celsblog

2008-12-31T19:53:00.000-08:00

Eve Ensler on Sarah Palin

2008-10-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

Read this via e mail and had to post~

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for "The Vagina Monologues", wrote the following about Sarah Palin.

Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this
choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover.
But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution
and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered.
Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be
the next president of the United States . She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S. , but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies
to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans.
It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent
on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008

the Choice

2008-10-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors

Very good reading about our presidential nominess and the state of affairs.

Obama and the Palin Effect

2008-09-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

Holy Moly, look at what Deepak has to say about Obama and Palin. Link to article is above.

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:
--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.
--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.
--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

How to Think

2008-08-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

While surfing/researching for my inventory project I came across this blog posting.

How to Think
Managing brain resources in an age of complexity.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day. The act of making the plan alone is worth it. And even if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to be learning something.

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things. Then, find the things that are not dependent on anything but have the most dependents, and finish them first.

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you've done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.

10. Keep it simple. If it looks like something hard to engineer, it probably is. If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will work better, be more reliable, and have a bigger impact on the world. And learn, if only to know what has failed before. Remember the old saying, "Six months in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes...)

The second practical note: I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "How to Think." Ed Boyden's Blog. Technology Review. 11/13/07. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/21925/).

From Early Adopter to Early Discarder

2008-08-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

From the NY times a few weeks back. Click on the title above for a link to the article.

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.

No, Not Here, That's Not Possible - Why Can't Artists Be Artists at SAM and the Frye?

2008-08-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

I was at my desk in the collections dept. when Jen Graves' intern showed up to inquire about painting in the museum. At first I was cranky, then realized how wistful and frankly envious I am when I go to major museums in the east and see painters actually painting from masterworks and ask myself why the hell haven't I done this?

Nice article, text below and link to it is also above when you click on the title.

No, Not Here, That's Not Possible
Why Can't Artists Be Artists at SAM and the Frye?
by Jen Graves

The first painting you encounter in the blockbuster traveling show Inspiring Impressionism at Seattle Art Museum this summer is not an impressionist painting. And it's not an older, "master" work—by an artist like Velázquez, Titian, or Hals—either. An exception was made to start the show with this otherwise unremarkable 1912 canvas by the little-known artist Louis Beroud because Beroud's painting, An Evening in the Louvre, directly illustrates the theme of the exhibition: artists learning from other artists, often by painting copies while standing right in front of them in galleries. In An Evening in the Louvre, a whiskered, white-haired Louvre janitor is beginning his work for the night, cleaning up after copyists in the gallery, whose easels and unfinished oil copies await the artists' return in the morning. This is part of how great artists learn, even artists who abandon tradition, the show reminds us. There's example after example of the impressionists' copies of master works in Inspiring Impressionism.

Well, SAM may support the premise of this show—but only in theory. SAM is the only stop on the exhibition's national tour, which also stops in Denver and Atlanta, that universally forbids painting in its galleries. The Stranger sent an intern, John Borges, to the museum posing as a great-artist-in-training, with paints, a palette, a drop cloth, and a traditional French easel, and he was escorted straight up to the administration offices and told what he wanted to do was impossible. "It seemed like the guard was rooting for me," Borges said afterward. But no dice.

Even as great historical European museums and many leading and smaller American museums allow painting in the galleries, SAM says it can't.

"We can't be all things to all people," Lauren Mellon, SAM's chief registrar, told me later. "Having a copyist program is very labor-intensive, and we don't have the resources to do it."

With last year's announcement by Mimi Gates that a massive influx of donations of art would catapult SAM to the status of "major museum," and given the fact that SAM still has an additional physical expansion built into its future plans in the new building it shares with Washington Mutual, will there ever be a time when SAM could accommodate copyists?

"It is not practical for this institution," Mellon said flatly.

Resistance like this makes Gary Faigin crazy. Faigin is an old-fashioned painter and artistic director of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. He's always trying, to no avail, to get his students in to paint at SAM—and at the Frye Art Museum, a Seattle repository for late 19th-century and early 20th-century German and Austrian painting.

"It's just an attitude thing," Faigin said. "The older museums are just more hip to the fact that this is part of the deal—it's part of your service to make this possible. The idea that it puts the art at risk, or that it blocks other visitors, or the chemical smell—well, all of that that seems reasonable if you started out feeling like you didn't need to do it. If you consider it a part of your mission, you work it out, just like all these other museums."

Both Mellon and Frye registrar Annabelle Larner said the European tradition is only practiced in a few major museums in the United States, those with extensive resources. (The Stranger's intern was bounced even more emphatically from the Frye.) But that's not really true. A quick search revealed copyist programs—programs that allow individuals into the galleries in order to copy in wet mediums—at the following museums: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, along with the ones you'd expect—the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The Art Institute of Chicago allows students of its school to copy. The High Museum of Art permits the practice for special occasions (usually for school groups)—special occasions like Inspiring Impressionism, where the show started its tour last winter. A class of students copied a Murillo from an earlier exhibition of Louvre paintings. Their copies were exhibited concurrently with Inspiring Impressionism.

When it comes to resources, a copyist program can be done on a shoestring—as at Denver, where a small portion of an education department staff member's time includes overseeing the vetting of applicants. The most extensive program, at the National Gallery, where 10 easels are maintained and loaned out, still amounts to only about a quarter of a full-time job, according to the current manager, Carol Nesemann.

On a trip to Vienna this summer, Pamela Belyea, Faigin's codirector at Gage and his wife, happened to see a copyist drop her paints to the floor in the vaunted Brueghel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. "Nobody batted an eye, they just wiped it up," she said. "It is ridiculous how challenging it is to find an avenue for art students to copy at the Seattle Art Museum or the Frye Art Museum. As a museum, if you actually believe you're creating a community of artists, then you have to crack the door open a little."

Considering that there probably isn't a single room in an American museum as precious as that room packed with Brueghels—or very few—why are some American museums so uptight?

"That's a good question," said Portland Art Museum director of collections Donald Urquhart. He quickly added that he didn't think "uptight" was necessarily the right word—Portland Art Museum forbids copying in paint, too. So do the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty. All three institutions say they're protecting their art and their patrons.

There are risks and irritations involved in copying. Paints could splatter, rickety easels could fall into works of art, and other visitors' views could be blocked. But that's why museums control the terms of their copy programs. Along with each permit comes a long list of rules and regulations. The only universal rule is that copyists cannot use canvases the same size as their subjects—that would be forgery.

Other rules vary, but most include stipulations about remaining a certain distance from the art, using approved easels, working only during certain hours when museum traffic is light, and relocating if another visitor asks. No extra guards are deployed to watch a copyist, but regular guards know and enforce the restrictions. Copyists are only allowed to work on one painting at a time, and the object of a copyist's work is agreed upon in advance. Museums only control copyrights to works they own, so copyist programs apply to objects in the museums' own permanent collections. If SAM allowed copying, for instance, you still wouldn't be able to copy the visiting impressionists, but you could make versions of SAM's big Sargent, its Bierstadt, its Cranach, or its newly acquired John Singleton Copley.

The National Gallery has regular copyists, from the woman who polishes off copies of impressionist paintings to give to her children, to the serious hobbyist who spends a couple of years on a single Dutch painting. Mellon, SAM's registrar, knows these people because she managed the copyist program at the National Gallery before she came to SAM. Still, she says, the galleries are too small and the art turns over too regularly even in the collection galleries for a community like that to develop at SAM.

Copying, apparently, is a polarizing subject. It does tend to come down to those who see it as part of a museum's job and those who don't. Mary Suzor, director of collections management at the Cleveland Museum of Art, says it's a small but vital part of Cleveland's commitment to education. She has been at museums with copyist programs for 25 years and has never heard of a damaged artwork. "It's a program that takes a certain amount of time and energy to see through, but the people who want to be copyists are motivated for all the right reasons, and they really want to do whatever needs to be done to follow the rules," Suzor said.

It's notable that the larger museums that disallow copying are on the West Coast, where museums are younger and less tied to European traditions. They also have fewer significant works of old art. Copying may seem like a stodgy, outdated, white-guy thing to do, but forbidding it also smacks of imperialism—of a second-rate king hoarding the few treasures he has. And who's to say that being anachronistic is the same as being conservative? Seattle's most adventurous museum, the contemporary Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, does consider requests from copyists. After all, an artist in the galleries is a profound symbol: It demonstrates that a museum is part of the messy life cycle of art, not a graveyard.

jgraves@thestranger.com

Hector

2008-08-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

Hector passed away peacefully at 9.55 am Monday, August 4th, 2008 at the vets office.
You were the best little dog and I will miss you and think of you often. No more pain sweet one.

We are doing okay, it is sad to watch little Peeper look for him every day.

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge
When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food and water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable. All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.

The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing: they miss someone very special to them; who had to be left behind. They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. The bright eyes are intent; the eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to break away from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster. YOU have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Got $2,200? In this world, you're rich

2008-08-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

From MSN, click on the title above for a link to article.

A global study reveals an overwhelming wealth gap, with the world's three richest people having more money than the poorest 48 nations combined.

The richest 2% of the world's population owns more than half of the world's household wealth.

You may believe you've heard this statistic before, but you haven't: For the first time, personal wealth -- not income -- has been measured around the world. The findings may be surprising, for what makes people "wealthy" across the world spectrum is a relatively low bar.

The research indicates that assets of just $2,200 per adult place a household in the top half of the world's wealthiest. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world, just $61,000 in assets is needed. If you have more than $500,000, you're part of the richest 1%, the United Nations study says. Indeed, 37 million people now belong in that category.

Half live on less than $2 a day
Sure, you can now be proud that you're rich. But take a moment to think about it, and you'll probably come to realize that the meaning behind these numbers is harrowing. For if it takes just a couple of thousand dollars to qualify as rich in this world, imagine what it means to be poor.

Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day. The three richest people in the world –- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú -- have more money than the poorest 48 nations combined.

Even relatively developed nations have low thresholds of per person capital. For example, people in India have per capita assets of $1,100. In Indonesia, capital amounts to $1,400 per person.

The study's authors defined net worth as the value of people's physical and financial assets, less debts.

"In this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital," the authors say. "Although capital is only one part of personal resources, it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly on economic development and growth."

That said, it's interesting to look at how those at different economic levels manage their capital.

Property, particularly land and farm assets, are more important in less developed countries because of the greater importance of agriculture and because financial institutions are immature.

The study also reveals the differences in the types of financial assets owned. Savings accounts are strongly featured in transition economies and some rich Asian countries, while stock and other types of financial products are more commonplace in Western nations.

The authors say there is a stronger preference for saving and liquidity in Asian countries because of lack of confidence in financial markets. That isn't so much the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, which have private pensions and more-developed financial markets, they say.

High incomes, negative net worth
Surprisingly, household debt is relatively unimportant in poor countries because, the study says, "while many poor people in poor countries are in debt, their debts are relatively small in total. This is mainly due to the absence of financial institutions that allow households to incur large mortgage and consumer debts, as is increasingly the situation in rich countries"

Meanwhile, "many people in high-income countries have negative net worth and -- somewhat paradoxically -- are among the poorest people in the world in terms of household wealth."

But let's not feel too bad about ourselves, even if we do have a negative savings rate. The average wealth in the United States is $144,000 per person. In Japan, it's $181,000. Overall, wealth is mostly concentrated in North America, Europe and high-income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90% of total world wealth.

The world's total wealth is valuated at $125 trillion. Although North America has only 6% of the world's adult population, it accounts for 34% of household wealth.

So be grateful for where you live in the world; it directly correlates to how much you have. But don't bask in superiority: The fastest-growing population of wealthy people is in China.

Look out when this population transitions from saving to spending. It's going to dramatically change the composition of the world economy, and it may just help prevent the world from becoming more of an plutocracy than it already is.

Renaissance

2008-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

From the wonderful Robert Genn

Renaissance means "rebirth." It's a term that refers to the intellectual and artistic movement that began in Italy in the 14th century, culminated with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael in the 16th, and has influenced thinking and creating ever since. The art historian Ian Chilvers has characterized it as "the time when Medieval turns into Modern and the religion-dominated world of the Middle Ages gives way to a culture more responsive to the individual." It has come to mean openness to change, to rethinking, and to the examination and often reinvention of more classical forms. These days, it seems we are living through a renaissance of realism in a world traditionally dominated by abstract expressionism. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, for example.

More than anything, renaissance is an attitude that transcends times and places. For creative people, a minor renaissance happens every day as we reassess yesterday's work and adjust our thinking to both its needs and our personal inclinations.

Would-be "renaissance artists" try to range widely in their interests, understanding, and capability. They do many things, know how to quickly research the information they need, do not necessarily follow the recipes of others, and are rather in love with the business of finding out for themselves. They both respect the past and contrive to discover the future. And just like Giotto, Pisano and Donatello, as well as the three guys mentioned above, "renaissance thinking" is learned.

The way I look at it, the idea of renaissance has eight great principles that just might be worth thinking about:

Curiosity as a way of thinking
Suspicion of authority and conventional wisdom
Respect for intelligently filtered history
Aspiration to higher levels of achievement
Vision for renewed potential in all things
Tendency to invent private systems
Reinvention and perfection of former skills
Accepting the challenge of the difficult

PS: "Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do." (Lucian Freud)

Esoterica: I'm laptopping you from the shade of massive plane trees on the ramparts of a defensive wall that surrounds Lucca, Italy. Cooling breezes flow in from the Ligurian Sea and the air is filled with ancient wonder and present curiosity. This is Giacomo Puccini's town, and tonight there will be a concert in one of the cathedrals now converted to a music venue. My daughter, Sara, is living here in a 13th century stone building where she is painting a new series.

Reflection

2008-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

From Robert Genn's weekly letters~

In this remote cabin the cellphone never vibrates and my only companion is a solitary cabin-mouse on a regular route, checking and rechecking points of interest, sometimes deviating off the track to inquire of something new. While painting, I'm reflecting on the crazy parallel universe of art dealing and art speculation. What has my daily plodding got to do with what happens to the stuff I make?

These thoughts have been stimulated by a book I brought with me. The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace seems to be a metaphor for art's secondary market--art aficionados, collectors, speculators, dealers and the fine-art auction business in particular. The book is about the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold--a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux, supposedly once the property of Thomas Jefferson when he was a young ambassador in Paris. Found bricked-up in a Paris cellar by a shady German wine merchant and collector, it was sold at Christie's in London in 1985 for $156,000.00.

Like a lot of high-priced art, the bottle is essentially undrinkable.

A few bottles are actually worth opening. Well-heeled, big buck guys get together for annual "tastings." Some tastings are called "horizontals" --all the wines available from different Chateaux from a certain year. Others are "verticals"--all the wine from a single vineyard for a series of years--say 1804 to 1927. Yep, sets of these old wines can be assembled by attending auctions and hanging out in the right cellars. In the expensive process of assembling, and the snobbish business of claiming the better palate, a kind of divine madness overtakes these guys, setting the ground for all sorts of tomfoolery and fakery. Bottles are topped up with younger wines and whole new antique vintages are concocted in found empties.

All this has nothing much to do with the wineries. Like artists, the vintners tend to their grapes, protect them from pestilence, oversee timely harvests, take care with pressing and bottling and send them out into the world hoping to make an honest buck. Then, depending on rarity, provenance and perceived quality, the speculation boys take over. Sometimes it takes a hundred years for all the stars to line up. But they do. Plonk or not, it takes these passionate characters to make things happen.

Best regards, Robert PS: "You can almost taste the wine that turns so many rational people into madmen." (Buzz Bussinger)

Esoterica: In the wine game, most of the tasters spit. Otherwise they'd be drunk as skunks. In the art game, obsolescence isn't as instantaneous. It takes time for art to win palates, and time to devalue as well. While it's okay to think ahead to tomorrow's tastes, and prepare as best you can if you must, the artist's job is to live in the now and to simply strive for maximum quality as he or she sees fit. Somehow the best lesson right now is the dedication and persistence of that mouse. I'm thinking he has a rather nice life in spite of all the traps that lie ahead.

World of World of Warcraft

2008-06-26T21:40:00.001-07:00

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play

"Painting is Dead"

2008-06-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am so, so tired of crtics/curators who still laboring under the outmoded conviction that painting is dead. Haven't we dealt with that in the last 100 years? God seems alive and well in the hearts and minds of many, Nietzsche couldn't completely kill him off now could he.

Our critics and art writers in this town always leave me with an unusual taste, kinda like biting on tin-foil. What got me riled this morning? This did, the review of UW's 2008 MFA exhibition, http://dangerouschunky.com/notebook/
hmmmm don't they say painting is dead every year? Scott Lawrimore who rarely shows painting at Lawrimore project...the painting show mounted the last year was one of the most intersting things I have seen there, went back 3 times.

"Painting is dead" returns 20,300 results on Google.

Hello people, paiting cannnot make a comback because it has never left. Here's a random article from the 90's. This may be over 10 years old but it is still true.

"So what do these numbers tell us? Like it or not, they say that painting is still the main currency of the art world (which is probably why people get so worked up over it). While the current house style of the art world is late-late Conceptual art, if you go even slightly outside the art world, painting is still art's ambassador. In fact, when there is no dominant painting movement, people at large seem to find it difficult to have an uplifting sense of the art scene."

FindArticles > Art in America > Oct, 1994 > Article
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n10_v82/ai_15821901/pg_2?tag=artBody;col1

A year in the life: tropic of painting - painting, various artists, various galleries, New York, New York - Critic's Diary - Cover Story

Jerry Saltz
A wide-ranging look at the 1993-94 season reveals that, despite rumors of its death, painting is alive and well in New York, where stylistic variations continue to flourish.

Assume the Position

For a medium supposedly on the wane, painting certainly was in evidence last season, and maybe even impressive, too. Last spring when I told people I was writing this article tracking painting over the course of the 1993-94 season, I got strong reactions. Essentially people divided into two groups - let's call them the left and the right. On the left people said things like, "I hate painting," "Painting is in trouble," or "Painting is out of it" - all, obviously, variations on the old "painting is dead" position. Meanwhile, on the right (roughly equal in number), people bluntly told me, "Right on, man - defend painting," "I hate political art," or "When are people gonna learn to look again?" This camp waits for the triumphant "return of painting." Both sides need to get a grip on the fact that painting can never come back. The reason painting can never come back is that it never left. Both camps are disconnected from reality.

From early September 1993 through early July 1994, I kept track of all the shows in 85 New York galleries: some uptown, some midtown, the majority in SoHo, nearly all of them listed in the Gallery Guide, and all regularly exhibiting contemporary art. Charting their monthly shows on a large five-page, color-coded graph, I counted and tracked 610 exhibitions. Of these, 240 (or 39.34 percent) were solo painting shows by living artists. If two-person or group painting shows, museum shows and exhibitions by deceased painters are added, the number grows to nearly 50 percent, with the remaining exhibitions divided between sculpture, photography, video, gallery group shows, theme shows and sundry installations.

So what do these numbers tell us? Like it or not, they say that painting is still the main currency of the art world (which is probably why people get so worked up over it). While the current house style of the art world is late-late Conceptual art, if you go even slightly outside the art world, painting is still art's ambassador. In fact, when there is no dominant painting movement, people at large seem to find it difficult to have an uplifting sense of the art scene.

This doesn't mean that painting is the "going thing," it just tells you that it's not an "already gone" thing. It's true that quantity doesn't equal quality and that proportionately there are as many bad painting shows as there are bad shows of sculpture, photography or whatever. But the fact that so many people in the New York art world are arguing about whether or not painting is dead shows how backwards things can sometimes get in the so-called center.

Look at some of the big galleries: nine out of ten shows at Gagosian's uptown gallery were devoted to painting or drawing. Six of eight shows at Robert Miller, six of seven at Emmerich, three of five at Mary Boone, and five of seven at Pace's downtown gallery were painting shows. Tony Shafrazi showed only painting, while a number of other galleries exhibited almost only painting: Jason McCoy, Frumkin/Adams, Pamela Auchincloss, John Good, David Beitzel and M-13. A very cutting-edge gallery like Feature had paintings up in every one of its shows an year.

Painting In Today's World

Even though people say, "Painting is not equipped to deal with the problems of our time," the reverse may be closer to the truth: our times may not be equipped to deal with painting's problems. Painting can take a long time to get good at. It can be difficult for an artist or an art student to stick with a commitment to painting when most art schools - and the art world in general - discourage gradual development in favor of a "get there now" star system. People may have trouble looking at things that stand still. TV and film are mesmerizing, and painting often takes a long time to look at properly.

But anyone who thinks painting is dead makes the big mistake of thinking that the medium is the message. The medium is not the message: the medium is the medium and the message is the message. No one says, "The camera is dead." Painting has been declared "dead" by almost every decade of the 20th century; before that the camera was supposed to replace it, and before that the novel. In the modern era, painting has continually been subject to periods of adulation followed by periods of attack. Though painting has recently been through a down" phase, it was not so many years ago that Barnett Newman came up with his famous dictum, Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting." And has everyone forgotten that less than 10 years ago, painting was unarguably "it?"

Donald Judd once said, "Painting is like musical theater" - meaning it's made up of a set of conventions. And in a way he was right. But just because painting is based on a set of conventions doesn't mean it's limited. In fact, it's amazing how malleable and resilient it is. It's a "takes a lickin', keeps on tickin'" medium. No matter what people do to it (and they've done some pretty strange things), it comes out as painting. In addition, those "conventions" always seem to be expanding.

Newness is crucial to all the art of our time, not just painting. In his essay "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaire defined beauty as having two essential parts: "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent; and the other part which is the eternal and the immutable." He goes on to say that if you neglect "this transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss." In other words, without a sense of timeliness art gets stale fast. The great struggle for every succeeding generation of 20th-century artists has been to define its own idea of what constitutes "the new." With each generation, that process has accelerated. Art continues to be about breaking rules and breaching boundaries. However, by now, people not only seem addicted to the new, they want the now and the next.

The fact that so many people want to be part of "the next thing" has contributed to a general lack of psychic support for painting. Anything not brand new is thought old. They neglect the "immutable" part of the equation, so painting itself, with its long tradition, gets downgraded. Newness doesn't always have to be shocking. Newness is as newness does. It comes in many shapes and sizes. It can be technical, incremental or personal. It may be easier to find a new medium than it is to find new uses for an old one.

Because painting has had such a long and illustrious history, it's an easy target. Sooner or later every "new gun" in town comes looking for painting - to challenge it, to knock it down. Because so many people take aim at it, something unexpected has happened. Painting has become somewhat radicalized, even renegade or nomadic. It's not clear yet what effects this will have, but something is going on. Of course if painters get smug (the way they can), it'll be over before it starts. For now, painting is seen as "second dog" and this appears to be giving quite a few painters a sense of incredible license. It's okay that no one is rushing to embrace "the new painting," partly because that might snuff out the life in it, and partly because there is no "the new painting." Painting is moving in a series of covert actions, one artist and sometimes one painting at a time. Sometimes it quietly grazes, other times it moves in concerted counter-insurgency. For now, painting is in some sort of gestating Trojan-horse phase. It's huge, it's right out in the open, but no one knows what it's up to.

Instead of asking, "What's new in painting," it might be better to ask, "Are there any approaches, now, that seem particularly promising?" Beck, the musician who wrote and sang last year's anomalous hit song "Loser," said something in a recent radio interview that sounded really right if applied to art (not just painting). Asked about writing music and lyrics, he said, "It's harder to be real than it is to be ironic." Irony, which we've had reams of in all mediums, feels somehow false right now, or at least less useful. That is not to say you can't make "real" art about irony: look at the ways Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke work around painting's supposed impasse. Both artists split the arrow of irony, so that their works exist in the gap between passion and pose. "Realness" doesn't mean sincerity or sanctimoniousness. Awareness or directness might be other words for it, or clarity, or the vaunted Abstract-Expressionist term "authenticity" (minus the posturing or the pride), or that supposedly outdated term originality. What's involved is more than a snicker and less than a declaration. A scent of the marrow. This is a pretty flimsy idea to hang a case on, I know, and it lends itself to misinterpretation easily, but the closer to the core a things is, the better. If something is open and done freely it contains possibilities, it can grow; if not, it turns rigid, predictable and dull.

Naming Names

It's interesting to talk generally about painting, but what's really fun is to try to chart the large and unorganized field of last season's solo painting shows: to designate groupings, track ups and downs, or just get a slightly more structured sense of what happened in painting between September of 1993 and July of 1994.

It's true there were no predatory painting movements stalking around last season, no big surges, but there were a number of painters - especially women painters - looking for ways to make painting speak to them, or to address political, sexual or ethical issues in nondidactic terms. There were newer artists having their first shows, who added much to the mix, while a seasoned batch of older artists continued a life's work. There were 80's art stars run amok and one or two who looked good. There were '90s wannabees, natural talents, studied practitioners, and artists who don't usually try their hand at the medium, embarking on or returning to painting. Some painters had breakthroughs, others took wrong turns. Realism - on the rise of late - came in many forms: photo-based, surrealistic, expressionistic and cartoony. Abstraction was ironic, decorative, anthropomorphic, optical or "painterly." And each of these subgroups has its own subgroups. Several shows got people talking; others were real duds.

I divided about 135 of last season's 240 solo painting shows into 10 categories (some of which have subcategories) that roughly locate, for me, the artists' particular place in the nebulous cloud of painting. I had to have seen a show to include it in this overview, so my list is necessarily limited, even lopsided, due to taste, schedule, memory and sometimes chance. In a number of cases I had already reviewed the show for this magazine before the project was conceived, so those artists are cross-referenced and treated here in abbreviated fashion. All in all, the field is enormous. Even at this 10,000 or so words, I realize I am only scratching the surface. [Editor's note: So many of the artists in this article have been covered in these pages during the past season that we have omitted our usual cross references to exhibition reviews in other issues. We have cross-referenced to exhibition reviews in this issue only, and to articles in this and other issues during the past year.]

The categories themselves are nonbinding and a little arbitrary, most of the artists could fit in more than one. There could have been categories for newcomers, sleepers, failures, types of beauty, versions of Minimalism, long-distance information (artists not from the United States), angry women, sexist men, slackers and hackers - but in the end they didn't hold enough interest for me or didn't defend the artists in fair enough terms. So here goes.

Category I.

The Big Cats

They're all men and they prowled the '80s like kings of the jungle. Now, more than 10 years later, most of them have either settled down, settled in or settled for just keeping on. The fact that they are all men should come as no surprise because when it came to painting in the '80s, women were not granted this level of notoriety. As one woman remarked, "In the '80s men made the most money, in the '90s they get the tenured teaching jobs." A patriarchal structure persists in the world of painting. It was not so long ago that a woman merely picking up a paintbrush was seen as committing a transgressive act. Things have to open up. If painting does not let in more of the world, eventually the world will let in less of painting.

A cast of at least eight '80s art stars had gallery shows last season to varying effect. Often people mistakenly measure a whole season by these shows in a kind of "as the big cats go, so goes the art world" star-oriented illogic. Nevertheless it's important to remember how new the work of these artists once looked and how very little painting today carries that kind of newness.

The best of the Big Cat shows was Gerhard Richter's (Marian Goodman); Richter isn't an '80s artist at all, but that's when he became known to most Americans. Richter continues to make either electrifying, icy, vividly colored abstract paintings that look like photographs once removed, or blurry photographic-looking realist paintings that feel like a mixture of fog and paint. Here he showed giant blue and green abstract paintings; I went expecting a generic experience, but these knocked me out. There was only one realist painting, a small flower still life, but it held the room. Last season you could see Richter's influence coming out in the work of a number of young artists (see Categories V, VI, VII and VIII, subsection 4).

All of "the three Cs" of the Italian "transavanguardia" (remember that?) showed. As usual, Francesco Clemente (Gagosian uptown) looked the best; in fact better than he's looked for the last few years when his soggy depictions of life in the immaterial world looked all wet. Last season, in a series of seven tall, X-ray-like panels called "The Black Paintings," which were done as illustrations for Robert Creeley's 1993 poem "Life and Death," Clemente pulled a bit of his special magic out of the hat. The work felt like a visual homecoming without appearing rote. Speaking of rote, Enzo Cucchi (BlumHelman) seemed lost in repetition and ersatz paganism. Sandro Chia (65 Thompson) meanwhile was shooting blanks. He seems mired in a sappy, vaguely neo-hedonistic realism [see page 139].

On the American front, Julian Schnabel - true to form - had two shows. The first (Pace uptown) was bad and featured a group of confused, garish paintings with the words "Boni Lux" scrawled across each one (in a manner similar to the artist's "Fox Farm" paintings of 1989). Unfortunately each one was also outfitted in an ornate Baroque-looking frame. But while this first exhibition showed Schnabel at his weakest, the second (Pace downtown) showed off his considerable strengths: his penchant for choosing great surfaces to work on, his big yet intimate sense of scale, and his mythic sense of ego. Because Schnabel clutters the airwaves with so much superfluous stuff it's sometimes hard to keep in mind how good he can be.

In a series of paintings called "early product paintings," which he exhibited last winter at Gagosian downtown, David Salle - who was the subject of a New Yorker profile by Janet Malcolm in July - seems to have consolidated some gains. These paintings were handsome, almost tasteful, and resembled early Rosenquist - especially in the '50s and '60s nostalgia imagery Salle used: ads for cigarettes, tires, cars and liqueurs featuring wholesome-looking, happy heterosexuals. Salle still has a virtually unbeatable, really original sense of how to put a painting together, even if it has become a bit familiar. His technique of layering images and his deployment of the naked female body has informed and infuriated a generation of younger artists (see categories IV, V and VII) but this show lacked the moody, sordid glamour of the paintings involving tapestries he exhibited in 1991.

With Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat gone, Kenny Scharf (Shafrazi) is the last of the prodigious graffiti artists. His new paintings reflected the verdant plant life of Florida (where the artist spends much of his time) as well as his desire to return to his earner cartoony style, without forsaking the Warholian layering of advertising and newsprint, which were here relegated to the frames. The result was conceptually confused. Although Scharf's pictorial skins and incredibly sweet artistic temperament were in evidence, the main portions of the paintings looked disconcertingly like the work of Alexis Rockman (see category VI).

George Condo (Pace downtown) is a latter-day Julian Schnabel who likes to paint big and dumb but with huge dollops of irony. Condo (who is more like a "Kitty Cat" than a "Big Cat") utilized a little Surrealism, a little "Bad painting," a little para-European tastefulness and a whole lot of his previous commedia dell'arte circus realism in his new work. He recaptured some of his old sense of the bizarre and added a whimsical space (which is irradiated by a wonderful, clean light), but except for the large Visions of Saint Lucy, the overall impression was as transitory as that of a street performer.

Condo's predecessor as stylish dandy is, of course, Markus Lupertz, who had one of his best, most centered shows in years, last season at the Michael Werner Gallery. Lupertz's new paint-ings (a series called "Men Without Women - Parsifal"), were big, rather beautifully painted faces somewhat suggestive of his fellow German Neo-Expressionist Georg Baselitz. They also seemed to relate to the mother lode of German Expressionism, especially the work of Nolde and Jawlensky.

Category II.

The Museum Cats

The museums did a lot with painting last season and not just in terms of great modern masters like Joan Miro [see A.i.A., Sept. '94], who held forth at the Museum of Modern Art last fall. There were four shows by living painters in New York museums: three big names and a sleeper - and if you thought about it they made a great quartet of painting's subjects, techniques, worldviews and possibilities. Briefly (because we want to get back to the trenches, which the museums aren't), there were the paintings of Lucien Freud at the Metropolitan and Robert Ryman at the Modern [see A.i.A., Jan.'94]. Ryman dismembers painting's structure, while Freud does the same to puckered flesh. Both open cracks into something philosophical. And there were the hygienic, cool surfaces of Roy Lichtenstein in his Guggenheim retrospective [see A.i.A., May '94], which harmonized in unexpectedly enticing ways with the prescient, muffled, somewhat photographic surfaces of Vija Celmins seen earlier in the season at the Whitney [see A.i.A., Oct. '93]. The four of these artists, in any event, formed a nice backdrop for the season's painting offerings in the galleries.

