of art and antiquities. He also emphasized that art wasn’t his business, but his hobby, and that one of the reasons he’d sought solace in it was to try to escape the pressure cooker of Hollywood and put himself into a different environment that was antithetical to his agency business. Besides, he pointed out to me, if he’d been such a jerk, would all those people have done business with him?

Probably. Because these were heady days in the art market. Like Hollywood at that time, supply was limited, demand was huge, and the dealers/agents were controlling the stars. To paint the picture with a broad brush, it wasn’t so much the art of the deal as it was the deal of the art. And Ovitz manipulated the two.


Let’s start at the beginning: In his early years as an agent, Ovitz, who came from a tract-home development in the San Fernando Valley, had little knowledge of art. He educated himself by hanging around people who grew up rich. Whatever art his more sophisticated pals indicated was good, Ovitz would try to buy. One friend even started looking for the worst thing in the gallery and then breathlessly declaring, “Now, that’s terrific!” Invariably, Ovitz purchased it.

At first, Ovitz was interested only in contemporary art, because it was the only art he could afford. His first real exposure came from an unlikely source: a former mailroom clerk at the William Morris Agency.

Barry Lowen rose from WMA to become vice president for creative affairs at Aaron Spelling Productions, but he was, as the Los Angeles Times once described him, a key “center of influence” in the art world. He’s best remembered as a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles and the short-lived Entertainment Alliance of the Modern and Contemporary Council, a support group for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (After he died of complications from AIDS in 1985, Lowen left his multimillion-dollar collection to MOCA and named Ovitz as one of his estate’s three executors.) Lowen was a passionate collector: Even when he could only afford the equivalent of lawn furniture, Lowen had paintings that were museum quality. He Sheetrocked over every window in his Hollywood Hills home to have more wall space to hang his art. Lowen happened to be best friends with agent Bill Haber, who introduced him to Ovitz. In Lowen, Ovitz found a valuable contact inside the rarefied and cliquish New York gallery scene, which was all but closed to him then.

At the time, there was an incredible demand for contemporary art, especially by well-known and even up-and-coming painters. Like other art neophytes, Ovitz couldn’t go into a major gallery, see a painting he liked, and then buy it. The vast majority of works were sold right out of artists’ studios long before they ever graced a gallery’s walls. Only the privileged few serious collectors who’d done business for years with a dealer were given a chance to buy the best pieces. Outsiders like Ovitz were left to scour what might come available on the much more expensive secondary market.

It was around this time that Ovitz saw the April 19, 1982, cover of New York magazine, picturing an exotic brunette beauty who was tagged “The New Queen of the Art Scene.” Mary Boone was credited with reinvigorating the SoHo gallery scene by hyping the reputations and prices of several young artists, like Julian Schnabel, amid a media frenzy the likes of which hadn’t been seen then or since. Ovitz made up his mind to meet Boone. He had the perfect go-between: Lowen, who introduced Ovitz to Boone during an exhibition of David Salle’s work at her gallery later that year. “I wanted to meet you because you’re like me,” Boone recalled Ovitz saying to her.

And they were alike in so many ways. Born in middle-class Erie, Pennsylvania, Boone had changed the way people in her field repped artists as Ovitz did with agenting. Boone forged a new entity in the art world: the star dealer. The year she connected with Ovitz, she was well on her way to becoming a legend. At that first meeting, Ovitz kept gushing about his enthusiasm for art, and especially for Salle’s work, proclaiming, “I always liked him.” But Ovitz had only California artists in his collection. “People you’ve never heard of,” Boone recalled.

She quickly recognized that Ovitz was yet another nouveau riche guy who’d made it big and now wanted the art to prove it. But Boone did sit up and take notice when Ovitz pledged to her that he “really wanted to be a great collector.” Because that meant, potentially, big money for her artists. Soon, Ovitz began flaunting his new relationship with Boone. Within weeks of the New York magazine article, Ovitz and his wife attended a glamorous dinner party in Boone’s honor held at the Bel Air mansion of Doug Cramer, a Boone client and executive producer of Dynasty and Love Boat. Around CAA, to his close associates and even clients, Ovitz boasted about how smart Boone was and what taste she had. Ovitz would call her nearly every day and send her cases of wine and Elsa Peretti jewelry from Tiffany & Co.

But that first year of working together was difficult for both art dealer and client. The reason was Ovitz’s overwhelming and annoying paranoia. While trying to draw the parallel that he and she were in the same business, Ovitz cautioned her repeatedly, “Don’t hustle a hustler.” It got to a point where Ovitz would openly challenge Boone’s authority on art, saying, “Well, I don’t believe you,” or “What kind of scam are you trying to put over on me?” whenever she urged him to have faith in an artist he hadn’t heard of. He even began complaining to his friends that he’d been “suckered” by Boone into wildly overpaying for several pieces of art, including a couple of Schnabels. He didn’t share Boone’s faith that Schnabel would become a superstar.

Finally, Boone laid it out for Ovitz: professing that he “really, really” wanted to have a great collection and wanted to buy art from her wasn’t enough. He’d have to trust her.

“Mike is the kind of person who goes to the doctor because he’s got a disease and then tells the doctor what the diagnosis is,” explained Boone. “I had three degrees in art history, I did this for 20 years, and I do it 60 to 80 hours a week. It’s all I do. If I say this is a masterpiece, and I don’t say it often, people usually believe me.

“But he was always challenging.”

Why Ovitz couldn’t rely on her word alone was understandable given his history as an agent. He had guided CAA to make its reputation not on nurturing unrecognized talent, but on stealing already established superstars from other agencies. Ovitz not only wanted, he needed someone else’s stamp of approval first.

Boone also had trouble tolerating Ovitz’s way of expecting to be put ahead of all her other collectors. At first, Ovitz refused to buy from any Boone gallery show unless he had first choice of all the artist’s work to be exhibited. That was a near impossibility, since it could be three years or more between when an artist finished a work and when it was shown; the usual practice was to sell each painting as soon as the last brushstroke was dry in order to keep the artist’s energy and, more important, the cash flowing.

But Ovitz insisted that Boone store all the artist’s work and sell nothing until the start of the show, so he could pick the best of the lot. Not only was his demand unspeakably arrogant, it also completely ignored any long-standing commitments Boone may have had with her regular customers of a decade or more. To draw a comparison to the movie business, it would have been as if a studio asked an agent not to sell a writer’s scripts for three years, storing up four or five in the meantime, so the studio could pick the best one and not have to risk losing out on that writer’s next blockbuster. Of course, Ovitz would have expressed outrage, and so did Boone.

But Ovitz always wanted, and expected, special treatment. Out of loyalty to her regular customers, and also fear of losing her artists, Boone refused to accede to Ovitz’s demand on this score — even when Ovitz suggested that she lie to her other clients about the practice. Instead, Boone gave Ovitz what she gave other good clients — right of first refusal.

When Eric Fischl’s Master Bedroom came up for sale, Boone, who’d advised Ovitz early on that his collection needed a Fischl, recommended that he buy the new painting at the bargain price of $25,000. She explained that it was a truly great piece of art, one even she wanted to keep herself, and that Fischl was rapidly becoming a hot commodity. Yet Ovitz was undecided, mostly because the painting’s style and subject were radical departures from what Fischl had been doing two years earlier. Ovitz didn’t trust Boone’s judgment that this new direction for the artist was an exciting one. So he passed.

The painting ended up being sold to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Ovitz kicked himself for not having bought it. Now it had the museum’s stamp of approval, not just Boone’s unofficial praise. In 1984, just two years later, Boone had another Fischl show. This time, Ovitz came prepared to buy.

But Fischl was now a darling of the art world, and only one of his paintings hadn’t yet sold. And that one, Vanity, had a reserve on it by the Tate Gallery in London. Ovitz, however, decided he had to have that painting. He nagged Boone to let him buy it, placing phone calls to her every day for the next two weeks. But Boone wasn’t listening. After all, she already had 50 too many collectors who all wanted the Fischl just as much as Ovitz, maybe even more. Ovitz was so desperate that he was prepared to openly grovel. In a letter sent via Federal Express to Boone and dated May 23, 1985, Ovitz repeated the word please 60 times. The Fischl soon found its way into Ovitz’s collection, not the Tate’s, thanks to Boone’s machinations. She expected him to be ecstatic.

Instead, he tried to renegotiate. “And that’s $25,000, right?” he asked.

Boone was shocked. Ovitz knew the price of the painting was $45,000, and a very conservative price it was, because Fischl on the secondary market was already fetching $500,000. (One reason was that Fischl only produced three or four paintings a year.) Ovitz could turn around and sell Vanity for three or four times its price. A huge fight ensued, and Boone told him not to buy the painting. Finally, Ovitz forked over the full $45,000, but only after considerable foot-dragging. And in a move that was both insulting and demeaning, he took four months to make payment — sending her two separate checks for $22,500. In the strangest move of all, he didn’t take immediate delivery of the painting. Instead, he asked Boone to store it at the gallery because he didn’t want his children to see the nude portrait. Boone’s gallery wound up holding Vanity for a full year. Even more embarrassing, every time Fischl himself visited during that time, he’d see his painting lying there unclaimed.

“Mike Ovitz doesn’t want his painting yet?” Fischl complained over and over.

Finally, in 1986, Fischl had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum to rave reviews. Vanity, credited to “Michael and Judy Ovitz,” was one of the paintings prominently featured. Suddenly, the painting’s nudity was no longer an issue, and Ovitz wanted the work sent immediately to his house. (Two years later, during an art lecture held at Ovitz’s Brentwood Park home, the CAA chieftain told the assembled group of collectors that he had acquired Vanity directly from Fischl before the artist had ever joined Boone’s gallery. Of course, it was common knowledge that Fischl had joined Boone’s gallery in 1982, and Vanity wasn’t even painted until 1984.)


Another artist Ovitz was eager to collect was Anselm Kiefer, one of the most influential German neo-expressionists. But that meant elbowing aside already-seasoned collectors. Boone had snagged a big Kiefer show for her gallery a few years earlier; now in the spring of 1983, she discovered that coming up for sale was a magnificent Kiefer — Deutsch, done in 1978, a time when the artist was producing little. It had been bought from her by the then-head of the Cologne Museum in Germany and since shown at many world exhibitions. The collector offered it to Boone to resell on the secondary market. Boone called Ovitz first. It was an extraordinary gesture, but it was also a litmus test of their ongoing relationship. The price was steep — $150,000, a sum that Kiefer at the time had never commanded. Ovitz’s reaction was to hem and haw.

