Art without price
Mar. 16th, 2007 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI've had a couple of meetings this past week with a gallerist who's working on an innovative way to sell media art. She's collecting together 70 media artists and plans to sell their work by -- well, I won't let the cat out of the bag yet; all will be revealed when she launches later in the year.
In some ways it would be ideal for me if she could succeed, because I'm "an artist without prices". The last show I held in Chelsea, and my Whitney Biennial performance, were presented as having "nothing prepared, nothing sold and nothing archived". I think, in an art world which is perceived as being more and more about money, this is actually rather refreshing. And note that the "nothing archived" claim rebuffs over-zealous academics too. While money and academic attention can undoubtedly vitalize the art world, too much investment and too much institutional respect tends to deaden it.
After thinking about this stuff more, I decided I like the perversity of this "nothing for sale" stance better than the possibility of getting paid. So for the moment I continue to be an artist with nothing for sale. It's almost like an artwork in itself. I've opted out of the gallerist's scheme, though I wish her every success with it.
She doesn't seem to mind; last night we went for a drink at Barbie Deinhoff's bar in Kreuzberg. "I feel like a tourist in the art world," I told her, "and I want to keep that feeling of its glamour." She started telling me "the art world isn't as glamourous as it --" but I cut her off, sticking my fingers in my ears with a smile and shouting "La la la la la!"
The thing is, glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If I want art to be glamourous, glamourous it shall be! To me, anyway. And perhaps a condition of that continued attraction is to stay somewhat distanced from the bumpy mechanisms and machinations of art's market. I like to quote Kafka about my attitude to Japan, but the same quote applies to the art world: "Happiness consists in having an idea of the good life, but not advancing towards it." I suppose you could think of it as endless foreplay.
You may ask what's left of the art world when money is taken out of the equation. What's left is perhaps what Brian Eno described, in a talk entitled "What Art Is For", delivered last month at Design Indaba Conference in South Africa: “Art is everything we don’t need to do. Art is a way of commonly testing other realities and it is a way of staying in tune with each other.”
One way I am participating in the art world's current money boom is by writing more and more articles about art and artists (for money, hypocrisy hounds!) for catalogues. I just finished a piece about Beck's Futures Prize-winner Matt Stokes which will appear in a book about him published later this year by the Edinburgh Artists' Collective, and a conversation between me and critic Carlo Antonelli will appear in the catalogue of a big exhibition about Futurism to be staged soon at the Bergamo Museum in Italy.
What interests me in writing about artists is how they self-define their own style, hone their interests, and how those interests connect with mine. Matt Stokes, for instance, documents early 90s rave culture as if he were a cultural archeologist of the early Christian period -- as if the sites of M25 "orbital" parties were the catacombs off the Via Appia. In the essay, I connect this to my own ideas about "the passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver", and conclude that subcultures can also be "superlegitimate".
The images on this page are of an installation Mr Liam Gillick made for the communal area of the CCA in Kitakyushu in 2000. His installation consisted of benches, low tables, bookshelves and Japanese lanterns. A book later appeared based on the project.
I've been aware of Gillick (who currently teaches at Columbia) for years, but I think he's someone I should find out more about. His work draws together an elegantly minimalist didactic look (he shares with Julian Opie an interest in spareness and idealized office environments), great colour combinations, Marxisant titles like "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" or "The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune", and "fictional yet non-narrative essays" -- something which brings to mind other "investigative" artists like Jeremy Deller, Rainer Ganahl, Luke Fowler or Annika Eriksson. I think they share something with designer James Goggin and his "ostentatiously non-demonstrative", socially-engaged, playfully didactic design.
I'm just pulling names out of a hat here, but you get the point: as a tourist, all I need is to find one interesting figure, and the whole big top of the art world is justified. Let the money, the logistics and the hype look after themselves. Sure, following my arguments the other day some of you will say "Money, logistics and hype are the whole context of the art world, its field. They change the meaning of every statement in it." That may be true, but to say that the art world was just money speaking money would be gross reductionism. The saving slippage lies in art's non-instrumentality, its eccentricity -- as Eno says, it's "everything we don't need to do".
In some ways it would be ideal for me if she could succeed, because I'm "an artist without prices". The last show I held in Chelsea, and my Whitney Biennial performance, were presented as having "nothing prepared, nothing sold and nothing archived". I think, in an art world which is perceived as being more and more about money, this is actually rather refreshing. And note that the "nothing archived" claim rebuffs over-zealous academics too. While money and academic attention can undoubtedly vitalize the art world, too much investment and too much institutional respect tends to deaden it.
After thinking about this stuff more, I decided I like the perversity of this "nothing for sale" stance better than the possibility of getting paid. So for the moment I continue to be an artist with nothing for sale. It's almost like an artwork in itself. I've opted out of the gallerist's scheme, though I wish her every success with it.
She doesn't seem to mind; last night we went for a drink at Barbie Deinhoff's bar in Kreuzberg. "I feel like a tourist in the art world," I told her, "and I want to keep that feeling of its glamour." She started telling me "the art world isn't as glamourous as it --" but I cut her off, sticking my fingers in my ears with a smile and shouting "La la la la la!"
The thing is, glamour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If I want art to be glamourous, glamourous it shall be! To me, anyway. And perhaps a condition of that continued attraction is to stay somewhat distanced from the bumpy mechanisms and machinations of art's market. I like to quote Kafka about my attitude to Japan, but the same quote applies to the art world: "Happiness consists in having an idea of the good life, but not advancing towards it." I suppose you could think of it as endless foreplay.
You may ask what's left of the art world when money is taken out of the equation. What's left is perhaps what Brian Eno described, in a talk entitled "What Art Is For", delivered last month at Design Indaba Conference in South Africa: “Art is everything we don’t need to do. Art is a way of commonly testing other realities and it is a way of staying in tune with each other.”
One way I am participating in the art world's current money boom is by writing more and more articles about art and artists (for money, hypocrisy hounds!) for catalogues. I just finished a piece about Beck's Futures Prize-winner Matt Stokes which will appear in a book about him published later this year by the Edinburgh Artists' Collective, and a conversation between me and critic Carlo Antonelli will appear in the catalogue of a big exhibition about Futurism to be staged soon at the Bergamo Museum in Italy. What interests me in writing about artists is how they self-define their own style, hone their interests, and how those interests connect with mine. Matt Stokes, for instance, documents early 90s rave culture as if he were a cultural archeologist of the early Christian period -- as if the sites of M25 "orbital" parties were the catacombs off the Via Appia. In the essay, I connect this to my own ideas about "the passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver", and conclude that subcultures can also be "superlegitimate".
The images on this page are of an installation Mr Liam Gillick made for the communal area of the CCA in Kitakyushu in 2000. His installation consisted of benches, low tables, bookshelves and Japanese lanterns. A book later appeared based on the project.
I've been aware of Gillick (who currently teaches at Columbia) for years, but I think he's someone I should find out more about. His work draws together an elegantly minimalist didactic look (he shares with Julian Opie an interest in spareness and idealized office environments), great colour combinations, Marxisant titles like "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" or "The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune", and "fictional yet non-narrative essays" -- something which brings to mind other "investigative" artists like Jeremy Deller, Rainer Ganahl, Luke Fowler or Annika Eriksson. I think they share something with designer James Goggin and his "ostentatiously non-demonstrative", socially-engaged, playfully didactic design.
I'm just pulling names out of a hat here, but you get the point: as a tourist, all I need is to find one interesting figure, and the whole big top of the art world is justified. Let the money, the logistics and the hype look after themselves. Sure, following my arguments the other day some of you will say "Money, logistics and hype are the whole context of the art world, its field. They change the meaning of every statement in it." That may be true, but to say that the art world was just money speaking money would be gross reductionism. The saving slippage lies in art's non-instrumentality, its eccentricity -- as Eno says, it's "everything we don't need to do".
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 11:21 am (UTC)Defining art as "everything we don't need to do" is I guess a way of glamourising it (the decadence of uselessness!), but I don't find it terribly convincing. We're making aesthetic decisions every hour of every day. There haven't been cultures without art. There is a compulsion and therefore necessity there.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 11:34 am (UTC)Glamour, for me, represents:
* Narcissism about the other
* Projection as construction (in other words, glamour produces rather than merely consuming
* Sexual desire
* Exogamy
* Advance by appetite
Eno puts non-necessity at the heart of his definition of art because he's not a Romantic ("we MUST create!") and because he's a fan of Rorty's ideas about contingency.