Category III.

Keeping On With

Distinction

Meanwhile, all over town, quite a few artists - mostly over 50 - went on with the business of making paintings. Among them were Frances Barth [see page 133], Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis, Bill Jensen, Ellen Phelan, Per Kirkeby, Louise Fishman [see A.i.A., Sept. '93, June '94], John Moore, James Bishop [see A.i.A., May '94], Martha Diamond, Robert Kushner, Sidney Tillim, Jack Whitten, Robert Zakanitch [see Cover and page 129], William T. Wiley and Konrad Klapheck, whose carefully rendered neo-Precisionist paintings (at Edward Thorp) come on like a burst of fresh air. These artists have found remarkable ways to make it new" again and again. Most have been exhibiting regularly for more than 20 years. Unfortunately they sometimes attract the cheers of a rather conservative segment of the art world who think these painters represent a "return" to "quality" when what they stand for is ingenuity, diligence and skill.

Elizabeth Murray (Paula Cooper) had a good show of smaller-than-her-usual, knotty, shaped paintings and one terrific flat canvas titled Bounding Dog depicting a big all-over-the-place red canine. Murray's work makes the strongest case I've ever seen for a painting being irregularly shaped, bumpy and full of holes. She makes you wonder why more artists don't break format. Lately Murray's convoluted, personal cubism and crazily colored surfaces have clashed to good effect.

Mary Heilman (Pat Hearn) had a mini-retrospective [see A.i.A., Nov. '93] that tracked her quirky, off-hand abstraction from the plain, gridded one- and two-colored process paintings of the 1970s to the luminous, wonderfully brushy allover abstractions she's now known for. Sometimes Heilman's work sags - especially her shaped paintings - but when she's on, there's a wonderful

In a series of new paintings, all of which were double-paneled and shaped, Robert Mangold (Pace downtown) gave his familiar contrasts of drawn line and muted monochrome surface a freshly solemn beauty. Each work had a simply drawn oval or ellipse which rested on, leaned against or overlapped another oval or ellipse. This is a really good example of an artist limiting himself to a handful of elements with terrific results. The things Mangold is doing with incremental - almost intangible - adjustments of weight and placement are stunning.

What Mangold is to nuance and Ryman is to white, Chuck Close (Pace downtown) is to the face. In each of his new paintings (all were portraits of artists) Close continued his divide-and-conquer approach of sectioning off the canvas into a regular grid, then filling in every compartment with a tic-tac-toe series of Xs, Os and squares. There's thought in every square inch of these paintings. Every section becomes an abstract painting unto itself before joining with its neighbors to create the whole. The surfaces read Uke peacock feathers. It looks simple but the results are magical.

Finally, in addition to a show of his early work at Robert MiHer that looked very good, Alex Katz showed a series of beautifully serene, almost minimalist views of seashores and trees at Marlborough that were a departure from his usual portraits and figurative groups.

Category IV.

Our Bodies, Our Selves,

You Asshole

While these practiced professionals were pushing their art further, a number of younger artists - mostly women in their 30s - were proving that performance art, photography and sculpture aren't the only mediums capable of making art "about the body" or dealing with corporeal politics. Sexuality, gender, eroticism and developmental psychology have become subjects, as well, for painters who have zeroed in on the body, dissecting it in extreme close-up, deforming it, stylizing it or making it the literal site of confrontation. Many of these artists have an unapologetic in-your-face anger or audacity: a sense of "here we are, deal with it or die." Much of this work is accusatory.

Patricia Cronin's (Trial Balloon) pornographic photographs had been popping up in group shows for a season or so and I always thought them uninteresting as anything other than sexy pictures. Last year, however, Cronin unveiled a group of exquisitely rendered, small watercolor close-ups- of two women making love. The bodies were lovingly depicted in gynecological detail, seen with strap-on dildos while hands fondle breasts and tongues lick labia. The point of view of each image was that of one of the participants. In other words, Cronin painted things you could only see if you were doing them. This lesbian viewpoint may seem obvious, but so are most really good ideas.

Nicola Tyson (Trial Balloon, see my May 94 review), exhibited five somewhat unresolved medium-sized paintings depicting strange surrealist creatures with exactly drawn nipples, hips, vulva and breasts. The surfaces and colors are dull, but the sense of woman fantasizing woman gives the work a quietly "queer" point of view. In a two painting, one-person show, Lisa Yuskavage (Luhring Augustine) exhibited kitschy colored portraits of very young girls who have grossly distorted female bodies. She's a good painter but her color - hyperintense pastel shades - is better than her drawing, which is fairly unremarkable. But there's a subtle "look what you've done to us" undertow to these otherwise still-too-impenetrable works.

Nicole Eisenman [see A.i.A., June '94] (Jack Tilton) takes aim at everyone. She uses a gritty social realist style (she can really draw) and a cartoony line (she could easily be included in Category V, the cartooning category) to depict women in the act of hunting down, castrating, killing or harassing men; or women giving birth, going to the toilet, helping to unzip Daddy's trousers, being subjected to various kinds of humiliation or sexual stimulation. In one work she parodies "The Big Cats," casting herself as a famous artist surrounded by a bevy of scantily clad "Nicole Eisenman assistants." Eisenman is over-the-top and out-of-control in a positive way. She's one of the looser cannons around, right now.

The invitation to Mira Schor's (Horodner Romley) show had one of the artist's paintings of a close-up view of female genitalia stylized as a semicolon. I don't know the connection between a semi-colon and vaginas but I know I'll never look at a semi-colon the same way. Schor also paints penises, breasts, holes and hair in a too tightly rendered style. Often these images are accompanied by or actually turn into text. As with early modernists like Klee and Kandinsky, Schor is determined to fuse language, representation and abstraction into a single vocabulary. At this point her goal may be more interesting than her actual painting - but there's no one else trying to do quite what she's doing except Suzanne McClelland, whose open, expressionist style is completely different.

Rounding out this category, Lari Pittman, who showed in a group exhibition at P.P.O.W. (and in Los Angeles last November), makes claustrophobically decorative paintings that feature stylized male sexual parts and acts, suggestive symbols ("69"), and a deadly prettiness that sneaks up on you. Julian Trigo (Luhring Augustine), born in Argentina, makes scratchy drawings of children at play who, on second look, appear to have cannibalistic impulses. Rita Ackermann (Andrea Rosen), who was born in 1968, paints little girls who have tiny budding breasts. Usually they're nude, or wear short-shorts or sometimes blood-stained underpants. Painted in simple black lines and set in weirdly abstract landscapes, these waifs smoke cigarettes, clutch dolphins or hold syringes. Ackermann is an odd combination of a lot of artists - Salle, Eisenman and Sue Williams among them - but her work has a real "look" to it and a complicated emotional temperature that could lift it above its trendiness. Marlene Dumas's (Jack Tilton) paintings of little children [see page 131] also fit in here, though the flat-footed ways they're painted leave me completely cold.

Category V.

Toon Time

This may be one of the most vital areas of contemporary painting. It could really be called The Peter Saul Category" after the godfather of wild, cartoony realism. Not only was Saul featured in the Whitney's "Hand-Painted Pop" exhibition last fall, where his early paintings looked surprisingly fresh, he also showed (at Frumkin/Adams) a number of recent Day-Glo distortions of John Wayne Gacy in the electric chair or Jeffrey Dahmer wired up in said chair while being force-fed by a policeman. Saul is the Warhol of Toon Time.

The cartoon continues to be one of the most ubiquitous influences in abstract, figurative and semi-figurative painting. Some of this work is covertly political and also deals with the body. Usually it is highly colored, ferociously wrought, and sometimes a little hard to take. An exception might be Phillip Smith's (Jason McCoy) work. His nearly monochrome surfaces are etched with cartoonlike symbols and figures that seem to tell stories of creation and the fortunes of life. More pictograph than cartoon and more restrained than most of the artists in this category, Smith is off to the side of things but in the thick of an interesting visual problem. And Carl Ostendarp (in several group shows last season) brings the cartoon to abstract art in the form of stylized paint blobs and cartoonlike exclamations. Chuck Agro's (White Columns) vividly colored glossy paintings of single bulbous figures have a great physical presence.

Christian Schumann's (Postmasters) first one-person painting show in New York was one of the best of the season. In it he exhibited a series of multi-colored, patchworked paintings with cartoonlike images and words. What makes Schumann so good is not only his inventive ways of making a painting. He's also got something of Salle's sense of a picture (by way of Basquiat). Transferred images, crinkled skeins of paint, found bits of paper and beautiful grounds of opaque color make up the surfaces of his paintings. His subject matter consists of comic-book-like figures which he appears to have plundered, then subjected to his own brand of permutation, many of them engaged in funny, aberrant or horrific acts. There's a raw energy and an undermining sense of humor to Schumann's work He's a natural; there's nothing forced about his work.

Amy Sillman (Lipton Owens [see page 139]) also has a touch of the facile natural about her, even if she's not as involved with as many different ways of making a painting as Schumann is. Her paintings have colorful, calligraphic, highly rendered images that tell veiled stories of her own life. Like Salle, Sillman layers her images on tasteful, attractive fields that can look like wallpaper, textiles or quasi-modern paintings from the 1950s. Sillman's work has verve and feels authentic, but her influences are keeping her a notch or two away from something new.

Thomas Trosch (Jose Freire, see my June '94 review) paints elegant ladies and gentlemen placed in lush gardens or in sumptuous rooms outfitted with only the "finer things." Trosch paints like a combination of Florine Stettheimer and Milton Resnick, but he thinks like a Disney cartoonist high on old issues of Vogue magazine. There is a quaint loveliness to Trosch's work, even if his images aren't that memorable.

Katie Merz's (Jack Tilton) paintings veer closest to actual cartoons. Often she deploys dozens of little drawings of rageful or discombobulated women in a single work. Other times a painting might feature one toonlike character. Merz is less interesting than Sillman because her work breaks down into parts too easily, and her emotional content isn't as palpable as Ackermann's or Eisenman's, but she does have a nice, nervous line and a snazzy sense of visual style.

The purest and the sweetest artist in this category, Lily van der Stokker Feature [see page 132]), applies frothy, happy abstract shapes that resemble thought balloons directly on the wall in what looks like magic-marker or Flair pen pinks, violets and blues. In her own way, van der Stokker skewers that unique brand of joy Americans wear on their sleeve. She shoots that bright yellow smiley face between the eyes with bullets made of sugar.

Category VI.

Weird Realism

The photograph and the expressionist figure insinuated realism into the art of the '80s. In the '90s, realism cut itself loose from these constraints and shows signs of becoming a subtly and often disturbingly manipulated genre. People don't expect to see things happen in a realist mode, partly because there is still a quiet prejudice against h, so of course they do. In addition to that, it appears as if numbers of people are about to abandon their allegiance to theory. You can almost smell it. More and more, we read critics, once bound by theory, who disparage it, calling for a more comprehensible criticism and art. My guess is that when they turn to painting, one of the first places they will look will be in the realist category. The critic-curator-artist Douglas Blau - who had two shows last season of his framed photographs - implored, "Let's get to content any way we can." Obviously all art has content, but the spirit of what Blau said rings true to many in the art world. People want their art to be "about" something. They seem tired of things formal, theoretical and of course ironic.

Toba Khedoori (David Zwirner) lives in Los Angeles; she works in the crucial blind-spot between Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter. She paints on huge sheets of white backdrop paper [see p. 137] and pins the finished works to the wall. The bottoms sometimes curl up, the edges are tom or wrinkled. In one work, measuring approximately 10 by 20 feet, she renders a giant yellow construction crane. Her surfaces, which are smudged, gritty and covered with a thin, translucent layer of way, work to great effect with the exactly rendered crane. Her paintings create a real vacuum, as meaning rushes out and the attempt to "read" them rushes in. She's great with scale, and her intelligence about making a painting borders on the philosophical. You can get lost in her works the way you do in a movie; they're absorbing to look at, yet their material presence is wonderfully indeterminate.

Peter Doig (Gavin Brown's enterprise), who lives in London, is also interested in the no-man'sland between photography and painterly painting. In spite of the fact that Doig combines styles (and is loyal to none) his work lacks any sense of archness or strategy. He acknowledges the photograph without imitating it or critiquing it. One large landscape painting - which looks like a huge out-of-focus postcard of a ski resort - features a group of green trees that melt into an abstract mass, while little colored daubs of paint double as skiers. Doig's paintings are intimate and banal, yet they also have a mesmerizing, cinematic sweep.

John Currin's show (Andrea Rosen) got a lot of people worked up. Currin, who has been painting oddish realistic portraits of middle-aged women, girls, old women and sometimes men, turned more narrative and menacing in this show. Some thought it was disgusting and sexist, others thought it was among the better shows of the year. One work depicted a blond, bearded, gaunt-looking older man with a much younger, buxom Hopperesque woman. Currin is not a latter-day Fischl. His style is exact but not photographic, illustrative but not commercial. He keeps his distance - more than he intends to. You make up the narratives. Obviously the ones that some people imagined were pretty sordid. These were Currin's best paintings and his most peculiar to date. In his next show, I'd like to learn more of what these images mean to him.

Alexis Rockman (Jay Gorney) continued to hone a verisimilitudinous surreal/sci-fi illustrative style in a series of glistening paintings of his by-now-trademark mutant animals. This time they're set not in some prehistoric bog but in a sort of biosphere that seems adrift in space. I miss Rockman's former, looser style and long for him to reintroduce it somehow. Also these paintings felt very "male" - very "frogs and snails and puppy dog tails." Their intentionally creepy, horror-show subject matter might therefore limit his audience. Nevertheless he's very good in his big paintings, which seem more expansive and open.

Another offshoot of Weird Realism might be called Rogue Realism. Right now Peter Cain (whose genetic resplicings of cars appeared in two group shows last season) and Robin Lowe (seen in several group shows) stand out. Lowe's particular brand of realism is dense, compact and dead-on. He's no fantasist. His portraits of little children have the intensity of Alice Neel but none of her brushy, drawn unfinishedness. At first Lowe's work doesn't even look like it's new. It looks almost like academic realism. He has a sure, equalized touch and a psychological depth that make his work hum with possibility.

I'm still on the fence about Manuel Ocampo's (Annina Nosei) paintings, which look like circus posters for the Stations of the Cross by way of Wes Craven (the director of the Nightmare on Elm Street" movies). Ocampo depicts cockroaches, skulls and humans who seem to function on the cockroach level in politically tinged paintings. Hugh Steers (Richard Anderson) makes hazily colored, loosely brushed images of a man with AIDS [see A.i.A., June 94]. There is a haunted serenity to Steers's work, even if he does have a somewhat underdeveloped sense of technique.

Under the Weird and the Rogue runs a river that might be called "A Fragile Beauty" - ephemeral depictions of fairly traditional subjects. One artist to be found here is Taboo, who is something of a natural himself, he makes washy New York cityscapes that look glamorous, poignant and a lot like the kind of painting you see at sidewalk art shows. Maureen Gallace (Nicole Klagsbrun, see my Nov. '93 review), a sleeper, makes muffled serene landscapes that try to do with barns, boats, trees and sky what Morandi did with bottles. Jim Hodges (CRG) covered the walls of the gallery with little white paper napkins, each of which presented a drawing of a different flower. The whole conjured a vision of coffee shops, lost time, aloneness and daydreaming. April Gornik's nonspecific, atmospheric landscapes (Edward Thorp), which have shown little sign of growth over the past decade, try to be visionary and descriptive at the same time, succeeding only occasionally. Elizabeth Peyton (at the Chelsea Hotel, see my May '94 review) mounted a show of her delicate yet provocative drawings of historical figures based on her reading. Peyton's work has a wonderful lightness-of-being as do the incisive paintings and drawings of Billy Sullivan chronicling "our world" (Stux and Tom Cugliani). Jane Kaplowitz's vast "Gone With the Wind" mural covered a whole wall at Cugliani. Jeremy Dickinson's (Cohen Gallery) small, pristine paintings of buses are like illuminated manuscripts. As I don't connect to them, I don't know how to write about the fantastic figurative worlds of Robert Yarber (Sonnabend) except to say they're both Weird and Rogue.

Many of the artists mentioned just above build on a long tradition of painterly realism in postwar American painting. Two exemplars of that tradition showed last season: most impressively, Lois Dodd (Fischbach), who exhibited small landscapes (often snow scenes) from the past two decades, and Jane Wilson (Fischbach), whose stripped-down, Luminist scenes of land and sky bore a telling relationship to the work of Mark Rothko.

Category VII.

Conceptual Painting and

Appropriation

Some people make paintings to make paintings, other people make paintings to make a point. A motley crew of conceptually inclined painters has sprung up over the past few years, a few of whom have gotten rather good at making their points as visually as possible. Artists in this category confront certain dangerous obstacles: the pit of political didacticism and the pendulum of theoretical dogma. If any of these artists ventures too far from the Path of Visual Thinking, their work can collapse into the ashes of irony.

Martin Kippenberger's paintings (Metro Pictures) are garishly colored and crudely painted. Usually he employs an accumulation of photographically derived images thrown together with the detritus of everyday life. Kippenberger changes styles from work to work (which must be fun). One of the paintings he exhibited in this mini-overview was actually a Jeff Koons liqueur ad painting that Kippenberger liked so much that he bought it, then exhibited it with his own name on the wall label. It's not exactly Rauschenberg's famous "erased de Kooning," nor is it Sherrie Levine doing Walker Evans, it's more like clowning around than picking a fight, a good-hearted slap on the back. Kippenberger is more interested in chaos than either destruction or anything egalitarian. That's what lifts him above all the other pan-stylists.

Deborah Kass (Jose Freire) doesn't want painting to die, she wants to introduce it to subversive subject matter [see A.i.A., June '94]. Kass exhibited a series of smallish, silk-screened takeoffs on Warhol's Chairman Mao paintings. Kass replaced Mao with Gertrude Stein and renames the series "Chairman Ma," after the ur-lesbian of modernism. Kass has no pretense to be formally original. Her achievement lies in the way she freshens up another artist's style with new meaning.

Guillermo Kuitca's "Tablada Suite" paintings (Sperone Westwater), which are based on a cemetery plan, are laid out as floor plans for huge structures: theaters, prisons, stadiums, etc. These intricate, nominally geometric grids of everyday modern fife imply thousands upon thousands of human beings, centuries of time and volumes of thought without depicting a single figure. Their overwhelming immensity as ideas is equaled only by the infinite hypnotic delicacy of their execution. Finding the grid - that staple of modernist abstraction - in real life, Kuitca returns it to paintings, infused with the sense of loss and hierarchy that are a part of that life.

Nicholas Rule's show was a disappointment (Paul Kasmin). I really like what Rule does. I'm not against change, but his new pieces - slight, washy abstract paintings based on the paths taken by hurricanes (not a bad idea) - were not up to the visual or intellectual level of his previous work. Worse still, if you didn't know what the paintings were about they didn't come across. Anytime you have to hang a show on an idea, you're in trouble. I still believe in this guy, though.

Gary Simmons, Ida Applebroog, Annette Lemieux, Komar & Melamid [see page 116], Dottie Attie, Byron Kim, Catherine Howe and Kay Rosen belong here as well. So does Glen Ligon (at Protetch), whose black-and-white text paintings address racial issues and are at once sobering and visually crisp. But before we leave this category we might do well to glance at the remains of those artists who steered too close to this area's obstacles: Adam Rolston (Fawbush), whose takeoffs on Warhol were vapid, and Lawrence Gipe (BlumHelman), whose attempt at shedding some light on 20th-century megalomania fell well short of its pretentious target. Sarah Morris's (Nicole Klagsbrun) paintings of words looked hopelessly caught in the spring of 1989. Their irony and archness is so empty and dogmatic that you can't help but think about all the other artists who have passed this way in the last five years. Finally, Lutz Bacher's (Pat Hearn) didactic appropriations of Vargas-girl pinups made no sense whatsoever.

Category VIII.

Abstract Painting:

Underdog or Uber Alles?

After two decades of story-telling, point-making or sermon-delivering art and pictures full of words, people may have lost some of the skills necessary for looking at abstract painting - for simply seeing what they see. (Indeed, not long ago I was at a dinner with a group of well-known artists and art dealers, all of whom professed to be "tired of abstract painting.") But formalism - or whatever you want to call it - is not dead. There are many ways you could divide the unusually crowded category of abstract painting: these are only four of them, and the second is the most problematic.

Sub-Section 1.

Mutant Greenbergian

Abstraction

Color Field painting, dormant and disparaged since the late 1970s, has been showing unexpected signs of influence, if not life, lately. A number of artists continue the reduction of painting to the essences that Clement Greenberg and the Color Field painters advocated. But some of those "essences" have gotten, well ... pretty strange: in fact, you could say they're popping out all over. This kind of painting has become physical and surface-oriented in ways Greenberg never imagined. Considering the thick Styrofoam waterfall paintings he exhibited last season - some of the bumpy projections must have extended almost a foot off the painting - Larry Poons (Salander-O'Reilly see page 130]), an arch Greenbergian himself, might be called a Mutant Greenbergian Abstractionist. This unlikely revival reminds us that as it is with artists, so it is with art movements: Never Count Anything Out.

A potpourri of different brushstrokes, spaces, colors and textures define the work of the English artist Fiona Rae. Rae is one of the most loquacious examples of Mutant Greenbergian Abstraction (hereafter referred to as M.G.A.). Her first show in the United States (John Good [see p. 131]) didn't live up to advance notices. Her work is a little stiffer and more self-conscious than you'd expect, given the elaborate conceptual framework it is supposedly built around (she might just as easily have gone into Category VII), but the most recent paintings, simplified with big Hans Hofmann-like blocks of color, show signs of a promising new direction.

The other extreme was taken by Elliott Puckette (Paul Kasmin, see my Feb. '94 review), who had one of the sweetest yet most austere shows of last season. In her first solo appearance, Puckette streamlined Pollock's alloverness into calligraphic lines and arabesques incised into painted wood. Lyrical, erudite and brimming with restrained emotion, Puckette's paintings read like abstract love letters.

Another first show, quasi-minimalist and not all that "Mutant," actually, was that of Sam Reveles (at CRG). In its severity his work flirts with classic Greenbergianism by way of Brice Marden (whom he once worked for) and Mel Bochner. Reveles's version of alloverness is a visceral accumulation of chaotic arching lines, usually on unprimed canvas or blood-red chromatic grounds. His work is packed with a pungent sense of full body contact. These marks manifest themselves as a series of whiplashes or sword flicks that are both controlled and violent, often given order by a faint pencil grid. Reveles's work has a smoldering erotic "thereness." (Interestingly, Julian Lethbridge - who appeared only in group shows this past season - uses a similar approach of letting marks accumulate, but Lethbridge's work has an elegantly reasoned, restrained power, as opposed to Reveles's steamy punch.)

Body contact of a different sort infuses Karin Davie's (Fawbush [see page 129]) curvaceous paintings, whose wavy, candy-colored stripes - derived from Op and Color Field - can have fun-house-mirror distortions as well as a surprisingly erotic twist. Writhing stripes of pink evoke form-fitting dresses, soft ice cream and Christmas wrapping paper. It's really quite an associative package. Davie's first show was sexy to look at even if it did fade quickly from memory after you left the gallery.

Ross Bleckner [see A.i.A., June '94] (Mary Boone) could just as easily be placed in the Realism category because of his romantic figuration, but his roots are in abstraction - or at least a '70s-based semi-abstraction - and his moody alloverness makes it possible to locate him here. Bleckner, who at a certain point in the mid-1980s was said to have influenced a number of younger abstract painters who were then exhibiting in New York's East Village, has been making mostly dark abstract-symbolist paintings for more than five years. Marked with the artist's by-now-trademark flashes of white fight, glossy surfaces and vague images of loving cups, birds or written names, Bleckner's paintings really are pretty. He doesn't seem interested in new ideas about beauty or different ways to make a painting; he relies on Gustave Moreau-like effects to produce certain calculated results. He achieves those results: the paintings are filled with sentiment and are elegiac; but at a certain expense. The work ends up feeling more melodramatic than dramatic.

Peter Schuyff (Paul Kasmin) is my "Just Can Me Angel of the Morning" artist: I like his work, but I don't usually talk about it. Schuyff has an individual sense of quirkiness that I admire, and his paintings are often fun to look at - if only to figure out how he gets his special optical effects to work. In his show this spring, however, he seemed to be going through the motions.

Other artists who rounded out this section of M.G.A. last season were David Dupuis, Rachel Finn, Mary Jones, Craig Fisher, Andrew Masullo (another sleeper), Cora Cohen, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Greg Kwiatek, Andrea Belag, Jacqueline Humphries, Gary Lang (whose brightly colored dense grids of space, at Michael Klein, looked good), Eva Lundsager (who more people should look at), and Lawrence Carroll (whose particularly shy versions of M.G.A. are evocative).

Sub-Section 2.

Abstractionism

This may be the kind of work that is helping to give painting a bad name. When people say, "Abstract art is boring," they might be referring to this type of abstraction. New York is quick to label other areas of the country regional, even provincial. But New York has its own regionalism and style. It's never talked about in mixed company, but there are panels about it, lectures, papers and whole issues of magazines devoted to it. Let's call it "Abstractionism." The only way I can think of to differentiate it from the rest of M.G.A. is to say that Abstractionism is "straighter" than M.G.A. and it has an unfortunate recessive "Save Painting" gene. Usually the Abstractionist comes up with a witty recipe or a particular formula: a brushstroke, a flourish of seductive pours and drips, a "signature" way of laying down paint - and repeats it over and over again, in a kind of mindless turf-protecting dance.

These artists make rules rather than break rules. It's amazing that something that started out as bold and open as abstract painting should in their hands end up so obvious and lifeless. Usually the work feels self-satisfied and more interested in gaining admittance to the Country Club of Art than in taking risks. Where artists in the other sub-sections of abstract painting want to throw Greenberg's pie in Greenberg's face, the Abstractionists just want a piece of the pie. The work is usually serious and has no sense of humor. These artists infiltrate the system easily. Collectors seem to find this work "understandable" because it purports to have "answers." Somebody ought to tell these artists that art doesn't answer questions, it asks them. The only thing that can be done about this type of painting is for the rest of M.G.A. to maintain a safe distance from it, in case its attitudes are catching. Generally the rest of M.G.A. seems to be outpacing these "straighter" Greenbergians. Exceptions to the above dim view might be Juan Usle and John Zinsser, both of whose paintings are "straight" but feel authentic; while painters like David Row, Cary Smith and Andrew Spence are in trouble, and are coming to look like Abstractionists through and through.

Sub-Section 3.

Garage Artists

Like Garage Bands, Garage Artists make their paintings with whatever's around: nails, string, chewing gum, Vaseline, yarn, rags or old underpants. They are more raw than their M.G.A. siblings and tend to flirt with a kind of ungainliness. But their work generally carries a gritty edginess. Joe Zucker, who was in a group show at Nolan Eckman, has to be counted a charter member: Zucker has found more ways to make a painting (cotton balls, pegboard, Rhoplex, string, netting, webbing ...) than just about anybody. Matthew Weinstein's recent paintings (at Sonnabend) were his best yet. He cut holes in the surface, painted the stretcher bars, tied things to the painting, and cut up and pasted little letters together to spell out lines from Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat" (in this last regard Weinstein is like Clemente, only played in reverse at the wrong speed). Thus Weinstein attains a kind of subject matter without being overly narrative. In addition to which the funny "ransom letter" style gave the work a nice folkish quality. Weinstein is pushing toward a personal vernacular abstraction. He needs one more push in order to fully escape the gravitational pull of the planets Terry Winters (Category X), Lari Pittman (Category IV) and Carroll Dunham (who was in a number of group shows and exhibited impressive drawings at Nolan Eckman). Dunham's work influences a host of younger artists, among them Amy Sillman and Christian Schumann.

More artists in this category: Fabian Marcaccio (whose paintings [see p. 102] sometimes spill over onto the wall from stretchers that can erupt into cancerous gnarls), Jim Isermann (who has used stained glass in his "paintings" and this year turned to sewing [see page 142]), Dona Nelson and Donald Baechler (both of whom have used old underpants and other bumpy items in their work), Jody Lomberg (a good artist who knits her paintings), Charles Spurrier (who sticks little brightly colored wads of chewing gum on his garish surfaces), Randy Wray (whose gooey surfaces could have been applied with a cake decorating tool), Jason Fox (whose paintings on sleeping bags look like prison tattoos by way of street graffiti), and Joe Leticia (who paints trompe-l'oeil patterns of plywood on plywood).

Sub-Section 4.

Mad Max Variations

There is a kind of abstraction that if it were human might be considered anti-social. It seeks automony and shuns "connection" or transcendence. A painter's version of "specificity," it is cold without being coy, distant without being unapproachable, difficult without being problematic. In a way it builds on some of the precepts of '80s appropriation and "simulation," but it's not so theory laden. It feels unbound, slightly outlaw. Here we find one of the more vexing artists around: Rudolf Stingel (who was in a couple of group shows), whose silver-orange monochrome abstract paintings look like Mutant Greenbergian Abstractionism on steroids or 'ludes. Stingel uses a simple step-by-step formula, which he's published, to make these "things." There's a tremendous coolness to the work that makes you think of Richter's abstract paintings. Stingel has also covered whole walls with bright orange carpeting, making the eye buzz.

Christopher Wool, who did not show last year, may have founded this category in the mid-1980s with his stark black-and-white abstract stencil paintings, and later with his paintings of words (one of which, Rat, was attacked in Morley Safer's "60 Minutes" segment bashing the art world). Another artist who belongs here is Dan Walsh. Edouard Prulhiere's work has a beautiful but tough sense of artificiality and forthrightness. I suspect he almost never uses a brush. His work looks mechanical but in very contradictory handmade ways. Perhaps because the gallery where he showed (Kubinski) closed not long afterwards, his exhibition went overlooked and under-talked-about. Damien Hirst's multicolored dot paintings, which have been seen at the Cohen Gallery, are as pretty as they are opaque, as dainty as they are deadpan and are purely "Mad Max." Mike Scott (Shafrazi) needlessly complicated his once austere art. Finally, Steve di Benedetto (Shafrazi), who once seemed very promising, combined a murky painter-liness with hard-edged optical effects. Like Scott, di Benedetto tried to do too many contradictory things. Both lacked a sense of resolution or clarity.

Category IX.

Crossover Dreams

Out on the margins of painting there's always a lot going on: artists coming in from the cold of sculpture, conceptualism or whatever, and artists departing from the canvas for points or surfaces unknown. There was quite a bit of crossing over and crossing back last year as painting, references to painting, and yearning for painting cropped up in places you'd least expect it.

Who would have thought it? Sean Landers (Andrea Rosen), the master of "I Gotta Be Me," correspondence-school art, letter-writing, self-flaggelation and self-promotion, took an unexpected leap from yellow legal pads to Abstract Expressionist-scale expanses of canvas. Reading became less of an issue, although the megalomaniacal doubt was still there to be read. But the looking got a lot more fun. Landers should also probably be given last season's "Howard Stern" award for upsetting the most people. The paintings are made up of running commentaries on the artist's problems with premature ejaculation, his breakup with his girlfriend, his encounter with a Greek woman whom he falls in love with outside a bar in Venice, and his craven desires for critical attention (he eventually made the cover of Artforum last spring). When I ventured that I really liked the whiteness and the open-wound feel of this show - how he lays bare certain hidden sides of the creative process and how "new" his work looks - two very p.c. critics (one man, one woman, both white) jumped all over me, saying, Who cares about the ravings of a straight white guy?" For them Landers is a latter-day "slacker" Julian Schnabel: they hate him, not just his work.

Another artist operating with "intent to paint" was Jack Pierson (Luhring Augustine [see page 135]), who previously excelled at beautiful, blurry, colored photographs, as-is installations and touchingly charged drawings, as well as word pieces made from the letters of old signs. But dominating his first show in this gallery was a group of all-blue oil stick paintings on paper that brought the "bluesy" aspect of Pierson's work to full chroma. Because the show itself was so stylized, people may have failed to appreciate what an accomplished sense of style the paintings had on their own.

Although Sol LeWitt's exhibition at Pace Downtown contained only 10 wall drawings (dating from 1970 to the present), it had a summarizing scope and encompassed the elaborate span of the artist's exploration of what is possible with a wall, a pencil, maybe some color, and an idea. The show was a real wow. This was one of the best shows of the year.

Dorothea Rockburne (Emmerich) also left canvas behind in her show of wall paintings [see page 110]. Like LeWitt, Rockburne covered gallery surfaces with images of curving lines arcing across rich expanses of powdery color. The works had a cosmological feel about them, like diagrams of the way forces interact.

Category XI.

Upping the Ante

Sometimes the most memorable shows of a season are not the best shows. They occur when artists move their work a little or a lot. It's great to see steps taken. It doesn't always mean the results are great, but the sense of effort and diligence makes us look a little harder and a little longer. In addition to the artists I will discuss below, a number of those I already have mentioned could have found their way into this category.

I've never really connected with Jonathan Lasker's work. A shape, some stripes, a thicket of tangled lines, slightly jarring color and a thick, casually applied surface: these are the ingredients that Lasker has manipulated for more than 10 years. He makes paintings of paintings that bear a striking resemblance to the "real thing." Although he obviously has a place in the M.G.A. category (not least because he helped form it), Lasker has progressively amplified the components of his art. His changeless but continually evolving style might make him a better artist than I thought he was. It wasn't so much that Lasker made a big move in his show last season at Sperone Westwater as ft is that his work has become more convincing. I still don't connect with it much, but I respect it a lot more.

Terry Winters's new gunky, gaudy-colored, dense paintings, his most abstract works to date (at Sonnabend [see p. 1301]), show him on the verge of what feels like a real breakthrough. It's as if Winters had gone inside the clustered pod shapes that drifted through many of his earlier paintings in order to reveal their coagulated structure. With a new Gothic sense of composition, never has his work looked so simultaneously beautiful and ugly, finished and unfinished.

David Deutsch was in only one group show all year (at Jay Gorney) but the three paintings he exhibited in it made a good impression. Deutsch is an artist whose work I always liked, especially his early paintings of landscapes dotted with strange surveillance tools. Then he became engaged in a protracted series of smaller, more conventional landscapes that I didn't like. The new paintings are better. One featured an allover grid of framed portraits of men who look like they once ran things. The painting had the feel of an observatory by way of a salon. It made it feel like Deutsch is "coming home."

Lisa Rayter (Petzel/Borgmann) wallpapered the gallery with her line drawings and then hung her paintings, Warhol-style, on top of them. Ruyter surprised me and spiced up her hyper-exact, analytic work, making it even colder - which is good in her case. Richmond Burton's paintings, seen at Matthew Marks [see p. 102], were better than the last group he showed in this gallery. Burton has a quirky personal sense of geometry which worked in one or two of these new paintings. Stephen Mueller (Annina Nosei) tightened his aqueous, visionary abstractions. The work had more resonance and more clarity.

Finally, Philip Taaffe took the decorative, as both concept and experience, to a new place. The new paintings in his spring show at Gagosian downtown showed the artist using motifs that evoke early modernist abstractions, Islamic tiles and grillwork, and European wrought iron, while also using natural forms like beetles and butterflies that have long been the staples of decorative design. Accumulating in small, delicate units, often consisting of cutout linoprints affixed to canvas, these large (sometimes too large) paintings have an understated, antiheroic grandeur. Perhaps signaling a new psychological complexity, the most recent painting in the show, Eros and Psyche, features a dense, irregular pattern of overlapping arrows, brushily painted in blood red. All the arrows point at the middle seam of the painting, as if it were under assault. This is an enormously evocative painting. An image of the beautiful naked, young body of the martyred St. Sebastian forms in the mind. Taaffe's work suits Baudelaire's criteria for beauty to a tee: something "immutable" (Taaffe's shapes and motifs) and something "transitory" (his original and sometimes exquisite ways of actually making a painting). He's uneven, but there probably isn't a better abstract painter of his generation.

Painting, as de Gaulle said of France, win never die, but like any other medium it passes through periods of dormancy and growth. At this point we may be moving out of the former and into the latter - entering a phase of vitality whose character is markedly different. Many painters, including Taaffe, are finding ways to expand painting's scope by directing it away from its overdetermined, overly masculine past to a bright future. It's about time.

Author: Jerry Saltz's last marathon overview of the New York art would for this magazine appeared in September '93.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

DO IT OURSELVES: ART COLLECTIVES RE-DEFINE OPPORTUNITY

2008-06-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

by Fionn Meade
Clicking on title is a link, but it is also here:
http://www.artisttrust.org/services/prof_dev/collectives

(excerpted from the Artist Trust Journal, Spring 2003)

Where collectives fit into the landscape of a given arts community has been somewhat of an under recognized barometer of social and aesthetic trends? Whether speaking of the collectively designed Dadaist publications of the 1910s, such as 391 and The Blind Man, or the loosely knit association of multidisciplinary artists that comprised the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of collectively instigated and self-produced art activity is often more appreciated after the fact as the back story of recognized individual artists.

Likewise, the impact of an artist collective or artist group is often not fully realized until a community is faced with the gap in activity that occurs when a group folds (local examples include Project 416, Fuzzy Engine and, most recently, Vital 5). The familiar eulogies of “they closed?” or “what happened to…” or “the rent was raised, what can you do” often come as ready justifications for why the closure of an artist collective or alternative art space was all but ‘inevitable’. That said, independently organized collaboration as an alternative to or an enrichment of individual art practice is an idea that is increasingly in the air these days.

As New York Times art critic Holland Cotter summed it up in a recent article, artist collectives are increasingly “Doing There Own Thing, Making Art Together” (January 19, 2003) and people are taking notice. Referring to such highly successful collectives as The Royal Art Lodge (which recently exhibited as a group at The Drawing Center in New York) and Forcefield (a multi-media contributor to the 2002 Whitney Biennial), Cotter points to the emphasis on “shared resources and dynamic interchange” as the consistent organizing principle of the new collective model. Both in creative and economic terms, artist groups across disciplines are re-invigorating the collective model as an innovative alternative to market-driven expectations of individual artists competing against each other for limited resources and opportunities.

While no means exhaustive, the following five groups offer insight into how local artists are embracing updated versions of the collective model, all of them addressing issues of sustainability with innovative approaches.

Stronghold, a nonprofit group of artists working in different disciplines formed as a pro-active response to the increasingly limited availability of artist live/work space in Seattle. As their mission statement puts it, “changes in the economy and its attendant factors consistently push artists out of urban centers. In order to combat this process, Stronghold proposes to build a ‘fortress’ for the arts community through the acquisition of property… that can weather gentrification when it hits a developing area.” Having recently secured a group of buildings on Beacon Hill in order to turn them into functional artist studios, Stronghold has already taken a big first step toward realizing their goals. As member artist Jordan Howland puts it, “Stronghold is first and foremost a mission: to serve as site and catalyst for the arts.” Stronghold embraces somewhat familiar ideals but with a circumspect and practical strategy for taking hold of real estate and securing their place as artists.

Similarly, d9 Dance Collective formed in 1992 in an effort to pool their resources and take control by creating their own opportunities. “d9 was created in order to put the power in the hands of the dancers and satiate a wider pool of talent than the normal outlets can sometimes support,” says member Kate Kerschbaum. d9 identifies and commissions work that they would like to perform, or choreographers they would like to work with as a dance collective, and then produces that work. Currently consisting of seven dancers, each member of the collective also takes on an administrative role in addition to their role as a performer. The reward, according to Kerschbaum, is “the collective’s power to create opportunities, maintain artistic control, and pool our resources to make new work happen.” An added bonus, says Kerschbaum, is the hands-on education in “how all the components of an organization work.” Nevertheless, says Kerschbaum, “it can lead to more meetings than dancing.” As it stands, the considerable success of d9 Dance Collective over the years led them to incorporate as a nonprofit organization in 2000 in order to “address its long-term sustainability.”

Put On the Dog is a digital design collective of four “created out of necessity,” offers co-founder Laura Blanchard. Looking to avoid the overextended and often directionless business ventures that became so commonplace in the dot.com boom and bust era, Put On the Dog developed a consortium of in-house designers that work on projects for nonprofit and private sector clients alike. “No office, no employees, only three of us as regular players—that was a lot for people to swallow four years ago. It still is, but we can demonstrate that it works successfully,” says Blanchard. Promoting a more agile, customized business model has allowed Put On the Dog to avoid common mistakes. “We aren't forced to take work to support a large group, so we can turn down work that looks like a black hole,” reasons Blanchard, “which allows us to focus on getting the best work, not just collecting a paycheck—something our clients take notice of.”

Begun in 1999, BuyOlympia.com offers a grassroots entrepreneurial take on the consortium model as it sells the goods of a group of Olympia-based artists to an online client base that continues to grow and grow every year. Indeed, as co-founder Aaron Tuller states, “the initial and ongoing goal has been to bring the creative forces of Olympia to people outside of Olympia.” With a product list that has grown from offering one item—Olympia-based artist Nikki McClure’s 2000 calendar (featuring original prints)—to over 250 items in their main online store (including a diverse array of artist books, artist-designed clothing, toys and accessories, as well as new titles from local record label Kill Rock Stars), BuyOlympia.com has grown quite organically. “We meet face to face with our artists, take the pictures of their products, process the orders, and ship the work out,” says Tuller, “allowing for artists to concentrate on their work.” As McClure attests, “their work (co-founders Pat Castaldo and Tuller) has been invaluable to me, allowing my work to find advertising and distribution through major magazines and, as a result, find an audience as far away as Japan and Finland.” While primarily conceived of as a tool to for wider distribution of original work, BuyOlympia.com has also served as a community catalyst, assisting local organizations such as the Olympia Film Society and LadyFest Olympia with their computer savvy, but also, more importantly acting as a pro-active conduit for local artists. “A sense of community among the makers has been a real benefit of being involved,” offers McClure.

The mission statement of another Seattle-based collective uses a more familiar precedent to get fresh results. Founded in 1996, “SOIL is a not-for-profit cooperative space established, supported and operated by local artists,” reads their mission statement. “SOIL exists as an alternative venue for artists to exhibit, develop and advance their work.” This streamlined vision has carried SOIL through the turmoil of three venue changes in seven years and a close to bi-annual turnover of member artists. Rather than impede its mission, this state of flux seems to be part of the plan as SOIL continues to put on provocative shows and present some of the best emergent art work in the city. “SOIL is a real mix of wonderful creative energy and irritating frustrations,” says Kiki MacInnis, a member artist and sometimes curator (The Gun Show, September 2002). “Without specific committees and without fixed rules and procedures SOIL reinvents itself over and over,” says MacInnis, “and I can’t decide if its looseness is a strength or weakness.” Funded largely out-of-pocket through membership dues and an annual auction, SOIL skirts the question of whether to become an institution in the local scene and focuses instead on the artwork.

Do it ourselves? Five innovative answers to the question of how to create your own opportunities.

MMMMellowvison

2008-04-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

lovely

2008-04-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

The tyranny of reality

2008-04-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks Robert :)

Those of us who sometimes mentor and instruct students are
familiar with trying to get people to really look at things.
Recently, after a few days walking around in a subject-rich
environment, I was agog with new possibilities. Burdened with
reference, I returned to the studio and proceeded to paint the
worst thing I've done in some time. It was one of those
paintings that has you considering a career in accountancy.
During the fiasco I began to better understand a syndrome I've
had all my life. It's what I call "the tyranny of reality."

Let me explain. When we are overloaded with subject matter, we
have an automatic tendency to neglect style and imagination.
Subject matter is no match for spirit. Too much observation can
change the creative event from one of spirit to one of
rendering. Surprise, chance, illusion, personality, audacity,
confidence and desire are the most affected. Abandonment and
even desertion may have to be contemplated.

Sad to say, but glorious nature stomps on creativity. The
artist becomes not a master, but a slave. On the other hand,
reflecting in tranquility, uncluttered by overabundance and the
need to get reality right, one is free to pass to another
level. "Reality," said Joyce Cary, "is a narrow little house
which becomes a prison for those who can't get out."

In 1970, the distinguished critic and social theorist Roland
Barthes wrote, "Painting can feign reality without having seen
it." When I first read that statement a door opened. Time and
again I've seen the idea make timid artists brave. Those who
dare to "feign reality" are in the agreeable business of
surprising themselves. Believe me, it's anticipated surprise
that keeps us at our easels. I hardly know of an evolved artist
in any field who doesn't understand this. "The job of art,"
said Francoise Sagan, "is to take reality by surprise."

Bogging down in detail will spoil the fun every time. I can't
think how many times I've failed to break down that door. Clive
Bell, another critic lashing out in the age of hyperrealism,
noted, "Detail is the fatty degeneration of art." He has a
point. Fat is tyranny. Reduce.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance
of things, but their inward significance, and this, and not the
external manner and detail, is true reality." (Aristotle)

Esoterica: Many significant artists might say that the opposite
is true, and for many, it is. Artists with no respect for or
understanding of reality can be a slave to their own
imaginations. When these imaginations are shallow, which they
sometimes are, there's nothing like a shot or two of the real
world. One of the hazards of art instruction is where you
suggest one person might loosen up, and you tell another to
start looking more carefully at things. Within earshot, people
are getting the opposite information. It's not like accountancy
at all.

Birthing Future Art" Careers

2008-02-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

Feeling anxious about my upcomming BFA exhibition I found this gem.

by Emile Ferris

As a junior at SAIC, when I think about my participation in next year’s BFA Show I am reminded of the sobering moment back in the eighth month of my pregnancy when I realized I was really going to HAVE this baby. Soon, it wasn’t going to be about the hilarity I experienced when my fetal daughter went “alien” on me in a restaurant and cart-wheeled so much inside my belly that she freaked out the other diners. It wasn’t going to be about having neighborhood parents giving me knowing smiles or even about kindly gang members offering me their seat on the “L.” No, I realized; terrible pain plus blood, sweat and curse-laden screeching tirades would be required, and there was no reasonable way around it.

Throughout your first three years of undergrad at SAIC, the BFA Show looms in your future, a monolithic inevitability. You put it out of your mind. “It’s a long way off,” you tell yourself, and then, during your last semester, the BFA Show is suddenly upon you. E-mails about mandatory meetings and space claims prompt a fine sweat to bloom at the back of your neck.

Considering the level of pressure involved, as well as the fact that this show is the culmination of years of hard work, accomplishing a gallery-quality exhibition can be a daunting challenge. The widely held belief, says graduating senior Rich Greene, is “that this event will make or break you because of all the contacts.”
Graduating painter Christina Sucgang suggested that one of the best ways that artists diminish BFA stress is to “show the work they’ve been doing during their time at school and not make work that is either specifically for the show or to get attention.” She stated that being honest in this way gives artists the time required to try new things and to prepare and perfect their craft. Graduating artist Natalia Ivancovich agreed. In preparation for the BFA Show, she advised undergrads to “explore materials and experiment with disaster.”

Long-time Chicago gallerist Carl Hammer, in an interview with F Newsmagazine, confirmed the wisdom in Sucgang’s sentiment and Ivancovich’s philosophy. Hammer stated that in past years he felt that the work shown at the BFA exhibition was “too slick, too polished” and that it didn’t represent the artist’s personal vision with enough heart. When asked what he looked for at the show, Hammer said, “I look for artists that are interpreting subjects in a new manner, one that’s thoughtful and that exhibits craftsmanship.” The gallery owner stressed how much he enjoyed seeing experimentation in student work and felt very pleased with a great deal of the work he saw at SAIC’s undergraduate event.

Despite the fact that graduate Ben Cowan had pushed his limits and ultimately created work he was proud of, he admitted that he “felt stranded” while preparing for the exhibition. “Even after I made a painting, I still had to think about how I was going to display it,” said Cowan. “Classes had not prepared me for how or if I should frame work, how to light it. Then I had to figure out where to get postcards made and how to get some publicity for the event. It was all very rushed and too exciting.”

How does one surmount such a mammoth task of exhibiting without having a nervous breakdown? SAIC printmaker Michael Argyelan took a systematic, almost scientific, approach. By process of elimination, he boiled 100 prospective pieces down to ten and then e-mailed digital images of those finalists to his most trusted faculty members. “I made a log of who liked what,” stated Argyelan, who eventually narrowed his display down to three works deemed strongest by his SAIC consultants.

Graduating senior Nate Wolf agreed with the idea of showing a limited number of works. “Keep it simple, don’t overcrowd your space. It’s not your last show, so don’t do a salon-style hanging.”
Most of the seniors that were polled by F Newsmagazine considered a few things necessary for BFA stress reduction: simplify everything as much as possible, think ahead, practice proper time management, and communicate promptly and effectively with the exhibitions staff.

“It is extremely helpful for participants to pre-plan, read all the guidelines and FAQ documents that are posted on the [SAIC] portal, talk to faculty members and staff about what they want to show and approach the installation with a spirit of ‘creative problem-solving’ to address the unexpected—as the unexpected will always occur,” said SAIC Exhibitions Director Trevor Martin. “Putting up an exhibition is a time-intensive process. It takes as much planning and concentration as making art. And if the artwork may challenge the School’s rules about safety and security, artists should speak with the exhibitions staff.”

Sculptor Helga Dangel, whose set-up requirements were complicated by a sound bleed from a neighboring artist’s installation, cautioned artists to “talk with the G2 organizing team right after space claim about the nature of their neighbor’s art work.” She stressed the importance of doing this “before starting to install because prior to installation, room rotations are still possible.” Dangel also encouraged future seniors to “start as early as you can, because everything takes longer than you think.”

But Cowan, a painter, disagreed on the usefulness of mandatory meetings and extraneous information. “Unless you are going to have a goat eat your painting in the gallery ... attending meetings about how to check out media, getting instructions on not setting things on fire or on hanging stuff from the ceiling is time wasted. All I did was hang a painting and leave. I would tell painters not to go to all of the mandatory meetings.”

Photographer Annette Martinez added that graduates should “try to stay focused, be organized and have a friend that can help.”

Argyelan, who consulted with his wife about specific aspects of his exhibit, extolled the virtues of Photoshop. Argyelan used the program to decide what paint colors would look best on his section of wall. “We looked at all my work in Photoshop, assessing it against different colors.” The printmaker, who ultimately chose a two-toned background, further recommended that artists use vinyl letters for their signs and make a self-published book prior to the show. “[The book] was only about $87,” said Argyelan, who felt that the price was justified when the full-color publication enabled him to show more of his body of work to interested gallerists, collectors and curators.

Flatfile Gallery’s Susan Aurinko, who brought her entire staff to the show, expressed her dislike of artists standing right beside their installations. When the art is good, “it jumps out at you,” offered Aurinko. Having a book in the display space allows patrons to view more art with less pressure. Yet, Flatfile’s Assistant Director, Aaron Ott, felt that this year’s artists’ statements “were far too derivative.” He advised graduating artists to find fresher, more thoughtful ways to communicate their work.

Aurinko and Ott were especially impressed by the work of two artists: Sucgang and Ivancovich. Argyelan was also among the artists whose work received positive comment from the Flatfile staff. Aurinko asked the artist to participate in a group show at her prestigious West Loop venue. The best way for jittery seniors-to-be to prepare for the BFA Show and to get noticed by gallery representatives at the event, according to Argyelan, is to go to a gallery. In his opinion, graduating students should scrutinize the ways galleries present work and model their own exhibition on what they see in professional circles.

“There are standards out there about how to display and how to promote,” noted the senior, who credits some of his pre-show savvy to a thorough reading of a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.

“Just make your work and don’t worry about the show,” Argyelan suggested. Despite the perception of the BFA Show’s importance, he cautioned seniors against seeing it as their final exhibition. Again, I return to the metaphor of birth. Maybe the BFA Show is just the birth of an SAIC artist’s vocation; perhaps nurturing a fledgling art career is a lot like nurturing an infant child. New art careers seem subject to something like colic—they squall and struggle, trying to fit into the world, but are not yet developed enough to be fully comfortable here. The profession requires commitment through tough times. Fragile in the beginning, the life of the artist involves many sleepless nights and hours of dirty and thankless effort. As Argyelan noted, “The BFA Show is not what opens doors for you. It is just the beginning of things.”

May 2006

Excercise and Experiment

2008-01-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

When all is only exercise and experiment, where
questions give more delight than answers, and results are the
lesser of process, we are given a special kind of energy. It's
shifty sand, though. Joy can be stolen because an artist has to
put enough technique under the belt to be simply confident. To
see a painting that never was, as it is to hear a tree falling
in a forest, witness is during, not after. What happens after
is really someone else's business. And one mustn't be fooled,
as I almost was, into thinking that it was some of my business
where they all end up.

From Robert Genn's weekly esoterica.

Getting to "must"

2007-12-01T22:01:00.000-08:00

Thank you Robert Genn

Psychologist Abraham Maslow has written, "A musician must make
music, an artist must paint, a poet must write--if he is to be
ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must
be." The question for many would-be creators is simply how to
get to "must."

Maslow spent a lifetime researching mental health and human
potential. He emphasized the study of healthy minds and
successful systems rather than the abnormal and the ill. He was
particularly interested in the hierarchy of needs, meta-needs,
self-actualizing persons, purposeful play, and peak
experiences. Leader of the humanistic school of psychology, he
referred to his ideas as a "third force"--beyond Freudian
theory and behaviourism.

Maslow saw human beings' needs arranged like a ladder. The most
basic needs, at the bottom, were physical--air, water, food,
etc. Then came safety needs--security, stability, comfort. Then
psychological or social needs--belonging, love, acceptance. At
the top were the self-actualizing needs--the need to fulfill
oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. Maslow
felt that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder inhibited a
person from climbing to the next step. For example, someone
dying of thirst is not likely to write or paint. People who
managed the higher needs are what he called self-actualizing
people. These folks, he found, are able to focus on problems
outside themselves, have a clear sense of what is true and what
is phony, and are spontaneous, creative, and not bound too
strictly by social conventions.

Here are a few of Maslow's ideas for artists wishing to further
evolve:

Systematically study, understand and neutralize the effects of
lower needs. Accept the world in all of its complexity, mystery
and ambiguity. Take cues from the winners in this world, not
the losers. Keep the company of the doers, not the talkers.
Play your personal game on as many levels as you're able. Fall
in love with your processes, innovations, dreams and higher
ideals. Be sensitive to and welcome the arrival of peak
experiences. Have no guilt when you see yourself becoming
compulsive and proactive. Allow yourself to be swept up in your
personal "must."

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? A
good question might be not why do people create, but why do
people not create?" (Abraham Maslow, 1908-1970)

Esoterica: Peak experiences are profound moments of love,
understanding, happiness or rapture, when a person feels more
whole, alive, self-sufficient and yet a part of the world--more
aware of truth, justice, harmony and goodness. Maslow found
self-actualizing people have many such peak experiences. Acts
of art can be structured so an individual sets himself up for a
series of them. He feels good, becomes habituated and demands
their repetition. Maslow was not a snob about his conclusions.
"A first-rate soup," he said, "is more creative than a
second-rate painting."

Yay Mr. T and Shatner

2007-11-21T19:07:00.000-08:00

Shh I dont know anything about video games.

Where Are All the Women?

2007-11-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

Where Are All the Women?
On MoMA’s identity politics.

By Jerry Saltz Published Nov 18, 2007

This week marks the third anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s reopening in its sleek new building, and a birthday is as good a time as any to celebrate. The museum has the most stupendous collection of modern painting and sculpture in the world. It is where we go to reconnect with our roots, the place entrusted with presenting the genesis of modernism. MoMA is our fountain of youth, our Garden of Eden, our Promised Land. But all these things will not last much longer if this institution continues excluding women from the display of its permanent collection of painting and sculpture from 1879 to 1969, which lives on the fourth and fifth floors. Everything about this museum rides on the vibrancy and diversity depicted there, and MoMA is allowing that life to drain out. It is slowly turning the history of modernism into a procession of dead presidents and greatest hits, in effect making modern art a gated community and a state religion.

Each fall since MoMA’s reopening in November 2004, I’ve gone to these two floors, counted the number of artworks on view, tallied the number of women artists included, and then pitched a fit in print. So many women artists had come to light over the past few decades that MoMA’s reopening in 2004 became an enormous opportunity to alter its monolithic version of modernism. There was ample evidence that MoMA wanted to do so in 2000, when the permanent collection was totally rethought. Even the usually conservative chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, admitted that previous MoMA installations had been “less real than ideal,” adding that the museum now wanted to investigate “multiple narratives.” It sounded as though the institution was on a slow but steady road to equal time.

That’s why the reopening brought such high hopes. On that Saturday in November 2004, the huge crowds wanted MoMA to be great. Opinions on the architecture varied but were primarily positive. (Yoshio Taniguchi’s building is handsome and essentially invisible; you can walk right past it and not know it, which may or may not be a good thing.) That first installation was the MoMA men’s club as usual, though you could make a case that it was an okay time for the old greatest-hits lineup to be trotted out one last time. (There were 415 works, excluding books, on view on the fourth and fifth floors, 20 of them—less than 5 percent—by women.) Either way, it was appropriate to temper one’s criticism. MoMA was learning how to deal with its new space, trying to get as many of the masterpieces on view as possible; we all needed to see them in their new house.

BACKSTORY
Despite its male-dominated collection, MoMA hosted its first solo exhibition by a woman only 13 years after it was founded, and 25 years before the Whitney did. “Josephine Joy: Romantic Painter” opened on June 12, 1942, followed in the next few years by Brazilian photographer Genevieve Naylor, Helen Levitt, and Georgia O’Keeffe. As for the Whitney, it was a pretty male preserve until sculptor Louise Nevelson showed her work in 1967. That is, if you don’t count the memorial exhibit devoted to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney herself—an artist as well as a benefactress—in 1943.

By the fall of 2006—after two years, and substantial tinkering—there were 399 objects on view; 19 were by women, or 5 percent. Yet even this figure was misleading because MoMA had included three decorative objects by the estimable Marianne Brandt that weren’t, strictly speaking, in the painting-and-sculpture collection. The museum also slipped in a great Bridget Riley. But it was dated 1983–2002, well outside the closing date of the floor. So the real number was still around 3 percent.

Which brings us to the present, and after a great deal of art has been shuffled in and out of storage and rearranged, you can’t say MoMA isn’t sticking to its story. There are 28 Picassos on view, 22 Matisses, 15 Mondrians, and 13 Rauschenbergs. On the fifth floor, MoMA has its Cézannes all in an astounding row. On the fourth floor, there’s a whole gallery of Ellsworth Kellys (constituting one of the museum’s “Focus” exhibits); the Johns-Rauschenberg-Twombly galleries have been revamped, as have parts of the Pop Art galleries. Best of all, the fourth floor now starts with six Willem de Kooning “Women.”

Sadly, those slashing depictions are about the only women you’re going to see there. By my count, there are 400 works of art on these floors, 14 by women. That’s rock-steady at 3.5 percent, and includes the Bridget Riley again. Even if you give MoMA the benefit of the doubt and count only the number of artists on these floors, there are 137—11 of them women. That’s 8 percent.

Not to sound like a broken record, but it has become bitterly clear that MoMA’s stubborn unwillingness to integrate more women into these galleries is not only a failure of the imagination and a moral emergency; it amounts to apartheid. Even the Met has integrated women into its twentieth-century wing, hanging four Florine Stettheimer paintings and a room of ten Georgia O’Keeffes. Obviously, MoMA can’t invent modern masters and new Cubists. By my count, only about one percent of all the art up to 1970 in MoMA’s Painting and Sculpture Collection is by women. The people who run this institution are earnestly trying to do the right thing; I’m not declaring them sexist bigots. Nor am I a quota queen, advocating that women be allotted their 51 percent: Art history isn’t about fairness. Nevertheless—and this is a vital point—MoMA’s master narrative would not be disrupted if more women were placed on view. In fact, that narrative would come to life in ways it never has before, ways that would be revitalizing, even revolutionary. Ask yourself if hanging any of the following artists would really ruin the narrative espoused by the museum: Barbara Hepworth, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Dorthea Rockburne, Yoko Ono, and Florine Stettheimer.

Or just take Alice Neel, a kind of American antihero (auntie-hero?) who painted in seclusion for nearly her whole life while raising children on her own in Spanish Harlem, and who arrived at an original figurative style that is simultaneously brooding, bizarre, and Pop-ish. She’s one of the better painters of the mixed emotions of motherhood, and maybe the best painter of pregnant women who ever lived. Or MoMA could explore the work of Hilma af Klint, the Swede who fashioned mystic-looking alchemical diagrams and who arrived at pure abstraction more than five years before the great Kasimir Malevich. Even Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe are missing. There’s no Mary Cassatt. I could list dozens more.

If the museum doesn’t own work by all of these artists, it needs to go shopping. For the hand-wringers who imagine this would trash the canon, I’ll note that cramming in 50 more paintings by women would still keep their presence below 16 percent. Of course, if MoMA removed some warhorses like Dine, Gottlieb, and Kitaj at the same time, things could get really interesting.

Ideologies are fortresses; ideas blaze new territories. As many have said, MoMA needs to begin telling a more complex story of modernism, or it’ll be telling a story only it believes. Museums are not tombs where people go to simply stare at objects. They are places to participate—places where things you don’t understand change your life. Museums have to not only defend the canon but also delve into and question it. They are guardians of history, but they’re also makers of meaning and metaphors. If a museum doesn’t continually nourish itself, it will die, and part of MoMA is dying.

But maybe only this part. Curators in other departments have bravely integrated women into exhibitions, with good results. This week will see the opening of Deborah Wye’s “Multiplex,” a big group show of 72 works made from 1970 to the present. Not only does this exhibition contain 26 works by women; a lion’s share of the space will be devoted to large installations by Louise Bourgeois, Hanne Darboven, and Nancy Spero. This summer’s “What Is Painting?” was more than a third women. The survey of Elizabeth Murray in 2005 was unevenly reviewed but a promising sign. The recent reinstallation of the photography collection includes excellent groupings of work by women, as does the current drawing show. The film-and-video and prints departments have long been virtually gender-blind. All this would resonate more if only MoMA weren’t fetishizing pure modernism on the fifth and fourth floors, trying to oversimplify the twentieth century.

Women in Museum Collections

2007-11-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

Data: Gender Studies
Is MoMA the worst offender? We tallied how women fare in six other art-world institutions.

Published Nov 18, 2007

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
That’s for the permanent-collection items on view; Kara Walker’s show is downstairs.

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
Four women on an otherwise male roster.

THE 2007 VENICE BIENNALE
Men: 76%
Women: 24%
As recently as 1995, the lineup was just 9 percent female.

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007
Men: 73%
Women: 27%
The upcoming fair will be enormous: 2,859 artists, about 715 of them women.

MARIANNE BOESKY
Men: 75%
Women: 25%
But it’s 50-50 in the gallery right now, with work by Liz Craft and a two-man show.

THE FRICK COLLECTION
Men: 99%
Women: 1%
There are two sculptures and one print by female artists in the collection, plus some anonymous work.

Good Advice

2007-10-31T16:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks again Robert Genn~

"Find a sanctuary where you can comfortably work.
Dedicate at least two hours a day to your art.
Have more than enough equipment and supplies.
Set short- and long-term goals and keep track of progress.
Think of your work as exercise, not championship play.
Explore series development and exhaust personal themes.
Work alone with the benefit of books and perhaps tapes.
Replace passive consumption with creative production.
Use your own intuition and master your technology.
Feel the joy of personal, self-generated sweat.
Fall in love with your own working processes.
Be forever on the lookout for the advent of style.
Try to be your own person and claim your rights.
Don't bother setting yourself up for rejection.
Don't swing too wildly and damage the well-being of others.
Don't jump into the ring until you're feeling fit.

