Jealous of artists

[imomus]

I'm jealous of artists.



I'm jealous of artists especially when a shiny new copy of ARTFORUM arrives. I flick through the pages looking at the ads.

It's important to be jealous, without rejecting. Jealous and full of desire.

I remember feeling this way when I read the New Musical Express in about 1980. "Who's got a new album out?" has become "Who's got a new show?"

I'm jealous of Dash Snow because he's young and cool and apparently has a lot of money in the family. He probably gets lots of sex.



I'm jealous of the Chapman Brothers because they get away with being so perverse. Hey, look, they have a new collaboration with Paul McCarthy!

I'm jealous of Paul McCarthy because he gets away with being even more perverse than the Chapmans do. And look, now he's giving his son equal billing! Maybe his son will continue after he's dead (because McCarthy's a cute, wizened little old man now, he can't have long), doing exactly the same sort of work. It could become a family dynasty of slithering shit and paint and blood.

If Paul McCarthy is Paul McCartney on the sleeve of "Meet the Artists / Beatles", is Jake George, and Dinos John, and George Condo Ringo?

I'm jealous of Thomas Hirschhorn in this video for his clever motto "Energy, yes, quality, no".

I'm jealous of Justin Lieberman for having the good idea of staging a one-man advertising agency in the Zach Feuer Gallery. I wish I'd thought of that!

I'm jealous of Makoto Aida for getting to play a lazy, compromised Bin Laden in a video, and getting into the MoCA's Out of the Ordinary: New Video from Japan, which is the stuff I've been calling Supereveryday.

I'm jealous of the super-elite art tribe who ride the global flow from one biennial to the next.

And I'm ultimately jealous of the fact that our society has evolved to such a level that we indulge people as if they were children, and let them act out the whims and games of children in public, and pay them for it. It seems that being an artist -- in the West, or in China -- is the ultimate evolutionary point of the individual. Perhaps it's a point we'll recede from as times get tougher later this century, but a world without these selfish, clever, silly children isn't a better one.

I certainly don't agree with Dr Louis Wolpert in this BBC programme about C.P. Snow's Two Cultures that science simply requires higher intellectual standards than art. I do, though, think there are still two cultures, art and science, and that they really don't understand each other's contexts.

You have to understand that jealousy is a big part of my modus operandi. Jealousy without resentment. I "advance by appetite". I "admire and exoticize the Other". I try to make myself like that admired other, knowing that the mission is surely doomed to failure, but knowing also that in that failure is my possibility of happiness. Because a man advancing towards his dream, but never quite reaching it -- and not really expecting to -- is a happy man.

The crazy thing is, though, that something is happening alongside my jealousy of artists -- parallel, but not really affected by it -- which is that some people are saying I am an artist.

This month Phaidon is publishing Ice Cream, the latest in their regular series of books singling out "100 of the world's top emerging artists selected by 10 esteemed curators". And, thanks to Philippe Vergne, who put me in the Whitney last year, I'm one of them!

"Each curator has selected 10 important new artists," says the blurb, "who have either emerged internationally over the past five years, or are still relatively unknown. Their definition of emerged means that an artist has had solo shows, but nothing large-scale in a major institution (apart from a couple recent exceptions), has been reviewed in the international art press, but not been the subject of a major monograph, and has been given sufficient exposure without yet becoming fully established."

Could that be me? No, it's obvious that I'm a songwriter-turned-journalist who merely finds the art world very glamorous. I have no visual practice at all -- I wish I did, I'd love to stick pieces of paper onto an ariel photograph of a city, like Joana Hadjithomas does in that ARTFORUM ad. I love the visual, I just don't do the visual. What I do is I talk, sometimes in art galleries.

I know real artists who'd be absolutely furious at my inclusion in Ice Cream, this piece of leapfrogging. Artists who went to art school, who work in paint or bronze. They feel what I feel -- that they're real artists and I'm not. That I haven't paid my dues. That my elevation in the art world has come for all the wrong reasons -- that I somehow managed to meet the right people, because I was some kind of minor celebrity, and get into their address books.