I like glamor too
Date: 2007-03-16 02:47 pm (UTC)<< Art is everything we don’t need to do >>
I sit and think about what would happen if the machines really could do all our work. What would I do if I didn't have to work? Probably OD on smack. But if I were able to keep my wits about me in the face of unstructured time, I suppose the only things to do are practical jokes and art.
If the machines do our work, and our needs are met, I suppose that leaves us at the top of Maslow's pyramid. A fabulous place to be. Nothing to do but amuse ourselves and loved ones with our creative efforts, and make the world a more beautiful place.
I hope we get there some day! I think, if we do, though, we will have already moved to another planet. I do not think humans will be able to leave strife behind until we have moved off this planet.
Re: I like glamor too
Date: 2007-03-16 03:20 pm (UTC)R
I am a nihilist
Date: 2007-03-16 03:39 pm (UTC)Why control their minds? Let them take themselves out. Death happens. We need to weed the planet anyway.
Okay say we get off the planet before we're much more evolved. We get to a new place with plenty of space. Resources are plentiful. No one *has* to do anything. What happens?
Some people die. Some people step up and use the time well. There will probably be violence while we figure out what it's like not to need anything. Do we start fighting over each other's husbands and wives?
We get to a point where the people left can handle unstructured time. And hopefully we get a lot of beautiful stuff to experience as a result.
I guess I'm more of an optimist than I thought.
I just don't mind if people, or I, die in getting to a better place. Don't get me wrong, am not brave, but I figure death is like jumping off a grand cliff and falling forever in a delightful way.
Am remembering that Stanislaw Lem wrote about such a quasi-utopian situation in, I believe it was "MEMOIRS Of A SPACE TRAVELER. Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy." That man was a visionary.
Re: I am a nihilist
Date: 2007-03-17 12:29 am (UTC)Re: I am a nihilist
Date: 2007-03-17 08:09 am (UTC)Re: I am a nihilist
Date: 2007-03-17 09:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 11:51 am (UTC)That lady is trying to SELL media art works?
The art world is "full of sound and fury"... The art world want to represent itself as flying over money and economy - like a transcendent universe - but at the same time they build galleries, present their artists in biennales, search for the critics article in a magazine... and so forth... So, is it possible, in our economic degree of civilization, be apart from money...?
Maybe Berlin cultural milieu is the most interesting experiment... (with all the glamour of the folk-technological bohemians...) ... or maybe non-western contexts where art exists only to sell figurines to the western rich people (that happily celebrate non-western cultural production as a manifestation of pos-colonial atitude...).
Tell us... adornian or maoist intellectual?
Pedro Félix
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 11:58 am (UTC)(Old "moist intellectual" slogan.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 08:10 am (UTC)from the invisible, the unknown, the undescribubble
Date: 2007-03-16 12:29 pm (UTC)Maybe..unless some one starts to write about it, categorize it, makes it ready for digestion, ah well..bla.
From tomorrow on I will do radio in a gallery space. It will be done during the working hours. Because the artist has asked us. And we (it is Adrian Shephard and me) gladly present her this exclusive joy, of having a live radio team, making radio just for her to make work more enjoyable.
There won't be any visitor, because the doors will remain closed. And when the doors open the visitor can have a glance at a work in progress without the worker (or us) being present.
It is a bit like what i think an exhibition should be like
1.prepare the exhibition in a space open to public (10 days)
2. opening of the show (15.00 to 17.00)
3. ask people if they want to eat something, and gather money from those who say yes. (17.00- 17.30)
4 go out shopping, come back and start preparing dinner.(18.00 - 19.30)
5 serve dinner and eat and drink ( 19.35- 21.35)
6 close the exhibition with a finishing off party (22.00 - until late)
next day: clean the mess
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 12:20 pm (UTC)- "perform" in the core of the high art world (using cars, garbage, whatever...) and accept the fact that once you enter a museum or gallerie your are in an different context where money, aesthetics, cultural politics are synonymous... and live with it!
- "perform" as a non-popular-cultural artist (whatever that means).. neither a high-cultural artist!
- Run away from the academic milieu!
I'm trying to life apart from all this but it's too emotionally stressful (at least in the academic world) where your production is evaluated by the money you raise for your Institution (even if you are working on Adorno and Popular music!!!!)
