105 Years from Now, All Artists Will Be Failures
Posted by: admin in ArtNEWS, What planet are curators from?, Artists in the Future, Artistic delusion, Art surveys, Artistic failure in AmericaI have to say, ArtNEWS’s experiment earlier this month, in having “experts” predict which artists from today will be famous in 2112, is, on one hand, quite amusing. On the other hand, however, it’s completely galling, a sign of everything that’s wrong with the art world.
Of course if you poll a bunch of art collectors and curators, and other art worlders who have a stake in the reputation of certain artists today, you’re going to get a lot of short-sighted, self-serving, and cynical answers. Alex Katz, for example, was the first person mentioned by the article. Does anyone really think that his unaccomplished, craftless, unappealingly flat style of painting will even be remembered, let alone acclaimed, just five years after the artist is gone?
I love, meanwhile, that a good percentage of people mentioned Andy Warhol, even though he’s been dead and gone for more than twenty years. That doesn’t really qualify him for contemporary status, sorry to say. But no matter, another artistic director mentioned, along with Warhol, a host of safe-bet, high-modernist heroes like Joseph Beuys, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson. Welcome to the 21st Century, daddio!
I understand that people are most comfortable with what they know, but doesn’t it seem like it should be the job of so-called art experts to look, every once in awhile, outsider their own visual box? Shouldn’t Christopher Knight be open-minded enough to mention an artist or two not from his own L.A. neighborhood? Shouldn’t the incoming Walker Art Center director mention an artist or two not part of that institution’s canonical holdings? Couldn’t any of these people have responded with real clarity about what it is in the art of today that will speak to people of the future? Shouldn’t the blending worlds of the nonprofit art museum and for profit art speculators strive for enough separation and distance so they can truly examine what makes art that will have lasting value?
Only one thing’s certain in the end. The art of today that will last in popularity into the future is art that has real power to speak to people—beyond the limited agendas, professional biases, profiteering mindset, and short-sighted cheerleading of the people quoted in this article.
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May 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Alex Katz was a visiting critic at my graduate school MFA program. He was a complete diva. The first thing he did to cement his divahood, was to refuse to allow one-on-one meetings with the MFA candidates. In the program I was in, the method was that the MFA candidates were informed of the visiting critics dates of attendance and we were to sign up for individual meetings. Each meeting was to last no longer than an hour. Katz refused to meet any of the MFA candidates individually, instead allowing only a group critique. He sat in a chair in the middle of a large room in the studio building as the students dutifully trouped their work in front of him. He was gruff and negative. He hated everything and said so. A student in a top floor studio was working on very large paintings. With much difficulty and with the aid of a friend, one painting made its way down the three flights of stairs and into the room where the critique was being held. One corner of the painting was being manoeuvered into the room, when Katz said, ” Take that piece of garbage out of my sight!” The painting was quickly removed. The student spent the remainder of the day crying in the studio. And the critique was for all intents and purposes over, as the students began to drift away rather quickly. Katz later told the MFA program director that none of the artists he saw had any talent at all.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Great story, and very revealing. He obviously knows how much of an overrated hack he really is, or else why would he try to hide behind the bitchy diva routine?
IMHO, Alex Katz is the art world’s biggest Emperor’s New Clothes story (yes, even bigger than Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst).