The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

A new story out in Time magazine discuss the inevitable news: As the rest of the world tanks culturally and economically, so apparently goes China.

At a Sotheby’s sale of 20th century Chinese artwork on Oct. 5, two-thirds of the 110 lots failed to sell, and many of the pieces that did find buyers went for below their estimated prices. By the close of the biannual sales of the world’s largest publicly traded art auction house, Sotheby’s took in about half what it had expected, at just over $140.7 million….

Many say the unimpressive results were a combination of already overinflated price estimates and the dismal economy. “Particularly with the fund managers, if they are concerned with things happening in the world, they may be inclined to hold on to their funds,” said Mark Joyce, owner of Koru Contemporary Art in Hong Kong.

That’s not good news for Sotheby’s. Following the poor sales, the auction house’s shares fell 14% on Oct. 6, hitting a three-year low. (Sotheby’s was not available for comment.) Nor does it bode well for the regional art market: the Hong Kong auction was its first gauge after the worldwide financial crisis hit last month. “Due to uncertainty in the markets, investors are making selective choices as to where to spend their money,” said Shirley Ben Bashat, director of the Opera Gallery Hong Kong….

Beijing-based artist Zhao Gang isn’t surprised. “Three years ago the prices started going higher and higher,” said Zhao. “Last year the price was pushed way too high, and it’s got to come down.” …

Still, the local art world isnt’ getting too depressed — yet. Says Bashat, the director of the Opera Gallery Hong Kong, “Many buyers see art as a safer investment in the mid to long term compared to other investments in the market.” Buyers may be turning away from contemporary Chinese art today, but at least they are keeping an eye on Asia.

As the deflated rich in this country wring their hands about how rapidly China is buying up U.S. bonds, securities, businesses, and land, I found it curious to find this story about attempts by Chinese artists who own the international fake art market.

Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) — In a village in southern China, Wu Ruiqiu is worried about the effect of an economic slump on the art market. He should be. Wu represents artists who make 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings. Wu is chairman of Dafen’s art association, which groups 8,000 artists in a suburb of Shenzhen, China’s biggest manufacturing hub. While employees in the city make cheap DVD players, computers and T-shirts, workers here produce Rembrandts, Monets and Warhols — by the millions.

Exports have fallen by a third this year, he said… About 85 percent of sales are exports, with the U.S. the biggest customer. A decline in demand has forced the smaller of Dafen’s 800 galleries to close. Others have slashed prices to compete…

Of the nearly 5 million paintings produced at Dafen each year, almost 75 percent are knockoffs (the locals prefer the term replicas). The rest are original artworks, said Fan Yuxin, vice director of the government’s Dafen Village management office.

Lan Xin, who runs a 100-square-foot gallery with Yue copies propped against the walls and hung on pillars, accepts custom orders. He clicked on an icon on his computer screen that expanded to show miniature images of paintings such as Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits. Lan said he commissions freelance artists to paint pictures customers order….

“The paintings here are cheap, they are good, what’s there not to like?” said Houston, Texas-based Judy Berckman, browsing the stalls of galleries for “abstract art.”Foreign companies think the same. The village’s products line the walls of casinos in Las Vegas and Macau…

Dafen’s prolific fakery roused complaints from original artists and their estates, prompting the government to introduce intellectual property rules that bar galleries from selling copies of works by living artists and those dead for less than 50 years.

Fan said an anti-piracy squad inspects galleries “once a month or once a week” and confiscates works that violate the rules. Still, he said the onus is on buyers and people who commission paintings to clear copyright issues.

“Painters just do as they are told,” Fan said. “Their obligation stops when they deliver the goods to customer satisfaction.”

A walk around Dafen’s galleries, full of copies of works by China’s bestselling contemporary artists, shows that the rules aren’t strictly enforced.

Here’s a review of a recent failed art exhibition that I wrote for The Thousandth Word blog: “Bang a Drum for the Losers.”

Be forewarned: My take on the show at hand, “Millions of Innocent Accidents” by the artists collective Hardland/Heartland at the Minnesota Artists Gallery (at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts), is a tad harsh. But I had a point to express, related to the cause of so much artistic failure across the land of late, which was this:

Shrill gestures like breaking windows, destroying property, and flouting the rules of civilized society do not make compelling symbolism. Instead, acts of a hopeful, imaginative, empathetic, or out-reaching nature are what’s needed to attract and capture the attention and support of others….