“Well,” he gulped, “I’ll be in Chicago in a day. Call me then.”

The clock was ticking for Boone, who had received the painting on consignment. One day stretched into two, and then three. A week went by and still Boone was unable to get Ovitz to make a decision. Every time she’d talk to him, he would say, “I don’t know. Let me think about it.” Finally, she could wait no longer and she tracked him down in a hotel in London. When she rang Ovitz’s room number, she was surprised when Ovitz client Bill Murray answered the phone. The actor started doing shtick.

“Don’t you understand? Mike is married,” Boone remembered Murray telling her. “He doesn’t want to have your phone calls all the time.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Boone replied, outraged. “This isn’t me chasing Mike Ovitz. This is about him making a decision about a goddamn painting!”

Murray called out to Ovitz, “Mike, you’d better get on the phone now.” Immediately, Ovitz picked up. Boone launched into an angry diatribe. “Listen, your business is full of homecoming queens from Omaha, Nebraska, that want to be movie stars. Well, my business is full of people that made a couple of dollars and want to be great collectors. When you want to be serious, you call me.”

With that, Boone hung up the phone.

Ovitz did not buy the Kiefer.

(Ironically, it came on the secondary market again in 1988, and, once more, Boone had control of its sale. She sold it to Angeleno Eli Broad. The price of the painting? One and a half million dollars — 10 times what Ovitz was asked to pay for it just five years earlier. The Kiefer became one of the highlights of Broad’s collection.)


After that phone call to London, the relationship between Boone and Ovitz chilled. Still, 18 months after Boone had hung up on him, Ovitz called her one day and asked contritely, “Can I talk to you?” Ovitz explained his hesitancy in buying the Kiefer and apologized. He acknowledged that he still had a lot to learn about the art world.

What he didn’t say was that he was learning it from Boone’s rival gallery owner, Arne Glimcher.

It was inevitable that the two men would link up. Ovitz and Glimcher shared the same striving social ambitions; both had reinvented themselves from nobodies into men of wealth and seeming sophistication. Like Ovitz, Glimcher came from a middle-class background. Born into a Midwestern Jewish family, Glimcher grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, began studying art, then borrowed $2,500 from his brother and opened a small Boston gallery called Pace, where he showed local artists. Eventually he moved to New York and was introduced into the heady New York art world. Soon Glimcher was buying upthe estates of Mark Rothko, Picasso and others at his elegant 57th Street Pace gallery.

It wasn’t long before, Glimcher and Boone were locked in a death match, especially after Schnabel met Glimcher at a Picasso exhibit, then jumped from downtown Boone to uptown Pace. At the time, defections of artists between galleries still had certain ground rules, which is why the old-school Castelli — for whom loyalty was everything — slammed down the phone on Schnabel upon hearing the news. It was around this time that Ovitz discovered Glimcher, thanks to Ovitz confidant and literary agent Mort Janklow, who made the introduction. Glimcher was not only Janklow’s art dealer but also a close friend, and Pace was conveniently located across the street from Janklow’s office.

Eager to replace Boone, Ovitz glommed on to Glimcher. And for good reason: Ovitz wanted special treatment, and this time he got it. He had offered that deal to famed dealer Larry Gagosian, who’d rejected it. He had offered that deal to Boone, who’d rejected it. He had offered that deal to Castelli, who’d rejected it. “I’d like to have a better relationship with you,” Castelli recalled Ovitz saying again and again.

“‘Well, you know what I have,’” Castelli said he’d replied. “‘You have to just keep in touch with me. Otherwise, I can’t constantly think of you.’ And then he disappeared.”

The deal, according to Castelli, was this: Ovitz tried to buy his art at cost, minus any dealer’s commission.

“He wanted to pay as little as possible, period,” Castelli told me. “No one was as bad as him. Now, some are hagglers. They want a 10 percent discount, no matter what, and if it’s possible to give to them, one does. If not, not. But generally speaking, they are not as bad as Ovitz. That’s just his nature.” (Ovitz insisted to me that paying commissions, or not paying commissions, was the responsibility of the artist, not the buyer.)

Unlike Castelli, who merely sold to Hollywood moguls, Glimcher dreamed of becoming a Hollywood player himself. In 1982, director Robert Benton gave him a cameo role as a bidder at an art auction in Still of the Night. According to Benton, Glimcher was so good that all of his footage made it into the movie. Then Ovitz pulled strings to get Glimcher an associate producer credit on Legal Eagles,the 1986 CAA package about the art world. Glimcher consulted with director Ivan Reitman (who became a Pace buyer), staged the art-happening scene, selected artwork for the sets and provided information about how the art business operated.

Soon, Ovitz was buying almost all of his art from Glimcher. Shortly after, Boone lured away the hugely respected artist Brice Marden from Pace, apparently in retaliation for Glimcher stealing Schnabel. The act stunned New York’s art community. The following year, Glimcher took away abstract painter Malcolm Morley from Boone in an almost gothic tale full of charges and counter-charges, including grave-robbing, slander, lawsuits and just plain gossip.

And in the middle of it all was Mike Ovitz.

By 1986, Morley was a major talent helped along by his long-time dealer, Xavier Fourcade. Fourcade had guided Morley to success by the start of the 1980s when the artist was 50. And Fourcade had lent Morley $500,000 to remodel the Methodist church on Bellport, Long Island, where Morley did most of his painting.

Still, Morley wanted to leave. His lawyer initially contacted several galleries, including Knoedler, Castelli, Robert Miller, Pace and Boone. In fact, the gallery that Morley most wanted to be with was Castelli’s, but the éminence grise steered Morley to Boone, who already had a long relationship with Morley. By February 1986, it came down to a choice between Boone and Glimcher. Boone offered Morley an incredible contract, which Morley signed with no fanfare in April 1986. The artist took an immediate million-dollar advance so that he could repay the $500,000 he had borrowed from Fourcade. But by the time Morley got his money, Fourcade had AIDS. Morley pledged he wouldn’t leave the dealer right then. So instead of making the contract public in September, as they had originally agreed, Boone, Morley and Morley’s lawyer decided to wait until after Fourcade’s death. That November, Pace announced it was organizing a show of prints for Morley. The artist flew to Los Angeles to make prints at Gemini G.E.L., the prestigious printmaker that Leo Castelli himself used. Staying at a friend’s home, Morley spent three months in Los Angeles mixing and mingling with the art world here. That’s when Ovitz made his move.

The first Boone learned of it was when producer Doug Cramer organized a lunch in Santa Monica at Michael’s Restaurant in Morley’s honor. Midway through, Morley took a phone call and then returned to his seat of honor. Then Morley took another call. And another. Three times in all. And each time, the phone call was from Ovitz. Cramer telephoned his pal Boone and told her that “something weird” was going on. Immediately, Boone became nervous. She grabbed the next plane to Los Angeles and arranged to meet with Morley. That’s when the artist began besieging her with questions. “I hear you’re going bankrupt,” he told her. “I hear Eric Fischl and David Salle are leaving your gallery. I hear you’re going to retire to the country and have a baby. I hear you cheat your artists.”

Boone was shocked. At first, Morley wouldn’t tell Boone who was spreading the rumors. When she pressed, he stammered, “Mike Ovitz is saying it.”

Boone asked Leo Castelli to intercede on her behalf. “I thought that probably Malcolm would be better off with Mary,” Castelli recalled during our interview. “Arne’s is a bigger gallery with lots of artists. He can’t take as good care, as Mary does, of artists. So that was my judgment. I spoke to Malcolm. He said, ‘Well, I’ll consider it.’?” (Morley later told Vanity Fair he was surprised to get the call from Castelli. “It was like God spoke! He said, ‘Stay with Mary. You can pop over the road anytime. We’ll have coffee...’”)

In February 1987, Fourcade died. The Morley-Boone contract was supposed to be announced. But Morley was still in Los Angeles, where Ovitz continued on an almost daily basis to lobby him, planting seeds of doubt about Boone while praising Glimcher. “Malcolm kept telling everyone that Michael was pushing and representing Arne and telling him that’s where he should go,” recalled Doug Cramer. According to a story in the New York Post, Ovitz told Morley that Boone was “going nowhere fast, that she was about to lose Eric Fischl and David Salle, that she was a pathological liar who had to pay her lunchmates like Philip Johnson to break bread with her.”

Boone couldn’t take it anymore. “Listen, Malcolm,” she told him, “I don’t really want an artist in my gallery that does not want to be there.” She and Morley agreed to rip up their contract. Immediately Morley joined Glimcher’s Pace Gallery.

Briefly, Boone considered suing Ovitz and Glimcher for contract interference. Catching wind of this, Glimcher tried sending Boone a conciliatory letter, dated April 7, 1987, claiming, “It is important to me that you realize that none of this was directed at you by me in any way. You were, unfortunately, the unwitting legatee of the negative aspects of these long negotiations. Currently, the art world seems to revolve around gossip.”

He never mentioned Ovitz. Neither did Boone’s reply, dated 10 days later. “It is true that gossip and rumors are all too prevalent in the art world, however they are not present here. The reality of the events as relayed to me from sources whom I believe we would both find reliable and from collectors normally associated with your gallery is that you clearly maliciously slandered my reputation with information and stories you knew to be lies.” Glimcher did not respond.

Soon, the news that a Hollywood agent was interfering in the art world hit the headlines: “Money Changes Everything,” “The Art Boom and the Disease of Acquisition.” In September 1987, Vanity Fair published an article, “The Art of Musical Chairs,” that soft-pedaled Ovitz’s unsavory role in the Boone-Glimcher-Morley brouhaha. The article even had Ovitz claiming it was Morley who’d first brought up the rumors, and that Ovitz had knocked them down.

Exactly how close Glimcher and Ovitz had become was soon clear to Edith Newhall, who, as an associate editor at New York magazine, began reporting a lengthy profile of Arne Glimcher in 1988. After she wrote Glimcher a letter asking for an interview, the magazine suddenly received a phone call from Ovitz. The agent had a brief conversation with Newhall’s editor, Peter Herbst, saying he was calling on Glimcher’s behalf to find out what kind of article Newhall was writing.

On September 12, 1988, in an article headlined “Hollywood Casts Shadow on Art Scene,” the New York Post’s Page Six reported that “any art dealer who doesn’t know who Michael Ovitz is better find out. It looks like the king of Hollywood dealmakers wants to tread on New York’s art turf,” noting that CAA was considering adding painters to its client roster: “The scariest thought for New York’s gallery owners could be that Ovitz may teach painters a new word: agent.” The article maintained that Ovitz had been “growing ever cozier” with Glimcher, and may even have become Glimcher’s partner.

Indeed, dealers commonly believed that Glimcher was giving Ovitz deep discounts — perhaps even selling him art at cost and without commission. Castelli, too, heard rumors that Ovitz had a “special deal” with Pace. In article after article, Glimcher insisted that everyone paid him a commission. And while researching her New York magazine article, Edith Newhall could not verify the charges. “I think I spoke to enough people who would have told me off the record that these things were true if they’d heard them,” Newhall explained. “And no one did. Afterward, when the article came out, no one wrote to me saying that I was wrong.” But when Malcolm Morley held his first Pace show the following year, Ovitz got the pick of the artist’s work. In fact, the painting was so big that Ovitz had to extend his dining room wall by eight inches. (Glimcher didn’t return calls for comment about this story.)

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Ovitz’s backing of Glimcher was no secret. In 1988, represented by Ovitz, Glimcher got executive producer credit on two big Hollywood movies, Gorillas in the Mist and The Good Mother. Glimcher was constantly dropping Ovitz’s name into every conversation. By 1989, Glimcher felt sufficiently schooled in moviemaking to jump from producer to director. That year, the hot property in Hollywood was Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and CAA controlled it. Ovitz delivered the book to Glimcher. (When the film came out in 1992, The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby said Glimcher at times didn’t even “seem to know where to put the camera.”)

By 1989, Ovitz secured a star for himself in the art cosmos when he finally made the cut for Art&Antiques’ annual list of America’s top 100 collectors. Noting that Ovitz was “tight-lipped” about his collection, the magazine declared him “one of the most active collectors of blue-chip contemporary paintings,” and publicized his relationship with “close chum” Glimcher. Included in his collection, the editors said, were Picasso, Stella, Kiefer, Terry Winters, Fischl, “and lots of West Coast African art,” which also happened to be one of Glimcher’s passions. The following year, Ovitz was listed with his photograph and an interview.

“I’m sure my helping Glimcher in the film area didn’t hurt me in getting art,” Ovitz later acknowledged.

Ovitz put an addition atop his Brentwood Park mansion to serve as an art gallery. Built onto the second story, it was a secluded room, painted pure white, with a raised ceiling and enclosed in a glass dome with electronic louvers. The art gallery became a regular attraction for dining guests and Ovitz would act like a professor leading a group of tourists through the Louvre.



With the 1989 opening of CAA’s new I.M. Pei–designed headquarters, Ovitz now had not just one, but two grand showplaces for his art. He painstakingly mapped out which artwork would grace the CAA atrium lobby. Glimcher had the idea to hire Roy Lichtenstein to paint the giant mural, but instead of going to Leo Castelli, Lichtenstein’s longtime dealer, Ovitz went around him. “He tried to go straight to Lichtenstein and make the deal with him,” Castelli said. “He didn’t succeed in my case.”

Ovitz’s next move was almost as outrageous. He decided that the price for the CAA mural should be based on size, and, since his canvas was only half as high as Lichtenstein’s Equitable Life Insurance Building mural in NYC, he should only have to pay half as much. Explained Castelli: “I had to get the help of Arne Glimcher for him to see that I couldn’t do that.” Even so, Castelli said, Ovitz paid a bargain price of $1 million for the mural, based on Oskar Schlemmer’s 1932 Bauhaus Stairway. “But money is not always the main factor. Roy was pleased having it there,” Castelli noted.

In fact, Castelli himself was disappointed with the mural’s ultimate placement. In the Equitable building, there was plenty of room for the public to view Lichtenstein’s mural from afar. Ovitz had pledged the same viewpoint for the mural at CAA. Instead, people who came into the lobby were placed just a few feet from the Lichtenstein, so they had no perspective on the mural. It was smack in their face. Castelli said it was not what Ovitz had promised.

Ovitz acknowledged to me that except for the Litchenstein, Castelli wouldn’t do business with him.

Ovitz also decided the lobby needed an original sculpture by Joel Shapiro, a celebrated minimalist artist whom Ovitz had learned was also his second cousin through their mothers. Ovitz called Shapiro’s representative, Paula Cooper, who ran one of the most respected galleries in SoHo. A gentle, soft-spoken woman, Cooper had little to do with Hollywood. And even less to do with Hollywood collectors. She didn’t know who Ovitz was, nor did she care. But the blood relationship between collector and artist interested both Ovitz and Cooper. Eventually, Ovitz came into Cooper’s gallery in New York, and she in turn saw him on a trip to Los Angeles. “He was extremely kind,” she recalled, “and put a car at my disposal one day. I went to see his collection.”

Soon Ovitz bought something small of Shapiro’s, as did CAA partner Ron Meyer. Ovitz even took Cooper out to lunch one day and explained that they should build a better relationship because, he said, “we do the same thing,” she recalled. Ovitz wanted to place a Shapiro prominently in CAA’s lobby. And that’s when the trouble started. “There wasn’t a problem for quite a few years,” recalled Cooper. “And then a problem developed, and his behavior was absolutely extraordinary. I was so shocked.”

Ovitz wanted to commission Shapiro but at cost. He wanted to pay nothing to Cooper as Shapiro’s dealer, and also refused to allow Shapiro to make an artist’s piece of the work. Under normal circumstances, cast bronzes are done in editions, so that the artist can retain at least one. But Ovitz wanted a unique piece, which Cooper felt was ridiculous considering the low price he wanted to pay.

As he had with Castelli, Ovitz tried to circumvent Cooper and deal directly with Shapiro, on the grounds that they were “family.” Shapiro was eager to do the sculpture but told Ovitz a commission would have to be paid to Cooper. Ovitz, according to Cooper, became furious. Ovitz was on the telephone to her and, in several conversations, “bullying, screaming, hollering,” she recalled. “He behaved like a child.” Cooper was amazed. “The idea that someone felt they were so powerful that they could threaten me... He had nothing to do with my life. What could he do?” she wondered. In the end, Shapiro did do the sculpture and he kept a cast of it. But Cooper was out of luck. She received a fax from Ovitz’s attorney informing her that in their view the commission was satisfied.

“We didn’t get a commission,” she said. “We got nothing.”

But just for whom Ovitz was trying to save money wasn’t clear. In fact, exactly which pieces belonged to the agency and which to the building that Ovitz still co-owns became muddied in many minds. Several agents would hear Ovitz describe the same piece as his personally and then, days later, as belonging to the agency. As Ovitz’s art buying became an obsession, it became anobject of awe and even ridicule at the agency. Every time agents made a million-dollar deal with a client, they’d say, “I just bought another Lichtenstein for Mike’s dining room,” or, “I just bought Mike another Schnabel.”

By 1990, fulfilling the NY Post’s worst fears, the agent did indeed begin representing the artists themselves. The New York art world had become as bewitched by Hollywood as the rest of the nation. Jasper Johns, John Baldessari and James Rosenquist turned up regularly at Hollywood-heavy parties with stars like Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese. Eventually, even Schnabel made a movie about the life of art star Jean-Michel Basquiat.

That year Glimcher was so busy with his film work that he needed someone to run Pace for him so he could devote himself full-time to the movie business. The dealer wanted an expert who could lend a scholarly patina to the gallery. Ovitz had the perfect candidate: Richard Koshalek, the world-class art historian and scholar who headed MOCA and whose hiring was considered a coup for the entire city. Ovitz began secretly wooing Koshalek for the job of running Pace. According to Koshalek, no terms were ever discussed, but Ovitz was said to be offering a deal at Pace that would pay the museum head $300,000 a year, plus such perks as an apartment in New York, a car and driver and a liberal expense account. Koshalek passed and instead signed a new five-year deal with MOCA. (Glimcher ended up stealing Paula Cooper’s gallery head Doug Baxter, who took Shapiro with him to Pace.)

Even without the completed deal, Ovitz’s wooing of Koshalek seemed to pay off when the MOCA chief delivered a much-coveted recommendation of Ovitz to the Museum of Modern Art’s prestigious board in New York. With the backing of Koshalek and others, Ovitz was invited to serve on a MoMA side board as one of Rockefeller’s special Chairman’s Council members, composed of about two-dozen other influential businessmen.

In May 1991, Ovitz personally hosted a major fund-raiser at CAA for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s preview of new Richard Artschwager artwork. The event was perfectly timed so that mention of it, and a photograph, could be included in a Los Angeles Times Calendar cover story headlined “The Art of Hollywood’s Other Deals.” In it, Ovitz and his wife, Judy, were pictured standing stiffly with Koshalek and Artschwager beneath the CAA lobby’s Lichtenstein mural. Another photograph of Ovitz and Koshalek was printed in MOCA’s in-house newsletter. But in that same edition, Ovitz and his wife were listed as surprisingly stingy benefactors of MOCA’s exhibitions and programs.

By 1992, Ovitz was finally elected to MoMA’s board of trustees, the only Californian on the panel. He had achieved the highest recognition in the contemporary art world. But the truth was MoMA did not bring in Ovitz because of his invaluable art expertise. Attendance at MoMA’s all-important fund-raisers and film programming had been steadily dwindling. The museum needed Ovitz’s Hollywood movies and stars to draw crowds.

As his first delivery, Ovitz gave MoMA the premiere of Barry Levinson’s Christmas release, Toys. The museum made money. But the movie was such a disaster that many MoMA partiers walked out of the theater in the middle of the screening.

