Meeting Gabriel Combs again after nearly five years was a shock. All the former young-punk anger and wiry strength that I had seen when I first met him was gone, replaced by frail deliberation, lumbering gentleness, even a kind of solemn grace. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he asked apologetically when I arrived at his small apartment in the rough and densely populated Stevens Square neighborhood of Minneapolis. He seemed unwilling to look directly at me, turning his back to the sink of his tiny kitchenette. “It’s fairly fresh. I just need to heat it up.”

I demurred, and held up the bag of Middle Eastern food I had picked up on the way over. “I can’t drink coffee this late in the day,” I said, “but I am hungry. You guys want to eat?” (Another artist named Ray, who has long spread an itinerant life between an old RV and the couches of friends, was also present.)

They accepted the food without thanks, like prisoners do, and ate mostly in silence. I swallowed pieces of spinach pie and chattered nervously, trying to get conversation going. I mentioned I was specifically interested in their artist careers, and how had art had perhaps let them to their current stations. This got them both started on a littany recitation of the slights, insults, and the past treacheries they’d endured in their lives, jobs, art pursuits, and so on.

I didn’t take careful notes (I wasn’t thinking of this as a journalistic visit), but I learned a few indelible facts that I record here. Combs had been supporting himself by selling art on eBay for more than two years–ever since he’d quit a job at a photo processing place, supposedly because of “some bitch” coworker who was blaming him for things that had gone wrong at work. In a typical month, Combs makes 25-30 small art works to sell, working in series to save time and reuse colors between images, thus conserving supplies. He couldn’t say exactly why he started selling art on eBay as a “survival thing.” It just happened “by chance,” he said, as he was applying, unsuccessfully, for job after job to replace the one he’d left. “I saw some others doing it on eBay, and I thought I’d try. I just put it out there. I weigh it against all the jobs I’ve hated, and I like this much more. I just need to figure out all of the marketing strategies.

“I feel like I got pushed into this… but I’ve made a pretty good run of it,” he said of selling his art at $10-$20 a pop, mostly to collectors from Europe.

While Combs luck seemed to have run out finally, it lasted awhile. And his art got sent out all over–Germany, England, Spain… “A bunch of people in Spain have my work,” he said. “If I could go anywhere, I’d go to France or Spain. The street art there is just incredible.” But Combs doesn’t have money to get to those countries, let alone to sustain himself for any length. He hadn’t paid his rent since November, and in the weeks leading up to his call-for-help blog and forum posts in early February he had been dealing with the heavy-handed mechanisms of the legal system.

Prior to ending up at the photo processing place, Combs had attended school in Minneapolis for graphic design. I can’t recall which school he attended, as there are several for-fee schools here that purport to train the next generation of working designer. I don’t know the details, other than Combs left school with a degree and a sizeable debt, but he was unable to find work in the field. “I really liked graphic design,” he said. “Really. It just was impossible to find a job doing it.”

The littany of blame, excuse-making, and self-demurral tossed out by Ray and Gabe against all the people in the art and professional world who were keeping them from success reminded me of some recent blog-writings about work and creativity of another Minneapolis artist who seemed to have hit rock-bottom of late.

I’m making no money on music. I can’t get a gig. I can’t find a decent job. And I don’t have a social life because I’m too broke to do anything, and besides, I should be at home recording anyways… Taking a chemical won’t change who you are. It won’t change your brain. It definitely won’t make your life situation any better. It can only promote change. So I’m trying to see what I can change and how I can help myself. I’m just afraid that the answer is to “find a job.”

Any job that fits my qualifications does not fit my skills or personality, and vice versa. That’s the trap I’m stuck in. I’ve gone after jobs that “fit me,” and I don’t get hired, usually because someone more personable is just as available. I was able to slip in to jobs only to get treated passive-aggressively, and sometimes even used as a scapegoat. If I’ve ever had a job that did not fit this profile, it was low pay and small hours.

EVERY employer wants a “motivated, team-oriented, self-starter,” which I can be if I were running a gallery or something. I can’t be that while answering bitter emails from dissatisfied Target customers. And I can’t pretend I’m going to. What the fuck is the point of that?

I’ve always known this about myself and that’s why I fight against the odds and work my ass off in my spare time, making music, making art, promoting the arts, volunteering, running a zine fair, etc. hoping that it will pay off down the line. The fact is that it WILL NOT pay off…

Based on former experience, the best case scenario is that I will settle for something that will pay me to simply maintain my human existence. If I save anything, it’ll cover the hole that I create when I get pissed off and quit. My only life, it seems, is a flat line. It also seems my creativity has been dwindling since I stopped getting student loans and switched to paying them. I made a huge mistake. I invested in myself. I thought being educated would get me somewhere. I didn’t realize that you’re more prepared for the workforce as a high school graduate than as a college graduate.