If you can stick with this regimen for a couple of months, I
can pretty well guarantee your progress. If not, then at least
the exercise will let you know the job's not for you. We all
have the potential to be slim, barrel-chested, rich, satisfied
or evolved."

Art schools: a group crit

2007-10-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

Art schools: a group crit: a range of issues confront today's booming art schools and university art departments: What skills should young artists acquire? Should they be shielded from the art market or connected to it? Who needs a studio PhD degree? Here, 13 educators, artists and scholars offer their divergent views.

From: Art in America | Date: 5/1/2007 | Author: Rubinstein, Raphael

Thankfully, some might say, there are not great numbers of artworks about art school. So, it's a surprising coincidence that two compelling works on the subject appeared in the same year, 1995. Educational Complex, by Mike Kelley, is a scale model of every school the artist ever attended, plus his childhood home. These largely modernist structures, including buildings at the University of Michigan, where Kelley got his BFA in 1976, and Cal Arts, where he earned his MFA in 1978, are linked in an unwieldy tabletop display that suggests a kind of institutional digestive tract. To create the models, Kelley relied on his memory, leaving empty and undefined the areas and spaces he couldn't recall. Speaking about the work recently on the PBS series "Art21," Kelley described how the organization of the structure is patterned on the visual-art training in Hans Hofmann's push-pull formalism he received as an undergraduate painting student and which he labels "visual indoctrination." Although it doesn't exhibit the in-your-face theatrics of Kelley's best-known sculptures and videos, Educational Complex is an incisive, almost Foucauldian diagramming of the institutionalization of American art.

The other work I'm thinking of, Alex Bag's Fall '95, is an hour-long video that follows a fictional student, played by Bag herself, through eight semesters at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Hilariously satirical of art student poses, the 16-part work charts its subject's evolution from painfully naive first-year undergrad with black nail polish and pierced tongue to self-assured senior who is able to pounce on a teacher's error and articulately denounce the commodification of youth culture.

The label of "institutional critique" can be applied to both these works, but something crucial sets Kelley's and Bag's works apart from most other examples of this ubiquitous mode of artmaking--they focus on art schools and university art departments, rather than the museums, galleries and private art collections that are usually the targets of such work. Maybe it's time for educational institutions to take their turn in the glare of critique, something that hasn't occurred on a large scale since the 1960s.

Perhaps the process has already begun. The education of artists has become a growing topic of conversation, both in the media and within academe itself. At the journalistic end, there has been a spate of sensationalistic pieces in newspapers and magazines (both print and on-line) about the phenomenon of dealers, collectors and curators trolling MFA thesis shows for new talent. The 2006 movie Art School Confidential, based on graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's original tales, also reflected growing interest in the subject, as did Frieze magazine's issue on art schools last September On the more cerebral side of things, there have been academic conferences and College Art Association panels devoted to the seemingly unstoppable advent of the studio PhD. Between these two poles, one gets the sense, among those teaching at or running art schools and art departments here and abroad, that the field is going through a transformative phase. Driving this process are both larger issues, such as technology and globalization, and more art-specific ones, such as the runaway growth of the contemporary art scene and a generational shift as many professors who began working in the 1960s and '70s approach retirement.

In response to these developments, this project of sounding out teachers and administrators on the past, present and future of training artists got under way last summer. The following set of eight general questions was sent out to provide a starting point for the discussion:

1. What have been the most significant changes in the teaching of art over the last decade?

2. Are there new or different skills and areas of knowledge that students require now?

3. Within an academic environment, how does visual-art training relate to other disciplines?

4. One gets the impression that a growing number of students are attending art schools and enrolling in university MFA programs. Has this been your experience? If so, what do you think is driving this growth?

5. What are your feelings about the relationship of MFA programs to the art market?

6. Should collectors and dealers be given access to students? Should students be encouraged to make contact with galleries as soon as possible, even before graduation? In general, what role should issues of profession and career play in MFA programs?

7. Are there significant differences between the U.S. approach, to training artists and European or Asian approaches? Is there something to be learned from other models?

8. What, if any, are the significant differences among schools within the US.? What makes for a successful art school/MFA program? What kinds of things most often stand in the way of a program becoming successful? And what are the criteria of success?

Some contributors" have sought to address all the questions, while others focus on specific points that particularly interest them. While this group, which includes representatives of both Kelley's and Bag's alma maters, is not intended to cover every significant degree-granting art program in the country, it does include individuals occupying a variety of positions at a range of institutions. There are teacher and administrators, employees of large public universities and of private art schools, long-time fixtures and new appointees, East and West Coasters and others located some distance from large bodies of water (something one of the writers, Dave Hickey, warns about--and being based in Las Vegas, he presumably knows what he's talking about). For those seeking a more in-depth view of the vibrant L.A. art-school scene--here represented solely by Thomas Lawson of Cal Arts--a good place to start is the November 2006 issue of Art in America, where 19 L.A. sculptors have much to say about their experience studying and teaching in schools" such as UCLA, the Otis" College of Art and Deson, and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Also included here, for a historical perspective on the subject, is a contribution by scholar Howard Singerman, the author of the fascinating Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999). Another historian of art instruction (among many other topics), James Elkins, writes specifically about the debate over the introduction of the studio PhD.

There's not a great deal of consensus, which is surely a good sign, especially to those who fear that the training of young artists has turned formulaic, leading to the production of a lot of formulaic art. On one subject, however, nearly everyone agrees--the need to bring more up-to-date technology into the educational process. Yet readers will also find teachers who recommend that students" read 18th-century thinkers such as Rousseau and Hume (a tactic employed by Laurie Fendrich) and others who stress social activism as an important component of contemporary art training (Lawrence Rinder, Judith Russi Kirshner).

In the longest contribution, Robert Storr, who recently became the dean of the Yale School of Art, challenges a new generation of art students to come up with an art-discourse vocabulary to replace the dated jargon of postmodernism. He also speculates on what factors go into creating a hot art school, admitting that same of it hew to do with luck, with whether a particular group of students and teachers can create the necessary chemistry. Storr thus acknowledges that it's the students themselves that are crucial to a successful program. They are also, alas, the missing voice in this symposium-in-print. If it was hard to select faculty participants from the hundreds of MFA programs around the country, choosing among the student bodies would have been infinitely more difficult. I only hope that they will be among the readers of the following pages and that, if they wish, they make their thoughts heard via letters and e-mails and--who knows--maybe even artworks. It seems an ideal time for a sequel to Alex Bag's 12-year-old piece. How exactly are things going out there, in the student studios and laptop screens of Spring '07?--Raphael Rubinstein

Howard Singerman

Commentators have been complaining about art schools in the pages of art magazines for a very long time, beginning well before Mercedes Matter asked "What's Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?" in 1963. But let me start midstream, and allow Matter's decades-old complaint to introduce the terms and camps that are by now most familiar. The founder of the New York Studio School, Matter argued that the problem lay in the classrooms of the new degree-granting university art departments springing up nationwide, in their credit hours and in their hectoring noise: "Silence is rare. Even a relatively quiet room is never without the intrusion of the instructor--for instruction no longer punctuates the student's work, it replaces it." The most damaging talk, in her view, was that about the art world: "Today, it is possible for a student to go through art school and gain an acute perception of 'what is going on,' a fairly intelligent grasp of the situation, and yet.... In old fashioned language, he will never have learned to draw." (1) Though the great majority of America's 200-plus MFA programs are at least on paper organized by metier, for many readers Matter's complaint still rings true: the assumption is that young artists no longer learn traditional craft skills.

This view is probably only partially correct. White it may be true that the more successful schools downplay the teaching of skills (here I mean those mostly urban and coastal institutions, whether independent professional schools or the star departments of research universities, that we tend to think of when we talk about "art school"), many less prestigious institutions continue to impart traditional skills--and often newer, more technologically advanced ones. These latter schools tend to be public, inland and much more crowded (ironically enough, it was in no small part these schools, and their then-new university-based MFA programs, that Matter was decrying). For those critics who lament the academic devaluing of the artist's traditional skills, what is even more grievous is the sense that students who can draw (or those with too great a sense of the romance of the artist) are mistreated by their art schools; they are pressured to conform or shunted aside: this is the given of Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Art School Confidential and of the recent film based on it. There and elsewhere at least part of Matter's "intelligent grasp" has been downgraded into cliched patter and updated as theory or political correctness. Teaching about the art world or the PC issues of cultural politics has come at the cost not only of traditional skills but of any familiarity with tradition itself and of what Pierre Bourdieu terms the "work of art qua object of belief." Andrew Hultkrans cast his Artforum story of the rise of Art Center and UCLA in the early '90s and the eclipse of Cal Arts as a cautionary tale, a warning against identity politics and against just the sort of French thing Bourdieu stands for: "Cal Arts' makeover as an academy producing laundry lists of theoretical tropes in lieu of objects was bad news." (2)

"Deskilling" is not just a problem, it is also a critical category, one that survey students can see a lot of in the recent two-volume textbook Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism by October editors Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Deskilling, writes Buchloh, is "a concept of considerable importance in describing numerous artistic endeavors throughout the twentieth century with relative precision. All of these are linked in their persistent effort to eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artist competence and aesthetic valuation." (3) Buchloh insists on artistic, or at least critical, intention, and elsewhere Yve-Alain Bois speaks of Daniel Buren's "deskilling sacrifice," suggesting that Buren had conventional skills to throw away. (4)

But what if deskilling is involuntary? As Buchloh observes, the term first appeared in the early 1980s in the writing of the Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn, who borrowed it from sociology. It's worth noting here that Burn and Buchloh use the term somewhat differently; for Burn, it is not a critical intervention but an outcome, the inadvertent and contradictory product of an art-school education. Writing, in 1981, about the local effects of teaching New York's styles since the 1960s, Burn says that deskilling is not the province of a select group of theoretically engaged artists but the standard operating procedure of all of the "sanctioned styles of avant-gardism," as they have been replicated in provincial schools worldwide. "It has not been uncommon during the past decade for students to experience an avant-garde context in their art school years but to find difficulty in sustaining such attitudes outside of the school and to then discover that they have not been taught skills to allow them to work in any other way." (5) Here deskilling is not only a necessary if inadvertent critique of autonomy--"with few or no artistically valued manual skills involved in the production of the work, it was hard to sustain the idea that the object itself was the exclusive embodiment of a special creative process" (6)--but also the enforcement of it, however degraded: a segregated or professionalized interest enforced by handicap.

As a complaint, deskilling suggests that there are essential skills every artist should have. But it is no longer clear what an artist needs to know, or needs to know how to do. It's not so much that we have nothing to teach, but rather that, in relation to the art of the recent past, there is no particular thing that needs to be learned. In any event, there is no guarantee how it is learned. Where craft skill is paraded--by Tom Friedman, say, or Tara Donovan--it appears as a kind of excessive or caricatured manuality in relation to downscale industrial material. And if, in some programs, Buren is taught in lieu of the skills he purportedly sacrificed, he might not be understood according to academic orthodoxy, as institutional critique, but instead as a practitioner of minimalist painting or public art or, like Jorge Pardo or Jim Lambie, interior design. Students might be expected to know how to situate Buren--or Friedman or Pardo--to appropriate or reject them, to find them "interesting" in relation to their own work. Still, it's not clear that this kind of skill, which might only be the ability to package oneself professionally, is what the art school's critics have in mind.

I understand full well why commentators call out for the metiers, whether for drawing or for a more rigorous theoretical or philosophical or political grounding. These are calls for something of value to teach, and more than that for a commitment, a content for the term "artist" that isn't atomized or sheerly idiosyncratic, and that might link one artist to another through something other than the market or the media. Nowadays, especially at our best schools, we teach "artists"--both a litany of names and the fashioning of individuality. Instead of working on a practice, it is the artist him- or herself who is worked on, pushed to internalize the art world, to take it seriously and to produce an identity in its image. Over 30 years ago Charles Harrison--like Burn, a member of Art and Language, a group whose critical interests have always included questions of pedagogy--characterized the working-over of young artists as "more psychotherapeutic than pedagogic.... While there may be both historicity and method in teaching someone how to draw, there is little of either involved in teaching them how to be artists. It is a cliche that art students are neurotic; maybe art schools keep them that way." (7) Or maybe nowadays the best known and most successful ones are those that build most effectively on the neurosis; at least that is what Charles Ray suggested about success at UCLA: "Most art schools are about students and teachers.... The reason the kids here are getting all this early success is because they're not art students, they're young artists. Young artists get galleries. Students study. Simple as that." (8)

Howard Singerman is associate professor of contemporary art and theory at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Leslie King-Hammond

The most powerful change to occur in the teaching of artists in the last decade has resulted from the increasing role within all disciplines of art that makes use of electronics, digital technologies and the Internet. New methods have evolved from the intersection of old and new.

All art students still need a foundation of conceptual, technical and critical training that reflects both tradition and innovation. We should keep adding to our curricula. Students need access to so much more information today because the way artists work now is so open-ended, using so many new techniques and technologies and mediums. Additionally, there is a greater emphasis on critical studies and professional development, including teaching and entrepreneurial skills.

Enrollment at the Maryland Institute College of Art has grown tremendously in the past 10 years; we expect more growth to come. What is remarkable is how good the students are when they come here. They know how to draw, they know how to paint, they know how to think conceptually and technically. The growing development of magnet art schools and community arts programs probably plays a large role in the experience of these students. Of course, we still reinforce technical skills, but more and more we are here to help students with the content and ideas in their work, refining (rather than jumpstarting) their art-making practice.

The art market, especially dealers, should be treated with great caution. Interacting with dealers too early often undermines the conceptual vision of developing artists. Young artists are often swayed by marketplace demands. Collectors often find the opportunity to support student and emerging artists by purchasing their work. This is a plus, as long as the young artist is not swayed by the attention and desires of the client.

Students should be encouraged to seek representation after the completion of the program of study, though blanket statements about this are dangerous. Inevitably, part of the role of institutions is to offer a certain access into the marketplace and art world in general. There are young artists who are ready to show in the public, market-driven art world, and others who are not. Many students should wait until after they are out of the academic arena, well outside their "student work" practices, to seek representation.

We are here for the long term. I still am in contact with students from when I started teaching 30 years ago; I see it as a vital part of my role as an educator to keep in touch with them and to help them when I can.

MFA programs should also be bringing in critics, collectors and curators to interact with the students, to share their professional experiences. We don't want our students to be blindsided by the diversified realities of the global art world, but we do want to create a safe environment to prepare and educate them for their journey.

All art schools are consumed with the question of what makes a "successful" experience. Each school offers different resources, networks, faculty and visiting artists. One thing a really good program will do is to designate individual studio space for the MFA student to work in for the duration of his or her academic experience. The sense of a strong artistic community will often make or break an MFA program.

Private art colleges and schools of art within a university that can commit to intensive curricular programs supported by institutional resources and quality studio and classroom space have the more successful programs. This is in contrast to art departments in colleges or universities, which tend to be more stressed for faculty and for private studio space.

I think that the size of a program has a lot to do with success as well. The balance that we have created at MICA allows for each of our 11 graduate programs to accommodate 10 to 28 students who are mentored by a director, a critic-in-residence, or several artists/ designers-in-residence for the larger programs. It is a slippery road to navigate: the graduate programs should be large enough to create a diverse and well-rounded community, but small enough to still be able to offer a lot of one-on-one attention.

Leslie King-Hammond is dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

Lawrence Rinder

I recently went on a month-long research trip to study curricula at leading European schools of art and design. European schools practice a variety of educational methodologies, though due in part to the European Union's so-called Bologna Accord (which has mandated the full implementation by 2010 of degree programs based roughly on the American BFA/MFA model) and in part to economic forces, there is a drift toward an American-style system. (One result of budget constraints has been the consolidation of smaller schools into larger consortia or their absorption into universities.) Nevertheless, a number of general differences are still evident between European and American graduate art education.

The beaux-arts model, in which students work--at times exclusively--in the studio of a "master artist" still exerts a strong influence on European art education. Occasional one-on-one contact with a single instructor is the pedagogical foundation of several leading institutions. Even in schools that have shifted away from this approach, students are expected to be very self-directed in their studies. The director of a major German art school reported that his school offers virtually no formal education, but that this is considered acceptable because the students pay almost nothing. Conversely, in most American MFA programs, where students pay dearly, the curriculum is heavily weighted with topical seminars and regularly scheduled critique-based studio classes. While students in American MFA programs often choose a school in order to work with a particular instructor, once enrolled they are typically encouraged to study with other faculty in order to diversify their influences. One benefit of the beaux-arts model is that it places an emphasis on art as such instead of on discipline-specific study. Most European art schools have done away with--or are in the process of eliminating--discipline-based education in favor of an interdisciplinary, project-based approach. The role of the discipline-based master teacher has been largely replaced by a cohort of workshop technicians who assist any and all students in engaging with, if no longer "mastering," a medium of their choice.

The relatively strong emphasis on seminars and theoretical analysis in American MFA curricula is countered in the European model by, on the one hand, a stronger focus on philosophy in undergraduate art education and, on the other, a more pronounced commitment to "research." Research--which is required by the Bologna Accord to become a standard element in European art education--is expressed in a variety of ways: in some schools it is understood to be a pervasive ethos of the faculty culture; in others, it is localized in thematically focused research centers or institutes; while in yet others, it has become the basis for an ever-growing number of studio art PhD programs. Although the term "research" is decidedly imprecise, it seems generally to refer to academic values more commonly associated with the humanities, i.e., in-depth investigation into a topic or theme, collaboration with nonartistic disciplines, and evaluative criteria based on citation and corroboration rather than on originality or "inspiration." Although the emergence of the studio art PhD--which has just recently hit America's shores--has resulted in a broad debate about the differences between artistic and nonartistic languages, methodologies and evaluative criteria, it is unclear to me what, if any, impact the emphasis on research is having on European students at the MFA level.

One very important distinction between American and European MFA programs is the vastly more international character of the European system. Thanks in part to the Erasmus Mundas travel scholarship, provided by the European Union, students in Europe can move easily from school to school across national boundaries. In the U.S., meanwhile, government restrictions on financial aid make it extremely difficult for non-Americans to afford the high tuition of our schools. Post-9/11 visa restrictions also place an onerous burden on anyone wishing to come to the U.S. for an extended period of study, or, for that matter, on faculty wishing to come from abroad to teach. While American art students presumably travel more frequently than the generally stay-at-home American population (only 21 percent of Americans even hold passports), they are certainly much less cosmopolitan than their European art-school peers, for whom it is common that at least one year of college will be spent at a school in another country. Given these conditions--and regardless of efforts to make curricula more global in content--students in American MFA programs are educated in an environment that all too often replicates our country's debilitating isolation from global diversity and ideas.

The institution where I work, the California College of the Arts (CCA), has recently developed a number of initiatives that resemble experimental programs at the most interesting European art schools. Our new social practices area in the MFA Fine Arts Program, for example, is comparable to the Critical Curatorial Cybermedia (CCC) program at Geneva's Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Like the CCC program, CCA's social practice area promotes social engagement as an intrinsic aspect of the art-making process and seeks the intersections among performance, urbanism and activism. Additionally, at CCA, the faculty and students of the social practice area are in conversation with their peers in architecture and design, opening up possibilities for profoundly hybrid projects. Like many of the most interesting European schools that offer degrees in both fine arts and design, CCA is entering the digital age without abandoning its expertise and capacities in more traditional mediums such as wood, ceramics, glass and textiles. We believe that dynamic exchange between artists and designers as they explore both high-tech and low-tech mediums will form the basis of much future innovation.

Lawrence Rinder is dean of graduate studies at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco and Oakland.

Laurie Fendrich

I teach mostly painting and drawing to undergraduates, many of whom take studio courses to fulfill what's called the "creative participation" requirement for a liberal arts degree. Every year, about 20 non-art majors join with the already-declared art majors to form the cadre who move on to take our advanced fine-arts courses. Although only a handful of these students go on to graduate school in art, or end up becoming artists, almost all of them possess an "artistic personality" and have vague longings to "express themselves." They frequently have thin skins (especially when it comes to criticism of their work), an unspoken conviction that they possess a special insight into things that other students don't have, and a sense that something is wrong with the world that malting art might correct, at least for them.

Many people who have artistic personalities never become artists, often simply because they lack the requisite desire for fame. On the other hand, many who do become artists have nothing to offer but their artistic personalities. Long ago, actual talent used to be required of an artist, but the permissiveness of modernism opened the floodgates for anyone who wanted to be an artist to be one. Even though neurobiology and postmodern theory together have made mincemeat of modernism, an enervated form of modern romanticism persists in studio-art classes in the form of "feelings" around which art teachers are forced to maneuver. Admittedly, the sensitive "serf" with its deep, soulful yearnings--celebrated by the romantics for its authenticity and autonomy, and for which untold thousands of young Werthers have suffered through the centuries--is now considered a somewhat pathetic phenomenon and consigned to adolescence. Paradoxically, just when the romantic serf began to be discredited, the idea that all truths are subjective (what is more romantic than that?) began to expand. In academe subjectivity has been given an honorary doctorate and cloaked in the cap and gown of postmodernist "historicism," i.e., the belief that what you think or feel is almost entirely dependent on when and where you live.

Practically all the art students I've encountered accept historicism as a fact, even if they don't use the word itself. They unquestioningly believe there are multiple truths, and that all truths are more or less equally valid. This historicist "form and pressure" (as Shakespeare dubbed it in Hamlet) crops up relentlessly in the studio classroom. In my opinion, it is steadily under, fining the mainstay of studio art teaching--the critique. It has been assumed that students' art will get better if smart, earnest art students and their teachers chew some serious fat concerning their work. But the critique is getting into ever-deeper trouble the more "better art" becomes a totally subjective matter. Why not cut to the chase and talk about marketing strategies ambitious students might employ to become rich and famous?

The notorious Q-word (for those of you born since 1980, I mean quality) has been banned from official art discourse since about 1975. Even so, it hovers backstage during every critique. Good students and reasonable teachers still know the good stuff when they see it, although they'll only say so with a faux-blue-collar spin: "Hey, that works." So while some art teachers fret over the need for more exotic computer programs, others lobby for more critical theory in the curriculum, and still others argue for more drawing, everyone ignores the real need: to resuscitate a way of talking about art that recognizes the value of art as a thing in itself, a thing that is impractical and politically useless.

The best art students--whether they paint pictures, manipulate digital images, or disperse empty beer cans and computer monitors in a darkened gallery--need to learn imaginative ways to step outside their own historicist subjectivity in order to understand the extent to which they are unwittingly trapped by it. Hiding behind talent-immune postmodernist cleverness won't cut it forever. Students should be taught the writings about art of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo and Hume. The point is not to make them wallow in the past, or to bore them to tears by forcing them to ingest hard-to-read Classical, Renaissance and Enlightenment treatises and essays, but to help them see how they can be truly radical only by going back to the roots for fresh, new ideas.

Whenever I teach Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert on the Theater, for example, my students are fascinated by his uncomfortably persuasive argument that art is--as often as not--a very bad thing that can destroy human happiness rather than enhance it. They also make the startling discovery that their own confidence in the primacy of feelings derives straight from Rousseau's ideas. When I teach Ephraim Gotthold Lessing's Laocoon, students wrestle with the idea that some things might be so inherently ugly or disgusting that no one--anyplace--can see them any other way. Reading David Hume's 1757 essay "Of the Standard of Taste" rattles their assumptions about the supposedly irrefutable idea of subjectivity. And selections from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America invite them to ponder the chilling possibility that great art and social justice are mutually exclusive.

The list of readings that can help art students climb out of the late-romanticism-cum-careerist pit in which they're currently trapped is longer and richer than the small selection I've provided here. Syllabi could easily include fiction (e.g., Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece or John Fowles's The Ebony Tower) as well as philosophy. To belong to your own times is well and good, but to be flattened by them is both sad and terrible.

Laurie Fendrich is professor of fine arts at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island.

Bruce Ferguson

My remarks are pretty much restricted to graduate art schools, an area very distinct from undergraduate programs. This focus is for two masons: first, as dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University for six years I ran a graduate school and know more about it; second, because I worked with the Anaphiel Foundation in Miami on and off over the past two years trying to figure out what a graduate art school might look like in the 21st century and what it might look like in Miami in particular. With Steven Madoff, I organized and conducted a large number of symposia with artists, educators, architects, designers and other art-world constituents to develop a program better adapted to the new context of making art. I also spoke at length to Miami artists, collectors, dealers and others about the conditions there for such a school.

As I see it, the most significant changes in the teaching of art over the last decade have been:

1. The introduction of new technologies of communication that affect both the teaching and learning of art and the potential for new esthetics. This is obvious to anyone under 20 but surprisingly is not yet coded into the curricula of most schools, which maintain a strong allegiance to values and even nomenclatures that emerged in the 1960s (presumably when many current professors were students).

2. The almost complete break between art history and the practice of art-making. Art history as it is now practiced is a traditional and conservative subset of history/ theory. It very seldom has any direct relation to the social or the personal embeddedness of work in the world and instead lives comfortably and hermetically "on the island of language," as historiographer Hayden White calls it.

3. The positive influence in studio programs of a kind of academic conceptualism that has resulted in "need-to-know" curricula. This means that rather than a body of knowledge to be handed down by gatekeepers, in the conservative tradition of academia, advanced schools teach students in relation to the individual student's needs. These schools see art as a methodological field rather than a body of knowledge. Skills in relation to medium and media are taught on this need-to-know basis. From school to school, department to department and even professor to professor, there are no standard criteria in the U.S. for skill-based activities in art, with the exception of basic software programming workshops. On the other hand, there is a set of necessary professional skills, many of them social, that is more a priority than ever before: networking, writing and speaking skills, fiscal planning, the mastery of intellectual property rules. In some cases these skills are being taught directly as part of a curriculum; at other times they are being conveyed by practitioners to whom the students are introduced. Simply put, as the arts have become professionalized, the need and demand for more professional skills have emerged.

People are always rightly saying that art training can and should relate to other disciplines, and ambitious students do take advantage of course offerings that run from philosophy to ethnography to various sciences. In general, however, neither schools of art nor the universities actually encourage such crossover or transdisciplinary work, except at a rhetorical level. In fact, it could be easily argued that structurally such transfer work is made difficult and laborious and probably represents a bureaucratic and academic threat to the larger environment. Despite the ever-increasing practice of artists' collaboration with other sectors of the intellectual economy, schools are very ill-equipped to deal with this impulse on an authentic basis. Patchwork quilts of "this and that" courses occasionally juxtapose disciplines but seldom is transdisciplinarity truly realized.

The growth of professionalization is being driven by an ever-expanding global market for art. To cite a familiar statistic: in 2005, there were at least 60 significant civic or national art biennials per year as well as many others less known. Add to that simple but staggering statistic the huge number of art fairs (almost one per day on average at my count of 282--although, again, not all are internationally noteworthy); a growing market (the over 300 galleries in New York's Chelsea are a symptomatic but not exhaustive index); an explosion of private museums; record sales in auction houses for contemporary work; a burgeoning field of art funds; a plethora of publications, consulting firms, art advisors and active investors, then the exponentially increasing number of accredited MA and MFA students is not surprising.

Personally, I welcome the fact that MFA programs are directly connected to markets and dealers. Students enrolling in graduate programs have generally been out of school for a while and are committed and urgent about their professions, evidenced by their coming back into the educational system. They are likely to take on great financial loads by the time they have completed their studies. They are not naive or monastic, and the schools are as much involved in the "real" world as they are. To pretend otherwise, as many programs have done in the past, is irresponsible. At school and elsewhere there are scores of people, books and pedagogies that underwrite a notion of "success" (in its fiscal sense at least) as a sign of loss of integrity or lack of critical thinking. These attitudes are subtly reaffirmed by some common modes of art-making, especially critical work about consumer culture or work done in the name of the public, for instance. Needless to say, many of the advocates of such approaches are tenured professors, the only people in the world with guaranteed employment contracts.

But even if students are inducted into the real world of fiscal, social and political interests, there are still no guarantees of viable art careers. Yet, I believe that the issue of "success" is a much more interesting and complicated one than the issue of failure. I believe, therefore, that instruction that stresses professional preparation, from the conceptual and theoretical to the legal and administrative, has a place in contemporary pedagogy. To send students out into the world to re-invent the wheel, as was often the case, is both depressing and condescending.

In touring European schools, I find the obvious difference between our studies and theirs is that the European approach is entirely based on charismatic figures and the myth of "free" education. What they mean by this, of course, is education underwritten by government funding. It is not only not "free" but, as a result, European educators and administrators don't have any idea what it actually costs to educate a student. With the European Union's demand for unit education, the Continent's art schools are likely to see the introduction of transnational criteria based on curricula and performance-based budgeting, ending a very long reign of romantic pedagogy. Yet undeniably, charismatic figures are the ones who engage students, whether here or in Europe, and education--being an elusive thing--is often best served by the chemistry developed by the mentor/student relationship.

My sense from comparing schools is that you never get it completely right and that all you do is provide the best conditions possible. Those conditions include respect for the students as artists, availability of necessary skill sets on demand, introductions to urgent contemporary intellectual currents and student colleagues who are diverse in all ways and professionally ambitious. Students do teach students as a major part. of the experience of school, a fact that does not receive adequate official recognition. But there are ways to enhance any experience. Jon Kessler, who was chair of the visual arts department at Columbia from 2000 to 2005, introduced a mentor process into the school's curriculum that oscillates between a classroom structure and a studio-crit structure. It allows students to spend time over two years with a major artist of their choice and it allows a major artist to have intense relations with students without thoroughly interfering with his or her practice. Business schools change their curricula in relation to the way in which business is done, and art schools must be flexible enough to do the same.

Bruce Ferguson is a former dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. New York.

Suzanne Anker

From John Dewey to Joseph Beuys to the present, philosophers and practitioners of art education have resisted the imposition of governing rules. Some artists and even some educators would go so far as to say that art cannot be taught at all. I'd like to propose that the issue of art's pedagogical platform is most effectively addressed today by defining art and its teaching as "epistemic things" that constitute "experimental systems."

In fact, the recognition of art as an experimental system is already evident in many European teaching models, where art-making and "picture science" are understood as forms of knowledge production. The concepts of experimental systems and epistemic things--especially as the terms are used by the German molecular biologist and historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheinberger--have migrated from the natural sciences into the plastic arts and humanities, providing a novel way to think about discovery and flux. "Experimental systems," Rheinberger explains, "constitute integral, locally manageable, functional units of scientific research. It is through them that particular scientific objects--epistemic things in my terminology--gain prominence in a wider field of epistemic cultures and practices."

Rheinberger's approach to research, innovation and analysis is hardly, if ever, invoked in American art institutions. Yet his ideas might be useful at a time when art schools are trying to figure out what are the essential materials and techniques needed in the contemporary artist's toolbox, and how to reconcile traditional handmade methods with state-of-the-art image production. One recent new offering at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) that addresses epistemic art is "Visual Science," a course taught by a molecular biologist and presented in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History.

The ubiquity of digital technologies in the culture at large--and the accompanying social, political, economic and esthetic ramifications--are perhaps the most crucial issues confronting today's emerging artists. At SVA, the fine arts department is currently in the midst of integrating digital technologies--including photography, video, 3-D modeling applications and computer-generated sculpture--into its program so that they will be accessible to all students.

Within traditional studio practices, problem-solving assignments tend to be bound by equally traditional restraints. Students acquire knowledge about materials, various techniques of fabrication and alternative image-making strategies. In short, they learn about the practical tasks involved in producing works of art. What also seems to happen in too many programs is that students aren't taught how to assess what they've done and what they might do next. An essential part of art as an epistemic practice, however, is the stress on reflective thought. Students of epistemic art are urged to keep progress notes, pursue competing solutions, experiment with multiple drawings and schematics; they need to learn how to archive source material and manage information, among other skills.

Today's emerging artists (and their mentors) face an art world substantially different from anything in the past, be it the classic Bauhaus model or the resistance modes of the 1970s. The art student must become conversant with a new set of conditions, and with shifting patterns of meanings and consumption. Both art-making and the art market operate within complex systems in which variables can unexpectedly cascade. The education of artists requires teachers capable of addressing the swiftly changing conditions in the visual arts, people who can help young artists to imagine and even, sometimes, to construct a more viable and sustainable future. In comprehending art objects as epistemic things, perhaps we can get contemporary art to move beyond what seems to be its most recent calling as consumer-driven commodity or vehicle to celebrity.