It was inevitable that, eventually, Ovitz’s art collection would impact his CAA business. All the time, Ovitz would huddle in his home with stars and directors he wanted to sign, but not before showing off his art to the likes of Tim Burton and Tom Hanks.

Just how far would Ovitz let art rule his life or his agency?

The answer came when Ovitz talked one of his signature clients, Sean Connery, into starring in the 1995 movie Just Cause, directed by Glimcher. The shoot was troubled from the beginning and got even worse when Connery saw the final scenes and pitched a fit. He demanded that the ending be redone. Glimcher refused. Things reached such an impasse that Connery threatened not to do any pre-release publicity for the movie. Studio boss Terry Semel called Ovitz and read him the riot act: “It is very important that you support Sean because he believes that all you care about is your fucking art dealer.”

Connery prevailed. As the press materials were being readied and the media junket was about to kick off, the movie went back into the editing room for weeks of furious recutting. “This caused an extraordinary breach between me and Mike,” Connery confided soon after. “I have done something that is not in keeping with who I am. I have kept my mouth shut. I have not said a word to any member of the press. I have behaved myself. If you knew me better, you would know just how hard that is.”

Ovitz almost lost a big client — all for the sake of his art.

A Digital Manifesto

"Let us abandon reason like a horrible mine. Let us throw ourselves into the pit of the unknown, not because we are desperate; but to simply enrich the bottomless reservoirs of the absurd."
Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti...A Futurist Manifesto, circa 1910.


The sleek and speedy machine of "Fine Arts" was demolished during a head-on collision with the insurmountably jaded wall of "Post-Modernism". No one, it seems, has much interest in even hauling off the wreckage. "Good enough", I say; "let sleeping dogs lie". It is time for a new order. Not one of those lame "rising-out-of-the-ashes" things; because it is time to turn our backs on what was. Let the art schools, fashionable galleries and the whole money grubbing industry of Fine Arts rot and rust and fall in from the weight of its own exclusivity. It is time for a revolution. It is time for a "Digital Manifesto".
Why a manifesto? Simply because no one does manifestos anymore. Therefore, what better way to connect the passion of the old with the promise of the new. If there is to be a Manifesto of the Digital Arts here are some of the things it should include.

I. Death to the ...
Like all good manifestos our's must call for the death of something or other. Usually, this death is wished upon an oppressor or an oppressive idea. I can think of no greater oppression than the concept of "limited editions". One of the things nailed into your head while attending the finer art schools is that the artist owes it to buyers, agents and your future estate to limit your output of a certain image. The argument usually is that too many copies drives down the prices and scares off your "investors". But, who really profits from this? Not the artist. This is the art agents' way of guaranteeing that after you die everyone else will profit.
Limited editions may have made sense in the past. Litho stones and silk screens wear out. An engraving plate can print the image upon it at only one size. But with today's digital printing, ten copies now are the same color and quality as ten more copies later. An image can be printed at one size on coated paper, and another size on back-lit film, and another size on canvas. Is each one of these a separate edition? Wherein lies the edition...with the image or with the materials and size? If this is a convention that can so easily be usurped, then why bother? Is it better to sell one print for a thousand dollars or a thousand prints for one dollar? "Digital" allows and should encourage the artist to limit their output based only on the demand for a particular work or image over the course of their whole lifetime. "Make hay while the sun shines"...(then bury your files with you).

II. We hold these things to be "contra-digital"...
As the story goes, Picasso refused to enter Braque's studio until he received Braque's agreement to his warning; "all artists are thieves!" Picasso absorbed Braque's conceptualization of "Cubism" and the rest is art history. And, why not? No one complains when an artist includes a tree they have seen in their neighbor's yard in some art they are working on, because that tree is a natural part of the environment. "Environment", however now includes the world wide web, music on CD, high quality photographs published in magazines, etc. Copyright laws are going to have to change to include the ability to sample these parts of the natural environment for inclusion in other artist's works.
Don't get me wrong, here, any person that copies or otherwise re-issues someone else's work in whole or part and sells that work as their own or without permission of the original artist should be a candidate for public flogging. With the original artist receiving the syndication and re-broadcast rights for the video taped flogging footage. It's only fair. Either that or convince all mankind to quit inventing and using machines that make perfect copies and provide instantaneous distribution of aural and visual materials. OOPS, too late.

III. Expand the creative bandwidth!
In the January/February issue of Communication Arts magazine (page 52), Paul Matthaeus wrote an interesting article about the transition in commercial TV away from the expensive proprietary special effects houses toward desktop multi-media platforms. The following paragraph makes a good argument for where Digital Art is also heading. Under the risk of public flogging, here is the paragraph:
"In the mid-"80s, print was revolutionized by an innocent little box called the Macintosh, and programs like Pagemaker and Illustrator. Suddenly the ability to manipulate text, design, texture and color was in the hands of the proletariat. Typesetters decried the technical deficiencies. "The Macintosh will never have the kerning pairs of a Mergenthaler!" And over a decade later, it still doesn't. But it enabled millions the opportunity to manipulate the media. Iteration after iteration, layer upon layer, the breadth and depth of design exploded, producing some wildly interesting work from the uninitiated and design illiterate. People who had no idea what the "rules" were, and felt no loss when they were broken"...had no business doing what they did, but thank God they did. Mr. Matthaeus went on to add, "desktop video may never reach the highly controlled and calibrated quality of conventionally-produced high-end Video...but like in Print, it just won't matter." Expanding the creative bandwidth is more important and will win out over preserving worn out standards and ways of doing business that are designed mainly to exclude and discourage the millions who now have digital control over the "visual" part of the Visual Arts.
While the integrity of an Artist's work must always be the major concern, Digital Arts must currently avoid being suckered into corporate maneuvering that limits creativity and access based on old standards, materials and money. For example, watercolor paper may not be the best substrate to reproduce an image. And, just because art salesmen are stuck in a place where what the image is printed on is more important than the image itself...where the frame costs more than they will pay the artist for the piece...where brand names mean more than innovation, we must not give in. We must continue to work and publish, show and share and market what we have made.
It is regrettable that some manufacturers in their zeal to sell over priced and maintenance intensive printing systems made claims as to ink longevity without bothering to learn the facts of their product. The Digital Artist will have to work for many years, now, to counter the already faint-hearted gallery owners who use ink longevity and desperate clinging to old materials as an excuse to ignore THE WORK that digital artists create. In the new world we are currently creating, high cost will no longer signify superior work. Galleries and critics alike will soon have to realize that creativity, vision, diversity and craftsmanship have returned as the benchmarks of "value".

IV. Toward a living Art...
Digital tools can make Art that is accessible; Art that everyday people can afford to take home and live with, and discard when they want to move on to something new. "Archivability" is a scam...a way to exclude...a lame excuse to charge more money. We can't possibly know that any one of us is making artwork that someone will want to pull out of an hermetically sealed drawer in five hundred years. Digital artwork is much more akin to the Japanese print makers of the 1700 and 1800s. No one questioned if those prints were going to last three hundred years. Those colorful, masterful, fast moving commodities served a different purpose all together...a living purpose. A purpose that was inextricably bound to expanded creative and commercial bandwidth brought about by new tools and techniques. The market for those prints roared with the life of mass approval not exclusion based on price or snobbish philosophy. This is where a Manifesto of Digital Art should carry us.

V. There is no conclusion...
Manifesto or not. Archival inks and papers or not. Limited editions or not. Regardless of the stalling tactics of galleries, critics and the art industrial complex, the genie is out of the bottle. Nothing will stop this innovation. All the excuses that plague the digital artist today will be swept away as this wave hits the beach. My advice is to grab your motherboard. Paddle out as far as you can. Catch the wave and enjoy the ride. Live long and prosper.

A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast

November 8, 2005

Dear Kelly,

Ernest Hemingway spent the years between 1921 and 1926 in
Paris. Living in cramped quarters and newly married to Hadley
Richardson, they warmed themselves by a small brazier and kept
things simple. This was his time of self-directed
apprenticeship in the art of writing fiction. Much later, in
Ketchum, Idaho, and in Cuba, he was to gather some unfinished
business from his Paris years into "A Moveable Feast." This
small book can be read on a medium length airline flight. It's
full of wit, personality and wisdom--of value to all creators.

"I always worked until I had something done, and I always
stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I
could be sure of going on the next day," he wrote. When
finished for the day, he would read something completely
different, or go for a walk--this in order to allow his
subconscious to continue work on the project. "I was free then
to go anywhere in Paris, to exercise, to become physically
tired. Then it is also good to make love to one you love."

On the beginning of work, he writes: "Start with a true
sentence and you can go from there." Hemingway found that
sometimes it took a little while to find that truth. When he
did, he was off and away. "The only thing that could spoil a
day was people--and if you could keep from making engagements,
each day had no limits."

Regarding style--but more to the nature of art itself--he says:
"You could omit anything--if you knew that you had omitted
it--and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make
people feel something more than they understood." Even an
important turn of a plot or a climax might be left out.
Hemingway understood that art is a co-project between an
artist's skill and the imagination of the art consumer. Absence
strengthens. Brevity heightens. To obscure is to intrigue.
Leave it out and the reader's imagination can make it stronger.

During this period Hemingway demonstrated a remarkable ability
at willful concentration. "The Sun Also Rises," his second
novel, was written in just over six weeks in La Closerie des
Lilas, a Montparnasse restaurant. A busy environment, he found,
does not necessarily mean interruption. Hemingway was not
without humour, humility and self deprecation: "Sometimes," he
said, "I have good luck and write better than I can."

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever
becomes a master." (Ernest Hemingway)

Esoterica: Hemingway is giving himself counseling in
self-understanding and personal efficiency. "I still need more
healthy rest in order to work at my best," he writes. "My
health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it
intelligently." Back down on the ground, I'm sleeping long and
walking vigorously. In my studio I've been consciously leaving
out stuff that I might normally put in--the features of a face,
a part of a landscape, some overly busy shapes--any element
that might just be telling too much. Thanks to Ernest.