Anyone who sees the way Gabriel Combs interacts with and approaches the world would quickly know that the root of his problems–his inability to keep a job, to market his art, to get along with others in a position to help him–likely lies solely within himself. It is a case where a person’s voracious creativity not only creates conditions for alienation and isolation, but makes the person blind to the reasons why he is shunned.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a good thing to see a person lose his vibrancy and vigor in this way–particularly when it’s a result of a voracious creative drive. Combs, compared to his old self, is a zombie now–diminished, hungry, lacking any spark of joy. It was vastly preferable to know him when even the smallest slight would provoke a shitstorm of rage and spew, when you were afraid that he might explode on you just because you looked at him wrong, and when you knew he was only seeing the world as a canvas on which he could make marks, literally and figuratively.

It was sad to see him like this, even if he told me he was hopeful and optimistic for the future, proud of his petty art sales, and eager to keep making art work. In the course of conversation, Combs brought up several times the name of Van Gogh, citing something he’d read in his letters to his brother Theo or talking up some aspect of his life. He also mentioned he had recently seen the Schnabel film about Basquiat. I wasn’t sure if he was identifying with these famous artistic failures, or if he was just acknowledging those who had previously traveled the path he was now setting off on.

“All things considered,” says Combs, “I’m a happy guy. What have I got to complain about?… I literally have nowhere to go. I could couch-surf, but I have no permanent place to go. If that’s what it is, then so be it.”

The latest updates on one of Combs’ websites suggest he was scheduled to hand over the keys to his apartment to a court representative on Monday–yesterday–at noon. Below is a picture he posted as the last image from his studio, just before it must have been carted away:

Today, just a few hours ago, Combs posted the following on the mnartists forums:

i’m close to kmart on lake… i have’nt been on since friday, so i missed about the painting on saturday. officially without a home now, having handed over the keys yesterday at noon. anybody know how to get a dvd out of a macbook drive? i stuck the last harry potter movie in here and it does’nt know its there and won’t let it out… i hope it does’nt mess this thing up. i got a ton of drawing done, as i’d been holding back from it for quite a bit. lots of thumb nails for paintings to do. have to get back to painting i a little bit here, but had to check the net. ramen noodles and bread… spring should bloom nicely this year. gotta run…

Arts and culture critic Terry Teachout has, today in a great Wall Street Journal essay, coined a new term that describes the tendency of certain successful artists to fail: importantitis. Touching on the careers of Leonard Bernstein (post-West Side Story), Orson Welles (post-Citizen Kane), and Ralph Ellison (post-Invisible Man)—all of whom struggled because they were “strangled by self-consciousness” in trying to make, after their initial success, the next great work of art.

In the article, the author proposes Teachout’s First Law of Artistic Dynamics: “The best way to make a bad work of art is to try to make a great one.” The Chronicle of Artistic Failure humbly proposes its own corollary to the First Law of Artistic Dynamics: “The best way for an artist to fail is to live in America.”

Because this site by design is concerned with the lofty idea of chronicling systemic artistic failure–following developments in arts policy, art world economics, the social condition of art, and the like–it may sometimes seem disconnected from the struggles of real artists on the ground. But of course, the reason I look at and write about these forces is because I am truly concerned about their effect on artists.

What I mean to say is, in the midst of my rants and deep investigations of this country’s unjust treatment of the arts I do realize we should remember the struggling artists who have come and gone and are still yet to fail. We should remember them and try to keep others from following in their miserable footsteps.

So, to remember the struggles of artists I’m introducing a new regular feature on CAFA, Favorite Failed Artist Stories.

And here’s the first story, Amedeo Modigliani:

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884–1920) was an Italian artist who, following the long-standing tradition, moved to Paris in 1906 to work as a painter. He worked furiously when he arrived in that town, making myriad images first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, then, in 1907, by Paul Cezanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot really be grouped with other avant garde artists of the time.

Not only was Modigliani’s style unique, but his behavior also stood out among his peers of the time, even considering the Bohemian standards they upheld. He carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used absinthe and hashish. While drunk at social gatherings, he would sometimes strip himself naked. In time, his childhood tendency toward illness was exacerbated by poverty, overwork, and self-abuse. His health declined. On January 24, 1920, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis. He was 35. The following evening, his common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window. She was eight months’ pregnant with their second child,

And here’s the kicker of the story:

During the 1920s, in the wake of Modigliani’s early death and spurred on by comments by the critic Andre Salmon, who credited hashish and absinthe as the progenitors of Modigliani’s unique style, many hopeful young artists tried to emulate this “success” by embarking on a path of Modiglianian substance abuse and bohemian excess. This was encouraged by Salmon’s claim that whereas Modigliani was a rather pedestrian artist when sober, “…from the day he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art.”

