The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

An article by Sharon Butler in the Oct. 2007 edition of the Brooklyn Rail posits, without giving too many specifics, a looming decline in the market for contemporary art, and it suggests practical steps that artists can take to deal with it.

“With the economy slowing down,” she writes, “hedge funds getting shaky, and investors seeking refuge, the art market seems certain to contract in a big way… The emerging battalion of artists on the thin margin of commercial viability is imperiled, and so is the fragile infrastructure that supports them.”

Butler suggests artists will likely fact the following difficulties: being left without representation, losing artwork that is being kept “in storage” by galleries, gallery check kiting and withholding payment for work previously sold, fewer exhibition opportunities for younger artists, fewer part-time jobs for artists, flatter career trajectories for artists, and drops in prices for art.

As a result, she expects: “An artist used to sunnier times wonders whether she or he should continue making art.”

Here’s the crux of the article, from the point of view of www.artisticfailure.com:

Outsiders may regard all this angst as the hand-wringing of spoiled children. After all, American art did not merely survive but flourished after the Depression and World War II. Why should we worry about it now? Real artists will stay their course and make their mark. The idea is that the free market, hard or soft, will filter through the truly great ones. It’s a hopeful and very American notion, but that market, at least for artists, has not historically been so bountiful. Yes, Abstract Expressionism sprung from children of the Depression. But artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, James Brooks, Balcombe Greene, and Norman Lewis—to name but a few painters of the era—fed themselves on wages from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration before they hit it big. Yes, minimalism flourished after the war. But Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held were able to go to Paris and find their muses only because of the GI Bill. Federal subsidies, it would appear, were key to sustaining the nation’s artistic capital.

Systemic sources of extra-market support for artists still exist, but they are not as abundant, generous, or widely available as the WPA was in the Thirties or the GI Bill was in the Forties and Fifties. In this light, it is perhaps too harsh to say that true artists would not default to careers in banking, IT, law, social work, cabinetry, or teaching, as many have. Galleries and collectors once committed to nurturing these artists may simply move on to the new crop of art school graduates, renewing the market cycle. But we’ll never know how their work might have developed had economic opportunities not deserted them. It is a virtual certainty that at least a few of them would have been great, so their foregone contribution could be considered a cultural loss and a failure of the market.

These sentiments are very similar to ones in a published essay I wrote last spring about the education of artists. I noted the disdain and antipathy that surveys show most people have regarding artists, and I also noted that, even so, more and more people seem to romanticize their own interest in making art. “What’s most unfortunate,” I wrote, “is that our country’s paradoxical attitudes about art–i.e., the coupling of a wishful attitude about creativity and a resentment of creative people—has coincided with a constant rise in the numbers of people seeking formal artistic educations.”

The rest of my article maintains a similar passionately ambivalent, slightly resigned shrug-of-the-shoulders tone as Sharon Butler’s. Doubtless, there is no solution for artists, for gallerians, for art lovers, or for the arts market to create its own success. Times will be hard in art, but artists will survive, or as Butler puts it: “the right blend of humility and constructive opportunism can see many artists through. The hardest thing for the individual artist will be striking a psychological balance between Pollyannaism and panic.”

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