But at the same time, as an artist without prices, I don't participate at all in the thing that many people would say makes the art world both real and evil -- the money.

"Look at this diagram of the art world," says Jerry Saltz. "You know what's missing?"

There are artists, collectors and institutions. What's missing is Jerry. What's missing is the art critic. And it's missing because there's no money in art criticism. "There's none of this" (Jerry draws a dollar sign) "in our thing". Things are only real (and evil) when there's money attached.

I won't be a real (and evil) artist until I have prices. So until then I can keep being pleasantly jealous of artists. And we can all relax, cool as ice cream.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm jealous of Momus (sometimes)...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

So am I!

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

I think it was Henry Miller, who was a painter as well as a writer, who said that suddenly he didn't feel so accomplished in his artwork after seeing an Apollo rocket take people to the moon. When people talk about hoax conspiracies concerning the moon landing, in my head I'm thinking Henry Miller won afterall, but then again someone will probably get to the moon eventually if it was only made up way back then.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

it took the moon landing for miller to put his art into perspective? now, that is some healthy self esteem!

Validation Comes From Within, Not the Tropic of Capricorn?

[thug-watch.livejournal.com]

Don't Complain About The Conspiracy . . . Become The CONspiracy!

Is your imagination so CONstipated that you cant see how jealous Mark Kostabi must be of the panache with which i sign his name to his canvASS? (http://youtube.com/watch?v=VpMFVKO6eCk)

[(Anonymous)]

I "admire and exoticize the Other". I try to make myself like that admired other

The trouble is, no man is a hero to his blog readers. There's something about the relentlessness of blogging, and all the small domestic details and endless repetitions of ideas and bugbears that seep out over the months and years, that ultimately makes the blogger immune from being exoticised. I mean, how many of those artists you're so jealous of keep up a daily blog with anything like your word count?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

no man is a hero to his blog readers

Oh, that's true. And I rather like undercutting my heroism this way, day in, day out.

And then again it's not true. I idolize Franz Kafka, and my favourite book of his is his diary. There, day in, day out, he lays bare his weaknesses and insecurities. It's a blog, basically. And it doesn't make me admire him any the less.

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

"I'm jealous of the super-elite art tribe who ride the global flow from one biennial to the next."

I am too. But isn't it an incestuous back-biting scene where you are only in the game as long as you keep morphing (or staying the same) to the pleasure of your collectors? And what about the environmental footprint of all these globetrotters playing the game of money surrounding art?

Sometimes I fear the art itself gets lost. In the slow life view of the world, shouldn't art have a localised sense of purpose? I've said it before, but I believe art is in a sad state these days. A cultural drought, as commented. With the internet giving away so much information for free these days, the models of commerce around art keep morphing. Its odd, I mean who buys art anyway? I guess the people at the big art fairs do. I've never been invited.

And BTW how does Jerry Saltz earn a living? I mean he lives in NYC where rents are not low .. does he play the horses?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jerry teaches at SVA (as you can see in the video I linked to) and writes for the Village Voice, as well as publishing books. He probably does okay. I describe him in my next Wired column as "the world's greatest living art critic".

Art with a localized sense of purpose would also be part of the global flow, a trendy thing to put in your biennial. It would be open to charges of hypocrisy as a result. When in fact it's an ongoing dialectic (the "glocal"), the kind of important paradox the art world is uniquely well-suited to playing with. Some Anglo puritans don't have a better word than "hypocrisy" for that stuff, but those contradictions (and an ability to engage with them without "resolving" them) really is one of the great strengths of the art world.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I wrote a beautiful story about the princess Momus and the Prince of the Book of Ice Cream to reply to this post with, but I got THE FEAR.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Woah, human-on-book slash!

princess Momus looking dreamily out of his tower window

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

Seriously you guys, the only Chapman Brothers worth knowing about are the ones that have a two-bit wrestleman answer emails for them.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Fake it 'till you make it, girl.

other negative emotions / media moves

[(Anonymous)]

Jealous of the Chapmans and McCarthy?! Not me. Loathing and repulsion are feelings I get. The worst of contemporary art.