Dave Hickey & Sari Carel

The art world from the late eighteenth century to the present has worked in a language of generations. Artists worked with their peers and among them to overthrow and supplant the generation in power. Then suddenly in the '70s you have artists who, rather than overthrowing their seniors, are pleasing them in order to get grades and public funding. That is exactly what my problem is with serving on National Endowment panels. I did it, and participated in it, but I have to admit that this is the first time in the history of American Art that an older generation has the authority to decide which works of the younger generation are privileged. This slowed down the style wheel to a virtual stop, and created a culture of mentors and protegés—a hierarchical, parental structure that would last as long as the National Endowment and the big museums and foundations had absolute power, say from '72 to '88.
During this time, it was almost impossible for anything to change, because our culture is composed of a public academic and museum sector that changes slowly, and after the fact, in 30 year cycles, and a private gallery and magazine sector that changes rapidly, sometimes overnight. In the last ten years the academics who have been retiring from American universities are Abstract Expressionists and Formalists hired and tenured in the late '60s, just as these practices lost public credibility. They are being replaced with Deconstructionists who are already out of date, and who will be in power for the next 30 years, talking about stuff that is already over now.
SC: So you see that as the origin of the shift?
DH: The first paradigm shift really had to do with the influence of French Theory in the '50s and the '60s. That's the world in which I was educated, and in its secular formulations it still has its virtues. I continue to believe that the bad thing about French Theory is that it has no heart, and the good thing about French Theory is that it has no soul. In the early '70s the influence of French Theory was considerably altered by the resurgence of German Aesthetic Theory—particularly that of the Frankfurt School whose academicized Marxism lent itself very well to the academicized Marxism that was practiced in American universities. And also, I think there was another set of problems. The powerful arguments of French Theory—as it might be applied to art—revolve around its critique of Metaphysics and the discourse of origins that manifest in speculations about the death of the artist, and the structural ideology of institutions.
If your in an institution teaching artists, you can't kill the artist or critique the institution with much credibility; if you believe in group identity and identity politics, you just restored the author in another guise. If you are tenured in a university you have to limit your critique of institutions considerably, because you are part of an institution. In other words, Post Structuralism is not an academic discourse; Frankfurt School and Marxism is. Also, in the '60s new English translations of writers like Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukacs became available.
They were much needed because, loosely interpreted, they allowed us to be Mystical and Romantic, to talk about authenticity again, about what artists feel and their identity. In the world I grew up in, the artist was really presumed to be dead, and to most of my contemporaries, issues of artistic identity mean nothing. They mean nothing to Warhol, they mean nothing to Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Bridget Riley, or Richard Serra. It's bullshit as far as they are concerned.

From my view, it is a bunch of Romantic bullshit. I think that we are having now a kind of Counter-Reformation that has to do first of all with the fact that for 25 years, the market for works of art was the kunsthalle, the museum and the university. You were being paid by the state to make art that couldn't sell, and the art itself, because it was totally isolated from the market, simply didn't change. All of that begins to change when the National Endowment no longer gives as much money, when jobs in universities are no longer available, when art stops being a nice safe place to go. Because for 30 years being an artist was a safe thing to do. You filled out forms, got your check, taught in classes, you flew to Berlin and put up press type on the wall, poured a bunch of leaves in the room, and a bunch of people came, and you had wine and cheese. Then you flew home, and taught your classes, and went to faculty meetings, and applied for a merit raise, which the university gave you because you had a show in Berlin.
And that works fine, although it does not create art that changes. So I think we are seeing now the restoration of sibling society, a society of peers. Most of the young artists that I know are interested in what their contemporaries think; they don't give a fuck what old people think. Your peers are who you live with till you die. You can please a lot of authority figures, but they're dead before you need them. So I think it's changing, in good ways but in a lot of silly ways too.