Suzanne Anker is chair of the fine arts department at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Thomas Lawson

The art world has become increasingly international over the last decade and information about it easier to find. More and more students, particularly at the graduate level, expect art school to provide the information, access and networking they will need. As a result, nobody teaching at the college level can comfortably present 10-year-old knowledge; everything has to be rethought and updated on an ongoing basis.

To answer the question "What makes for a successful art school?," it seems necessary to address a couple of more fundamental ones first: what is an art school, what is it for, and what does it do? It is perhaps obvious to say that an art school provides training for successive generations of artists, but that in turn opens up so many questions about the nature of art, and the nature of a career in art, that we will never find a place to begin. What is clear is that in order to deliver; a school must have a reasonably clear understanding of its own, historically driven account of what is important. The schools that are deemed successful, that come in at the top in terms of rankings, can point to lists of alumni who have achieved some renown in the international art world of the biennials and art magazines. But it is important to recognize that there are other measures of success, and a good school, one concerned with educational outcomes as much as with art careers, will give its students access to useful strategies for making productive lives out of creative impulses.

Some of the denizens of art schools impact the mainstream culture--graphic designers, animators, game designers, for example--but for the most part art school provides a refuge from that mainstream, a haven for those who seek, however temporarily, an alternative. The chief responsibility of those of us who oversee these precious institutions is to preserve this haven, and to prepare future generations to maintain it. Above all, art school is a place to think about art and how to make it, to learn to form judgments and act on them, to discuss the relevance of. art and its practice. The role of the art school is to prepare young artists to live the life, without undue pressure from the conforming ideologies of the market, from "responsible civic discourse" or even from a prescriptive history of art as one generation understands it.

For anyone dedicated to teaching young artists there is a necessity to constantly monitor the state of art. We must continually ask ourselves, what is at stake today? What are the necessary skills for an artist? I would argue that the primary skills needed are analytic and critical: how to understand images and texts, how to think through personal decision-making. What students need are the tools to navigate the world they find themselves in, which, in terms of images, is a digital one. Some may choose to do this by opting for a number of low-tech interventions, from performances to discussion sessions driven by the instinct to collaborate, to various graffiti-based strategies and so on. To build a foundation on drawing skills, as some still advocate, presupposes a primacy of painting and sculpture that is no longer a given.

In the end, the only instruction that really matters is individual, one-to-one discussion of work in progress or recently finished--the encouragement of a singular voice, within a historical and critical context. Interesting, insightful remarks can come up in class, but they are random events, as likely to be ignored as picked up and acted on.

I think there are two contradictory forces at work in the recent growth of studio programs. At the undergraduate level, more young people are looking for alternatives to corporate culture, interested in experimenting with different ways of being in the world. Growth at the graduate level--increasing competition to get in, increased expectations after coming out--is driven mostly by a recognition that there is now a professional career of some viability to be had in the visual arts, and that the MFA is the essential key to entry. It is these two years that impart a sense of the currently relevant, and allow time to create a body of work shaped by that sense.

The market offers a hot-wired connection to topicality; it creates palpable excitement and a sense of connectedness, not to mention the opportunity for reward. But it also poses a danger of overexposure or premature exposure of unresolved work. It seems to me that structured encounters between marchers and makers--annual open studio days, graduation shows and such--can be productive on a number of levels, but that in general, art school should be a place to fuck up without fear of consequences, and to learn from the messes made. It should also be a place to explore other ways of making and presenting art, a place where the market does not reign supreme.

There's a widespread assumption that MFA programs provide the best measure of art schools. I would like to propose a nuanced demurral. While it is certainly true that MFA programs have become increasingly important in an ever-more professionalized world, I would argue that it is the health of an undergraduate program that best indicates the strength of any school, and that it is there that you find the most significant differences among schools. Institutions that nurture their BFA populations, and seek ways to integrate the raw enthusiasm and unlearned spirit of the best undergraduates with the more focused discipline and broader knowledge of the graduates, foster an environment that benefits all students as they seek the best ways to give form to their creativity. Schools that invest everything in the MFA program, leaving their undergraduates in virtual quarantine, run the risk of becoming isolated, theory-bound and boring.

Thomas Lawson is dean of the School of Arts at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.

Saul Ostrow

During the 15 years that ! have worked with graduate studio students, the critical and cultural environments that inform their vision of the role of artist and art have significantly changed. While many students still go to graduate school to develop their skills or to get the necessary credentials to teach at the college level, others are increasingly attracted to those graduate programs that promise entree into the art world. Regardless of students' expectations, the long-term obligation of a graduate program should be to create an environment in which "student-artists" can develop their ability to think about how they will work within a cultural context in which the boundaries between disciplines are being redefined, both technically and conceptually.

When I was a graduate student in the very early 1970s, art was still considered a vocation, and getting an MFA meant spending two years in a program defined by a medium. Painters, photographers, sculptors, printmakers, et al. were nominally and often physically segregated. The standard program consisted of long hours working in the studio, minimally supplemented (and usually only because the accreditating agency required it) with some art history courses and perhaps a seminar in "contemporary issues." As such, given the luck of the draw, intellectual training was haphazard and slipshod at best.

These graduate programs were premised on the view that artists train artists, that art is eternal, fixed by history and form and that, for the most part, an artist made art for him- or herself. The evolution of styles was therefore understood as the product of subjective preferences, individual insights instigated by social and material conditions or, more cynically, by market forces. Given that these programs often lacked a true curriculum, "student-artists" were expected to refine their vision, skills and concepts under the supervision of a faculty that bickered like old married couples, while encouraging students to work their way through formal and personal issues. Consequently, the primary pedagogic tools were the individual tutorial and the group crit, which were complemented by the occasional visiting artist who came to lecture on his or her career and work, and field trips to important local exhibitions.

Although many graduate programs over the years have begrudgingly adapted to the need to teach theory (or "critical studies") or to develop non-medium-specific curricula, the fact that graduate programs have not significantly changed structurally or pedagogically is a concern for many of us involved in the question of how artists are to be educated. While it is true that most artists continue to make their careers within the gallery system, outside of creating digital arts programs and allowing for individualized curricula, school administrators and their faculties have been slow in responding to the needs of those student-artists who are interested in engaging in scientific research, or who believe a career in art can consist of doing land reclamation projects, revitalizing under-represented communities or working with corporations.

To meet the needs of those students who wish to work outside traditional venues would require that an art school's graduate program have a truly multidisciplinary curriculum offering not only technical and esthetic training but also academic preparation and guidance in those areas that will influence their practices as artists. This means going against the traditional atelier approach because it necessitates establishing a curriculum with a core of mandatory subjects, as well as workshops and laboratory courses.

One of the challenges to producing programs that are in keeping with contemporary art practices is ironically the corporatization of education, which is a reality that cannot be ignored. What this means for those institutions in the business of educating artists is that they must balance their commitment to addressing evolving cultural standards with the institutional tendency to seek those solutions that are most readily marketable. Given that it is difficult for art schools and colleges to revise their curriculum on a regular basis, increasingly they have chosen to introduce career-oriented business courses offered under the heading "professional practices." While there is nothing wrong with this, I believe that, along with advancing a business model of professionalism, a forward-looking graduate program should encourage students to explore the broader social and philosophical networks and frameworks that inform contemporary cultural production. This calls for not only a new pedagogic vision but also recognition that the arts, by helping the dominant culture to absorb new esthetics, concepts, practices and technologies, are the research and development department for our society as a whole.

Saul Ostrow is chair of Visual Arts and Technologies Environment at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is also leading a task force charged with creating a new center for graduate studies in collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Art and several Ohio universities.

Dave Hickey

During the 1990s, I ran a graduate program in studio art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It was, by my standards, a successful one. About 40 percent of my ex-students now exhibit and sell their own art in national and international venues. Many of them support themselves doing so. Here are some notes on what I learned from the experience:

1. In the present moment, artists are better off training themselves at home and acquiring the benefit of a good liberal arts or art historical education. This, because the model for graduate art education, established in the early '70s by John Baldessari and others (myself included), is 40 years old and virtually obsolete.

2. Art schools are unhappy, ugly places. They tend to inculcate philistine, institutional habits of mind and to teach young artists more about teaching than about art. Since teaching art has been destructive to the practice of every artist I know who teaches, I try never to forget that the few good, serious teachers of art pay a price that's way too high for the privilege of doing it.

3. Teaching art, in my experience, is a genuine privilege that comes with its own oath to "do no harm." It also breaks your heart.

4. Art is a cosmopolitan practice best taught in cities near the water. Teaching art in a provincial cultural environment that does not celebrate and embrace change is totally self-defeating. It transforms art into a compensatory discourse that can help a stranded student maintain his or her sanity for few years in the boonies. It cannot, however, help people who teach under these conditions maintain their sanity. These people are doomed....

5. Teachers of art practice have one overriding obligation to their students: to be intimately familiar with the contemporary standards of art practice, discourse, trade and exhibition against which their students' work will be measured--so their students will know the unspoken rules they are choosing to break or not to break. The art market itself should be dealt with evenhandedly and explained in detail. It is a fact and an option from which students should not be cloistered. Demonizing the art marketplace does more damage to students than exposing them to collectors and dealers who are irrevocably a part of the art world.

6. Art school must be free or cheap. It is virtually impossible for a young artist to establish a mature, courageous practice with a six-figure educational debt.

7. Art students should not be placed under the authority of older practicing artists whose work they are mandated to render obsolete. This guarantees bad advice and destructive criticism.

8. Any teacher of art who conceives his or her job to be "teaching young artists to think critically" should be fired immediately for intellectual dishonesty.

9. All group crits with faculty and students in attendance should be abolished immediately. These crucibles privilege the verbal over the visual and allow faculty members to poison and manipulate peer relations among their students.

10. Nurturing attention paid to an art student should never be confused with attention paid to nurturing art.

11. Unfinished work should be presumed not to exist.

12. Art in the context of an art school always looks bad, especially when it's very good.

13. Regular supervision and oversight of young artists' practice should be suppressed. My rule: "If you're not sick, don't call the doctor."

14. If art students want to study Continental theory, they should learn German and French and study it in a philosophy department. Because (1) art schools are incapable of distinguishing properly between theory and practice; (2) art school classes in these subjects are little more than uncritical "slow pitch" indoctrinations taught by advocates rather than scholarly adepts; (3) all of the American translations of this work are poisoned by the moment of their making; (4) this entire discourse is now "historical"--a dated, conservative, academic field of study and no longer live talk.

15. Only saints can nurture real talent. I am a writer, not even an artist, and even I can't avoid feeling a twinge of resentment when a pimple-faced twerp with a skateboard under his arm shows me a mature and persuasive work of art. I can see, much more clearly than the twerp, the road opening before him, the obstacles falling away, and it's all I can do not to stick out my foot and trip him. If I were an artist, with a stake in the game, I would probably trip him, and tell myself that it's for his own good. It wouldn't be. Better to buy the damned art and take your profit on the back end.

Dave Hickey is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was previously a professor of art criticism and theory.

Archie Rand

If the music is true the form takes care of itself.--Cecil Taylor

After World War II visual arts programs were shimmed into academia as a magnet for GI Bill revenues. They are not a good fit, as colleges are rarely the forums they imagine themselves to be, but rather places where students learn accommodating behaviors. Future employers are then assured that the graduate is a team player. This format produces MFA programs that are not outfitted to generate inspiration, as the grading system and syllabi are respectively repressive and cynically superficial. The students are ordinarily directed to tweak their reconstructions of present models. There is then the insistence on verbal self-presentation that rejects any unfootnoted poetics. Idea replaces imagination and reference replaces enthusiasm. Respect for the potential of the student's desire can lapse amid all this. Some of the more savvy incoming students will have already cut back on their own curiosity, anticipating its replacement with a company-issued strategy.

MFA programs wonder if they are supposed to turn out that elusive art star or make available some version of the studio-lite experience to fulfill their pedagogical mandate. Regardless, people will teach using the methods by which they learned. When you look at '60s Yale grads, "Hairy Who" Chicago Art Institute grads, '70s Cal Arts grads and the recent Columbia grads, the students who went on to become well-known artists usually attended as a group during a relatively brief period. Years ago I asked David Salle if he knew that his Cal Arts class was hot and he replied, "Yes. You know. You always know."

Sometimes serendipitous student/faculty chemistry flourishes, allowing great fertility. I've seen it happen and in retrospect can recount the details but it's always different. The common factor is student and faculty dedication. Aside from that, there's no rationale behind the guarantees of excellence promised by a grad school art education.

Young artists learn effectively from their peers. That kind of dialogue should be given comfort in an academic institution. A successful MFA program, one whose graduates remain artists, chooses its incoming classes based on sightings of commitment rather than proficiency. A faculty member would be well advised to maintain a humble wonder, despite what experience may caution. Under a diverse faculty, students witness conflicting ardors. Ideally, to the student, the visual buffet is available and nonhierarchical. The transmission of love and the receipt of that love from other artists, mostly dead or inaccessible, and the resultant self-actualization will be made tangible as reliable visual evidence. Cocteau said that poetry is a machine for the manufacture of love and that all of its other properties were lost on him. The acknowledgment of art's powers of intimacy is too dicey for the business of college. It is affection, supported by memory, that gives this activity a social function and a moral component. The cultivation of a student's capabilities for the exchange of affections with art can permit the creation of an appetite for histories and approaches that will allow that student to ingest more than can ever be taught. A concerned instructor can recognize this but, make no mistake, this is a spiritual and only incidentally mechanical activity. Guston remarked bitterly that Reinhardt fired Rothko from the Brooklyn College faculty, where I now teach, because Rothko "spent too much time talking to the students." In what could be seen as an act of retroactive penance, Vito Acconci has recently been appointed to the Brooklyn College art faculty.

The European style of open discussion as epitomized by Joseph Beuys and, in this country, by John Baldessari, is discouraged by administrative bean counting. Sometimes, it is the unqualified instructor's early horror in the face of an anarchic relentlessness that changes college art-making into a formulaic process that discourages intuition. The question of why artists do this thing and why we should continue can't be addressed logically. This may explain why we get irony that apes the effects of engagement, and a teaching method based on juxtaposition, that academic tool of comparison that dependably produces paradox. Many MFA art products are the result of a system of false discovery that allows a quick grasp to viewers who congratulate themselves as they point out overt contradictions in the work Most grad students are encouraged to make art that is the equivalent of a term paper--this shuts down entrance for the subjective irrational, the source of real discovery.

It is sobering to note that in the past 30 years, coincident with the increased influence of MFA programs, and making slight allowances for advances in technology, consecutive Whitney Biennial catalogues show remarkably little innovation in approach as to art-making (despite curatorial intent) when compared, decade by decade, to the art movements occurring over the past two centuries. The unintentional immorality of teaching recent, but beatified, art could lead to an acceptance of cant and disinvite the self-analysis required for an involved experience. Picasso said that the spirit of research was alien to him while he cautioned all artists against taking up teaching, "the other profession." One version of the story has Matisse asking Picasso how France came to find itself under Nazi oppression and Picasso answering, "The art schools did this."

The undergrad schools continue to stock MFA applicant pools with a majority of painters. The art of painting trusts that a 2-D surface will be retrieved as a real 3-D and 4-D occurrence. This is a mystical piece of cultural and genetic hardwiring, which MFA programs find hard to accept. They prefer to concentrate on the compositional or on the manual--on the physical construction and presentation of the artwork.

Techniques are teachable, and they are apprehended quickly when the artist understands an unmentionable imperative: that the artist needs to emit involvement. Techniques are whatever you require to give you grounding and to make your work understood. However, because universities think of themselves as fair-minded, they adore playing with theories and exercises yet don't like conclusions. MFA programs can be lazy and would rather contextualize work against a preexistent stance than confront discomfiting responses to doctrine. The truth is that artists really don't ask all those questions that the MFA programs posit are important. They just answer them. But MFA programs need to report to an academic matrix of accountability. What artists actually do, therefore, is ridiculed as juvenile while the sophisticates gather about, in kindness, to encrust the student in acceptable mannerisms.

I respect my friends who believe in a talent that affords a display of conventionally recognizable skills. I, however, believe that talent is courage and desire and that everything else can be learned. Gratitude is the great creative tool. John Coltrane often expressed his thanks to a divine presence. Louise Bourgeois wrote, on accepting an award, "Thank you, thank you much, that is my philosophy."

Art occurs in a state of grace. This can be patiently explained and somehow understood--there are enough artists to verify it--but then you are asked to teach. This can be exhausting. So it is more convenient to have an educational methodology. However, the result of this compromise is a lowering of expectations. I feel that anyone who walks into your studio and good-naturedly asks, "So, what are you doing here?" is visually illiterate and useless as a critic. The visual has a manifest evidentiary capacity in which specific intent is irrelevant. Unfathomable work deserves a respectful response without the premise of an agreeable or even a correct read.

MFA programs have produced some noteworthy products. Most of them are exciting and beautiful, spewing ambition and intelligence in invigorating presentations. But there's also much that consciously acts as illustration for given philosophical positions or is simply encouraged to be adequately polished, that is, a good version of something that preexists. Not a new tactic and, historically, art that has employed these armatures has usually been termed academic. It is a sugar high and is tacitly understood as such. Being topical, this work partakes in designed obsolescence and is made for those who desire the temporary footing that it offers. An interesting development, akin to the advent of the 45 rpm record. The difference is that this work knows exactly what it is and comports itself as a contender for longevity. The advent of this kind of work is the first fruit of the conditions, not just in the studio but in the market and critically, which graduate schools have fostered. MFA programs have become "idea monopolies." They are the only game in town if a young artist needs credibility or a network. This is as dangerous as it is inescapable. The corralling of unregulated imagination and free thought can lead to problems far more serious than esthetic stultification.

Archie Rand is a professor of art at Brooklyn College.

Judith Russi Kirshner

When the Harvard Business Review proclaimed the MFA the new MBA in 2004, it legitimized the business of educating artists, reinforced the celebrity of the artist and designer and confirmed the economic viability of art and design as professions. Driven by a variety of market pressures, art schools and universities, whose tuitions have skyrocketed, have been compelled to become accountable to at least two masters--accreditation by both independent and federal agencies (for example, the Spellings Commission was recently appointed by the Secretary of Education to examine post-secondary education and make recommendations for its reform) and the students whom they are competing to recruit. The promise of professional opportunities and economic security is meaningful to students and parents who pay for tuition increases and especially crucial to those who are underprivileged. Looming over the former goals of critical analysis, modernist discipline and artistic achievement prized in the art academy and university is Richard Florida's thesis of the innovation and productivity of the creative class. To the acquisition of esthetics, add affordability and accountability. Northwestern's School of Continuing Studies program in Arts and Humanities advertises its offerings with a question: "Who says the arts don't pay?"

The "ed biz" is so much a satellite of the "art biz" that a recent cohort of high-profile curators have taken positions in art schools, shifting easily into educational leadership with impressive international connections and credentials that do not emphasize pedagogy. Yet, in Europe the kunsthalle tradition has nourished exhibition spaces whose programs are consistently innovative, a good example being Portikus, an exhibition space adjacent to Frankfurt's Stadelschule art academy. Indeed, newer institutions have assumed the rhetoric of institutional critique as their foundational core, incorporating that resistant dynamic into their rationale for exhibitions. This summer's Documenta, which is being directed by Roger Buergel, a professor at the University of Luneberg in Germany, has foregrounded education as one of its themes listed on its Web page.

In the U.S., some of the very best work is shown in spaces linked to an educational institution, for example, in university-affiliated galleries such as the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Hammer at UCLA, and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I am employed. When the visiting-artists programs of art departments become public and attract audiences to campus, they also present marketing opportunities as schools compete to recruit students and funders, both drawn by star power. Visiting artists add currency to curriculum even as they represent models of success and challenge the status quo of permanent faculty, the often dedicated mentors who are the working stiffs of art schools. Media coverage of celebrity attractions, whether artists or curators, accelerates and emphasizes the slippage between conceptual practice and boutique production. Given the quickened pace of global art-market consumerism, it's no surprise that dealers and collectors now seek out affordable discoveries in graduate studios and thesis shows.

Despite the fact that glamorous galleries sweep ever younger artists into their folds, that auction records trumpet million-dollar price tags for living artists and cinematic fictions portray art school corruption, the best art programs foster critical engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration; they interpret and critique rather than mirror the best practices of the field, which they don't define as just the marketplace. I like the Washington Monthly's rankings of schools, which challenge the measurements of excellence and alumni popularity in the influential US. News and World Report college guide. Instead, Washington Monthly analyzes social mobility, research and community service, ideals that map easily onto dynamic art programs in which a diverse group of students are encouraged as artists to become self-reflective, intellectually curious and politically engaged.

Social activism can't be taught effectively in a classroom; it requires artists/educators who present models rather than curricula designed to promote this approach. Keeping up with the innovation market is not all bad, since vastly superior education in new media and digital technology is partially responsible for the major curricular shifts in the teaching of art. It is collaborative practice that erases conventional boundaries between designers, environments, scientists and artists. In the best art schools and universities, students find opportunities to span mediums and blend them in hybrid compositions, whether involving oil paint or immersive virtual environments, without the imperatives of commodification and beyond the confines of traditional studio practice. A more insidious challenge is the increasing replacement of language, art history and connoisseurship courses with visual literacy and "service learning" (a phrase that describes teaching students how to work in community settings, formerly called outreach). Many artists graduate lacking knowledge of the rich diversity of the visual archive that precedes and contextualizes their work. In the specialized, artificially limited context of art academies, a sense of entitlement is assured as artists are trained in a hothouse of other artists and true believers.

Yet not all of our students are narrowly following the professional path to elusive stardom; some come for the education. Charged interactions occur in the university, where the artist has no special status but is part of a complex community composed of biologists, engineers and historians. Veterans of campus culture wars, artists are forced to engage and compete with other disciplines. Artists are also forced to become educated alongside the biologists, engineers and historians who, importantly, become educated about art. Artists participate in a system in which their instructors compete for research grants and tenure alongside scientists and humanists; their success as artists is not guaranteed and their identity as members of a vibrant citizenry is never taken for granted as it may be in the private academy. As educators, the first lesson we have is to listen to students and then recruit those whose lifetime goal is not only to be a painter in L.A. or Antwerp but also to become a researcher. Art student Rick Gribenas, in his second year at UIC, finds value in "new possibilities as well as new technologies, hobby and 'zine culture, radical thought and activism ... interactivity, environmental interface and immersive virtual content." Creativity flourishes when there is a critical mass of diverse individuals working side by side in science, literature, theater and architecture, often in an urban setting--think Florence in the 15th century, or Los Angeles in the 21st. Academic freedom continues to guarantee opportunities for experimentation, and art schools can become provisional shelters from the pressures of globalization, commercialization and the competitive hunger for the new.

Judith Russi Kirshner is dean of the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Robert Storr

The most significant changes in the teaching of art over the last decade have been the ever-yawning discrepancies between critical approaches--as taught in seminars or espoused by visiting lecturers and artists--and the actual conversations in studios, the types of art coming out of them and the conduct of the majority of students and young artists in the world.

The conventional academic discourses--the often patently anachronistic utopian and dystopian theories that long enthralled my generation--dominate the classroom without there being any significant check on theoretical exaggeration, rhetorical inflation or simple challenges to credibility and responsibility, such as, "If you really believe that the end of art and of the world as we know it is nigh, then why are you doing what you are doing, making what you are making?"

It's not that I am particularly optimistic about any aspect of the situation in which we find ourselves today or that I fail to take seriously the basic questions raised by "postmodernism." As a product of the late 1960s, I have posed them in my own fashion, and aspects of them are, if anything, more urgent than ever. It is just that the experiences that I take for granted as being integral to those questions are now historical, and have little to do with actual lives and circumstances of students who are expected to recite them as a catechism. Walter Benjamin ca. 1938, filtered through the crises of 1968, doesn't add up to 1988 or 1998, much less 2008. Nor is Lacan's distinctly mid-20th-century, and peculiarly French, rereading of Freud necessarily the best place to start a discussion of photography, or of feminist performance today--much less of digitally manipulated photography or abstract painting.

If you're anxious about the rise of authoritarianism--and who isn't--then buck it. Don't just talk back to it in another authority-based language. It's time for post-postmodern generations to make up vocabularies and metaphors of their own--and teach them to their elders. That verbal process goes hand in hand with creating new visual forms. The absence of the former retards or compromises the latter. Or else the emerging generation might radically cleanse the existing vocabularies of dated jargon. "To purify the language of the tribe" was how Mallarme once defined the goals of modernism. At the moment, scholastic obscurantism is more of a threat to sharp critical thinking inside art schools than the "dumbing down" going on outside them. And it's a huge barrier between people within the art system and those at its peripheries and beyond with whom young artists might want to communicate.

Plain speaking about complex matters is not anti-intellectual, it is the achieved result of sustained intellectual labor. Moreover, poetic expression in the service of critical speculation is not the "soft" alternative to "hard" thinking. Rigor is demanded in both, but if you examine the shelves in most studios these days you will find shockingly few books of poetry or fiction. How many students are asked to read the secondary literature on Baudelaire, Beckett, Borges, the Russian formalists and so on, without ever reading any appreciable number of the original texts, and without ever reading literature as literature?

And, while we are at it, who reads history anymore? Who has hunted the sweeping generalizations now in circulation back to the best researched and argued accounts of actual individuals, events and institutions? As Pound said, a generalization is a check written on the bank of knowledge. How many checks bounce these days because people fail to monitor the balance between theory and verification?

The widening focus of studies in art schools, along with the growth of interdisciplinary frames of reference, has been in progress since the 1960s. This is a good thing insofar as it breaks down the serf-imposed limitations--the esthetic parochialism, really--of the old master-student system of studio teaching. Of course, such teaching still has its role, an important one on many levels. But as far back as the Caracci and the Renaissance, art academies were intended to free students from the bonds of traditional guild-based training and give them access to the liberal arts generally, which in those days included history, geography, classical literature, rhetoric and so on. In our day it includes the sciences, the social sciences, critical theory and a host of other fields.

Surely artists have other uses for these bodies of knowledge than specialists in them, and surely they have a right to what Harold Bloom calls the "creative misreading" of what they encounter. But lazy misreading, or the arbitrary or purely polemical misuse of ideas and methods that have their own logic, is another matter, especially when artists claim some of the authority of those disciplines as their own in debate with others in their world. The intellectual tyranny of glibness is as damaging to art as that of dogma--and the two combined are lethal to both art and ideas. If artists speak outside their area of specialization, fine, but if they are speaking within that of someone else, they should be prepared to listen and learn when their speculative approach to the material runs up against true expertise and thoughtful counter-positions. After all, it is not as if everyone doing the "new" social history--much of which is based on intensive archival documentation--accepted Foucault's sweeping and frequently fact-light interpretations as gospel.

Meanwhile, there is undoubtedly a generational divide between those who take new technologies as givens and adapt well to their ceaseless metamorphosis, and those for whom they pose a constant, in some cases nearly insurmountable, challenge. Drawing used to be the lingua franca of art education; now, computer and video skills are. There is no going back, though there is no reason to regard drawing as methodologically obsolete, either. Some people are at home with both ways of making and manipulating images. Increasingly, however, we are dealing with two distinct visual cultures, both in terms of the ability to read images and in terms of the ability to bring them into being. But the notion that they are necessarily polarized--that technology has eclipsed the handmade for some vanguard teleological reason or, on the conservative side, that people opt for cameras because they just can't draw--is the purest nonsense. Bruce Nauman, who is one of the great contemporary innovators of sound, video and other new forms, is also a master draftsman, and he draws all the time. Incidentally, he started out as a teaching assistant in Wayne Thiebaud's drawing classes at UC Davis. On the other hand, Ron Gorehov, generally thought of as a "pure" gestural painter of the old school, has used computers to compose some of his recent abstractions. The fact is that artists find their mediums as need and experience dictate. And just as pioneers of electronic means pick up a pen or pencil, many who may be slow if not reluctant to learn new tools will find a motive and a way to do so.

The number of people who elect to study art has grown out of all proportion to those who are likely to make art. But then there were always more aspirants than eventual practitioners. When I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, we were told that if 10 percent of our class were working in the arts in any capacity 10 years hence that would be a high rate from the school's perspective, and a success.

Given the proliferation of art programs, those statistics, if true, must have dropped to under 10 percent nationwide, which makes it all the more important that art schools take seriously the need to prepare students for critical thinking as much as for creative "doing." Beuys was misleading about everybody being an artist--even many gifted people can't sustain the effort--and his siren song has lured a good many naive souls into troubled lives and others into confusion about what an artist is. Nevertheless he was on to something in arguing that people with art training who approach problems with an open, improvisatory mind are not inferior in real-world situations to those with focused professional training of other more "practical" sorts, and may in some cases be superior to accredited professionals because they learn early to conjure up and play with unscripted options rather than just plug in known solutions to known problems. Chuck Close told me that when he was at Yale, back in the days when formalists talked endlessly about solving the problems of art--by which they meant making the next move in a game with roles set by critics such as Greenberg--his classmate Richard Serra said, "No, artists don't solve problems, they invent them." That is an attitude and a skill that can readily be developed in art school and then applied to surprising effect anywhere one happens to end up.

Historically, art and artists have always moved in and out of the shadow and the spotlight of the market. Only the ignorant, the envious or the hopelessly romantic--plus the rare holy fool--speak of art that is pure, entirely free of the market's temptations, pressures and rewards. Van Gogh wrote to his dealer brother all the time about selling pictures, even as he was just learning how to make them. And it wasn't only the money he wanted; he craved validation. So it's entirely understandable that dedicated young artists should be thinking about how to get their work into the public eye and how to make a living at it. But art schools should not be a dating service that matches the young and the restless with avid art lovers. They should not be in the business--and in an increasing number of schools with aggressive "placement" strategies, it really has become a business--of selling their programs based on the ability of students to sell, and so in effect to speculate or encourage speculation on the early careers of their graduates.

When considering whether or not to open their doors to outsiders, and if so how often and how wide, graduate programs and the students in them should keep in mind that the two to three years spent there will be almost the only time in the lives of young artists when their primary audience is people as informed, as driven and as committed to the long haul as they are. The dialogue that can only take place among peers or with older artists with whom the students have chosen to work is crucial to the roller-coaster ride of doubt and confidence. It accompanies the often disorienting experimentation and abrupt changes in direction students need to go through to arrive at an underlying sense of themselves, and to forge their first--and I stress first--mature body of work. Trading that dialogue and introspection for the usually fickle attention of browsing buyers is a mistake.

Earning a reputation that then needs to be protected for art that may be smart and stylish but is not yet that first mature body of work can slow growth down or in the worst case stop it cold. There is a line in a Carter Ratcliff poem that made a big impression on me when I was in that situation, and even though my "creative misreading" doesn't do it full justice as poetry, I offer that version for what it is worth: "Becoming famous in a style that is not your own is like going to jail for something you didn't do."

The ultimate question, though, is not when you should make an initial move in the direction of the market, or how to respond when it makes its initial overture to you, but how ambitious you are for your work in the long run. How do you pace yourself relative to your particular talents, emotional stamina and powers of concentration, as well as to the particular demands and rhythms of the kind of work you do? Many of the artists most admired these days--Acconci, Nauman, Baldessari, Bourgeois, Polke, Kelley, McCarthy--were comparatively slow to find any real market success, much less market security (if such a thing even exists). So anybody wanting to be an overnight wonder and a radical paradigm-shifter should read very closely the bios and exhibition and collecting histories of those they look up to. If a classmate "takes off," so be it. As the ferociously savvy Alex Katz once said in these pages, "A jerk is somebody who competes with the wrong guy."

At the Art Academy in Dusseldorf where Beuys, Richter, the Bechers, Immendorff and so many extraordinary artists studied and taught, the old master-student system still exists, and it can work. But one has to remember that for every relationship of this kind that develops--Immendorff and Palermo with Beuys, for example, or Gursky, Ruff and Struth with the Bechers--there were hundreds of cases of students who became fixated on or overwhelmed by their mentors. Broader access to faculty in various disciplines and of diverging esthetic convictions, plus discussion centered not only on the professor's wisdom or experience but also on student-to-student dialogue, are the better way so far as I am concerned, though for the lucky and the strong like Immendorff--but not Palermo, who suffered from his discipleship--being "the student" of Beuys must have been a heady way to start out. My only "famous" teachers were Ed Paschke and Peter Saul. I learned a lot by arguing with them, and from their challenges to prevailing modernist "good taste." But there was never a question of being their protege, since both of them thought what I was doing--first "eyeball" realism, then "eyeball" abstraction--was completely hopeless. We'll see.

There are many factors that make art schools click--and usually it is for a decade or less, after which they need to be jump-started again. The first is the care with which students are chosen and the luck they and the faculty have in the chemistry--shared concerns, mutual support, intimate rivalry and what-the-fuck-give-it-a-shotism--that is generated among members of a given class or two. This is what made Yale, Cal Arts, UCLA and some of the London schools hotbeds at different times. As I suggested, big-name professors are not essential; a lively visiting-artists series attended by all students regardless of medium or general orientation is. By the way, as Cal Arts and UCLA show, you can't go wrong hiring John Baldessari.

Otherwise, the faculty must be serious and generous about the teaching part of their vocation--just "putting in time" should be grounds for early retirement--and they have to be fully engaged with their own work and in touch with the wider world, even if that world hasn't always or even ever paid them much attention. Defensiveness and turning one's back on what is really happening out there kill the imagination (which is not to say you need to automatically like or approve of new art). Along with the most virulent of all, bitterness, these are the occupational illnesses of those of us who teach, and they are highly contagious in small communities of faculty and students. Articulate pleasure or passionate but respectful displeasure in the work of others is also contagious; these are models of engagement as important as anything else one can transmit to--or awaken or confirm in--a young artist. But basically students-as-young-artists are on their own by the time they arrive, and the professor-as-older-artist is, too. At its best, art school is the more or less productive meeting of as many supple and unpredictable minds as can be arranged. It's the partially organized but largely ad-libbed exchange and differentiation of interests among a group of semi-strangers, all of whom are playing for keeps.

Robert Storr was appointed dean of the School of Art and professor of painting and printmaking at Yale University in 2006.

James Elkins

Ten Reasons to Mistrust the New PhD in Studio Art

The PhD in studio art is news on this side of the Atlantic: there are only two such programs in the U.S. (at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine) and one in Canada (Universite de Quebec a Montreal) (1) There will soon be many more. (2) (One is being planned now at York University in Toronto, and talks are underway in several U.S. institutions.) Overseas, things are different: as many as 10 universities offer the degree in Australia, and it is ubiquitous in the UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and other countries. It is already expected for a teaching job in Australia and Malaysia. (3)

So far there is not much serious literature on the subject, and almost all of what exists has been produced abroad, including my own writings. (4) Here are 10 reasons to mistrust the new degree--followed by one reason why the degree needs to be studied and even implemented, despite all its flaws.

1. Students in the new degrees are expected to do serious research. The length of dissertations varies from around 25,000 to 75,000 words. How many artists with MFAs can write at that length? How often is art improved by a 300-page dissertation written by the artist?

2. Clearly the new degree exacerbates the academization of art. The PhD will keep students in school between two and four years after their MFAs, not including the time they spend writing their dissertations, which might stretch on--as it does with art history PhDs--another five years or more. Artists will be at least 30 years old before they are out in the world.

3. The new degrees have often fallen into solipsism: in the UK, a PhD student might spend 30 to 40 hours per week in the studio and the library, making art and writing about it. The student may have the same supervisor for her art and her research. Under those conditions, it is not uncommon for the dissertations to become extended introductions to the artist's own work.

4. The PhD in studio art is unique among nearly all degrees in requiring two bodies of work: the art and the research. It's as if the art needed to be validated by a kind of labor that the university can reliably assess, but it makes the studio-art PhD an awkward hybrid. (5)

5. The new degree is a double threat: students whose dissertations are in history of art or philosophy will get PhDs in those fields, and in addition they will be able to teach studio art. Small colleges and art schools can employ such people to work in two different departments. It's a "double threat" because--so goes the perception--people with only one specialty will find it hard to compete.

6. In the new degree, students will become more self-reflective than ever: their research will be directed to themselves and their art. To some extent, reflexivity is a general goal of advanced education, or at the least an inevitable by-product. But is self-reflection always a good thing for art? And who can measure it? Or teach it?

7. When the MFA degree was instituted after World War II, it was hastily defined, and even now there is no extended account of the difference between the MFA and the BFA. (There are lots of ad hoc definitions, but no academic definition such as other programs have.) If we don't really know what the MFA is, how can we build on it?

8. The uneven reputation the PhD has in England, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Australia has to do with the fact that in the UK system--where the proliferation of PhDs and DCAs (Doctorates in Creative Art) started--departments get more money if they have PhD programs. It's been difficult for the degree to escape the suspicion that it is a transparent, even cynical, engine for academic solvency. (And on the other hand, as the new degree spreads, it will put pressure on U.S. institutions to find funding for students.)

9. There is a standard rhetoric for new academic programs in the UK: they have to demonstrate that they possess a methodology for research and that they generate new knowledge. Those two expressions continue to support the introduction of new programs in a number of countries, despite two important problems: no one knows how to define art as research ...

10. ... and no one has come up with a persuasive argument that art is a kind of knowledge. A massive literature has sprung up since the 1970s defending art as knowledge, produced by research, but it is a tortured literature, not widely read except by the administrators and faculty of the departments in question.

These 10 reasons to mistrust the studio-art PhD could easily be expanded. There are all sorts of things wrong with it. But there is also a reason why it needs to be taken seriously: it is coming, and there is no way to stop it. Every one of the objections and doubts about the new degree was once leveled at the MFA, but by the 1960s the MFA was ubiquitous. Now the MFA is commonplace and the PhD is coming to take its place as the baseline requirement for teaching jobs.

My own interest in the degree is to see how it might be done in the most coherent and challenging manner. Because the U.S. academic system does not require catchwords like research and new knowledge (and the long train of often tortured justifications that they have brought with them), U.S. institutions have the opportunity to rethink the degree, and make it into something truly interesting. If it is carefully conceptualized, it has the potential to be one of the most innovative and genuinely interdisciplinary programs of all: a real challenge to the university, the art school and the students who participate in it.

I'll end with just one thought along these lines. If the art that a student makes is no longer classified as research, that frees the academic portion of the PhD to function in the way that it traditionally has, as more or less systematic, professional-level, original research leading to new knowledge. The PhD in studio art affords the opportunity to rethink what such research, or knowledge, might be for. In Australia, some students have chosen research fields very far from their art practice: they have gotten PhDs in anthropology and even chemistry. In some cases, the students' art has no direct connection to those fields: it's just that from their point of view, their art would be helped by a PhD-level understanding of, say, chemistry. In those cases the students have a supervisor in studio art, and another in the relevant field, and neither supervisor is required to spell out the connection between the two. The assumption is that art is a life-long activity, and that the artist herself might not have a clear idea of the relation between the fields. To me, that kind of arrangement is an exemplary use of a university. The juxtaposition of painting and chemistry, or sculpture and anthropology, is genuinely interdisciplinary because neither the supervisors nor the student knows what shape the interaction might take. And such combinations raise fascinating problems from the faculty's point of view: How, exactly, should the chemist supervise a dissertation that is going to be put to an artistic use? What role does art theory, or art criticism, have? When the student writes about her own art, how should her writing be evaluated? By whom?

These are all lovely questions, much more entrancing, I think, than the usual perplexities of interdisciplinary encounters and collaborations. They could even compel the "noncreative" portions of the university to reconsider the place--always marginal, always dubious--of the "creative and performing" arts.

But that's only one suggestion. Provided the rhetoric that currently justifies studio PhD programs can be left to one side, and they can be openly and thoroughly reconceptualized, they may well prove to be more than just the annoying next step in the academization of art--they may turn out to be the promising next step in the rethinking of the university.

(1.) This is not counting the several universities that have, at one time, independently implemented PhDs in the studio arts on their own terms, without taking account of international developments currently driving the field; that includes Columbia University and New York University. The Montreal program focuses on science; there is also a program at Concordia University. For the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, see www.idsva.org.

(2.) Degrees that resemble the new degree--PhDs in design and in music, in the conservatoire tradition--have been around for a long time, but they are not structurally related to the studio-art PhD, which is closer to the half-dozen PhDs in creative writing that already exist in the U.S.

(3.) I thank Sam Ainsley, Glasgow School of Art (which also runs a PhD in studio practice), for the information about Malaysia.

(4.) The first book was The New PhD in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins, no. 4 in the occasional series called Printed Project (Dublin, Sculptor's Society of Ireland, 2005). The second was Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, edited by Katy McLeod and Lin Holdridge, London, Routledge, 2005; see also their article, "The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture," International Journal of Art & Design Education 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 155-68. There is also Artistic Research, edited by Annette Balkema and Henk Slager, a special issue of Lier en Boog: Series of Philosophy and Art Theory 18, 2004; see www.lierboog@dds.nl; and "The Artist's Knowledge: Research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts" edited by Jan Kaila, Helsinki, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, 2006. I thank Timothy Emlyn Jones for this last reference. A crucial document in this respect is the UK Council for Graduate Education's internal study "Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design." An expanded U.S. edition of the first is under preparation, with new essays by Victor Burgin, George Smith, Judith Mottram, Henk Slager and others. Lynette Hunter at U.C. Davis is also working on an anthology with an emphasis on performance studies.

(5.) At the University of Plymouth, there is only a minimal writing requirement; that was instituted to solve the double-requirement issue, but it also means the faculty are responsible for determining what might count as a PhD-level art exhibition. George Smith's program, the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, is the opposite; he does not anticipate teaching studio, but only the related theory.

James Elkins is chair of the department of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as chair of the department of art history at University College, Cork, in Ireland.

(1.) Mercedes Matter, "What's Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?" with responses by Howard Conant and Gurdon Woods, Art News, September 1963, pp. 41, 56.

(2.) Andrew Hultkrans, "Surf and Turf" Artforum, Summer 1998, p. 109.

(3.) Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Deskilling," in Hal Foster; Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernity, Postmodernism, vol. 2, New York, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p. 531.

(4.) Yve-Alain Bois, "1967c," Art Since 1900, vol. 2, p. 520.

(5.) Ian Burn, The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath," in Dialogues: Writings in Art History, North Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1991, p. 105.

(6.) Ibid., pp. 105 106.

(7.) Charles Harrison, "Educating Artists," Studio International, May 1972, pp. 222-23.

(8.) Dennis Cooper "Too Cool for School," Spin, July 1997, p. 92.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.

Why Artists Make the Worst Students

2007-10-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic for The New Yorker

Why Artists Make the Worst Students
© Peter Schjeldahl, 1998

Editor's Note: Peter's speech at a conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists was brought to my attention by one of our readers when it was transcribed and published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/27/98. What Peter says about artists is true of most talented and gifted people as students, and his insights offer an instructive perspective for the collaborative knowledge development and learning environment.

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I teach an art seminar for seniors at Harvard. One peculiarity of my own education is that I barely have any. I'm one of those '60s dropouts you read about, and I never took an art course in my life. This background made me incredibly nervous about teaching, but it has gone all right.

I'm fascinated by the problem of teaching artists in college, because, What is an artist? An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrarian mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative.

The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child. By child, I do not mean childish behavior -- I mean the irrational conviction of the sacred.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa. I'm well aware of this as a problem -- particularly at Harvard, because at Harvard, the students are, by definition, the best in the world. That's who they select. It's certainly a luxury for teaching. The students can actually all write, which is astounding. One of my fellow teachers there once said, "It's amazing, these kids. You can throw the stick as far as you want to in the swamp, and they'll bring it back every time." But along with that comes a cageyness and an all-too-ready ability to beguile teachers.

I have what I call a "gang theory" of education. All gangs are formed by individuals who, for one reason or another, are misfits, wander to the margin by themselves, discover each other, discover other people like themselves. They bond together. If all they have in common is that alienation, they're a very dangerous group of kids. But if they have some aspiration in common, they can be intensely creative. In a way, everybody does this growing up. Every age group is a cohort -- particularly in our culture, which is intensely generational. When we grow up, we tend to trust only those who share our exact historic and cultural period, who watch the same television shows with the same attitudes. Childhood, for everyone, is more than formative. It's a trove of spiritual material for a lifetime. But this is especially true of artists.

Gang members are extremely competitive, but not with each other. They pool their resources, their information, their knowledge, and attack the world. Teams work this way, too, but I like the concept of the gang because, with art, there has to be an element of condoned anarchy. You can't measure creative development by criteria that are like crisply executed football plays. Coaching a gang, it seems to me, one must concede the role of judging individual worth to the group.

In a gang -- of art students, say -- everybody knows without saying who is the best. It's very primitive, very hierarchical, in the way wild animals are hierarchical. Everyone knows who's best, who's second best. There's a lot of doubt about who's third best, because everybody else thinks they're third best. Except for one person who is absolutely hopeless. This person, as a mascot and scapegoat, is cherished by everyone.

The problem is: How do you nurture a gang in academe? I don't think academia should take much responsibility for this. A college education is, and should be, people wanting typical careers in the structure of the world. Education must not distort itself in service to the tiny minority of narcissistic and ungrateful misfits who are, or might be, artists.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it. If you don't know what you want, that's normal at your age. And I will feel your pain -- up to a point. But if you don't know what you want past a certain point, then we're just chattering, we're wasting the taxpayers' or your parents' money. This is fine. It happens all the time. But it's depressing.

My aim is to help kids realize that they're artists already, or that maybe they don't really want to do it, which is more than fine. They've saved themselves a lot of grief, and they can get on with their lives. I tell them that I'm not interested in educating their minds, I'm interested in sophisticating them, which is different. Sophistication is knowledge that's acquired in the course of having a purpose. You know why you want the information at the moment that you put your hand on it. You're not just storing it up for a rainy day.

And what are you learning about in my seminar? You're learning about the course of art, the course of society, the course of the world, the course of your life. You are joining a conversation. You do not prepare to join a conversation. You come up to the edge of it and listen and kind of get the beat, then you jump in. And maybe if you jump in too soon, everyone's going to give you a look and you'll slink off and come back later. It's to get this conversation going among a group of people, when they're students -- that's what I'd like to be able to do. It's a very messy process.

Aspects of sophistication. Love and style. Spirituality and street smarts. Why do you need street smarts? Shrewdness? Toughness? It's to protect something soft that is going to be in danger if it's exposed at the wrong time and place. It's to protect a soul. But to protect your soul, you have to have one to start with. There's nothing that can be done about that in a seminar.

The role of the teacher in gang theory is to throw red meat through the bars of their cage. My particular expertise is savviness about the New York art world, so that's what I share. With another teacher, it would be something else. There's nothing innately relevant or innately irrelevant to an artist. If their minds and spirits can't put the stuff in order, then they're not artists. Very often the flashiest, most seemingly talented person turns out to be not an artist at all, and some hopeless klutz ends up being Jackson Pollock.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There's no more organized information. I'm trying to establish within my seminars disorganized information, which students can start practicing their moves on.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Schjeldahl, Art Critic for The New Yorker

Wow

2007-09-12T23:40:00.001-07:00

Weird Cat Jump

2007-09-12T23:21:00.000-07:00

Miss you Liz

2007-09-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

"Everything has been done a million times. Sometimes you use it and it's yours; another time you do it and it's still theirs."

Elizabeth Murray

An Old Favorite - The Dancing Roomate

2007-09-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

Shining Redux

2007-09-08T18:29:00.001-07:00

No Love at Huckabee's

2007-09-08T18:25:00.000-07:00

DIARY OF HEROIC PROMISCUITY - Nate Lippens

2007-08-27T23:56:00.000-07:00

I just adore nate Lippens ;)

New York is all legend all the time and it can't get enough of its heroic promiscuity. I love it, of course. And resent it too. The old money, boys' club, Ivy League bar-setting mentality makes me sleepy and heavy with disgust. It's a mindset that has shaped all of American life since such a thing came into consciousness.

Hollywood is the acknowledged and flogged exporter of American mythology, but the truth is that New York is the real factory of legends, myths, and heroes. They radiate westward, sometimes gloriously, sometimes with the toxicity of landfill. If Hollywood is the home of illegitimacy, then New York is the home of legitimacy. If you can make it there, you can condescend everywhere else.

In June, I headed there for a hero, to attend the Allen Ginsberg Memorial Reading with Eileen Myles. We met on that rainy Sunday afternoon to catch Gordon Matta-Clark's show at the Whitney. It was the final day of the show and everything seemed fraught: the throngs of people trying to get through the show, to take it all in before it vanished. The tours moved at a clip past us and we wandered off separately.

The show did little for me. Eileen came over and we both blurted out simultaneously, "Did you see the arrow drawings?" Of all the works in the show — the architectural cut-outs, the elaborate, heroic monster transformations — it was two small works on paper that transfixed us. Eileen took some of the papers that were stacked on the gallery floor as souvenirs. "Wallpaper," she said.

Matta-Clark died young of cancer. So did Eva Hesse, whose work I saw last summer at the Jewish Museum. In both cases the materials that the artists used are thought to have contributed to their deaths. Mythically, they play as artist Madame Curies, poisoned by their own hands. We can wonder at what they would have accomplished had they lived. We can admire their obsessiveness. We can feel the martyrdom of dedication.

We then made our way through the mostly embarrassing, Disney-ified Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. There were a few celebrity pics interspersed with ephemera, rock show posters, and optical illusions. Yes, Robert Indiana, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Lindner, and Lynda Benglis all put in cameos, but they were mostly lost in the scrapbook explosion layout. It was more like Spencer Gifts than an exhibition and it was packed. The hard art of upstairs had given way to populism. Of course, the truth was that we were bowing at the Gods of the '60s and the '70s. And the Gods were men. The video in the Gordon Matta-Clark show was focused on the men and the women were literally in the kitchen and serving. In the psychedelic art show Marianne Faithfull and Grace Slick appear but mostly it's cock of the walk. Second verse same as the first. And there was Allen Ginsberg's face in the mix of celebrities, hippies, yippies, burnout, drop-outs, and headcases. We took that as our cue and left.

The Ginsberg event was a continuation of hero worship, much of it heartfelt and personal. Eileen blew a gust of now into the proceedings with some poems from her book Sorry Tree, published by Wave Books in Seattle. She was attaching herself to a tradition rather than a legacy. She read a few poems that she also delivered at the Henry Art Gallery back in April for her talk Everything Is Not Enough.

Following the reading everyone went their separate ways. Eileen and I got caught in a downpour and sought refuge at an empty-ish restaurant. She mentioned that the difference in the event was that "if Allen was still alive, we would have all gone out for dinner together."

★★★

The idea of the one-city critic is finished. This was what I heard in a discussion with another art critic. He insisted that like artists and curators, who travel, the critic must too. He had just returned from Venice and was regaling a table of us with tales of the Prosecco-drinking exploits of the art world. The more he talked the quieter it got. He was holding court. Afterward, a fiction writer who used to cover the East Village scene during the mid-80s boom and who was vilified for not being more "supportive" of the scene at the time told me, "That felt like déjà vu, all the talk is money and real estate and collectors." It was a pitch for critics to shill art as luxury fetish objects. Who wanted to remind the grandstanding critic of the stock market crash of '87 and the subsequent tumble and bust of the art world? Who wanted to suggest to him flipping through old issues of Artforum and asking where they are now, all of those hot commodities?

I actually like the idea of critical promiscuity. But I'd take it further: travel broadens the mind but multiple fields of investigation are even more important. It may seem inconceivable to artists but writers have practices too and it's important to stay fresh, to be restless, to never get too comfortable.

The next day I headed to the galleries. June in New York City felt like school was out. It was in a way because most of the art world cognoscenti were off to Europe for Basel and the Biennale. The merchants really were in Venice and with them some of the feverish trading floor mentality in Chelsea had lifted and I was free to wander through the summer shows.

Unsurprisingly, over-rehearsed uniformity and art-as-commodity permeated the blue-chip galleries. The smaller galleries weren't much better. Many artists seemed to be repurposing barely digested references. Built spaciness abounded. There were enough vapid art / architecture hybrids to fill every shelter magazine and several art quarterlies for good measure.

There were some surprises at smaller venues: Tom Meacham, at Oliver Kamm held promise if you believe painting is dead but canvas isn't. Liz Markus at ZeiherSmith encapsulated the Whitney, '60s / '70s mash-up well. Her works were Rorschach's of 60s painting references with 70s iconography. It beat the psychedelic show but a little went a long way.

I saved Trisha Donnally at Casey-Kaplan for last. I've loved her work especially the Canadian Rain piece, which is owned by Bill and Ruth True and has shown at Western Bridge and HAG. Somewhere on the Rhine the owners of Casey-Kaplan were partying on a pontoon, but in the gallery I didn't smell money or an idea. It was devastatingly bad. Pine branches on the floor, blown up photos, and a sound piece. Her elusiveness didn't even graze cleverness. The shaman vibe of her previous work had shrunken down to a few talismans.

I wandered through a dozen more galleries where plenty of knock-off Banks Violette gothica and junior varsity Matthew Barney pretenders were in evidence. Too much of it was Vice squad Brooklynese for the terminally cool. There was also much more of conceptual algebra: figure out what x equals, break the code, and feel smug. There has to be something more compelling than the mechanics of a clever parlor game to sustain the work. I couldn't wait to get back outside and take in the real visual pleasure on the streets.

★★★

I love flamboyance. Maybe that was why I was so smitten with Gego and Louise Nevelson's shows. Also after Chelsea and Matta-Clark it was a radically different everything. Of course, flamboyance is in the eye of the beholder or the definer. With her outlandish costumes and showgirl / drag queen false eyelashes most people would admit that Nevelson was flamboyant. Gego would be a harder sell. But I think her withholding, exacting yet organic wire sculptures are very flamboyant. They are so ephemeral that they demand attention.

Gego is undergoing the kind of re-discovery that the art world loves: an underappreciated or marginally known artist (usually dead) is finally given the respect and attention they deserve and everyone agrees they deserve it and so we all get to feel satisfied. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I love narrative; I like a story, especially a backstory. A bad childhood, alcoholism, horrible marriages, exile. In various combinations this one-downsmanship is the arc that draws me in. It is the counter-heroic. Or the heroic masked as loser lovely.

Gego does and doesn't fit the model and actually that's her appeal. Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, the daughter of a Jewish banker, she studied for a career in architecture and engineering. But in 1939, she left for Venezuela where she stayed until her death in 1994. Her work is simple and complicated, seemingly freehand semi-geometric drawings and sculptures which she called "drawing without paper." At the Drawing Center it was these twisted wire pieces that captivated. She wrote in a notebook: "Sculpture: three-dimensional forms of solid material. NEVER what I do!"

Gego ignored labels. She didn't really get going as an artist until she was already in her 40s and had raised a family, divorced, and settled with the émigré painter Gerd Leufert. No one knew how to package her work: Drawing? Sculpture? Abstract? Formal? Romantic? Organic? It was a tough sell and to some it probably still will be. Drifting through the small-scale exhibit I was thrilled at the pleasure of the work and the lack of heroics. The anti-heroic impulse in Chelsea is answered with abjection. But here it was something else, demanding yet quiet work.

The heroics came later in the day at the Jewish Museum where I saw Louise Nevelson's show. Nevelson mixes authority and impressionism. There is grandeur to the work, an outsize feel that is in keeping with the artist's persona. She is seemingly the flipside to Gego. Yet both are delicate in sensibility but roused by stoicism to be tough. And both of them remained elusive in Gego's transient perceptions barely registered outside of Venezuela and Nevelson was more familiar to many as a fashion gargoyle in a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph than as a sculptor to be reckoned with.

Her found object assemblages — abstract expressionist "boxes" grouped together to form new creations — have an almost holistic totemic quality. As she said,"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you're really bringing them to life — a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

Nevelson was 42 before she had her first solo show. In 1959, at the age of 60 she was included in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was a launching pad for Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly — all younger than her son. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, a compact survey of 66 works organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport for the Jewish Museum, is her first New York museum show in 27 years.

Nevelson's installations made of street salvaged wooden remnants have AbEx scale, Cubist geometry, and a strong emotional undercurrent. "Self-Portrait, Silent Music," a grid of 24 black boxes is lined with cast-off fragments and a portrait of the artist and it leads to the stunning wall-scale environments including the haunting 225-foot memorial to the Holocaust, "Homage to 6,000,000 I."

They are mammoth in size and yet there is something small, personal, and mysterious to them, in a way that David Smith and Richard Serra never are. I appreciate and admire their work but I'm not moved. Nevelson's work has influenced many but she will always be the eccentric woman in her costumes and bravado, demanding attention. She has her legend because that's what becomes a legend most. In a photograph Gego stands in profile with her gnarled hands, cigarette dangling from her mouth, bending wire and will. Half of her back cock blocks the camera from the pleasure of her creation. She worked a different legend, one of work for work's sake, art as life.

"The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend" is on view through Sept. 16 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200.

Nate Lippens writes about books and art for various publications. He still lives in Seattle.

Elizabeth Murray - Death to Cancer at 66

2007-08-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Murray
(NY Times)

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 14, 2007
There are so many separations in every artist’s life — the projects that live only in the mind, the ones that go no further than a few sketches and, of course, the divorce that takes place when a work is really and truly finished and begins to live on its own. For those of us who celebrated the life and work of Elizabeth Murray, who died of cancer on Sunday at age 66, we mourn our separation from both.

Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape. People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.

But we — many of us New Yorkers — have been lucky to have known the woman herself. I have never met anyone in whom frankness and delicacy combined in the way they did in Elizabeth. Her eyes were very bold, and her face seemed constructed to make sure you couldn’t miss that boldness. There was a wildness blowing through her, and to talk to her was to feel that she was consciously effacing, for your benefit, something that would unhinge you if she let it out, which she did in her work. That was before cancer.

And if you happened to see her in the past year, frail and bald and as direct in the eye as ever, you knew that there was no effacing the knowledge of death, or the fresh understanding of life that that knowledge gives.

Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose. It was central to her idea of herself, and yet the reference it makes to the living woman will now become more and more oblique. The work will live on in the durable world. But the memory of the artist lives on only in us, who are made of the same impermanent stuff that she was. VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Mencius

2007-07-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

The chinese philospher Mencius once said: "Why I dislike holding to one point is that it injures the tao. It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others."

Context

2007-07-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

From Robert Genn~

Did you ever wonder about the difference between a piece of art
in someone's basement and a piece of art in the National
Gallery? Did you ever wonder just exactly what constitutes
"good" art?

Readers may be familiar with the recent experiment done by the
Washington Post. The brilliant violinist Joshua Bell, fresh
from a performance at the Library of Congress with the Boston
Symphony, busked for free during the morning rush at a
Washington Metro station. Of the thousand-odd passersby, only a
few stopped, or even paused, to listen. Small change fell
infrequently into his open violin case--the very case that
holds his $3 million 1710 Strad. Most were oblivious to some of
the most beautiful and difficult music ever written for his
instrument. Interviewed after leaving the building, it seems
few commuters even noticed the guy in the baseball cap standing
by the frequently swinging doors. Thinking back, Bell believes
some thought his efforts offensive. The nearby skin mags,
shoeshine lady and lotto ticket machine got more attention. If
you want to see a remarkable video taken of the experimental
performance, we have it for you at the top of the current
clickback. See URL below.

Bell, when playing in more conventional venues, is a guy who
makes about a thousand dollars a minute. Much has been written
of his Metro debut. My take is that the Metro is now and will
forever remain an inappropriate place to hold a concert. Any
concert. Quality art deserves and needs a proper frame to be
fully recognized as quality art. In art, perception and context
are all-important. "Art pity" is not a significant generator of
fans.

Many visual artists who read this will never see their work in
the National Gallery. While there's a complex mix of
machinations that needs to happen in order to be there, we can
often make the choice to be in better venues. Quality mags beat
scandal sheets. Commercial galleries beat barber shops. We can
be selective about our galleries, too. The unfortunate truth is
that it's better to be on Lord Bluffington's walls than on Joe
Blogg's on the other side of the tracks. People who pay big
bucks to put their bottoms in the front row are just a wee bit
more likely to be enthusiastic. It's human nature.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "I was oddly grateful when somebody threw a dollar instead
of change." (Joshua Bell)

Esoterica: Curiously, children being hustled by with their
parents were the ones who often turned and gawked. It was the
adults who hurried them out of harm's way. Still, Bell picked
up about $34 during his 43 minutes in the Metro. "That's about
forty dollars an hour," he mused. This is probably better than
a more average violinist performing in such a place. A
particular few--mainly ex-violinists--noticed the quality and
hung around to give a listen. No crowds gathered. Only one
passerby recognized Bell. She didn't know what the devil was
going on, but she gave him a whopping $20 anyway. She was
framing him differently.

Why the Art World is a Disaster

2007-07-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

It is now that we begin to encounter the fevered quest for novelty at any price, it is now that we see insincere and superficial cynicism and deliberate conscious bluff; we meet, in a word, the calculated exploitation of this art as a means of destroying all order. The mercenary swindle multiplies a hundredfold, as does the deceit of men themselves deceived and the brazen self-portraiture of vileness.
—Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis

Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile.
—Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Why the Art World is a Disaster
Roger Kimball

Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see “Wrestle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She’d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts—yes, those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things—yes, those things—to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something … special.

Well, these folks are not naïfs. They’ve both been around the avant-garde block and back a few times. If they said an exhibition was ostentatiously horrible, then it was likely to be something worth taking some trouble to avoid—unless, that is, your job description includes regular stints as a cultural pathologist, in which case it is something that duty requires you to inspect, docket, and file away for the instruction and admonition of future generations.

This is my unhappy position. So, one fine May morning I motored up to lovely Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of the elite, super-trendy Bard College. Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. If your bank account is healthy (tuition and fees for first-year students: $47,730) and young Heather or Dylan is “creative,” i.e., not likely to get into a Harvard or Yale or Williams, then Bard is a place you can send them and still look your neighbor in the eye. The college is probably best known for its baton-wielding president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras in his spare time and whom the music critic Tim Page once described as the sort of chap who gives pseudo-intellectuality a bad name. Bard also has the distinction of being, as far as I know, the only college in the United States to honor the memory of Alger Hiss, the perjurer and Soviet spy, by establishing a chair in his memory.

It had been a long time since I had visited Bard. Back in the early 1990s, I ventured into its sylvan purlieus to write about the opening of the Richard and Marieluise Black Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture. Now here we had, attached to the old edifice, the Marieluise Hessel Museum of Art. Two Marieluises? It turned out to be like the evening star and morning star of philosophical lore, Hesperus and Phosphorus: two names but one and the same orb—in short, as William Demarest put it in The Lady Eve, “It’s the same dame.” The German-born businesswoman shed the unfortunate (or maybe not) Mr. Black somewhere along the line. Although married again, she is taking no chances and now endows her endowments with her maiden name. Marieluise has been busy. In the early 1990s, when the Black Center opened, her collection of contemporary art consisted of some 550 items. It has grown to 1,700, of which approximately 200 items are on view in “Wrestle.”

You will not be able to see “Wrestle.” By the time you read this, the exhibition will have closed. But do not pine. You haven’t missed anything. Have I become jaded? Too many close encounters with Gilbert and George, Matthew Barney, and all the other exotic fauna that populate the galleries and art museums these days? Perhaps. In any event, I thought my friends overstated the awfulness of the exhibition. Don’t get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts, “explicit” images, and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn’t worse than dozens of other exhibitions I’ve seen, you’ve seen, we’ve all seen.