….As soon as I walked into this gallery and saw the poorly conceived, dolefully hopeless work that this well-meaning group of artists purported to consider compelling visual art—all their random and indistinct trash and burnt paraphernalia and jumbles and piles of detritus and tossed off dreck and doodles and goats’ heads and black tar corner accretions—my spirit fell. The show was a disaster, off-putting and uninspiring, and it was clear at a glance that this loudly shouting, in-your-face visual group had failed to reach out to others in any meaningfuly to get their righteous points across….

The chief problem is that, while it’s clear that Hardland/Heartland’s hearts are in the right place and they have the energy to make a lot of work (and I mean a lot of work), they just don’t know how to make much that is compelling and symbolically relevant or that embodies and expounds on their frustrations, fears, and angst in a way that someone else would care to look at. There’s no hope here, no imagination, and certainly nothing to empathize with.

An article in the National Post of Canada, titled “The working man’s case for arts funding,” reveals some exciting news from that quiet country to the North: Canada has, politically speaking, finally reached the 1990s. Canada has at long last discovered the great golden age of the American “Culture Wars.”

According to the story’s author, John Moore:

(Prime Minister) Stephen Harper’s campaign has been all about easy points. Teens with guns; lock ‘em up. Average families (we all think we’re average); give ‘em a tax cut. Arts funding; let the sushi-eating, bow-tie-wearing snobs pay for their own meat dresses and urine-soaked crucifixes. Earlier this week, the PM took a gratuitous swipe at the arts, cleverly widening the perceived divide between “ordinary working people” and the “elites” who make their living in creative endeavours.

Ah, such warm and gentle memories this evokes in my hardened art-loving heart. Jesse Helms. The NEA Five. Piss-Christ. Pat Buchanan. Rudy Giuliani. Oh, it’s so fun to demonize the arts and terrorize artists! So much fun!

The author continues with some good points (that puts some of the blame on the artists themselves):

It’s not easy to make a case for the arts, which is precisely why they are such a ripe target. And artists don’t make it any easier. Most Canadians don’t really have a warm and fuzzy impression of Wendy Crewson or Margaret Atwood. Outside of their books, sets and performance venues, artists have a frustrating inability to connect with anyone but each other.

No, it is not easy to clarify why the arts are important to protect, nurture, and support. I’ve tried to do this for years, and I sometimes feel I’m no closer to any answers than I’ve ever been. Moore, for his part, gives the examples of Cirque du Soleil, SCTV, and a full host of Canadian art stars — all of whom received small token amounts of important governmental support when they were struggling to get established. Without such support, he suggests, these institutions that have entertained and thrilled so many people would simply not have been able to survive and thrive.  Because of this, he argues, small amounts of leg-up money from the government ultimately benefits all of us, not just some untouchable elite.

It’s a tough sell, no doubt. Good luck with your wars, Canada. Having been there-done that, I don’t envy you. At the very least, however, I can say in all sincerity: “Welcome to the 90s!”

I thought now would be a good time to check back in with Gabriel Combs, the artist whose descent (into homelessness, substance abuse, and near-incarceration) I have covered here and elsewhere. Fortunately, Combs keeps a MySpace page, on which he has been updating his blog fairly frequently of late. Below are some interesting tidbits from his blog:

Date: August 16, 2008
Post title: sepulchral beatitude of a heartstring fugitive
it was a love story first, now a tale of unending loss. sometimes i don’t want the day to end, as i don’t want to face another night alone. sometimes the night seems more fruitful in its suffering dread. got to this point giving away my heart to fools and liars. i always believed and was so dedicated. so in love and so blind, regardless of my mistakes and short-comings. so in love with the world, a world i now cannot find…two stories, one loving and one hating, one living and one dying.