By the way, Jerry Saltz now writes for New York Magazine. Movin' on up! While the Voice is historically more the paper of the common (counter-cultural) man, it was recently bought by a newspaper chain and has since gone mainly to the crapper. Hope NY Mag won't tame Jerry's awesome writing.

Re: other negative emotions / media moves

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh! (http://gawker.com/news/village-voice/jerry-saltz-jumps-voice-ship-for-new-york-248577.php)

CP Snow

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for reminding me about that 2 Cultures programme. I love CP Snow. There is really no reason why artists and writers should not know something of each other's work; and the idea that an artist and intellectual can say, almost with pride, that he knows nothing about science, is bizarre.

Greetings from NW6

[(Anonymous)]

Jealousy, 'bad'; envy, 'good'.

Just don't let them call it outsider art.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking recently about the difference between the artist and the hobbyist. A couple weeks ago, I was asked if I had something to contribute to a small gallery show. I sent the curator jpegs of three pieces, and he said "if they're ready to hang, bring them all over."

I'm not an artist, and I don't even know what "ready-to-hang" means. I figured "frames" right? Frames are foreign to me, but I had a couple sitting around the house, and spent the next day struggling to fit my frames to my pieces

It almost killed me, because I don't use frames. When I make something, I throw it on the floor for a couple days, then it may lay on a table for a week. It moves around my apartment like a household pet, till I decide if it's good enough

But I don't frame anything, short of mounting something on a funky piece of corrugated cardboard so I can prop it against the wall

A friend of mine, who has made money from his art, watched me in this struggle to prepare something for the eyes of others, and chuckled a bit. He's like "you want to be an artist, but you don't want to think about how others will see your work. You don't want to do the boring bits the rest of us do to prep our work for consumption"

And he's right, I don't want to do that boring stuff. I don't want to break my fingernail fucking a frame

I ended up only submitting one piece to the show and it was mounted poorly. Call me a hobbyist, but I doubt I'll make the effort ever again to submit something to a show, I've got better things to do : )

Momus, you inspire me a bit, your aloofness to the art establishment, and yet they still want you!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"Momus, you inspire me a bit, your aloofness to the art establishment, and yet they still want you!"

lol ice princess

[schizo-robot.livejournal.com]

i'm jealous of your music and lyrics, also always thinking "aha! why didn't i think of that!"

A Complete History Of Artistic Jealousy (parts 17-24)

[zooportj.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with Jerry Saltz. Is the monetary value of art (the price it fetches on the open maket) a direct correlation to the amount of value it has as a piece of art or even jealousy that is attached to it or, perhaps, the artist that produces it? I think not. What's true of art is true of art criticism.

I think the amount of jealousy I feel towards someone is directly disproportional to my ability to become like them. It was a very wise man who sang "When I see a beautiful woman - I'm jealous all the time".

Re: A Complete History Of Artistic Jealousy (parts 17-24)

[(Anonymous)]

We are moving from a civilization of the image to a civilization of optics. This leaves open the possibility of an 'optical correction' of the world –the reconstruction of perception according to the machine. The machines themselves have become opticians. This is an unprecedented event. The vision machine and the motor have triggered a catastrophe within the visual arts, and they have not learned from it. On the contrary, they masked the accident with commercial success. (http://www.semiotexte.com/books/accidentOfArt.html)

Urbanist and technological theorist Paul Virilio trained as a painter, studying under Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Bazaine and de Stael. In The Accident of Art, his third extended conversation with Sylvere Lotringer, Virilio looks back on the century in order to address for the first time the situation of contemporary art within technological society. This book completes a collaborative trilogy began in 1983 with Pure War (peace as war) and continued in 2002 with Crepuscular Dawn, an examination of the collapse of space into speed and topology into real time from architecture to bio-technology.