This rallying cry—toward debauchery and excess—has grown to become the modern hallmark of the romantic soul longing to be a tragic, doomed artist. For this—the great seed source of failed artists everywhere—we can thank Modigliani and his posthumous propagandist Salmon!

I 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.

A longer version of this essay was originally published by mnartists.org on 10/5/07:

Creativity Is Killing the Culture

By Michael Fallon

“Creative people must be stopped.”***
–recently sighted bumper sticker

THANK HEAVENS FOR BUMPER STICKERS. Call them visual pollution, call them corny or trite—a good back-of-the-car sentiment sometimes helps one to know what to think about things. I spotted the above sticker on the back of a green Ford Prism in Saint Paul on a crystalline Wednesday afternoon this summer, and in one quick moment of clarity, it helped me resolve a vexing internal argument. It was an argument that seemed counterintuitive to my art-centered belief system—and one I’d been mulling over for weeks.

“Creative people must be stopped” is, to be sure, an awfully stringent sentiment, and one completely at odds with received wisdom in our culture today, but then—isn’t it true? Aren’t there really too many people in this country trying to do too many creative things—like the proverbial too many chefs attempting to make too much proverbial soup? Isn’t it the case that with all these creatives roaming around we simply don’t have enough people left over to ingest all the creative soup?

These thoughts had come into my head a few weeks before, because I found myself hating the sentiment of a song on the new album by Wilco, a band whose music I usually enjoy. Called “What Light,” the new song extols the listener to, if they feel compelled to, go ahead and paint a picture or sing a song, and “don’t let anyone say it’s wrong.” Such people, apparently, should simply sing what they “feel” and paint what they “see,” whether or not it’s any good at all or if anyone cares to see it. And if, as is inevitable when given so much creative freedom, these creators become “strung out like a kite” or kept “awake in the night,” then that’s okay too. For you see, apparently, there’s a light, “a white light,” inside each of us that makes all this creativity-related discontent and unhappiness inevitable.

TODAY, THERE IS AN ENDLESS LINE OF PEOPLE WHO PAINT PICTURES OR SING SONGS and don’t care if anyone else cares to look or listen. This may well be because of the endless hidden and not-so-hidden messages (such as in this Wilco song) this culture gives, particularly to young people, to get up and start creating.Just create, says the world. Go ahead and line up along with thousands to be on American Idol or America’s Got Talent or whatever. You can do it! And while you’re at it, why not fill the web with your poetry, videos, art, musings, and every little snippet of creative detritus you can muster. And don’t let anyone say it’s wrong!

Never mind that no one really has a “light” hidden deep inside that makes them able to paint or sing or whatever. You could argue that most people, genetically speaking, do not possess the recessive traits that make creative talent likely. You could also argue that few people also have the perseverance to endure long hours of training, preparation, and hard work that make true art work possible.

Such hard realities aren’t in keeping with the times—when Nike exhorts us to “Just Do It” and Xerox screams “Express Yourself”; when students receive ribbons just for participating in the art exhibition, regardless of the quality of their product; when the very notion of “creativity” has spawned an entire industry of books (140,587 titles on Amazon.com last time I checked), countless magazine articles, and websites, such as www.creativity-portal.com, which among its many features and articles has links to fifteen expert “creativity coaches” who promise to help you “find inspiration” and “unlock your creative talents”; when people flood the internet with self-promoting blogs like www.agirlwhocreates.com by a children’s book illustrator who describes herself thusly: “Holli’s artistic talent and creativity has been evident from a very early age. Although she excelled in many areas of school, art projects were always her favorite. In third grade, Holli’s art teacher presented her with a big green pencil case (which she still has today) for having the best drawing in the class,” or like http://www.onesongeveryday.com, maintained by a guy who wrote, for whatever reason, one toss-off song a day for an entire year; when social scientist Richard Florida starts an entire cottage industry by inventing a new social classification, the “creative class,” and a new job designation, the “creative industries,” that impossibly includes about a third of the current work force; when “thinking outside the box” and “thinking laterally” and “pushing the envelope” become such commonly repeated sentiments that they are almost universally accepted as useful ways to approach almost every problem; and when a new organization called CASK (Creative Art Space for Kids) has as its philosophy that we are all born creative and this needs to be fostered because “when a child creates a work of art, they are not just drawing a picture, they are creating aspects of self-importance (!) [and] individuality (!).” (Exclamation points mine.)