Date: August 20, 2008
Post title: narcissism prevalence; prima donna persona non grata
i hear there is a handbasket suitable for my transport to hell. …i checked in to the ER for many, many problems exactly three weeks ago to the day. they ejected me several hours later as i had no “actual plan to commit suicide”

Date: August 27, 2008
Post title: Alcoholic Altruism/Augean Artiface
twelve pack goes down like gravity. falls like an anvil, falls like autumn. i can feel it heavy, more than last year. dropping further and faster. another day passes, un-named and unknown. got up half dead today, morose and numb. nose numb and red. i love how it feels to have that haze. saves me to live another day on the slow suicide savoring how i die. one with a perpetual death but still lives to tell about it. there is no pre nuptual to marriage with this ritual. i’m not sipping, just stammering and stuttering under lifes’ trauma. i don’t seem to die regardless of my planning. i wish i had some advice for someone to not end up here or to alleve some friends concern i’m too far gone. you see, i don’t have hope to make it anymore and so i have’nt a care in the world. i don’t expect to live and i can’t seem to die. i slit the wrists but the blood just keeps coming. i’m going to go lay down in the gutter amongst my filth…its an empty round in a full chamber game of russian roulette and i wear the crown of shit. hands down, quit askin questions. i got an answer for your suggestion. i’m sweatin while you’re restin. calloused while you’re guessin. curse everyone while i’m blessin.

Date: August 30, 2008
Post title: minnesota mediocre; fair game midwest manifesto
five months homeless now. sold everything just about. i think i can make six months. trying hard to set shit up to go back to ohio (cue pretenders song) for a minute after september. wur um frum, lotsa folks in graves there. never seen my moms grave yet. might find where abouts some other family, down in kentucky, virginia, ect. back in them mountains…when a fly comes in my studio my tendency is to maim it and offer it to my pet spiders. i did so today but busted it open and it fell thru the web and the maggots came out and consumed the corpse. i imagine they began to die and there was like one fat one left in the end. i did’nt bother to observe the end of it. reminds me of the art world.

Date: September 4, 2008
Post title: troubled water torrent/noli me tangere via tantalos
woke up on the sidewalk the other morning. i lose days here and there. if you’ve seen the jackson pollock moving picture the scene where he wakes up on the (as i remember it) cement platform underneath a window with some kids looking at him. dirty and deranged. i was in a block that was mostly a school, lying on sidewalk that was paralell to black asphalt. i remember drinking with a couple of guys from tibet. learned a thing or two before the blackout set in. things about my thinking and spirituality while speaking with a buddhist. (one guy i think was not speaking english and was deaf anyways) …sold the engagement ring yesterday, took it off my key-ring. got ripped off for gold but freed from a trap of sentiment. being in my mind is being a cat herder. i keep up and multiply ideas like bacteria. beneficial parasites. yo, you got the sun in your eyes in this show down and am i an artist or a writer. leave you guessing as your eyes narrow and mine grow wider.

I promise to post new material to CAFA very soon (once funeral fallout has settled, grant deadlines have passed, and life falls back into its regular pattern), but in the meantime here’s an updated version of the material I linked to in my previous post.

The reason I reposted this piece, and the reason I’m resubmitting it here, is I added more thoughts at the end based on events that occurred on September 15. By this I mean, in particular, “…the country’s continued and deepening economic decline and slide into oblivion; its inexplicable and pathetic fascination with Sarah Palin; its continued and maddening political gullibility; and the suicide of David Foster Wallace, who once, appropriately enough, observed in his essay ‘Consider the Lobster’: ‘After all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.’”

 If you’re lazy (like me!) and just want to read the new material, here it is, block-quoted:

AFTERWARD: SEPTEMBER 15, 2008: So it took ten long years—after giving it all I had to give—for me to fail in art. And while there are lot of platitudes that I could spout off here—about what one should do when given a bowl full of lemons, about what one should do if at first one doesn’t succeed, etc.—let’s be realistic for a moment. On July 15, 2008, I learned, plain and simple, that my expectations for art will never be met, that I will never be quite the success in art I hoped to be, that the arts community will never rise to the levels that I dreamed for it, and that I am lucky to have escaped.

I could point out that it took twenty wasted years, after graduating from college with a hopeful degree in art, for me to understand that a life in art is a doomed life, but I won’t dwell on this. Instead I’ll point out I’m not particularly unique in realizing the nature of the art world. The great German painter Gerhard Richter, for instance, said as much when he proclaimed: “Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.” The great American painter Jasper Johns said, about his early career as an artist: “I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn’t matter—that would be my life.” The American realist painter William Bailey said: “…Frankly, I believe that every painter is in a state of continual failure. The only constant in a painter’s life is failure.”