I thought about this as I picked my way through the galleries at the Hessel Museum. A “video installation” by Bruce Nauman in which a man and a woman endlessly repeat a litany of nonsense, tinctured here and there with scatological phrases. Been there. Photographs (in four or five different places) by Robert Mapplethorpe of his S&M pals. Very 1980s. Histrionic photographs by Cindy Sherman of herself looking victimized. Been there, too. Nam June Paik and his video installations. Done that. A big pile of red, white, and blue lollipops dumped in the corner by … well, it doesn’t much matter, does it? Any more than it matters who was responsible for the room featuring images of floating genitalia or the room with the video of ritualistic homosexual bondage. Ditto the catalogue: its assault on the English language is something you can find in scores, no, hundreds of art publications today: “For Valie Export, the female Body is covered with the stigmata of codes that shape and hamper it.” Well, bully for her. “As usual with Gober, the installation is a broken allegory that both elicits and resists our interpretation; that materially nothing is quite as it seems adds to our anxious curiosity.” As usual, indeed, though whether such pathetic verbiage adds to or smothers our curiosity is another matter altogether.

No, the thing to appreciate about “Wrestle,” about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluise Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and, sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It’s outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The “arts” at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary. Leon Botstein described Marieluise Hessel as a “risk giver.” An essay in the Bardian, the college magazine, elaborates on this theme:

She was drawn to work that challenged and subverted the status quo, work that flaunted [the author means “flouted,” but, hey, this is Bard] and struggled with urgent, utopian notions of gender and identity, feminism, and the politics of AIDS, among other issues.
Mr. Botstein and the Bardian have it exactly wrong. When it comes to art, Ms. Hessel is neither a risk taker nor a risk giver. Like Bard itself, she simply mirrors the established taste of the moment. Far from “challenging” or “subverting” the status quo, the 1,700 objects she has accumulated are the status quo. And far from “struggling” with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world. “Academic,” in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of “scholarly,” but rather in the sense that we speak of “academic art,” stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory. A wall full of photographs of two girls does nothing to “interrogate” (a favorite term of art- and lit-crit-speak) identity any more than a mutilated doll forces us to reconsider our usual notions of whatever-it-is those odious objects are supposed to make us reconsider. Really, the only thing exhibitions like “Wrestle,” or institutions like the Hessel Museum, challenge is the viewer’s patience.

Ms. Hessel once enthusiastically recalled her introduction to contemporary art as a young woman in Munich: “It was like entering a cult group.” That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of perspective and modeling we have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better) and 2) the right politics.

Again, my point is not to deny the repellent nature of much that was on view in “Wrestle.” It deserves its “X” rating, all right. But it has been a long time since shock value had the capacity to be aesthetically interesting—or even, truth be told, to shock. Decades ago, writing about Salvador Dalí, George Orwell called attention to, and criticized, the growing habit of granting a blanket moral indemnity to anything that called itself art. “The artist,” Orwell wrote,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Orwell was writing in the 1940s. Already that attitude was old hat: it had definitively entered the cultural bloodstream with the Dadaists shortly after the turn of the last century. What those folks didn’t know about “challenging” and “subverting” conventional taste and attitudes wasn’t worth knowing. In essentials, they pioneered all the tricks on view in “Wrestle”—the sex, the violence, the tedium, the presentation of everyday objects as works of art. The difference is that Duchamp was in earnest: “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” No wonder he gave up on art for chess. Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality. I do not have much time for Marcel Duchamp; in my view his influence on art and culture has been almost entirely baneful; but it is amusing to ponder how much he would have loathed the contemporary art world where all his ideas had been ground-down into inescapable clichés, trite formulas served up by society grandees at their expensive art fêtes in the mistaken belief that they are embarked on some existentially or aesthetically daring enterprise. Perhaps Duchamp, aesthete that he was, would have savored the comedy. I suspect his amour-propre would have caused him to feel nausea, not amusement.

Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like “Wrestle,” of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody. When the outré attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.

That’s part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic—well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art. As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying “Wrestle”—accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days—demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication. It’s not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn’t even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man’s land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the “art” is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it, as witness the little red band that surrounded the catalogue for “Wrestle.” This “work” was by Lawrence Weiner and read: “An Amount of Currency Exchanged from One Country to Another.” The point to notice is the usurpation of art by these free-floating verbal clots, full of emotion but utterly lacking in what David Hume called “the calm sunshine of the mind.”

A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money—not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with “the arts.” The presence of money means the presence of “society,” which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday’s philistine is today’s champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be. If tout le monde is going to an opening for Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim, you can bet your bottom black tie that the nice lady next door who gave MOMA $10 million will be there, too. The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called “the revenge of the philistines.”

A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in “Wrestle”: almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy. But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman’s “Good Boy, Bad Boy” was right: “this is boring.”

2007-06-22T09:45:00.001-07:00

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright

2007-06-22T09:44:00.001-07:00

"You only have control over three things in your life--the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior).

How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don't like what you are producing and experiencing, you have to change your responses. Change your negative thoughts to positive ones. Change what you daydream about. Change your habits. Change what you read. Change your friends. Change how you talk."

Jack Canfield – The Success Principles

Cas Haley

2007-06-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

!!!

Go Paul!

2007-06-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

A Fresh Crop for the Market

2007-06-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

Review by Jen Graves

A little-known fact of Seattle art is that contemporary dealer Scott Lawrimore first became involved in art as a grade-schooler singled out for his drawing of Scrooge. Presumably the Lawrimore Scrooge had a sufficiently miserly presence to inspire his teachers to spirit him away to special advanced art classes, and this is how many art students are first identified—by their ability to reproduce something already known. This, however, is the last thing we actually want from artists (or just about any graduate of anything).

Every spring in Seattle, the two most prominent art schools, University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, hold exhibitions that display the proposed answers to the never-ending riddle of innovation, like the queen coming to Rumpelstiltskin one more time. The whole setup is dramatic. And in the meantime, as the artists are trying to find themselves, you're trying to find them. Most people with art degrees don't become career artists. Student shows are a way to make early bets on who's going to make it. It sounds harsh, but it's true.

The students at Cornish are supposed to be less polished; they're receiving bachelor's degrees, while the UWers are being declared masters in their field. In general, the art by the UW students, on display at the Henry Art Gallery, is competent. It's also sedate. With a few exceptions, it feels small in scope, and in some cases, shriekingly derivative. Has news of the hot art market reached all the way into UW classes and sent students scrambling to offer their most obeisant selves to dealers rather than to push the limits of what they can do? Or does graduate school itself feed complacency?

It's no coincidence that the two artists who stand out are the ones whose works seem the least fixed, the least contained in the gallery, the ones still squirming with play: Fred Muram and Matthew VanHorn.

Muram made three modest videos: one of him being fed a hamburger by three hands (two of a pair and one misfit, as if in reference to the clunky collage effect of early digital manipulation); one of him struggling comically inside a plaid blanket; and one with writing on his palms and the backs of his hands indicating his left and right and your left and right, with his voiceover reiterating the written phrases. Each video has its charms, but each is easily criticized, too, as if it were built with intentional chinks in its armor. They are actually part of a larger performance series (not included in this show) in which Muram narrates and critiques his own work.

VanHorn's piece, titled "Yes," she said... yes, is a giant crouching monkey made of scrap wood (and with a beard that looks like a frayed used carpet fragment), a big bright yellow tub, and a bunny costume. VanHorn says he intends to wear the costume to interact with the objects. As the story builds, other objects might be substituted, or added. The objects already bear the marks of contingency: the sculptures stand on wheels, the costume is apprehensive on its coat rack. Even the artist doesn't know where this piece will go, but given the uncanny attraction of the objects, I'm inclined to give it a chance.

Other artists worth watching are Michael Simi (is his Beef Stew Monster stalking visitors or imploring them?), Benjamin Eckman (do not miss his folk-artist statement), Nola Avienne (one hopes she is not quickly running out of things to do with metal filings), and Aitana de la Jara (whose large paintings are conventional, but feel devotional, and true). Already humming along nicely in his practice is Ross Sawyers, who has shown his photographs of false interiors at SOIL and CoCA, and who'll solo at Platform Gallery in July.

The art at UW has a lot of robotic moving parts. Cornish, meanwhile, is all body, in states ranging from muscular spasm (Robert Randall) to pleasant sedation (Jessamyn Johns, Justin L'Amie). (The show has already closed.) The women are in the lead. I'm taking down the names of Nicole Laverty (for her video of herself as a dirty old man and a pigtailed girl), Rachel Setzer (for her White House made of birth-control-pill packages), Ashley Bubacz (her sugar-decorated eggs with tiny disaster scenes inside), Madison Stratford (her acerbic celebrity collages fashioned using gauche lights and a handheld label-maker include the line "Everything I need to know I learned from [dealer] Greg Kucera"), Laura Kinney (dirt and delicacy), and Redd Walitzki (her Victorian digital animation).

Almost every one of these women is also showing weak work, which is fine for now. It's the sparks you look for

The Fine Art of Pushing Yourself

2007-06-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

Wisdom from Robert Genn

While it's generally a good idea to move in the direction of
successes and proficiencies, from time to time it's also
valuable to take a look at weaknesses. Pros try to understand
and disarm them. Amateurs either deny them or don't know they
exist. Here are a few thoughts on the fine art of pushing
yourself:

It's painful, but you need to make a "baddy inventory." You
need to identify no more than three at a time. If you pick too
many, the task overwhelms and discouragement can set in. Homing
in on specific areas of difficulty is easier if you see them as
"zones of temporary avoidance."

Get specific. Be honest. Give instructions. Make notes to
yourself: "Due to the persistent and chronic failure of looking
and seeing, my trees have become overly simplified, clichéd,
and limited in species identification. I must now resurface
with baby eyes and look again at trees. I must step outside in
all lights, open my eyes to variety, and rethink arboreal
anatomy by notation and sketch."

There's no better cure for mediocrity than a dose of truth. And
there's no better reason for taking the cure than the
challenge. Fall in love with potential accomplishment. Central
to this process is the realization that it's a personal quest.
It's not a mentor or instructor but the trees themselves that
give the demos and crits. Taking this course and building
accomplishments one by one is like putting shiny new coins into
your pocket. Accumulated pushes lead to creative wealth.

To push yourself to higher ground you need an attitude. The
attitude is both achievable and hard won. It's possible to be
deceived that this attitude is the result of natural causes.
Further, it's easy to give credit to what seems to be inborn
talent or irregular creative genius. Digging deeper, the better
artists often have many "eureka" moments when the way forward
is seen to be clearer. Eureka can happen by simply looking at
your hands and realizing that you have everything you need to
overcome. "Genius," said Thomas Edison, "is one percent
inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Perspiring
is part of the attitude. Evolved creators are just as curious
about their failures as they are of their successes.

PS: "If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly
because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can
accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for."
(Vaclav Havel, playwright)

Esoterica: We artists are fortunate in that most of our tasks,
while often daunting, are also relatively pleasant. The
art-push needs to be noble and yet modest--one step at a time.
Helen Keller noted, "I long to accomplish a great and noble
task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as
though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not
only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the
aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker." This is
the nature of our theatre. "Work," when it involves "play," may
just be the key to "push." In the words of Arnold Toynbee, "The
supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and
play." To perspire in play is to know progress.

Lovely

2007-05-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

Subject Matter

2007-03-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

"The subject means little. The arrangement, the design,
colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance,
not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something
additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing,
a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness
of all things." (Emily Carr) "The most deadly picture is a
picture of nothing at all." (William S. Burroughs)

Field Notes on Play

2007-02-11T09:33:00.000-08:00

So often Robert Genn says just what one needs to hear ;)

There was no use in arguing with the woman. She had asked me
what I thought she should do next and now she was against my
suggestion. It was she who had complained her work was dull.

"Your work will continue to be dull," I said, "until you learn
to play." This was no ordinary girl--well read, smart in every
way, and very, very neat. She had read all the books. "Work is
play," she said. "Play frees up the inner child, empowers
confidence and invites creative elan. Play is a creative need."
She knew her Carl Jung.

I told her that my dad used to say, "If you can dream it, you
can do it." This advice was given in my early teens, and it
sent me off into some extreme fantasies. Like painting a mural
on the Grand Canyon. I recruited helpers, but it was the park
rangers who were unable to see my vision. "But you at least had
the dream," she said. "Some people never have them."

Talking some more about play, I suggested there were two more
things she needed besides a dream--a new way, and a new toy. I
demonstrated by laying in a painting with one of those small
rollers that house painters use for going around the edge of
door frames. The pay-load lasts forever. Colours dabbed and
mixed around the roller provide never ending blends. She gave
it a try.

After a while I pointed to a virgin tube in her paintbox. "It's
Aureolin hue--yellowish, I never use it," she said. I showed
her mine. "For the last week I've been mixing it with
everything except Mai Tais," I said. "Here in Hawaii it's
useful. Makes things glow. You can substitute it for white.
It's great for glazing too. New tones with every mix. Ya gotta
love it." She squeezed some out.

Artists are not always prepared to take advice from other
artists, but this one was beginning to see the light. "So, in
order to play properly you need three main things--a new dream,
a new way, and a new toy," she said. "I think so," I said.
"Maybe you just need a new toy, because then you might just
pick up the new way and the new dream." A peculiar creative
silence overtook us. A big wave could have taken us out. Later,
I noticed her wading into the surf. She was glowing. I squeezed
out more Aureolin hue.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the
intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." (Carl Jung)

Esoterica: Aureolin hue gets its name from aureole, the glow
that emanates from the figures and particularly the heads of
holy personages in medieval and Renaissance art. The head-glow
is also called a nimbus or a halo. If someone is miraculously
rising, the aureole is called a "glory," and if it's in the
shape of an almond it's called a "mandorla,"--the Italian word
for almond. The early Roman church referred to the effect as
"vesica piscis"--Latin for fish's bladder. The middle ages were
big on holy glows, their painters worked hard to make them from
fugitive, now discontinued colours. The modern pigment was
developed in Breslau, Germany, by N.W. Fischer, in 1848, was in
wide use by 1860, and is currently engaged on the Kona coast.

On Big and Small

2007-02-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

From the lovely Robert Genn~

When we first arrived on the Big Island we were greeted by some
of the highest winds and roughest seas in several seasons.
Veteran surfers were turned away by the lifeguards. Saffron
finches huddled in low hedges behind lava walls. Standing on
our own seawall, I easily named a future big one "Storm on the
Kona Coast."

Pressing against the wind under the roar of the breakers, the
following days provided time for notes. Foam that whitened the
ocean for half a mile out. Great curlers where no
boogie-boarder dared. A black line that straddled the horizon.
Loaded with cliches (the translucent, green-lit wave, smoking
tops, Neptune's grasping claws) the scene would bring a sense
of awe to the most jaded. But here in this cinemascope diorama
of power, the love of small stuff is confirmed.

Make your mistakes with less on the table.
Have low commitment for courage and creativity.
Catch the wisdom of series and set.
Make variations on themes and motifs.
Build proficiency on the personal game-board.
Overcome the natural tendency of preciousness.
Feel the energy of the portable smug.
Use natural selection to drive potential larger work.

Just as the digital revolution has sped the learning of
photography, painting "smalls" in series speeds creative
progress. Because digital imagery need not be sent out for
developing, the travelling photographer can test settings and
see results on the spot. In the same way, learning on the go,
the series painter sees each variation develop. In either a
linear or in simultaneous (multi-tasking) process, a better way
is often found. Like the digital photographer, she crops,
tints, fills, glazes, sharpens, softens, revisits--and makes
the ultimate decision to keep or delete. It's the time-honoured
wisdom of the sketch.

It's good to be small and portable in the midst of greatness.
The act of remaining on location (unlike taking the tourist
snapshot--then back on the bus) has the effect of "burning in"
the experience and making it your own. It may be small stuff
you're doing, and your inadequacies may revisit and haunt you,
but the artist's life is big stuff indeed.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is."
(Robinson Jeffers)

Esoterica: Small work fits in with the pace of modern life. In
the time where the one liner, the quick fix, instant
gratification and short concentration-spans rule, small stuff
works. Life burgeons--family, friendship, fellowship, dining
and watching long-neglected DVD's like Al Gore's witness to
global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." All becomes part of
the matrix. Like an impossible jigsaw on the coffee table, the
paintbox is always there with its permanent invitation to
frustration, understanding and joy.

Letters to an Artist

2007-01-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

Another lovely one from Robert Genn~

In 1903, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke responded by letter to a
young man seeking his advice. Rilke eventually wrote ten
letters now collectively known and much published as "Letters
to a Young Poet." They are heartfelt advice from a successful
(but still struggling) artist to another who was deeply mired
in self-doubt. The classic language of these letters soars in
beauty as well as lofty good sense. His idealism is applicable
today to all who might pursue any sort of creative activity.
Yesterday, on a pathside bench deep in a blustery,
storm-destroyed forest, I reread the letters. Here, partly in
direct quotation and partly in condensed summation, are some of
Rilke's ideas:

Your work needs to be independent of others' work.
You must not compare yourself to others.
No one can help you. You have to help yourself.
Criticism leads to misunderstandings and defeatism.
Work from necessity and your compulsion to do it.
Work on what you know and what you are sure you love.
Don't observe yourself too closely, just let it happen.
Don't let yourself be controlled by too much irony.
Live in and love the activity of your work.
Be free of thoughts of sin, guilt and misgiving.
Be touched by the beautiful anxiety of life.
Be patient with the unresolved in your heart.
Try to be in love with the questions themselves.
Love your solitude and try to sing with its pain.
Be gentle to all of those who stay behind.
Your inner self is worth your entire concentration.
Allow your art to make extraordinary demands on you.
Bear your sadness with greater trust than your joy.
Do not persecute yourself with how things are going.
It's good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult.
It's good to love, because love is difficult.
You are not a prisoner of anything or anyone.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Czechoslovakia and
died in Switzerland. Dogged by fragile health and the constant
search for inexpensive and healthful accommodation, he
anxiously moved from one climate to another. Considered the
greatest modern poet in the German language, Rilke counselled
the young poet, known only as Mr. Kappus, over a five-year
period. No evidence exists that they ever met.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "Being an artist means not numbering or counting, but
ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, standing
confidently in storms, not afraid that summer may not come."
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Esoterica: Two main themes--trust and patience--pervade Rilke's
letters. "Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as
opposed to arguments and discussions," he says. "If it turns
out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner
life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your
judgments a silent, undisturbed development, which, like all
progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or
hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let
each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to
completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable,
the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding,
and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a
new clarity is born: this is what it means to live as an
artist."

Snowy Morning

2007-01-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

Gonna be a cold one tonight, the view is lovely though.

Seattleites are standouts in otherwise flat CoCA Annual

2006-12-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

By Matthew Kangas

Portland Art Museum Northwest art curator Jennifer Gately, guest juror for the 2006 CoCA Annual, visited studios in addition to reviewing slides to select the artworks now on view at the Center on Contemporary Art. She chose 16 artists from Seattle, Portland and New York City from nearly 1,000 entries. Three artists split the meager prize money: Robert Yoder ($500); Lucas Blalock ($250); and Jennie Thwing ($250).

An artist-supported alternative space founded in 1980, CoCA in 1989 took over the duties of the venerable "Northwest Annual," which the Seattle Art Museum (originally Seattle Fine Arts Society) had hosted between 1914 and 1975. In 2002, CoCA's board decided to junk the regional focus and open up the competition nationwide. Was it worth forsaking the 74-year-old tradition?

Probably not, but this year's effort by Gately is a valiant, even charitable, effort. CoCA's annual can no longer be compared with the remaining Northwest juried shows (the biennials at Tacoma Art Museum and Gately's own Portland Art Museum), because it is much smaller, with a fraction of the prize money. But the CoCA Annual is the only annual competitive show held in the Greater Seattle area since the old Bellevue Art Museum closed. Maybe it's time to re-orient the CoCA Annual back toward Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington exclusively.

Emphasis is put on the seamy, sleazy and ill-constructed in the works of Oregonians Alicia Eggert, Stephanie Robison and Sean Healy. As to the New Yorkers, Gately found Margarida Correia, Christine Gatti and Shen Wei. Photography plays an important role in their work but fails to reveal any original ideas. Were they and the Oregonians really worth including?

The Seattleites, on the other hand, leave the others in the dust. Elise Richman's paintings contain hundreds of tiny built-up strands of oil paint and are intensely physical, optical and abstract. Susanna Bluhm's quirky mixed-media paintings of awkward abstract shapes could lead somewhere I'd like to go. To be disappointed but to want to see more is always a good sign.

Like Bluhm, Tim Cross' work has a light touch. However, it has firmer, more easily identifiable imagery. "Heater Beach" and "Black Bridge Beach" (both 2006) mix trees, fire and metal pipes in landscape settings. All are drawn with ink, soot, liquid paper and, of course, coffee.

Ross Sawyers' computer prints of big beautiful empty rooms are also big, beautiful and empty. They're too similar to many other artists and demonstrate an awareness of trends more than an individual vision. (This is a frequent criticism of regional artists who are often unable to see originals and must make do with art magazines.)

2006 CoCA Annual, noon-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, through Dec. 30, Center on Contemporary Art, 410 Dexter Ave. N., Seattle; free (206-728-1980 or www.cocaseattle.org). Robert Yoder and Scott Foldesi are the stars of this year's Annual. Yoder's vinyl-and-metal-tape collages are colorful and highly structured. With several New York shows under his belt and a sterling reputation locally, Yoder should retire from competitive shows and leave them to the younger generation.

Foldesi has got to be the most talented young Seattle painter still without a gallery. His large photo-based scenes are part paint-by-number satire and part David Hockney. They are remarkable for how much they can convey with so little paint. Like Cross and Bluhm, he treats a blank white background like a big piece of paper. Included in last year's Annual, Foldesi raises another question: What happened to the CoCA tradition of giving the best of the Annual artists their own solo shows? Foldesi should be at the top of the list.

As to the Portlanders, Sean Healy is the one to watch. His circular relief of hundreds of cigarette butts is hilarious and timely. And don't miss "Egghead" (2006), his tribute to Melville Dewey, the founder of the Dewey Decimal System common to library-card catalogs. An upended library table has a likeness of Dewey rendered in hundreds of used chewing gum wads. Remember when you stuck your gum under the library table? Go see it.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Emily Hall's Farewell

2006-12-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

The Road of Good Intentions Is Paved with Painted Pigs
The Stranger’s Departing Visual Art Critic Re?ects on Ambition, Naiveté, and Why Seattle Still Isn’t a Great Art Town
BY EMILY HALL (From 2004)

Well, goodbye.
Even as I hate the valedictory impulse to generalization (I much prefer the small specific), I'd be remiss to leave this city without some sort of fond or not so fond farewell. Even as I write this I'm swinging pretty wildly between feelings of nostalgia and good riddance--not entirely surprising, since Seattle's art world is rife with the kinds of contradictions that so firmly cement us somewhere between backwater and art capital, and that pulled me regularly between pleasure and despair. Good work by really very talented artists on the one hand; a patronizing, social-work-driven attitude about art on the other. A whole lot of lip service paid to the idea of art, but very little money backing it up. There's sophistication, and there's naiveté. In my very first weeks of writing The Stranger's art calendar, in 1999, I got an indignant letter from a woman whose show--in Bellingham, quite out of the range of The Stranger's purview--we had failed to include in our visual art listings. It was cruel of me, she wrote, to ignore her show, because art had--literally, she said--saved her life.

Probably you already know that I take a dim view of ascribing life-saving qualities to art. I tend to take a view more in line with critic Dave Hickey's in his essay "Frivolity and Unction": "We could just say 'Okay! You're right! Art is bad, silly, and frivolous... Rock and roll is bad, silly, and frivolous. Movies are bad, silly, and frivolous. Next question?' Wouldn't that open up the options a little for something really super?--for an orchid in the dung heap that would seem all the more super for our surprise in finding it there? And what if art were considered bad for us?--more like cocaine that gives us pleasure while intensifying our desires, and less like penicillin that promises to cure us all, if we maintain proper dosage, give it time, and don't expect miracles?" (Good God, but the man can write!) In Seattle, the general drift is toward penicillin, toward the cure-all, and also toward a rigorously democratic idea about art, one that encompasses album covers and industrial design and accessibility and education. In many ways it's fitting, if not emblematic, that Seattle's progress in art, to much of the art world, is tied to glass: The Studio Glass movement, with Dale Chihuly at its prow, is characterized by a distinct defensiveness about taking a medium out of the realm of craft and trying (forcefully, willfully) to place it in the realm of fine art.

The contradictions we face here make for both good and bad news. The bad news: Seattle is not a great city for art or for artists. The question of what it would take to make it a city taken seriously by the rest of the world (local artists sought out by collectors from elsewhere; artists moving here from elsewhere; local art writers regularly represented in national and international publications) has no simple answer, perhaps no answer at all. What I can tell you is that there isn't enough of anything: not enough good galleries showing risky work, not enough money available to artists to try new things and possibly fail (a great deal of the available funding is project-dedicated, so that failure is not an option), not enough critical outlets, and not enough critics, in the outlets available, thinking interestingly and hard about how art does what it does and how the work in this city compares to work in other cities, or (perhaps most importantly) willing to risk letting the public know when the art or the curatorial practice fails. And, of course, there are not enough collectors (though God bless the ones there are) willing to tear their gazes away from New York and Los Angeles and London and Berlin and buy the work (quite often the peer in quality of work from those other cities) right under their noses.

This is an inelegant knot of a situation, because it's not entirely clear which problem should be solved first. It's a series of exquisite dead ends. If there were more money for artists, there'd be more good art, and more galleries would open. If more galleries opened, there'd be more opportunities to see good art, and the Seattle viewership would increase--maybe skyrocket--in sophistication and collecting. If Seattle artists were getting more national attention from critics, national agencies and foundations would direct more money to artistic production, and there wouldn't be this constant stream of artists leaving for places where they'll get noticed. But my instinct is that no single advance would create the rising tide that Seattle needs. Somehow the base has to expand all at once.

What must happen, what absolutely must happen, is for this city to get over its ambivalence and distaste for ambition. You don't become a great art city by filling the street with painted pigs. You become a great art city by supporting artists doing what artists do. Everyone, from the National Endowment for the Arts on down to teachers and well-meaning citizens, likes to yammer on about how important art is to how we see ourselves as a civilization, to advancing as a civilization, and yet where funding is concerned, art is consistently lumped in with education and social work and even tourism. This attitude produces a lot of bad art and, instead of creating respect for artists, makes artists into propagandists, educators, and decorators. It's an unfortunate contemporary convenience that so many disparate activities--from after-school programs to public art to unrestricted money for artists--are collected under the same rubric, under the same innocent-seeming word. To do this is to make conflicting claims for art, as Bruce Bawer wrote in a pointed critique of the Poets Against the War anthology (which included, alongside poems by established writers, poems by children): "What does it mean to profess the inestimable value of the poet's role in society... and then to suggest that even an 11-year-old can fill that role?" This sort of confusion about what art is for produced such disasters as Pigs on Parade, the "arts tourism" championed by Michael Killoren at the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs a few years ago, and the repurposing by committee that transformed BAM from an interesting contemporary museum into a community crafts forum.

Think of it this way: Should Little Leaguers play in Mariners games? It's the same sport, after all. But of course not. Somehow acknowledging that some are more talented than others (to say nothing of higher paid) doesn't rankle so much when it comes to building stadiums. I am so tired of the pummeling taken by what's commonly known as elitism, this insistence (itself quite sniffy) that art is somehow out of the realm of common experience, that its pleasures are not available to everyone. Certainly it's become more common to have to, you know, read something (a plaque on the wall, an article in a newspaper, an artist's statement) in order to begin to understand a work of art, but this is what great contemporary art does: It advances through ideas, by engaging our minds. And art galleries are perhaps the only venue where art, any art form, is free to the public. It's all there, available and wanting nothing more than your attention.

Don't get me wrong: It's nice that Seattle is so concerned with human enrichment and better lives for everyone. It might very well be the case that the Bellingham woman's life was saved by art. And it may well be the case that art keeps kids off drugs, cures cancer, enhances self-esteem, and makes America great. But please understand that I write this only out of real ardor for and delight in art: All of those things, and other positive aspects (like helping the economy, like attracting the so-called creative class to Seattle) are not art's problem. To demand that art fulfill such a role is to limit the scope of what it can do. Art is good for us only because it's art, because it exists outside the realm of advertising and politics, and it is only good for us (whatever that means) when it presents an object with which our relationship is not already bossily mediated. In the best possible scenario, we create our own relationships--intellectual, emotional--with art, so that the most elevated claim it's possible to make for art is that it makes us more thoughtful, perhaps more complex, people.

The good news--finally, the good news--is that despite this handicap, there's a lot of real forward movement around here. Artist Trust continues to plough a lonely furrow by giving artists project grants and fellowships (and the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has recently given a generous handful of artist grants as well, a development that's long overdue). The renovated Toshiro-Kaplan Building provides artists live/work space (a rarity), bringing a cluster of working artists back to Pioneer Square, saving that neighborhood from being so removed from the world of art as to be irrelevant. Rhonda Howard and her organization Thread for Art supports artist-driven exhibitions and produces lovely catalogs, so that artists have documentation of their work as well as exposure. The collectors Bill and Ruth True have opened Western Bridge, a good-looking space in which they'll be showing works from their collection as well as commissioned works, which brings to Seattle works that we might never otherwise see. The renegade stencil gang Beware the Walls invigorates public space with the kind of surreal street moments that reframe everyday experience. The ceramics program at the University of Washington (which is only tangentially concerned with ceramics and has amazing teachers Doug Jeck, Jamie Walker, and Akio Takimori) produces interesting young artists. There's a cluster of newish galleries on Capitol Hill (including 1506 Projects and Crawl Space) that have a lively artwalk and some appealing (if not yet fully realized) shows. There's Platform Gallery opening in the fall, run by four artists who have a taste for the difficult, and who don't kowtow to usual gallery practices. Billy Howard and Jim Harris also aren't afraid of difficult work; the shows in their galleries seem to revel in it. Greg Kucera, in his gallery, has taken on some interesting younger artists, and brings news from the rest of the country. Greg Lundgren is still around, plotting his next move (the openings of his shows at Vital 5 Productions rate among the high points in the social life of art in the last few years). And it would be disingenuous, if not modest, if I failed to mention that The Stranger's Genius Awards allow the paper's editors to take a break from relentlessly criticizing everything and shower affection and money on artists they like.

There have been casualties. We lost Walter Wright to Atlanta (after his two good exhibition spaces, Project 416 and Fuzzy Engine, fell to the manifest destiny of development). Artists Jennifer West and Nicola Vruwink moved to Los Angeles. Curator Meg Shiffler is in New York for graduate school, and will probably stay there. Many of the artists behind RedHeaded StepChild, an artist-run zine I had the privilege of working on (they made an exception for me, since I was good at grammar) for the two years of its existence, have dispersed for other cities. Every one of these departures (and all those I can't remember at this moment, sitting here in a cluster of people tapping away at their iBooks at Victrola) made me sad, and soon I'll be leaving, too. Well, perhaps that won't make anyone very sad. But at least--and it seems I've got the valedictory impulse after all--I got the last word.

Emily Hall was The Stranger's visual art editor from 2000-2004. She now lives in New York City.

The Fabulous Nate Lippens

2006-12-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

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.

Review of Bo Bartlett from ArtDish

2006-12-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

Bo Bartlett at Winston Wachter Fine Art
Through January 4, 2007

The Bo Bartlett exhibition at Winston Wachter is a winner of an exhibition, and because it contains so many different kinds of work, it gives us a good overview of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses.

Very much on the plus side of the ledger is the way Bartlett’s fierce intelligence, taste, and painterly virtuosity informs nearly every work. There are few, if any, contemporary American artists who can match Bartlett’s ability to conjure people and places in paint, and the inventiveness and energy of his brushwork is a joy to behold. The faces of his sympathetically-observed subjects gaze out at us with a directness and intensity that is at times almost disconcerting. Everywhere we look, there is a dramatically painted, highly aware person staring back. Few of his subjects glance away, or for that matter, glance at each other. They want very badly to gain our attention and to let us in, albeit obliquely, to their secrets.