Another reason it is changing is that in the history of art, the tides of influence tend to go back and forth, they tend to be reactive. One generation reacts against another; the next generation, reacting against the previous one, goes back to the generation before that, which is to say the tides of influence in the art world tend to skip a generation.
So now I have students who are really into Bridget Riley and Richard Serra; students who study Warhol, mostly as a colorist. When you are a young artist, you look around and you say, 'Gee everything sucks, I am going to go back to the moment right before everything started sucking, and try to find a new way out of that'. So you have a lot of artists trying to find a new way out of '60s art, much in the same way artists in the '80s tried to find a new way out of '40s art—in the sense that Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Francesco Clemente looked back to the early figurative sources of Abstract Expressionism as a place to start. So that's perfectly natural, and it happens all the time.
The problem today, of course, is that art cannot change so fast because it is so highly institutional. The people in the museum are going to be there forever, the people in the university are going to be there even longer. The institutional super structure of the art world, which is always out of date by definition, is really out of date now. I think that you do begin to see small undergrounds, although its hard to stay underground for very long just because if you're any good at all, people really want to look at it, because there is so much boring fucking art. Anybody who sees anything they like, they go crazy. I know artists just coming out of school and they already have a waiting list of 40 paintings, and that's not because they are great artists, it's just that they're not bad artists.
SC: I am assuming that there has always been quite a lot of bad and boring art, no?
DH: Not ideologically bad and boring. We have lived with an ideology that says, "If it looks good, it's bad. If people like it, it's bad. If it's appealing it's reactionary". So you have artists consciously making the worst looking art that they can. And it can really be bad, because it usually looks bad even when you are trying to make it look OK. So I'm pretty optimistic.
SC: So you think the whole premise of underground arenas and artistic practice is not a bankrupt idea to try and work from?
DH: It works if you want it to work. It depends on what you want. I grew up in a world in which what artists aspired to was to be able to go to their studio, make art, sell a work occasionally, so they can buy some Wheaties, and some records, and listen to records, and make art, and eat Wheaties. And that was their goal: stay away from the straight world, and stay away from the university, and live their lives. So if that is your aspiration, then yes, I know quite a few young artists that are achieving that now. Most young artists don't want that.
SC: What do they want?
DH: They want to fly to Berlin, and put up press type, and that's fine 'cause there is an audience over there for that. But I argue all the time that painting today is much more like Jazz than it is like installation art. It is a discourse that people who know know, the people who care care, and the people who don't care we don't give a shit about. Painters are famous the way Jazz musicians are famous—which means the people who care about painting know them. I just wrote a piece for Art Forum about John Wesly. He has been a famous painter for 40 years among people who love painting. I can go over to Cal Arts and ask them if they know who John Wesly is, and they would go, "Huh? What discourse does he participate in?" I am in the art world only insofar as there are interesting things for me to write about. When that stops, or when I stop getting offers to write things, I'll be out. I won't be going around looking for work; it's not like its any fun. When I was a kid, I had a gallery in Texas, I met Leo Castelli, and I thought Leo was cool. And I would think, "When I go to New York, maybe I will have lunch with Leo, or maybe I can have lunch with Sidney Janis." I would be hard put to think up anybody in the art world I would like to have lunch with today. Maybe Leo Steinberg.
SC: How was Leo cool?
DH: Well, he liked art and he was a business person who wasn't obsessed with money. He liked gossip and he had a good eye. He understood how it works. He virtually invented the '60s. He treated his artists right: he never let them go, they always left him. When I was a dealer, he told me good things. "David" he would say, "The art goes out, the money comes in."
SC: So an environment working under the title "Museum of Contemporary Art," is that a paradox to you? Say, institutions that produce shows like the "Whitney Biennial" and the "Carnegie International," are they dramatically failing to present us with successful surveys of the present state of affairs?
DH: I think it's pretty peculiar. I think it's a little unnatural. I don't think you should grant appointed conservators, which is what museum people are, the power to determine the course of art. I don't think they are worthy, I don't think they are committed, I don't think they know what's going on. Traditionally, contemporary art museums exhibited artists that had a large constituency in the culture of people who cared about art, and wrote about art, and bought art, so when an artist achieved a certain level, a certain vogue in that world, then they would get a show. Museums represent, in my view, constituencies for people who care about art in that area. The presumption that some fricking teenage curator who went to school in Chicago is going to know more about art than a person who has travelled all over the world looking at it, but doesn't happen to have a degree—it makes no sense to me. I don't see why these people should be telling us what to think. I don't think that contemporary art benefits from being publicly administrated.
The main thing is Americans don't like art, they won't pay for art, they don't deserve art. That's just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That's fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it's not very educational. I keep challenging people, "Tell
me one thing that you've learned from art." It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don't need to know anything to understand good art. The only justification for an exhibition these days is some educational purpose, or if it's a box office. At the MoMA what goes is what will get them a box office; the MoMA is more market driven than Mary Boone is. Mary Boone will sometimes put something up just to see if people like it. The MoMA would never do that. And there are a lot of artists that would benefit from a show at the MoMA, who are Modern artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, James Brookes, and many others who never had a major show. The MoMA will put up Picassos, because people will go see that. The perfect MoMA show would be Picasso's paintings of the Holy Land from the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy.
SC: I understand you are going to do one of these "hŸber" shows. What are your ideas to make it different?
DH: Well, its called "Beau Monde," beautiful world, and I am interested in doing a show that has length as well as width. Most shows are comprised of people from age 35 to 45, of all nations, genders, ethnicities etc, etc. My show will start with people from the oldest practicing generation, and also include some people in their '20s, all of whom are interested in fabrication. Rather than dealing with cultural identity, I am interested in the interface of cultures—the impurity and reconciliation of various cultures, about how one culture impacts another.
SC: You critique works of art with regards to their ideological stance, positioning generosity and inclusiveness against exclusivity, and speaking about works that practice contingency rather than autonomy, and are anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritative at their core. How does that influence your taste?
DH: I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that's very difficult. Works of art don't have messages. They don't have determinate meanings. They're not just formal objects. Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don't mean anything, but they have meaning. And that's how art works. A Pollock doesn't mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It's totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don't know what it meant, I know that the story doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Artists don't know what they're doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.
I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That's not meant to discount the artist. It's meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don't know anyway. I know some grown up artists who know pretty well what they are doing. Ed Ruscha knows what he expects to get, so do Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. But these are people in their sixties and seventies. Anyone who is much younger than that, if they are any good, are still improvising. And then there are people, like Rauschenberg, who are 70 years old and are still improvising. Bob doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, but he is doing it every day. I am interested in that, I don't like rules. I think art is for people who like art, who like to talk about physical things in the world. I don't think there is any difference, say, between talking about the Lakers and talking about Terry Winters. Maybe that the Lakers are better, and you talk about them with different people. They are both occasions for discourse.
SC: Your art criticism seems to be a choice you've made within the sphere of writing. You use art criticism to write just as much as you use writing to criticize art.
DH: Yeah, I am a writer. My whole idea in life is to be able to make a living doing what I like to do. I like to write, and I like to write about hard things in the world—I don't usually like to make things up—although I do occasionally. It's fine to make things up at times, because it's so hard to write about things in the world. I am a pretty good writer. I mean some days I write better and some worse, but I have skills, and my view of the world is solid enough that regardless of the topic you give me, I will say some version of the same thing. I wrote a piece called "Earth Scapes, Land Works and Oz" back in '72 for Art in America about Land Art and my position has not changed since then. I have spent most of my career writing about Post-Minimalist art. I write about Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Ann Hamilton, Robert Gober. Only recently, because of the shift in taste, do I get to write about people whom I have deep temperamental affinities with, like Warhol or John Wesly. For 30 years you couldn't get a job or occasion to write about these people. I like getting assignments, if I didn't get them I would probably not write anything, except maybe Rock N Roll songs. God, I thought of a really good name for a band the other day, I saw it in Newsweek; 'Cloning Pigs for Parts' . . . "We're,
like, Cloning Pigs for Parts and we're from San Bernardino . . ."
SC: You should go into business.
DH: Yeah, I make up pretty good band names. My other best one was 'Clown Meat,' which I like a whole lot.
SC You being an art critic, as well as a gallery owner in the past, I'm curious to hear what in your mind is the relationship between artists, critics, gallerists . . . what's going on between all these people?
DH: Well. The art world is very easy. When I was a dealer I used to say, "The artist makes the work, I sell the work, the artist's girlfriend or boyfriend tries to get me to give them the money." That's all it is, it's as simple as that. It's all about the public adjudication of value. I prefer today, since I don't really do reviews anymore, to write for commercial galleries.
SC: You mean catalogues?
DH: Yeah. If you write for magazines there is all that educational bullshit you have to put in.
SC: You mean like general art history stuff?
DH: All these magazines are written for sophomores in Southern Illinois University. So you have to say things like "Andy Warhol, the Pop artist." You have to tell everybody who John Wesly is. And I find that to be kind of boring. I just did a catalogue on Picabia for Michael Werner Gallery.
SC: That was a great show.
DH: It was a great show, I love Picabia. And it was really fun; I could just sit down and write about Picabia, and presume that everybody could read and write, and knew who Picabia was, and who Alfred Barr was. Also you're working with professional editors. Art magazines don't have professional editors. Their idea of good writing is Derrida or something. And also it pays better, and it can have some impact on the life of the work. Nothing you write in a magazine, except for maybe a review, has much impact.
SC: Doesn't it have a direct connection to the market value of the work?
DH: Oh certainly, but the market value also has direct connection to the general esteem in which the work is held. Picabia has for many years been a complete cult artist. I was into Picabia, in the mid '70s I bought one for one thousand dollars and sold it for four. He has been an artist held in high esteem by a lot of people for a long time, but without essential market value, and there are people with great market value, Cecily whatever . . .
SC: Brown?
DH: Yeah, Brown, I don't know many artists who hold her in high esteem. She has skill, she may get better. Obviously, there is no direct correspondence between market value and sophisticated esteem. But at the same time you can't separate these things. Put it like this, if you've been an art critic as long as I have, it is very important to be what they call "bankable." Which means if you look at all the people you have written about, it is important that their prices go up. In other words, you're not going to spend all your time writing about some bumpkin who carves tree stumps in Seattle. It doesn't matter, the word's not out there, people are not talking about it, its just vanity writing. I do that sometimes, but not very much. Nor is there much good to be gained from doing theoretical analysis. Theory is easy, practice is hard. I used to say theory is playing poker with no spots on the cards. I like to critique the hard world, so the hard world becomes a critique of what you write. And you want to have influence; you want to make people take what you value seriously, and you want people to question what you don't take seriously.
I don't write negative criticism very much. I would never write a negative review of a young artist. There are certain sort of hyper-inflated reputations, which I will occasionally take a shot at. I took a shot at Clemente's Neo-Expressionist paintings, and I love some of his work. I took a shot at Christopher Wool as well, who seems to me an incredibly pretentious artist. But I don't usually do that—it's easy to critique and it's hard to praise—so I would rather tell you why I think something is good. There is really no such thing as an art critic having power; works of art have power, and you have to kind of be right and persuasive at the same time. It helps to understand commerce for what it is, which is a way to make a living doing what you like to do. I don't have a fancy family, I didn't go to Harvard, I don't have a trust fund, I never got a fucking grant and I am not likely to, because I don't have a grant-friendly sensibility. If it weren't for the magazine world, I would probably be teaching Melville in some junior college, and drinking. I would be dead, or still out with some sleazy garage band playing "Free Bird," and "Rock N Roll Hoochy Coo," that's not something you look forward to.
SC: Yeah, that's not a pretty thing. I remember reading you dropped out of grad school—
DH: Yeah, I hated it.
SC: What was wrong?
DH: Well, I always thought it was about intellectual adventure, and it was really about a lot of people who wanted to be junior professors in a school and that was it. It wasn't exciting. My idea of embarking upon graduate studies was to go some place where the smart people are. Unfortunately, the smart people are no longer in universities, the smart people are writing for [The Simpsons, the smart people are writing for LL Cool J. There are exceptions, and that's an exaggeration, but most of all academic culture is just one big handicap, and I live in it with colleagues that I respect, but it ain't where the thoughts are thought. I kind of like teaching—I mean, I enjoy working with artists. But what I do with graduate students now, is exactly what I did with the artists I represented when I was a dealer. I go to their studios, we sit around and talk about the work with the idea of how can we get this shit looking like something. That's it. I like being around people who work. All of my social talk is with people who have done something between the time I talked to them last, and the time I talk to them now. University people really don't do very much, so you have to talk about pets. I am mostly interested in people who are doing things and are busy. I get along with them.
SC: So when did you start teaching?
DH: Well, I was doing semesters here and there, and then I decided I wanted to move to Las Vegas, so I kind of bullied the people here into hiring me, because I had a good resume, and I wanted to have health insurance, and I wanted to have contact with young artists, but not as a critic. Since I have a lot of apparent leverage in art world, young artists don't behave "normally" around me anymore. I enjoy working with young artists, I find myself in the midst of a generation of young artists with more temperamental affinities than I had with young artists for many years.
SC: Do you like TV?
DH: Well, I watch it all the time.
SC: What's you favorite thing?
DH: Basketball. I'll watch anything. I liked Perry Mason so I like Law and Order which is like Perry Mason. The first half is law the second is order, it's a type of Formalism. The density of the variations they run on that sort of thing becomes interesting. I watch kickboxing movies, which seem to be the most orderly movies that are made. Some guy kills some guy's brother and then there's explosions. I like them because all the people that work on these movies are extremely professional and the plots are very orderly—they all have a kind of coherence that your standard Hollywood movie doesn't have any more. I was telling somebody the other day it looks to me that Hollywood is making foreign films. I mean what fucking universe does Runaway Bride live in. It's like it comes from Belgium or something, what the fuck is that about. The last one I really understood was Encino Man, which was pretty good.
SC: What was that about?
DH: It's a high school comedy in which a bunch of kids living in Encino defrost a Neanderthal man who becomes the most popular guy in school.
BEN BUCHANAN: What about reality TV?
DH: Oh, I hate that.
SC: What about cops?
DH: Kind of, I like the song. The song is great and I like the idea that as long as I keep my fucking shirt on, I won't get arrested. I don't like baseball. I don't like most things, I mostly channel surf. The Simpsons are cool.
SC: Consistently cool.
DH: Yeah. I like actually that cartoon on MTV, Daria, with the little girl . . .
BB: The disaffected youth?
DH: Yes, the disaffected youth, I think she's great. I recognize that family. I watch whatever comes up. I usually watch Biography but I don't really like it. There is only about one in ten that's any good, but it's interesting to know shit about peoples' lives, and it's also interesting to speculate on what their lives are actually like, as opposed to what you have been told that they were like. I hated Survivor because I teach at a faculty and Survivor is about how bureaucracies work. First you cut off the odd and the weak, then you cut off the strong, then you form an alliance of mediocre people, and the administrator of that alliance gets to be dean. And that's what Survivor is about.
SC: And they get the cash.
DH: Yeah, they get the cash. I watch TV without the sound. I am actually kind of annoyed that there isn't any music on MTV anymore, that there are all those reality shows and sit-coms. I'll leave MTV on, and if the picture looks good, I will put the sound on, although the music video industry has collapsed. Its one of those genres in which the first ones were the best ones.
BB: That's very true.
DH: Also, I was a songwriter, so I hated MTV. I didn't like that they got their shot at my song, I would rather have them send me a video with a clip track, and let me write to their video. Rather than putting my teenage love song on Mars or something like that.
SC: I guess you've been around America a lot since you were a kid, moving around with your family, and later on your own.
DH: Yes, I am a habitual traveler.
SC: So . . . what's this place all about if it's about anything?
DH: I don't have any idea. It's interesting, and its perpetually amazing. It is less amazing than it used to be because a lot of the eccentricity and the regional differences have been smoothed out. In a sense, I like that. I like that anywhere I go, I can stay at the Holiday Inn, and I know where the bathroom is. But I am really interested in people who make it up as they go along and there are still some out there. Regardless of what my colleagues say, you have in this place, still, a lot more options, and a lot more freedom than I see in other places. You can really do some weird shit. You can always leave town as well; go to the edge and declare that the center. You can always leave town and start again and then start 'againagain.' It is possible in good times to live on the margin. Like in the '60s and '70s, their was enough money floating around to get by. I have no idea how I supported myself between '68-'78. This kind of money and fluidity is coming around again, so there is enough money that there is a margin that you can survive on. And that privileges improvisation. I think it is going to get better, I believe in Darwin.
SC: You believe in evolution and progress?
DH: No, I believe in deviation. What you want is a maximum field of deviation. And anything that tries to keep things from deviating is against my principles. The more deviation there is, the more new things you have to select and not select from. And that interests me. That's why I didn't like art from '75 to '85; that was against deviation. You had to be a certain kind of person to be an artist, and believe certain kinds of things that I stopped believing when I quit the SDS. So that's my aspiration for the art world, that it would be a place that tolerates intellectual tumult.
Sari Carel : Often you discuss in your essays and writings a principle shift that occurred in American culture and economy as well as in the Art World starting in the early '70s. You describe this change as having considerable influence on the course of Contemporary Art since then. What are the origins and consequences of this paradigm shift?
Dave Hickey: The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.