Something fatal has happened to the visual arts, and it has gone unnoticed. In The Accident of Art, Virilio and Lotringer argue that a direct relation exists between war trauma and the visual arts. Technology is war by other means. And today war and accident are just one and the same thing. Accidents are no longer minor, they all are major. Just look at the World Trade Center. Accidents, Virilio claims, are inventions in their own right. They alone can liberate us from speed-induced inertia.

Unlike the performing arts, art has failed to reinvent itself in the face of technology, and simply retreated into painting or surrendered to digital technology. For a wheel to turn, there must be a hub that does not turn. All the way up to the motorization of the image, there was a fixed point, a point of reference in the civilization. Now there is no more perspective in the cultural sense. Art is no longer localized. If there is no focus, there is no perception. The question today is to rediscover a fixed point so it all can turn.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

In "Out of the Ordinary: New Video from Japan," just those flashes of the woman with the umbrella were brilliant.

Why do I idolize Japanese woman artists so?

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I thought the video kind of sucked.

However, bubble tea is brilliant.

[(Anonymous)]

Jerry Saltz thinks critics are missing from the art world? He claims that he doesn't make any money? WTF is he talking about?

iMomasu, I was talking to my friend, a big bad artist, the other day and she said that when she first started showing that someone told her about "the impostor complex" - that everything you are doing is fake and that someone, someone who's not fake, is going to call you out, and everyone will laugh you out of town. Not that paranoid self-doubt is anything new, but I think this feeling must be especially strong in the art world because, of course, it's all a big mind game. Not that it is an irrelevant mind game, but you have to realize some serious mental manipulation of the simple physical world is going on when someone pays millions of (monetary unit)s for little scraps of paper. So keep on playing and don't look down! Anyway, I saw you at the Witney and I liked what you were doing. It was using words, not images it's true, but you were among the best-dressed... A week or so ago you were talking about the CCA, their "social practices" major (it seems interesting - this is an amazing school, but they are going to have to produce the work that lives up to their words... ) Anyway, the students there are really throwing about the word "artistic intervention." Doesn't your work have something to say about this? The last thing is, your friends who are artists who might be negajealous of your success in the art world should realize - to aspire to be an artist is a low goal - you must aspire to be a human, a complete creative person. Whether or not you can draw pretty pictures is just a distraction - you must do what needs to be done and that may be anything. I like this website because it is one of the few places where I find someone looking for meaning in art, rather than looking for meaning for art. Right on! - Synesthetic Superscam

[jaimi.livejournal.com]

I wish I were a polished derelict like Dash Snow and made collages with my own semen and Polaroids and garnered lots of praise for it. LOL

Do The Strand

[(Anonymous)]

Nick

On Sunday I play my first game of the cricket season for the 'Brighton Beamers' against Patcham..Elephant Power/Coco Rosie/Matt Elliot on my iPod whilst I linger at Long leg

did you catch G and G on Jonathon Toss tonight?...

I'm jealous of artists like Viv Richards, Ken Dodd and Chris Morris

ever yours

maf

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Momus, I am in constant amazement when I hear and read your works. I feel that you aren't giving yourself much credit. Who cares if you aren't widely known, what matters is that you have a small community of devoted fans. I feel that it's a great thing that you let your fans reach you in such a way that they can feel a certain closeness to you. I just listened to your music for 2 hours straight (well, not really, I had the sudden urge to listen to Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance") on a car ride home from San Diego to Los Angeles. What you don't realize is that many of your songs give me such bizarre and fascinating visuals in my own mind. Your words evoke many feelings in me, from happiness to puzzlement. I can create my own movie in my mind, with the soundtrack as your songs. Momus, you ARE an artist to be envied. Countless times I have felt the overwhelming urge to cover your songs. If only I could find a way to actually do it.

By the way, what instruments do you use in Pygmalism?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you, Microworlds!

Pygmalism was recorded with a medieval quartet called the Dufay Collective (http://www.dufay.com/recordings.en.html). They were playing things like sackbuts and crumhorns and flugels and viols and a regal.