Now, in mid-September, two month after my grim nadir and a few weeks after the debacle of the lipsticked Pit Bull, while the days retract, gardens dry up, and a wan chill fills the air, I look back at all the drama and despair of the end of my arts career, and I am happy I am still able to breathe. I say this full knowing that the economic and cultural woes have only deepened since July 15. Lehman Brothers has tanked; Merrill Lynch has been bought up (even after nearly 100 years of independent operation); the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped on his day by nearly 500 points (the sixth highest amount in history); and David Foster Wallace committed suicide after battling with deepening depression (ironically enough while living the hometown of my brother, where I had just happened to be visiting at the time because of the death, at age 84, of my grandmother).

Yet despite the ever-darkening clouds outside my existential cabin, I am placid now, after having removed myself from the turmoil of a life in the arts. I’ve started a new, more sane, less soul-sucking, job, and I’m quietly, after two years and two months of dismay, coming to terms with my potentially misspent artistic life. If I had been, back on July 15, more level-headed and more prone to thinking for the long-term, I might have realized that—despite the individual failures of thousands of young people like me, despite the constant struggle and eventual capitulation of all of us in the arts, despite the endless climb against the raging current—it doesn’t matter really. Art goes on. Art survives and continues to be made, usually by the next generation who, in their energetic ignorance, relives the failure over and over again. Over the long term, individuals like me matter little in the face of the painful human compulsion to realize beauty from the labors of the hand.

If I were more resilient and long-suffering, or perhaps more talented or more cutthroat, all I’d have had to do is wait until these things that are ruinous to us now—in the culture, and in the art world—had passed, and we’d moved on to a more optimistic and hopeful time. Some of my more long-suffering artist friends have already spoken such words to me since July 15, the worry-lines of resignation on their faces giving lie to their optimistic words: “Music always gets made,” one said to me, “and it’s up to us—each of us—to come to the music.” Those who walk away from the music, he seemed to be saying, aren’t worth worrying about.

Maybe, I nod outwardly. But inside I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an end time looming in the arts. Yes, people will continue coming to the art in their way, sticking with it or not on their own terms, finding their own equations for success and failure, and all will abide. But I wonder just how many more of these smart and capable young people who become fascinated by, and fall in love with, art—against their better judgment—have to ruin their life because of it. How many of us will continue to fall in love with such a life partner, passing twenty rocky years with her until we find out she’s been unfaithful since the beginning? Yes, maybe the music will go on no matter who is there to make it. But will the music have the resonance and beauty it’d’ve had if the culture had somehow agreed to make at least a minimal commitment of energy to it?

Truth is, there’s just no good way to spin a post-July 15 world. The only solace, perhaps, are words by the Irish critic and poet Edward Dowden, who said, “Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.” Perhaps July 15, 2008, simply had to happen so I, and perhaps you, could at last look at the artless world with new, and clearer, eyes, and realize that failure just is our lot in the arts. It’s just the way it is.

And while it’s sad that a person who’s dedicated so much time to art should be so bitterly resigned to failure now, perhaps this need not be a tragedy. Perhaps, in fact, this is a liberation and a blessing, a full license for me to investigate a number of new questions about art. Instead of wondering how I can survive the next week as an artist, I now can ask, with deep intention, why can’t the life of artists be better in this country? Instead of worrying about my next opportunity to exhibit or be on display, I can chronicle of the various aspects of failure in the arts in our time—with the view of someone who’s seen it and lived it—and expose the unaware to the depths of the problems faced by artists in America. I can take pause and wonder why can’t the beauty made of artists’ hands become a more integral part of the everyday life of Americans? Why aren’t we all working together—all of us, in all corners of the country—to prop up the arts and make our land more rich with beauty, with artistic ideas, with the well-crafted trappings of an elegant life? I can wonder exactly what it means that we’ve created a culture so antithetical to all the things that art stands for.

And so, with my hard-earned awareness of the precarious nature of a life in the arts I am driven now to seek potential answers about why, if art is doomed to failure, are we living creatures so attracted to its pain.

I’ve been distracted and out of town this week due to work and funerals and other everyday matters, and so I’ve had no original material to post on the subject of artistic failure of late. To make up for my distraction, here’s a link to a story that was posted this week on mnartists. It’s a story about my own latest bout with–what else?–artistic failure. Until next week…

My grandmother, Billie Sinclair (Noland) Barnes passed away on Wednesday morning, September 3, 2008, at 5:05 am Pacific Daylight Saving Time, after a long illness. She was 84 years old, and survived by her husband, John Wesley Barnes, son Jay, daughter Pamela, and three grandkids.