A collection of quotes by artists on how to deal with criticism.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt


”Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad” -- Claude Monet

“It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.” -- Pablo Picasso

“I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway.” -- Francis Bacon

“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -- Henri Matisse

“The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path – the concrete study of nature – to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.” -- Paul Cezanne

”When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.” -- Marc Chagall

“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” -- Elbert Hubbard

”Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway .” -- Eleanor Roosevelt

”I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?” -- Andy Warhol

”[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. … Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.”-- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

”Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” -- Tom Stoppard, author

”Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.” -- Man Ray

“I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.” -- Claude Monet

“The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.” -- Edouard Manet

“Creativity takes courage.” -- Henri Matisse

Digital Artists: A Tale of Three Photographers

Digital Artists: A Tale of Three Photographers

By Lorraine A. DarConte

Today, there are almost as many different ways to create a photograph as there are photographers, and digital technology has only made the list longer and more interesting. Just as some photographers prefer Canon over Leica, or Kodak as opposed to Pentax, they are picking and choosing the digital tools that best serve them in their photographic pursuits.

Juliya Lezhen, a young student originally from Russia, submerged herself in the world of junkyards and rusted metal and emerged with a series of colorful, abstract images reminiscent of Rorschach tests and Pollack paintings. Joe Deiss, a master of large format photography, has temporarily abandoned his Deerdorf to work on a series of botanicals that are one-hundred-percent digital. And I, myself, have been busy leading my own personal digital backlash by returning to photography’s roots and learning the fine art of alternative processes, with a little help from digital technology (so much for that revolution).

My current series, Plant Abstracts, combines new, 21st century digital technology with early 19th century photographic processes including Vandyke, cyanotype and gum dichromate. I chose to photograph plants – foliage and flowers – for several reasons. One is the challenge of presenting the subject matter – which has been photographed, sculpted and painted by most everyone – in a new light. Plants are also readily available models with good attitudes that are, simply put, beautiful and hard to resist, no matter how commonplace.

Printing the images using these early processes allows me to produce photographs on a wide range of paper surfaces that result in prints with beautiful textures and tonal range, adding to their unique quality. The digital technology – in this case, scanning and manipulating images, and then making computer-generated negatives – allows me to create an image that exists in my mind’s eye and work with traditional photographic processes.

All images are first photographed with film and then scanned. I transform the images via Adobe Photoshop and an iMac with one or more filters such as "twirl" or "noise." Images are also converted to black-and-white. Some of the photos are heavily manipulated while others I barely touch. I then invert the images in Photoshop to create a negative (a positive can also be used). To make a negative, I print the inverted image (any size from 5x7 up to 11x17) on Pictorico Premium OHP Transparency Film with a color printer. I use an Epson Stylus Scan 2000. That’s the digital portion of the process. The prints are created individually, by hand, with a few well-mixed chemicals, some fine cotton/rag papers, a contact frame, hake brushes, UV light and water. The paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals, dried and placed in a contact frame with the negative. I then expose the image outdoors (a UV box may also be used), typically for about two minutes (time varies with negative density, of course). The prints are developed mostly in water (for all three processes), although Vandyke prints must also be fixed. Since the photographs are printed on 100-percent cotton rag papers, I can also add color by painting them with traditional watercolors.

Recently, I was asked why I go through the hassle of hand-making prints when I can get a similar effect using digital software. For me, it’s about acquiring new skills and honing old ones and mixing new technologies with old-fashioned craftsmanship. It’s about the texture of the paper, the curve of a brushstroke, and rich, beautiful colors. It’s about a quality print that is truly one-of-a-kind.

Rusty Revelations
"The light here in Tucson is incredible," says photographer Juliya Lezhen. "There’s hardly ever a cloudy day, so I never need to use a flash or other artificial light. Every day I can go out and photograph something." Lately, that "something" for Lezhen has been metal, mostly of the rusting, peeling and decaying variety. "I started noticing little details and imperfections on metal, and so I concentrated on photographing these flaws, up close and personal. I find the process of deterioration and erosion intriguing," she notes. "Neglected, discarded and antiqued objects can be found almost anywhere, and because they’re exposed to the elements, they are changing every day. Most of these things," says Lezhen, "no one pays any attention to. They’re just part of our everyday lives. But I discovered, while looking through the camera lens at a tiny portion of peeling paint, a whole new world created by bright colors and beautiful light."

Indeed, Lezhen’s images, although surreal, emulate landscapes, moonscapes, and perhaps even a few very strange dreamscapes. One photograph resembles fried eggs dripping down the side of a wall and another appears to be a screaming robot. They are also reminiscent of images seen and imagined via those infamous Rorschach tests—with one glaring difference – Lezhen’s are bright and colorful, although both may be viewed while prone on a couch. "Different people see different things while looking at my photographs," reiterates Lezhen, who does have a background in psychology. "In a way, many photographers are psychologists," she adds, "because of their ability to look at, analyze and see something different through the camera lens."

States Lezhen, "I chose to do this particular series by shooting 35mm transparencies, which I then scanned at 5000 dpi using an Agfa scanner. I used Adobe Photoshop 7 as a digital darkroom where I burned, dodged and made minor color adjustments. Most of the images are not manipulated or even cropped," she says. "I try to crop in-camera as much as possible. I did a little color management, which I learned through trial and error, but I did not change the original colors. I saturated the colors somewhat, because after scanning, some color and sharpness are lost." The prints were made on an Epson 2200 printer using Epson’s 13x19 Enhanced Matte Paper and Epson’s archival inks.

"I consider myself very fortunate," says Lezhen, "to be able to use today’s advanced technologies to help me create my images. By shooting film I am able to preserve that special warmth and grain that it provides. But by outputting digitally I can take advantage of the advanced digital tools, which provide me with more flexibility and a greater control over the final product."

Digital Photograms
Joseph Deiss has created the ultimate series of botanicals by placing his subject matter directly on a scanner, resulting in images with precise detail and color reproduction. The images are, in a sense, modern-day photograms, but with a lot more information. "Last summer," said Deiss, "my son, Julian, returned from Alaska with a portfolio of algae pressings that I so admired, I had to scan them. After my initial attempts, which were less than stellar, Julian constructed a box so that I could make cleaner scans. The box keeps out miscellaneous light and allows me to work with three-dimensional plants. It’s a simple black box that fits over the scanner and has a hinged flap at one end so plants with long stems can be scanned without being disturbed. This," explains Deiss, "is my equivalent of a digital camera."

"I scanned the best of Julian’s algae pressings, then moved on to other plant life. I began collecting weeds and flowers and whatever else caught my eye and started pressing and drying some and scanning others. As of now, I have about forty pieces. I’m really indiscriminate about what I pick; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, it can be almost any growing thing. In fact, I just brought some nasty looking thistles back from the beach and they came out absolutely beautiful. I spend a lot of time maneuvering the plants on the scanner so they take on a form that is interesting, pleasing and challenging to the eye," says Deiss. "The scanner has very little depth of field, so pressed plants are always sharp, but the freshly picked plants are only sharp up to about three sixteenths of an inch and then quickly fall out of focus, as well as falling into darkness."

Deiss works with an Epson Expression 1680 Pro scanner with Epson software, a Macintosh G4, 1.25 GHz multiprocessor with 2GB of RAM, a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, and a 15-inch LCD monitor. "I am religious about keeping the monitors calibrated," Deiss emphasized. He uses a ColorVision Spyder with OptiCAL software for monitor calibration.

While in Photoshop (version 7.0.1), Deiss spends about 10-12 hours per image doing touch-up work. "There’s always bugs, pollen and sap to deal with," he notes. "Bugs that move during the scan have to be repaired. And, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I work with 16-bit files, so I can make color and contrast changes without losing too much information.

My file sizes are about 600 to 800 megabytes." Deiss does most of his work using curves, color balance and the lasso and stamp tools. "Before I make a test print I use an edge sharpening routine so that I get a nice crisp image. Ultimately, these images are meant to be about 30x48-inches. I see an Epson 9600 printer in my future…"

Deiss currently prints his images on an Epson 2200 with Epson Enhanced Matte paper. "I’ve always chosen the matte papers. It’s probably a hold over from my (woodcut) print-making days.

Sept2003, Digital Output

Harnessing Digital Art Media

Harnessing DIGITAL ART MEDIA by Jeremy Sutton
Challenges, Choices and Opportunities

Artists today have use of a new generation of powerful digital tools that have opened up new vistas of possibilities. Digital prints are now in the collections of prestigious museums, art galleries and private collectors throughout the world. More professional photographers than ever are crossing the boundary between creating pure photographic prints and making fine art images, where the original photograph serves only as a launching point for artistic interpretation rather than an end product in itself. Using digital tools in creating fine art raises a host of questions: How do you describe your artwork? How do you value your work? How do you address issues of originality and longevity? This article examines the challenges, choices and opportunities for the artist today, sharing the perspectives of art collectors, gallery owners, art critics, artists and fine art printers.

Throughout history artists have used and experimented with the latest tools, technology and media. They often met resistance and skepticism from a public that tends to resist change. Much of the art media we take for granted today, such as canvas, photography and acrylic paints, were revolutionary when first introduced. “Every tool has been new technology at some time,” says Donald Farnsworth, founder of Magnolia Editions, whose clients include renowned artist Chuck Close. “From the invention of handmade paper 2000 years ago to the invention of acrylic paint in the 1960s, there has always been new technology.”

I’m interested in content, not media,” explains Catharine Clark, ownerdirector of the Catharine Clark Gallery. “Good art is not about the medium; it’s about the idea.” The artists’ ideas drive the art, not their choice of tools, technology or media. For Clark, art is content-driven, not media-driven. Art collector Robert Pritikin echoes Clark’s sentiments when he expresses, “I couldn’t care less about digital media.” For Pritikin, the inherent value of an artwork is related to the subject matter and the historic nature of the artwork. Founder and director of Trillium Press, David Salgado, describes art as “the physical manifestation of philosophical ideas” and explains, “Art is not media specific, it is a process.”

