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.

[(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?

[(Anonymous)]

Being a hero luckily isn't the only way to be admired.
I like your way of defining jealousy. The russian have two forms of this, white jealousy and black jealousy.
Do you feel flattered, being part of ice cream?

Robert

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, that thing about white jealousy and black jealousy. I was just thinking that English doesn't really have a word for jealousy as something positive. I suppose we'd say "appetite" or "aspiration" or "admiration", but that's not quite it, you'd have to combine those three terms into one.

In Japanese you'd say "Ii na!" It means "Wouldn't that be nice! I'm jealous!", but in a positive rather than a dismissive way.

Yes, I feel super-flattered about being in Ice Cream. But I also feel like a fraud. Like there's been a big mistake, and the art world will soon realize it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

White jealousy = vanilla ice cream
Black jealousy = sesame ice cream

[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]

And by the way I can't help relating this black/white jealousy distinction to the video that's just emerged, the V-Tech shooter video. He comes out as incredibly jealous of his fellow students. So if it's "important to be jealous, without rejecting. Jealous and full of desire," he comes down on the wrong side. He rejects, and instead of Eros, his jealousy brings him to Thanatos.

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Woah, human-on-book slash!

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

http://electricwitch.livejournal.com/19286.html#cutid1

*runs*

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Fake it 'till you make it, girl.

[(Anonymous)]

I always think いいな。could be translated to be something like saying "thats great," or "wow!" when something great happens to your friend and you wish it happened to you. Prefaced of course with a short suck of air that is sighed out after you say it.

As an artist though I am often jealous of scientists. I'd like to be the Carl Sagan of the artworld, spending hours alone in the lab only to emerge and proclaim some great wondrous leap in thinking.
Art is the extended phenotype, no?

Ryu

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous of marine biologists who get to discover new deep sea species every time they descend in ALVIN.

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.

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.

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)

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!

princess Momus looking dreamily out of his tower window

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee

[(Anonymous)]

Is it that he rejects or is it that he, for whatever reason, feels rejected? If he feels rejected, even if he does so in an infantile neurotic way, then might his Eros be a source of the problem?

With the V-tech shooter, it is so obviously jealousy. But what if it were also privledge or lack of privledge? What if he recognized that and went haywire? How much was he hallucinating in order to justify himself, and how much of an imbalance in privlege was actually present. This idea has been nagging me, bothering me lately.

If he were a buddhist instead of a christian (as far as I know), he might have dealt with this by realizing that getting what he desired might not satisfy him, and so privledge would mean less.