The poem posted below—which was originally posted on CAFA on May 15, 2008, just after the death of Robert Rauschenberg—was actually intended to be a tribute to my Grandma Billie, who had just become bedridden at that time. I’ve added an additional Postscript, in honor of my grandmother’s death, to the version I originally posted on this site. Enjoy.

The 1964 Venice Biennale

for Billie

In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
Kenneth Noland’s paintings occupied half the American pavilion
at the Venice Biennale,
and Robert Rauschenberg won
the Gran Premio—
the youngest artist to do so to date.
As a result Europeans raged about America,
its Pop sensibilities
and its imperialistic designs—
though they didn’t riot like they would in 1968,
when I was two.

In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
my parents met on a blind-date trip down to Tiajuana,
in Baja California,
and my mother’s mother,
my grandmother Billie Ruth,
celebrated the twenty-somethingth anniversary
of her divorce from Kenneth Noland,
whom she had met in Asheville, North Carolina,
during the Second World War
when she was just eighteen-years old
and had run away from her mother.

In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
the esteemed Cardinal Urbani proclaimed a Biennale ban,
and the president absented himself.
Critics fumed too,
at Castelli’s campaign for the American.
“An offense to dignity,” said one;
“A general defeat of culture,” another.
But the artists could care less,
Chamberlain hopscotching across piazzas like a bear,
Oldenburg and his melting typewriter,
Cunningham and a safety pin to hold up his pants.

In 2007,
Forty-three years later,
long after half of these men’s deaths,
and after I had reached the age that Noland was at that time,
I would read about the Venice Biennial
and its embarrassment of riches,
about Rauschenberg’s combines
which had everything but Merce Cunningham’s pants.
And I would pause and consider
how things never really change—
unless you are a cobbler or a typewriter repairman—
and that is both a good and bad thing.

(Postscript)
Then, in 2008,
In the spring of the year,
I passed through Captiva Island,
Where Rauschenberg kept his own council as he faded,
And my grandparents in California
Barked at hospice workers,
Accusing them of swiping their savings,
And treated their family like gold-digging strangers.
When my mother shunned Billie Ruth’s funeral in September,
I sent a note to the artist Noland—
Though he wouldn’t know me from Adam—
And he replied that he had fond memories of her.

So much going on around me. So hard to keep my mind and attention focused on failing artists.

Yesterday, I saw part of a skirmish between 100-odd unkempt and bandannaed young urban rebels and the police.

I watched, across the river from the riots, thousands of people sitting on the grass, listening to musical acts they barely seemed to care about, playing frisbee and surreptiously smoking dope.

I got a message with photos from my wife who had been given a last-minute ticket to check out the national Republican Party that was visiting my home town; she said the event mostly was pretty dull.

This all brings to mind the following Quote of the Day (CAFA QOD):

“This place has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.”
–Don Draper, “Mad Men”

On one of my other art-blogging projects yesterday, a guest poster published a fantastic piece, called “The Nester,” on the relationship between shitting and art-making, and how sometimes the most disgusting and deviant acts can inspire non-comformist, creative thinking. This is a particularly appropriate rallying-cry, I think, in this age of constantly diminishing returns in the culture. You’ve just gotta read this story; trust me, you won’t be disappointed (repulsed, maybe, or horrified–but not disappointed).

Here’s a sampling:

Artists have done themselves a great disservice in needlessly construing creative expression into the larger-than-life mythologies, brainwashing doctrines and pseudo-political advertisements that comprise the clusterfuck that art is today. We’ve created a framework for art that warps our hearts and minds into believing that art requires authority (galleries, museums, academia); precepts (formal aesthetics, airtight intellectualism); and high culture (icons, award ceremonies, magazines). We’ve convinced ourselves that art is an austere discipline and not the boundless, soul-searching siphon that can dredge out our deepest and most authentic creative desires. Unfortunately, art is just as much about popularity, ego, money, class, idolatry and condescending intellectualism as it is about using modes of creativity to purely and earnestly explore ourselves and our relationship to the universe….

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that people go clog some toilets to proclaim their creativity. Rather, I am suggesting that we draw from the Nester’s example the conviction that we can and must treat our own creativity with the dignity it deserves. We need to stop making art that relies upon a toxic art world, to stop making art that tries to find a way into Artforum, and instead finds a way into the deeply transformative creative passion that burns in each of us.