Pedro
Viva Post-bit Capital!
Date: 2007-03-16 12:24 pm (UTC)Eno Left Roxy Music To Do His Laundry
Date: 2007-03-16 12:33 pm (UTC)Coming from a community arts background for us it was about liberation from the poverty of expectation. I suppose right there you have the in tune with others and exploring other realities. In the tight constraints of the limited view, eccentricity and escape were frowned upon. Unless they served the dominant controlling forces. Like the artistry of the gangster in Performance.
As always there are value judgements. Grant funding,the poverty industry. What is worth it. Have you earned it yet, baby?
Either this post is really deep or this is kicking coffee. Recent viewings of Hip Hop's appropriation by the art world in the mid 80s show the compulsion to create other realities. In a sense that needed to be done.
With glamour I am more of a Scots traditional definition man. A shape shifting hex. To change how things appear to someone.
"Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. - John Berger"
Re: Eno Left Roxy Music To Do His Laundry
Date: 2007-03-16 12:40 pm (UTC)That was me being anonymous up there. Shapeshifters!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 12:58 pm (UTC)There's definitely less of that weird creative community (in all things), and more of that ... obsessive careerist type deal. Nobody just wants to have fun with imagination anymore. :[ :[
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 03:35 pm (UTC)Now those who are having a modicum of success in the art world just say "sour grapes" and continue there little fashionista eurochic party.
I don't think Momus would have access to this type of artworld game playing if he hadnt made his name in music before. Also the eyepatch helps .. ie most of what one sees these days is for effect. Ironic little conceptual ploys as ephemeral as champagne bubbles ...
yeah I'm a bitter little hobbyist (see my post today), but atleast the game's not over yet. One reason I chose art in the first place was that its a calling that lasts a lifetime. Unfortunately for me, I'm more the type that stays in the studio rather than going out and trying to network or strategize on "the next big thing"
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 08:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 09:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 02:40 pm (UTC)Hence, my address.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 01:59 am (UTC)You can play with my puppets anytime.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 08:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 03:02 pm (UTC)Using Click Opera to promote political agendas
Date: 2007-03-16 03:44 pm (UTC)I am campaigning for a 2008 U.S. presidential candidate. Are you going to get pissed if I promote him here? Hahahah I know you will, but will you stop me? If I do it gracefully, will you let me get away with it?
Was this a problem in the 2004 election? Did U.S. readers advocate for the their political preferences in these pages?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 04:43 pm (UTC)me too ¢ (http://members.aol.com/joeyknow/jk7.html)
C'mon!
Date: 2007-03-16 05:45 pm (UTC)(...) collecting together 70 media artists and plans to sell their work by -- well, I won't let the cat out of the bag yet;
...is pretty frustrating.
Coitus interruptus
Re: C'mon!
Date: 2007-03-16 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 06:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-16 10:02 pm (UTC)Re: Using Click Opera to promote political agendas
Date: 2007-03-17 08:15 am (UTC)oldest professions
Date: 2007-03-17 02:24 am (UTC)but the art brothels of the world certainly promote
their flux for glamour.
Wasn't much of a Roxy fan. Pragmatists, ok by me.
you were in my thoughts last night
Date: 2007-03-17 02:29 am (UTC)Re: you were in my thoughts last night
Date: 2007-03-17 09:28 am (UTC)On the one hand, it's good to allow equality and specialization within a miniworld, and that's what the creation of a competition category for "gender others" allows. On the other hand, to promote equality at such a price has the effect of diminishing equality within the big world, the world of the "gender it".
And the question then is, is the world of the "gender it" more real just because it's bigger, richer and more powerful? Should we try and change it from within, or without? Does allowing the gender other into a relatively unchanged gender it film world diminish the asymmetrical strength of the gender it or boost it?
It's hard to imagine a world where gender is a difference that no longer makes a difference. And it would be a mistake to imagine it as necessarily a more equal world than the one we live in. Other binary distinctions, other "its and others", would structure our lives.
I think also that we have to see the asymmetry between men and women as producing "women's films" as we know them. In a world where gender was no longer a "difference that made a difference" (a structural difference), say goodbye to the whole idea of women's films!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 08:03 am (UTC)Meanwhile, someone else has to do those things.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 09:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 09:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-17 04:23 pm (UTC)