Equally striking is the sense of place that informs these realistic, but highly stylized images. Bartlett has long been associated with the sort of landscape setting familiar from the works of Andrew Wyeth (a friend and mentor of the artist), particularly the stark, elemental coastline of Maine, conceived as a place where only the jagged pyramid of crashing waves interrupts the cleaving marriage of rocky land, churning water, and featureless sky. Bartlett uses the starkness of this setting to lend drama and weight to the stories of the people he portrays, life-sized, in the foreground. These coastal narratives are iconic, timeless, and freighted with a sense of significance. Though Bartlett paints the world of today, since the early 90s he has allowed barely a glimpse of the familiar artifacts of contemporary life, things like sprawl, billboards, and television, the better to focus on the human subjects that are the center of his interest.

So linked is Bartlett with the primal Northeast that it comes as something of a shock to come across several walls containing modest-sized images of Seattle landmarks, everything from Mt. Rainier to the Space Needle, with the container docks and the headquarters of amazon.com thrown in for good measure. Several of these paintings contain rather anonymous figures – not looking in our direction, for once - but for the most part they serve as a sort of catalog of regional attractions, observed with the fondness and attentiveness of a new arrival. It’s as though Bartlett is trying on the local landscape for size, considering which elements to use in narrative paintings yet to come. He’s also making nice with the local clientele, something we can well forgive him for when the baubles are as luscious as his amazing, molten-paint depiction of the spotlit Smith Tower, or his close-up of a container of Starbucks coffee, lit and rendered with the attention and reverence we associate with depictions of holy relics. It’s your basic $30 thousand-dollar cup of joe, and it’s sold.

Given the importance Bartlett clearly assigns to the niceties of his physical location, which has changed, it’s no surprise that movement, transition, and change looms large as a theme in the show. His companion Betsy – an artist at the same gallery - figures in several of these images, here seen meditating while voyaging on Puget Sound ferries, there accompanying the artist on a highway voyage to the opposite coast.

In this latter painting, entitled The Good Traveler, Bartlett the driver stares directly at us through his side window (rather than at the road ahead) while his companion examines a map. The featureless landscape they pass through is a slice of nowhere, a place to be gotten by on the way to somewhere else. The neutral green-grey palette used for car, clothing, and land is set against the light on Betsy’s face and the vivid blue of several lakes on her map. An incongruous tiara glitters atop her forehead – is she for real? But she’s clearly the focal point of the painting, for it’s she who is engaged in the moment, taking care of business. He’s conflicted about the journey – why isn’t he watching the road? --and we’re led to wonder how far he would get (and where he would go) if he was left to drive alone, which I take to be the point of the painting.

Other large narratives feature beautiful, solitary figures enigmatically meeting our gaze with theirs, or groups of figures lost in their own thoughts. A bus full of everymen and everywomen metaphorically enacts their individual journeys through life; a gorgeous, nearly nude girl with a baby portrays a modern Madonna; two figures lounge on a couch.

If there’s a weakness to these large narrative paintings, it’s clearest in this last image, attractive and competent, but lacking in narrative tension. In his perfectly controlled sense of design and lighting, and his preference for a particular slim, attractive, and preppy physical type, some of Bartlett’s work inadvertently brings to mind the faux-American scenography of fashion advertising, the perfect WASP universe of Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s one of the curses of contemporary art that the line that separates art from fashion can at times seem so fuzzy, and at times Bartlett seems to veer across that line.

Perhaps it’s also my discomfort with this brittle perfection that make me so enamored of the most interesting and provocative painting in the show, the disturbing Au Matin. While the subject of Au Matin is also transition and displacement, this time the transition is ominous in the extreme, and the imagery is skewed, starting to break up.

Here the Maine coastline of the setting may or may not be a figment of someone’s imagination, since cliff, sea, and waves are seen through a mysterious wall, one which fades in and out of view.

Walking towards the edge of this phantom cliff and away from us are three figures – two identical men in overcoats and fedoras holding a woman in a bloodied straightjacket. Equally unsettling is the posture of the three figures, all of whom lean to one side in a highly choreographed, highly stylized manner, further destabilizing the image. The materiality of the paint shifts in a way that makes us doubt the substance of nearly everything, except for the coagulated blobs that depict the burnt out embers of a fire in the foreground, made of the artist’s palette scrapings. It’s a great picture, and an open-ended one, whatever its place in the artists’ ongoing autobiographical saga.

Au Matin is also interesting in that it represents a new direction for the artist, one in which the dreamlike and the surreal plays a larger role. Already at the top of his game technically, Bartlett clearly aspires to more deeply probe the mysteries just beyond the visible surfaces he has so long, and so skillfully, depicted.

Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero

2006-12-07T05:12:00.000-08:00

Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero

Millions of viewers of NBC's Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don't know is that he's been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic's top programmers.

In an ensemble cast that features solid acting all around, Oka steals the show every time he's on the screen. The show literally has his Hiro living out the exploits of his own comic book, 9th Wonders.

Since graduating from Brown University in 1997, Oka has worked on more than 30 big-budget Hollywood films at ILM. During that time he has written more than 20 programs and 100 plug-ins for the leading special-effects house. While audiences might not have known his name or face until Heroes, they've seen his programming magic on the big screen in films like The Perfect Storm, Star Wars: Episode II, Terminator 3 and the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."

Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.

"It was also a way for upper management to determine how much drive we had," said Oka. "If we wanted to, we could always start our own projects."

After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big "show" with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, were the result of code written by Oka.

"That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows," said Oka. "I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis."

A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

"The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated," said Oka. "I would simulate viscosity or advection, things that are specific to the way water moves. We'd do a cheap simulated effect for these movements and they were used for things like the spray and wakes in The Perfect Storm."

Oka managed to get his Screen Actors Guild card by performing in a few industrial videos. After working on The Perfect Storm for nearly two full years, Oka moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in 2001. He appeared in a number of TV shows (Scrubs, Reba, Without a Trace) and films (Along Came Polly, Legally Blonde 2, House of the Dead 2) before Heroes thrust him into the spotlight.

Working remotely from ILM's Los Angeles studio, Oka has remained active with movie effects, although now he's limited to one or two days of ILM work a week because of his production schedule.

"I love both acting and programming equally," said Oka, who enjoys challenging both sides of his brain. "I think it enriches me and enhances me as an artist. I have a lot of appreciation for what people do in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. I don't think I could like one without the other. Eventually, I think the road will lead me down to producing or directing, because it's more about problem solving."

Should Heroes' early success continue for NBC, Oka said he would love to be able to direct an episode in season three or four and bring all of his ILM cronies in to help out.

"I'd make use of my employee discount -- buy two effects and get one free," joked Oka.

AHHTV

2006-12-06T03:11:00.000-08:00

FCC: All Programming To Be Broadcast In ADHDTV By 2007

WASHINGTON, DC-The FCC is advising that no new show exceed six minutes, and that all programs contain intra-episode recaps.

WASHINGTON, DC—The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-1 Monday to require electronics manufacturers to make all television sets ADHD-compatible within two years.

To adhere to the guidelines, every program, with the exception of The Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show, will have to be sped up to meet the new standard frame rate of 120 frames per second.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin characterized the move as "a natural, forward-thinking response to the changing needs of the average American viewer."

"In the media-saturated climate of the modern age, few have the time and energy to sit still for an entire episode of King Of Queens," Martin said. "Although the FCC will leave it up to the television networks to make the necessary programming changes, we are recommending, in accordance with the ADHDTV standard, that all shows be no more than six minutes in length, and that they contain jarring and unpredictable camera cuts to shiny props and detailed background sets."

"We're also advising that intra-episode recaps occur every 45 seconds," he added.

The ruling represents a growing shift toward ADHDTV, a television format designed to meet the needs of an increasingly inattentive and hyperactive audience. The tuner includes a built-in device that automatically changes channels after three minutes of uninterrupted single-station viewing, as well as a picture-in-picture-in-picture-in-picture option.

According to Sony, the leading manufacturer of the ADHD-compatible sets, the new technology will allow viewers to play up to three simultaneous video games while watching television.

"Many of our ADHDTVs will come with a motorized base," Sony spokesperson Richard O'Dell said. "In the event that the viewer turns his attention away from the television, it will begin to rotate and emit sirens and piercing shrieks."

The mandate to conform to the new format has already been met with some resistance, particularly from movie channels like HBO, live programs such as ABC's Monday Night Football, and the History Channel, whose ambitious five-part, 10-hour historical documentary about World War II, slated for completion in late 2007, will have to be shortened to a six-minute montage of the war set to a medley of Ashlee Simpson hits.

Some networks, however, are embracing the change.

"A majority of our shows are only watchable for a few minutes at a time anyway," said Fox president Peter Liguori, whose recently unveiled fall 2007 TV schedule includes over 850 new series. "We're going to roll out an exciting lineup of major sporting-event highlights, late-night yell shows, and a brand-new season of The O.C. that will feature 37 new characters and—well, I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say it will have a lot more guys jumping up and down, saying, 'Hey! Hey! Look over here!'"

On standard 4:3 televisions, ADHDTV programs will be shown in letterbox format, with the top and bottom of the screen alternately filled with bright, flittering butterflies, undulating rainbow-colored patterns, and singing hamsters in top hats.

Skeptics say the switch to ADHDTV will likely be delayed in favor of other projects or even completely forgotten by next week. However, the FDA is fast-tracking approval of the new drug Entertainalin, developed in anticipation of the modified programming. In clinical trials, the drug has been effective in helping viewers concentrate not only on the new TV format, but also on their immediate surroundings, the couch fabric, a dog passing by the window, and pieces of lint floating in the air.

How to avoid nightmares

2006-10-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

Great attention is to be paid to regularity and choice of diet. Intemperance of every kind is hurtful, but nothing is more productive of this disease than drinking bad wine. Of eatables those which are most prejudicial are all fat and greasy meats and pastry. These ought to be avoided, or eaten with caution. The same may be said of salt meats, for which dyspeptic patients have frequently a remarkable predilection, but which are not on that account the less unsuitable.

Moderate exercise contributes in a superior degree to promote the digestion of food and prevent flatulence; those, however, who are necessarily confined to a sedentary occupation, should particularly avoid applying themselves to study or bodily labor immediately after eating. If a strong propensity to sleep should occur after dinner, it will be certainly bettor to indulge it a little, as the process of digestion frequently goes on much better during sleep than when awake.

Going to bed before the usual hour is a frequent cause of night-mare, as it either occasions the patient to sleep too long or to lie long awake in the night. Passing a whole night or part of a night without rest likewise gives birth to the disease, as it occasions the patient, on the succeeding night, to sleep too soundly. Indulging in sleep too late in the morning, is an almost certain method to bring on the paroxysm, and the more frequently it returns, the greater strength it acquires; the propensity to sleep at this time is almost irresistible. Those who are habitually subject to attacks of the night-mare ought never to sleep alone, but should have some person near them, so as to be immediately awakened by their groans and struggles, and the person to whom this office may be entrusted should be instructed to rouse the patient as early as possible, that the paroxysm may not have time to gain strength.

Intelligent Design

2006-10-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

Images of delight

2006-10-04T04:52:00.000-07:00

Images of delight

This morning Antoinette Ledzian of Stonington, CT wrote:
"Digital art has been my savior. Moments which might have been
blurred have turned into transformational pieces through my use
of Photoshop. I love the instant processing, the ability to
rework my images and go right onto another piece. I could never
do this when I practiced calligraphy or painted. Possibly I've
finally found my medium. What's happening?"

Thanks, Antoinette. It's an epidemic. Creative folks of all
stripes find the making of digital art to be almost
irresistible. Brilliant software--on a constant arc of
improvement--permits ever more speedy and imaginative
manipulation. Through portals like Flickr, images are posted
and feedback is immediate. Communities are born and people are
empowered. Instant gratification is the order of the day.
Worldwide, more than a thousand new images are currently being
posted every second. Like poetry in the last century, more is
being made than seen. And like poetry, the making of it is
absorbing, challenging, life enhancing, and full of beautiful
"aha" epiphanies. Digital manipulation is probably the fastest
way to cross-breed motifs and ideas. Everyone who tries it can
see that it's a creative tool like no other. To get an idea of
current and cutting edge digital art, I've asked Andrew to put
up a collection at the top of the current clickback. See URL
below.

And yep, digital has its problems. While holding out the hand
of democratization to all who would participate, like
photography itself, it also runs counter to the role of art as
commodity--digital is difficult to make rare. Its facile nature
and general proliferation tend to render it less valuable.
Those who would commercialize digital are faced with the
question of what to do with it. Posters, art-cards, gallery
sales, even pay-per-view on the Internet have so far shown only
faint success.

For us, digital is a celebration of looking and seeing, of
delight in what nature has given--and what the human creator
can do with what is seen. Its champions and masters are now
appearing. Digital is a welcome force for human exchange and
universal understanding--a sort of instant handshake that helps
to make real our essential brotherhood and sisterhood.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "A computer is an interface where the mind and body can
connect with the universe and move bits of it about." (Douglas
Adams, 1952-2001)

Esoterica: In Leonardo's time there were few artists and those
few made magic that the wise and privileged desired. Today the
wise and privileged make magic for themselves. We can still
make our mark with brush and canvas, or chisel and stone--but
we are also blessed with the grace of a higher technology. In
the words of Daniel Bell, "Technology, like art, is a soaring
exercise of the human imagination." Can it be that this
technology is a window to a brighter future? "The new
electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of
a global village." (Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980)

In Praise of Days

2006-09-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

Pearls from Robert Genn

Yesterday, Nancy Hall of Sandy Hook, Manitoba wrote: "As an
artist, mother, farmhand, two-dog owner and a writer, I would
sure welcome some organizational tips! I'm curious how you pack
all you do into your life."

Thanks, Nancy. Early one morning when I was a very small kid, I
was standing on some rocks at the beach below where we lived.
The water was flat calm and grey to the horizon. I remember
thinking what a remarkable thing a day is. I wasn't thinking
about a "special" day, I was thinking about an ordinary day--a
day you could do things in. As I grew older I came to realize
that days are golden units by which our lives are measured. As
a self-anointed self-manager I realized that if I were going to
get anywhere, I needed to bring good habits, joy and a certain
amount of sacrifice to my days. By the time I was in my teens,
I had figured out that habits were holy--I saw in habits the
key to an independent creative life:

Work doggedly, one thing after the other.
Begin work early, finish many things each day.
Work on what comes to hand, what demands attention.
Have rough plans--work them daily.
Rest from the work--look at the water.

Regarding joy, Winston Churchill said, "It is no use doing what
you like; you have got to like what you do." I observed that
all kinds of people worked at jobs that were distasteful to
them. I didn't want to be like that. Besides, I was struck with
a peculiar disorder--I couldn't concentrate on dull jobs. I was
really lousy at everything except those things I wanted to do.
I needed to have work that was some sort of automatic or
semi-automatic joy. I wanted to be most often in "the joy
mode." I figured my work habits would take me there. By my
mid-twenties I had discovered that work is not work when the
work is loved. I had fallen in love with art.

Regarding sacrifice, early on I found that my days were not
long enough. I had to be more efficient in my use of the time
allotted, and I was prepared to make sacrifices. It was okay to
cut back on the time taken socializing, commuting and eating.
One must not, I thought, sacrifice sleep, exercise,
contemplation, love, family or dog activity.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let
me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow."
(Mary Jean Irion)

Esoterica: To be fair, a supportive partner and studio
assistants go a long way toward fooling people into thinking
that one is organizationally competent. Helpmates are above
angels. The telephone and the computer, on the other hand,
present special problems. I save some outgoing calls for the
car--and actually look forward to making them on a relatively
safe, hands-free (Bluetooth) system. A studio computer frees
up, speeds up, and actualizes an artist. Around here, Tuesdays
and Fridays are particularly full because there are so many
Inbox friends. As I'm older, and perhaps more mature, this
universal socializing is hard to resist. I'm eating better too.

Paris Hilton targeted in CD prank

2006-09-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

Sunday, 3 September 2006, 14:04 GMT 15:04 UK

Hundreds of Paris Hilton albums have been tampered with in the latest stunt by "guerrilla artist" Banksy.
Banksy has replaced Hilton's CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

He has also changed pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog's head.

A spokeswoman for Banksy said he had doctored 500 copies of her debut album Paris in 48 record shops across the UK.

She told the BBC News website: "He switched the CDs in store, so he took the old ones out and put his version in."

"It might be that there will be some people who agree with his views on the Paris Hilton album"
HMV spokesman

But he left the original barcode so people could buy the CD without realising it had been interfered with.

Banksy is notorious for his secretive and subversive stunts such as sneaking doctored versions of classic paintings into major art galleries.

His spokeswoman said he had tampered with the CDs in branches of HMV and Virgin as well as independent record stores.

He visited cities including Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and London, she added.

A spokesman for HMV said the chain had recovered seven CDs from two Brighton shops but was unaware that other locations were affected.

Artistic leeway

No customers had complained or returned a doctored version, he said.

"It's not the type of behaviour you'd want to see happening very often," he said.

"I guess you can give an individual such as Banksy a little bit of leeway for his own particular brand of artistic engagement.

"Often people might have a view on something but feel they can't always express it, but it's down to the likes of Banksy to say often what people think about things.

"And it might be that there will be some people who agree with his views on the Paris Hilton album."

A spokesman for Virgin Megastores said staff were searching for affected CDs but it was proving hard to find them all.

"I have to take my hat off - it's a very good stunt," he added.

Meauring Tenacity

2006-09-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

The English landscape painter John Constable spent a lifetime
studying clouds. Seeing them both vaporous and solid, he found
them to be the most challenging of actors. Yesterday near
Ashern, Manitoba, under the prairie sky, I entered into their
leaden tops, slid down their warming gradations and confirmed
the dimensions of their mysterious volumes. Turning my
attention to their edges, I saw that they were cut with yellow
counter-light, while subtle tones slid progressively down the
colour wheel as they moved toward grays. In addition, their
flattened underbellies were brilliantly warm where they
reflected the golden fields below. Wispy micro-cloudlet
partners added vivacity, energy and design. Still, these clouds
were lit and shaded like any art-school blocks. "When such a
simple thing is so complex," said Constable in a similar
situation, "one needs tenacity."

In degrees of tenacity, some of us are steel-toed hiking boots,
others are an old pair of flip-flops. This understanding just
may determine how far we go. Thankfully, within the creative
universe there are different personality types--the sensitive
and the insensitive, the automatically creative and the
developmentally creative. Right- and left-brain tendencies as
well as other personality quirks provide a wide range of
possibilities and expectations. Constable, the most gentle and
sensitive of men, was also tenacious. I've asked Andrew to put
up a few examples of Constable's clouds at the top of the
current clickback. See URL below.

Sometimes I think this art business is all about channelling
and focusing our tenacious natures. These days, the general
ease of life promotes playtime, laziness, goofing off and a
"let George do it" attitude. But thriving artists often have
what I call "the relentless pursuit of entitlement." I'm not
talking about the entitlement to be supported--grants,
residencies, etc. I'm talking about the entitlement to "get
good."

Getting good takes work, and tenacity shows itself best during
the process of making art. "Genius," said Jane Hopkins, "is the
infinite capacity for taking pains." These pains can be minor
and yet powerful. John Constable was among the first to
tenaciously sit out in nature and try to work out such
seemingly lesser issues as relative darkness and lightness,
plainness and complexity, form and formlessness, weakness and
strength.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." (P.
D. Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, 1694-1773)

Esoterica: Nuances are those subtle and seldom noticed
differences occurring in nature that many artists need to bring
into their work. Nuanced work depends on observation,
understanding and application. Nuance is often the difference
between ordinary art and great art. The tenacious artist takes
the time to get it right. Good enough is not good enough.
Further, tenacity and humility can be friends: "I know very
well what I am about and that my skies have not been neglected,
though they often failed in execution--and often no doubt from
anxiety about them." (John Constable, 1776-1837)

Scholarly Perspectives on Digital Art

2006-08-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

From artist Bruce D. Price
A recent issue of ArtNews (November, 2003) featured a Russian artist said to be pursuing "a digital aesthetic." His works, it turns out, are "pixel-based paintings of art-historical classics." Why, one might ask, does digital art need to refer to anything historical? What's the point? Digital is the unpredictable present and the unseen future. Let's see where that goes.

At the start of the 20th century, intellectuals hailed the beauty of the machine. This philosophy was called Machine Aesthetics. What the intellectuals meant was the sleek aerodynamic surface of the racing car or ocean liner. (They did not mean the dirty engine or dangerous boiler.) At the start of the 21st century, we are entering an unexpected new chapter in Machine Aesthetics. Now there's no beauty on the surface, as the computer can be in a cardboard box or hidden in the wall. The beauty is deep inside the silicon chips that enable computers to perform a billion calculations a second. Digital art can be understood as Machine Aesthetics II--The Inner Beauty.

A sculptress (more precisely, a potter who makes artistic ceramics) was interviewed in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. "Sometimes," she said, "the most interesting pieces come from a series of guided accidents." Exactly. Many digital artists would tell you the same thing: "I'm looking for those wonderful accidents that are more beautiful than anything I might think up beforehand. Serendipity--that's the best part."

Digital art can be used to replicate traditional media and to represent traditional subjects--e.g. to paint a flower or a nude. Brilliant work will be done in this direction. But why use this exciting new medium in old-fashioned ways? Avant-garde thinking suggests: this new kind of machine (the computer) should be used to create new kinds of art.

How do they do it? Hard to say. Even digital artists can't always tell how other digital artists achieve their effects. There's trade secrets and luck and even unexplainable, unrepeatable results. In an odd way, digital art of today is like glass blowing in Venice in, say 1000, when every glass blower had personal secrets and techniques. This mystery is part of the fun in digital art. But don't be intimidated. If you don't like the art, it's bad. If you like it, it's good. Buy it.

That Jackson Pollack dripped all those paintings was a big problem for many people. Cynics said, "My kid could do that." The Jackson Pollacks of today are digital artists. People ask, "So, when my kids get a computer, then they'll be able to do digital art?" Sure--exactly to the degree that when they get a set of oil paints, they'll be able to do oil paintings.

A new field is emerging, the sociology of computers. Here are the first findings: Turns out that almost half the population thinks the computer is bad, a devilish machine that is both impersonal and anti-creative. This Luddite perspective views the computer as a cookie-cutter drudge. For these people "computer art" is an oxymoron... Simultaneously, almost half the population thinks the exact opposite! Computers are gods. Push a button and opera comes out. Any child and a computer can write War and Peace and outpaint Manet. An artist painting on a computer isn't doing anything because the god-like computer is doing the work. Sorry. Neither view is very helpful. The computer is just a tool. A word processor--i.e. a computer programmed to manipulate texts-- doesn't create poetry, and an image processor--i.e. a computer programmed to manipulate images--doesn't create art. As always, poets make poetry and artists make art.

Digital art--here's one reason why the art world sometimes tries to pretend it's not there--is hugely democratic. Once a piece is created, the artist can make multiple copies. In this respect it's exactly like the photograph, another much maligned democratic medium. For the first 100 years of its existence, let's say 1850-1950, the camera was not considered a real artist's tool. What did the photographer actually do? Push a button, that's all. Much too democratic. But little by little, good artists went to work with the camera and made great art. Philistine opinion gave way. The same story is now being replayed starring the computer. What took a century in photography's case will pass by in relatively few years for digital art.

Andre Breton and the Surrealists said that artists should liberate the unconconscious. The idea was that you don't try to control everything. You let the creative process loose. Turns out the computer is a natural ally to experimentation, freeing the unconscious and, in effect, getting out of the way.

Toward a Digital Manifesto: the pixel is the language of the future. Digital is the landscape on which we will live. The goal of the digital artist is to explore the vast new aesthetic possibilities that digital technology has presented to us.

Welcome to the digital universe.
© Bruce D. Price 2004

Resonses to "Hope"

2006-08-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

"When artists slip the collar of convention, only then can they roam the forest of new found sites. With skill they may return with their visions for others to see in the code of their paintings. I do not understand the language or code of the birds but I do still love their songs. New visions need not be fully understood--only agreeable. I believe that true genius does not understand the word fear--instead their sails are set by hope of unseen shores."

Todd Plough

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase

2006-08-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

Willpower is best used with care

2006-08-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

Cordelia Fine
June 14, 2006

A DECADE ago when I was an undergraduate psychologist, a departmental librarian called Anne was doing something any psychologist would say was impossible. Every year, with near-perfect accuracy, she would predict which third-year undergraduates would be awarded first-class degrees.
Anne didn't know how their essays were rated, what A-level grades they had under their belts, or how they scored on IQ tests. (All information many would say was essential to forecasting final results.)

All she knew was how often she had seen students in the department library: reading course notes, photocopying journals, borrowing books. And the handful of students who Anne saw a lot - conspicuously more often than the other students in the same year - were going to get a first.

Anne was working on the principle that in academic achievement it is self-discipline, not talent, that counts. Ten years on, a study published recently in Psychological Science has come to exactly the same conclusion.

Psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman descended on the eighth grade of a large public school in the northeast of the US. As the autumn leaves fell, each of the 160-odd children took an IQ test, then they (and their parents and teachers) answered questionnaires that probed self-control. Are you good at resisting temptation, they were asked. Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Or do pleasure and fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?

The children were also given a real-life test of their ability to delay gratification. Each was handed a dollar bill in an envelope. They could choose either to keep it or hand it back and get $2 a week later. Their decision was carefully recorded.

The researchers returned in spring. They took note of each child's grades and then looked back to see both how clever, and how self-controlled, that student had been in autumn. What, they wanted to know, was the most important factor in school grades?

The psychologists discovered it was self-control, by a long shot. A child's capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.

At first glance, research of this sort is a comfort to those of us not exploding with raw talent. The science seems to back up the writer Kingsley Amis's well-known advice that "the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of one's trousers to the seat of one's chair". Why, in that case anyone can write a book. Yet a small problem remains; namely, the problem of keeping the seat of one's trousers applied to the seat of one's chair.

Amis kept to an "unflinching schedule" of 500 words a day, according to The Guardian. (No doubt the young Amis would have returned the seductive single dollar bill to the researcher with barely a hesitation.) But just as we all have different levels of physical endurance so, too, do we differ in the strength of our will.

Some people are simply more susceptible to temptations and distractions, and we all sometimes reach the limits of our willpower sooner than we would like. "Programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement," psychologists Duckworth and Seligman conclude from their findings.

So what can we do to strengthen self-discipline, to transform ourselves from impulsive dollar-snatchers to lofty long-term investors in future success?

Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The "moral muscle", as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

Take, for example, a group of hungry volunteers who were left alone in a room containing both a tempting platter of freshly baked chocolate chip biscuits and a plate piled high with radishes. Some of the volunteers were asked to sample only the radishes. These peckish volunteers manfully resisted the temptation of the biscuits and ate the prescribed number of radishes. Other, more fortunate, volunteers were asked to sample the biscuits.

In the next, supposedly unrelated, part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to try to solve a difficult puzzle. The researchers weren't interested in whether the volunteers solved it. (In fact, it was insoluble.) Rather, they wanted to know how long the volunteers would persist with it. Their self-control already depleted, volunteers forced to snack on radishes persisted for less than half as long as people who had eaten the biscuits or (in case you should think chocolate biscuits offer inner strength) other volunteers who had skipped the eating part of the experiment.

As this and many similar studies show, if you draw on your reserves to achieve one unappealing goal - going for a jog, say - your moral muscle will be ineffective when you then call on it to help you switch off the television and start essay-writing.

What, then, can we do about this unfortunate tendency of the moral muscle to become fatigued with use? One option is to build it up and make it strong. Evidence is starting to accumulate that the moral muscle, like its physical counterpart, can become taut and bulging from regular exercise. People asked by experimenters to be self-disciplined about their posture for two weeks were afterwards stronger willed when it came to a test of physical endurance, compared with other people allowed to slouch about in their usual comfortable way during the fortnight.

By regularly exercising self-restraint and virtue in all areas of life (moral muscle cross-training, we may call it), we will come to resist temptations with the same casual ease with which a world-class athlete sprints to catch a train. That, at least, is the idea.

Unfortunately, like any sensible, long-term strategy for self-improvement, this approach has limited appeal. For just as we want to fit into those trousers next Monday - not after eight tedious weeks of healthy eating and regular exercise - it is often the same for our more cerebral ambitions. Exam dates are set in stone, deadlines loom on the horizon, or may even mock us from the past. In other words, there simply may not be enough time to become a master of temperance and virtue before tackling our goal.

Fortunately, there is also an attractive quick-fix approach to the problem of limited willpower. This is to use your moral muscle only very sparingly. My father, a professional philosopher, has a job that involves thinking very hard about very difficult things. This, of course, is an activity that consumes mental resources at a terrific rate.

The secret of his success as an academic, I am now convinced, is to ensure that none of his precious brainpower is wasted on other, less important matters. He feels the urge to sample a delicious luxury chocolate? He pops one in his mouth. Pulling on yesterday's shirt less trouble than finding a clean one? Over his head the stale garment goes. Rather fancies sitting in a comfy armchair instead of taking a brisk jog around the park? Comfy armchair it is. Thanks to its five-star treatment, my father's willpower - rested and restored whenever possible - can take on the search for wisdom with the strength of 10 men.

Although we may not all be able to live the charmed life of the well-paid scholar, the general principle - not to spread our inner resolve too thin - is an important one. If you are about to embark on a big project you court disaster if at the same time your life is cluttered and demanding, or you also commit to draining attempts at self-enhancement. The would-be novelist whose taxing day job exhausts her moral muscle will find it harder to apply the seat of her trousers to the seat of her chair. The dieting philosopher will struggle to keep his attention on a tricky passage of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Where are the students whose self-discipline is constantly worn away by other concerns? Not in the library reading course-notes, photocopying articles or borrowing books. And if they are relying on their smarts to get them to the top of the class then there will be disappointment ahead.

But don't just take my word for it. Ask a librarian.

Cordelia Fine is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne.

Make a Conservator Happy

2006-08-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

From Art Biz Coach ~

Camilla J. Van Vooren is a good friend who is in my Toastmasters club. After she leaves us on Wednesday mornings, she goes to her job as Senior Conservator of Paintings, Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts in Denver. I asked her recently what kind of information conservators need from artists. If you are concerned, as you should be, about the enduring nature of your art, take heed:

"What we desperately need to know from artists, I think, is a 'structure and instruction' report which makes specific references to their intent., i.e., 'If that caviar falls off your work, should I restore it or just go buy fresh caviar?' [Did I mention Camilla has a sense of humor to be envied? She continues. . . ]

"Seriously, what I think would be of immense value would be a form that covers every aspect of the structure of the work. For example, on an oil painting, start with the 'auxiliary support,' the stretcher, strainer, panel or board that the art is executed on. Then we would talk about the gesso or ground layer, then the paint film, the varnish, etc. It would be helpful to the artist to keep records of these things for their own future reference.

"For each of these categories, the artist would list the brands or types of materials used including technical references, especially if it is an unusual material. If they would include procedural notes such as layering schemes it would be invaluable to future conservators.

"Then, they could include notes on the degree to which they would have any part conserved or restored. For example, if the stretcher fails, do you approve of a conservator removing the canvas from the stretcher and replacing it? Now, on all of the different areas, they could include condition notes and their thoughts about it with some general comments about their intent at the end. This might be anything from 'Do anything necessary to preserve the 2-dimensional image' to 'Do NOT VARNISH' to 'Let the thing rot. I specifically do not want it to be preserved!'

"If we had these types of guidelines from the artist, it would be heaven!"

KNOW THIS Conservators need to know your intent and materials.
THINK ABOUT THIS Future generations have no idea what your intent was. You have to spell it out if it isn't obvious.
DO THIS If you want your work preserved in a museum one day, make a conservator happy. Get in the habit of keeping notes about your working materials, techniques, and intent.