The Fabulous Nate Lippens

We were lucky to have a superb substitute for our "Propulsion of Art in a Viral Age" course last week. Gretchen Bennett and friends were off to Miami for Art Basel (have a cocktail and a stroll on the beach for me).

Nate was the art critic for the stranger for years, he's writing for the P-I now if I remember correctly. Here's a sample of his writing, and its back to working for the final push of the semester :)

Assume the Position
A Critic's Unsentimental Education
BY NATE LIPPENS

"What are your credentials?" the gallery owner asks me. He's smiling. He's jocular, but he's also dead serious. Art-world humor--it's a killer. It's my first official art walk as this paper's art reviewer, not an Eames side chair critic, and it feels a little like speed dating: There's a lot of ground to cover and everything has potential. Are you the one? Or you?
It's also the first Thursday without longtime Stranger art critic Emily Hall. And while I had fully expected scrutiny and the second-best feeling of being the replacement cast for a beloved cultural doyenne, I was a little unprepared for the veiled--and just plain naked--hostility directed my way. When I weakly tell the gallery owner that I've written for this paper in every arts section for the last four years, he snaps, "Not good enough." It's played as a joke but it isn't. Then he adds, "Do you even like art?" I'm flustered and I fumble some lame response; I want to get away from him fast.

This interaction comes directly on the heels of another opening reception for a much buzzed-about show during which I met an artist who said, "Don't you write a country music column?" Yes. "What are you going to review--a quilt show?" Fair enough. That's funny.

While the personal reception hasn't been wonderful, what sticks with me at the end of the night is the feeling that I have trespassed into somewhere I don't belong and have been swiftly reminded of my place. The issue of elitism in the Seattle art community is something Emily Hall wrote about--and tried to debunk--in a farewell essay in last week's paper ["The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs," July 8]. "I'm so tired of... this insistence that art is somehow out of the common experience," she wrote, "that the pleasures aren't available to everyone." Her impliction is that elitism doesn't exist, that everyone is welcome at galleries. But based on my experience that simply isn't true. There is a mentality and an attitude about art--perhaps stemming from a protectiveness toward it, since it can be so easily dismissed--whose core conceit is exclusion: You don't have the tools to understand this; you shouldn't be here. Elitism has driven me away from the art world several times over the years--in Chicago, in New York, and, yes, in Seattle. (Curiously, in London of all places, I never encountered such starchiness.) And this has been true for many of my friends--smart, credentialed people. It's the real crisis--more than funding, more than education--that plagues contemporary American art.

Before July's First Thursday, I had never existed on any of these people's radars. I see art all the time, but I've usually avoided openings and gone to galleries on weekdays when no one is around and I don't have to be surrounded by the less-charming aspects of the art world. I'm not an artist and I didn't study art history or criticism. I didn't study anything formally. I cobbled together my own art education like a magpie, pulling from many different sources to find my way, and wandering down a lot of dead ends. I read (and still enjoy reading) Lynne Tillman, Peter Schjeldahl, David Rimanelli, Gary Indiana, Roberta Smith, and Holland Cotter--not to mention the inspiring (and inspired) New York School Poets, who brought their chatty abstraction to art writing. My version of an education, whatever its drawbacks, freed me from being stuck in a rigid theoretical rubric. I don't want to be frozen into a stance that dictates my opinions neatly, where expectation always becomes experience. You can turn yourself into little more than a prop plane of other people's ideas by adhering too closely to theory. It's a great (and sometimes helpful) place to visit, but it's too constraining to live there.

But none of that is the point. Or is it? If pedigree is truly what matters, then admit it once and for all that art is not for everyone--that it's for the rich, the blue-chip collectors, the lavishly educated. And stop asking the rest of us to care, to nurture, fund, and support it. If you think we are beneath understanding art, then don't ask us to revere it.

Last week, Hall, quoting art critic Dave Hickey, wrote that art in this town should be more like cocaine and less like penicillin--more intellectually decadent and less curative. And while I agree with her that art shouldn't be a prescriptive, what she didn't mention is that this town is buried in art cocaine. People are paranoid, they talk all the time, and they have nothing to say.

Just observe the strange parade at First Thursday: bobbleheaded girls, yammering on cell phones, in low-slung jeans with dorsal cleavage showing, standing beside a young man in a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, next to someone having an insular, sibilant art-world conversation (artists say meaner things about other artists than any critic ever would). It's glorious and uncomfortable, communal and fractured, with people oohing over work that I think is crap and whizzing by the stuff I think is transfixing.

I love those moments, especially when they pry open the gap between thought and expression, when the work slips the noose of easy description, when it flatters writers by making them think that it needs them to translate, to capture--but it's only a cock tease. Art doesn't need a writer. It does need a viewer. And that's where I will write from: What does it look like? Why am I looking at it? What is it doing and does it succeed?

I've never articulated it this plainly but I suppose this is my mission statement: I want to go out and report back. My allegiance, as it were, is to the reader, to the layperson. Can I really recommend that show? Separate of connections, pedigree, social life--is it good?

Perhaps this is what I should have conveyed to the gallery owner who took so much delight in deciding I was unqualified to think about the work he had on sale: I don't care if you went to Columbia or grew up in a trailer by the Columbia River, I'm interested in the work. I'm very much aware that an artist's background directly influences their work, but it shouldn't be the only thing supporting it. I don't want to have to see the strings. Everything you need to know should be in the work itself.

At the end of First Thursday I'm exhausted, a little wounded but not too much worse for the wear. Art gives way to a complicated experience; it's one of the few things about which we aren't told directly what to think, and that can be intimidating. What's damning--not to mention disheartening--is when you're told you're not allowed to think about it. Art is also, for me, a source of wonder and mystery, and its seductive pull keeps drawing me back to it, elitism be damned.