“People at first didn’t realize the computer was a medium that allowed you to process ideas,” says Griff Williams, artist and owner of Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color. “Originally, photographers used the medium to enlarge and create different substrates. It was used as a reproductive medium.” Gallery 16 works with artists to extend their studio practice by exploring new possibilities opened up by the digital printing medium.

Characteristics of the Digital Medium

“Every medium has a signature look,” Williams explains. “An intaglio print, such as an etching, has a characteristic look that is associated with that specific type of printing press technique. By contrast, the digital press can faithfully reproduce the look of graphite, layers of overlapping tissue paper, collage, silver-halide photographic prints, and so on. It acts like a funny hybrid or chameleon of a medium. That is the danger and the beauty. The danger is the implication that it’s something it isn’t. The beauty is that it is a remarkably eloquent tool for creating images on almost any absorbent surface, from matzah to silk.

“Historically in printmaking, restrictions were placed on size and substrate materials. Now, with the digital press, we can print on virtually anything at any scale, and we can control how the print is perceived, such as making it a sculptural element in an installation.”


George Krevsky, owner of the George Krevsky Gallery, tells the story of a collector wanting to purchase a digital photographic print. The artist of the desired work wanted the collector to have an original silver gelatin print. The collector came in and looked at the prints side-by-side and was unable to distinguish between the two. Krevsky explains, “This goes to show how the digital printing technology is now so advanced. It is difficult to differentiate digital photographic prints from the more traditional method of printing photographs.” While acknowledging its technical excellence, Krevsky is skeptical about the maturation of the digital medium. “The jury is still out on digital works. The nuances, where are they? Where is the depth? How will it hold up with time?”

San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker fears that “there’s too much freedom (in digital media) to give the right kind of friction to give artistic results. Art requires resistance to give results… Resistance is essential.” Artist Dawn Meson agrees with Baker in that the digital medium can make it harder for the artist to let accidents be, since “it is too tempting for many artists to correct and make perfect.”

Trillium Press’ Salgado sees the artist as a boxer wherein the medium (the “punch”), digital or otherwise, invites a reaction (the “counterpunch”) from the artist. An example of punch/counter-punch in digital media is the way artist Hung Liu used the water solubility of the Iris dye inks (“punch”) to create dripping effects (“counter-punch”) by running water down the prints. Farnsworth echoes Salgado’s sentiment by explaining, “Everything I’ve ever invented began with a mistake, and you only make mistakes by doing.” In other words, treat digital media like any other: Dive in, try things out, and react to what emerges. I encourage my students to take risks on the canvas, to be committed to their brush strokes and the creative process. Building up history on your canvas, embracing and working with serendipity and “mistakes,” whether working digitally or traditionally, is what brings your canvas to life and adds nuances and depth.

Words and Meaning

We are pioneers at the dawn of a new digital age where the earlier definitions of what constitutes fine art are transforming. New paradigms and vocabulary are needed.

The traditional distinctions between painters, sculptors and printmakers are breaking down. Clark explains that many of the artists she represents “describe themselves as working across media.” She recommends that everyone take the time to visit galleries and museums, to look at art, to see for themselves the mixing of media and how the content relates to the media.


Original Versus Reproduction

There is a vital distinction between original prints, where the print itself is the final artwork, and reproduction prints, where the original artwork exists in another medium. Clark emphasizes the importance of educating the public about the difference between original and reproduction prints. Gregory Lind, owner of the Gregory Lind Gallery, finds it troubling from the perspective of fine art when “instead of new media being used to create new art, technology is used to duplicate existing works.”

Top: Hung Liu with a series of original mixed-media artworks based on a common digital print
Middle: Gregory Lind with a Will Yackulic goache and ink on paper.
Bottom: Using a digital loom in Belgium, Magnolia Editions published a 15-foot-high tapestry of Chuck Close’s portrait of musician Philip Glass, seen here with Magnolia Editions founder, Donald Farnsworth.
“Giclée” comes from the French word for a spray or spurt of liquid. According to Williams, it was first introduced in the digital printing industry by Mac Holbert of Nash Editions in Los Angeles. At the time, Nash Editions were using early Iris printers with dye-based inks that were designed for proofing, not for longevity. Holbert apparently called their prints “Giclées” to fend off questions about longevity. Subsequently the term has come to refer generically to all types of inkjet printing. It is largely used today in reference to reproduction prints. There is some confusion in the marketplace due to the presence of “embellished Giclées” (reproduction prints that have some hand brush strokes added, not always added by the original artist). The intrinsic value of an original print is significantly more than that of a reproduction print, including embellished Giclées. The consensus of the people interviewed for this article is to avoid using the term “Giclée” to describe your original prints.

When a digital print is combined with non-digital media, we may ask ourselves, “How do we describe the end result?” Artist Liu goes beyond the print by building up layers of paint and resin and assemblage over the original print in order to create a solid structure that bridges printing, painting, collage making and sculpting. The artwork is not a painting or a print; it is not purely digital or traditional. It is an original one-of-a-kind artwork, and yet the source print for the image is reproducible.

Clark’s approach to describing artwork is to provide a literal and specific description of what makes up the artwork. If it is a digital print, she describes the type of print and what substrate it is printed on such as “pigment print on Rives BFK 100 percent rag cold-pressed watercolor paper.” A digital painting where traditional media has been applied to a digital print could be described as “mixed media.” Gallery 16 Editions describe their original prints as either “Iris prints” when created using the Iris printer, or as “pigment prints” when created using any of their pigment-ink-based inkjet printers.

I describe my paintings as “combined media on canvas.” They originate as paintings created in Corel Painter (sometimes based on photographic reference); they are printed out on canvas and then have various media, such as acrylic paint and pastel, applied on to the canvas surface. I avoid using the terms “digital art,” “computer art” and “computer-generated art,” all of which imply that artistic skill is secondary to the fact that the computer was used. After all you’d never describe a Van Gogh painting an example of “oil paint-generated art!”

Multiple Originals

“An artwork created with the use of digital media and which has the physical form of being a reproducible digital print,” Clark explains, is an example of what can be termed “multiple original.” That is, there is no other original artwork other than what is expressed on the digital print. The term multiple original is widely used in galleries and museums when referring to traditional fine art prints such as woodcuts, engravings and etchings, lithographs and screen-prints. In all these cases, there is a matrix or plate of some kind that the print is based on, but that matrix does not constitute the actual artwork. In the case of digital paintings the digital file is equivalent to the matrix or plate. The print is the artwork.


Above: Artist Hung Liu applying oil paint onto a resin-coated digital print at Trillium Press.

Multiple prints can be made from the matrix. Each print may vary slightly due to the way ink is applied (or rubbed off) or due to further working of the print surface with other media. Even with these unique aspects to each print, which make them each one-of-a-kind artworks, they are still linked to each other by coming from a common matrix, and are thus multiple originals.

Creating multiple originals carries the responsibility to track the edition in order to imbue them with value to collectors and clients. An edition may involve some artist proof prints and a limited number of actual artwork prints available for sale. Clark says she likes to keep the length of editions down to between three and seven in the total number of prints. Many artists choose to have larger editions. For artwork created with digital media choosing an edition length is the same decision that any printmaker faces. With a digital file and high-quality digital printer, an unlimited number of multiple prints can be made that are almost identical; with traditional prints, the matrix or plate eventually degrades, and that sets a natural physical limit to the length of an edition.

When hand artwork is applied individually to each print, the artwork takes on a one-of-a-kind stature yet is still related to the other artworks based on the same print. At Trillium Press and Urban Digital Color, they refer to such prints as “Edition Variée” (EV).

No matter how an edition is defined, or how long it is made, an edition represents a symbol of trust between the artist and the art buyer. Lind points out that for him there is a boundary between what is acceptable in terms of the integrity of an edition (for instance, a limited edition of five well documented prints) and what is not acceptable (for instance, editions of hundreds of reproduction prints with hand brush strokes added by people other than the artist, with different editions for different size prints, and with the false implication that these prints are original works of art).

One way to ensure the integrity of an edition is to provide detailed and specific print documentation with every artwork. At the Catharine Clark Gallery, the buyer of an artwork has, included on their invoice, a statement of exactly what constitutes the edition, referring to size, substrate, printing method and the number of the print in the edition.

Preservation, Archival Integrity and Longevity

Williams says, “Longevity issues and color fastness were concerns people had about digital. At the end of the day these concerns are a little hypocritical since many other (non-digital) media will have more archival problems than digital prints. That’s why we have conservationists.” On a similar note, Pritikin points out, “Visual art comes in infinite forms, from pastels, oils, and pencil drawings, to sky writing and sand sculptures, some art only lasting nanoseconds.” So the issue of longevity is always relative.

Digital printing technology has made enormous progress over the last 15 years in terms of longevity, durability and color fastness. Today’s generation of pigment inks are far more stable than traditional watercolor paintings. One question that arises regarding preserving artwork is the need for fixatives. Williams held a pigment print on paper, one that had not been sprayed with any fixative, under running water and showed that it didn’t run at all. He doesn’t use fixative, but I have found that a spray fixative helps prevent pigment inks coming off my canvases when I work into them with acrylic gel medium or pastel.

Looking Ahead

“The stuff we don’t know is the most exciting stuff!” exclaims Noah Lang of Trillium Press. The best is yet to come. Looking ahead, Pritikin points out that “there are countless media for art, and, of course, all the media that haven’t been invented. God knows what they’re going to have 20 years from now.”



Jeremy Sutton is a San Francisco-based portrait artist, author and educator, working in combined media. Jeremy has a M.A. from Oxford University and studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford, and the Vrie Akademie, the Hague, the Netherlands. Jeremy has authored several books, videos and DVDs on Painter and digital art, the most recent being Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artist’s Handbook (Focal Press, 2005) and Painter IX Simplified for Photographers (six- DVD set). See www.jeremysutton.com and www.paintercreativity.com/.