''Who Gets to Call it Art?," Peter Rosen's documentary about the rapid-fire changes in American art in the 1960s, begins with a startling premise that it never really follows up on. ''What will the public think?" asks sculptor John Chamberlain of trends in art. He answers it himself: ''Well, who gives [an expletive]? It's their job to catch up."
Cate McQuiad of the Boston Globe begins her short review of Rosen's movie with this little anecdote, which is very much to the point of something I've been thinking about lately.
The other day in class I mentioned the "avant garde" and was met with blank stares by my students, who needed the idea explained to them (part of me was relieved...I mean, after all, wasn't the avant garde myth something a lot of us were out to get rid of in the first place?) I thought of one of my favorite reflections on an artist's relation to his audience, which appeared in an essay Jonathan Franzen wrote about William Gaddis called "Mr. Difficult". Here's a brief excerpt:
It turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience. In one model...the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work, it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel...exists independent of how many people appreciate it. We call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art historical importance.
In the opposing model a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, the writer providing the words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group...This is the Contract model. The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.
Substitute "artist" for "writer" and "artwork" for "novel" and you've got a common loggerhead at which artists often find themselves - should we concentrate on the nutrional value of the meal we're serving, or should we be looking for clever dressings to make the vegetables more appealing? Do we want to challenge or please or audiences?
The answers appear to be more complicated than one might expect. Nearly every artist I talk to these days - and maybe it's an LA thing - seems concerned with "serious" subjects and goes out of his or her way to avoid things that could be seen as trivial or self-absorbed. What you get is a lot of art that one feels people ought to be interested in because it's serious - like the problem of rural illiteracy or hunger in the developing world - but which few actually care about, a concerned minority that almost always excludes the artist himself. Everyone gets challenged; no one gets pleased.
I feel like the Dave Hickey of "Frivolity and Unction" - like making a rallying cry for art that artists actually care about enough to debate whether or not it needs to be shown in the first place. Art that they are too pleased by to let go, but too bothered by their own selfishness to keep to themselves. This is closely relates to my other platform these days - a forced anonymity for all artists under the age of 60. Under my scheme, all contemporary art would be sold as "anonymous" and the revenues passed through secret accounts to the artists. Besides destroying the market for fashionable artists whose names are more interesting than their work (insert your favorite example here), this initiative would have the added benefit of discouraging anyone from entering the profession for purposes of seeking fame, as any renown - even recognition - would be off the table for decades. Audiences would be free to choose their own pleasures and their own challenges in a world in which one could no longer call challenge a pleasure or pleasure a challenge as a means of excusing lapses of personal judgment.
1 comment:
I have been meaning to reply to this post for a while, to say that I dig the idea of anominity, at least as a theory. It seems that art-viewing attention seems to focus first on the name, who created the work, and then shift to the work itself, a seemingly backwards approach. I'd like to again mentioning teaching, because most of us can relate, for me it seems impossible to evaluate someone's work totally seperate from their history; knowing that so and so is "talented" inevitable makes me see/ respect/ expect things from their work. I think that the same is true in the artworld, if someone is represented by a topnotch gallery, or has developed a name for themselves, an assumption often occurs that whatever they do is golden, contrary to Joe Shmo showing valid work at some hole in the wall bar, whose work is totally discredited. It is a little like the National Portrait Gallery vs. the National Gallery, my experience with the portrait gallery was that it focused more on who was painted, than on the painting itself. Much the same as a painting's worth being determined by who painted it, rather than the work itself.
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