An otherwise prestigious school—Skidmore College in upstate New York—decided a few years ago that creativity is such an important “skill” that, after a multimillion-dollar rebranding effort, it changed its school motto to “Creative Thought Matters.” According to the school’s marketing material, Skidmore people “believe that every life, every career and every endeavor is more profound with creativity at its core.” It explains that the college seeks out faculty and staff who are dedicated to “showing students how their own lives and successes will be shaped by their ability to think, communicate and solve problems creatively.” And, apparently, a science professor at the school described the role of creativity in his work as a “sense of exhilaration—like when you’re hiking and you go off the trail, and you realize that you might be standing on ground that no one has ever stood on before.” (I’d argue that that’s probably a recipe for getting lost and perhaps catching a little hypothermia, but then what do I know about trails anyway?)

Over and over, today’s culture not only reinforces that everyone is creative, but also that we have to be creative in order to be fully realized and fulfilled beings. We are told we need to have creative work, and that our creativity is the key to innovation at our work. This is true even as the number of cubicle-bound paper-pushing jobs ever seems to multiply, and as fewer and fewer jobs really require much creativity. We are told, and have bought the notion, that creativity is now the solution to every problem, and that without creativity we are destined for failure. And having bought into how essential is creativity, we end up constantly seeking validation—from the culture at large or from anyone who will give it—for what we want to hear: that we are creative, essential, important people who are valid and crucial to the working of modern civilization.

What is the result of all this bluster about “creativity”? Well, inevitably, lacking validation for its creativity the creative “class” grows ever more despondent in their lives and disgruntled in their jobs. Statistics show that job tenure has declined over the years, and according to a recent CNNMoney.com poll, 49 percent of workers expected to change jobs in the next year. Meanwhile, rates of depression among the population have increased in recent years. Whereas only 1-2% of the population in 1915 had major depressive episodes in their lifetimes, 15-20% do today, and the number of people being treated for depression increased sharply particularly between 1987 and 1997 (more than tripling from 1.8 million people to 6.3 million). Young workers are rapidly becoming known above all else not for their “creativity,” but for their tendency to become unsettled and to grouse to any and all about being underappreciated for their boundless creative skills.

I know there will be some—perhaps many—out there who will judge me harshly for pointing out such things and for my harping on something so seemingly harmless as encouraging everyone to become creative. But I would argue that the feel-good sentiment of shouting “just be creative” to every impressionable young person leads us toward a very dangerous dead-end—in which we become a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work to get a job done, or, even worse—and more to the point for the sake of the future viability of the art culture—who no longer deem it worth their time to bother checking out any of the stuff that anyone else has made.

The constant lip service to creativity leads to the creation of more and more stuff—art and music and writing and the like—that is actually not very creative, uninteresting, of poor quality, and off-putting to any potential audience. This may seem an impossible thing to stem from such a feel-good sentiment—more creativity must mean a better world, right?—but the problem is that more emphasis on creativity means less emphasis on what it is precisely that makes art good. It’s not the simple act of making—of creating something, anything—that makes art. It’s the application of craft, dedicated practice, careful thought, hard work, and artfulness that makes art. Real creative art is a rare and precious thing and this will likely always be so.

Some will argue that there’s always been a lot of bad, uncreative art in the culture, but this seems a pretty pat answer when you truly consider what’s become of the cultural landscape in the past thirty years or so. We’ve become so inundated with creativity—in weblogs dedicated to every petty interest and whim, in vanity websites created by people of not much interest, in random belly-gazing podcasts of the braindead, in home-edited YouTube snoozefests, in well-meaning “preprofessional” writing associations, in endless craft groups and quilting associations and art meet-ups, and so on and so on—that actual audiences for honest-to-goodness good art and real creativity and cultural production are driven into hiding. Isn’t it the supreme and telling irony that even as the cultural emphasis on creativity grows, the actual audience for art is shrinking in real numbers?

Let me just repeat again: While real numbers of artists in this country has grown by more than 300 percent since the early 1970s, the art audience has shunk.

This is what truly concerns me. This is at the crux of my rant. People, your audience is running away from your and your “art,” because they now believe that artists are unable to make anything worth looking at or listening to.

“Creative people must be stopped,” indeed.

*** As near as I can determine, the “Creative people must be stopped” sentiment stems originally from a 1998 album of the same name by the Texas alt-rock band Baboon.

It’s a telling sign of the times that an influential international arts magazine—Frieze—has not only mounted, in recent years, a big commercial art fair in London, but this year, apparently, the underlying subject of this year’s fair (Oct 11-14) is commerce for commerce’s sake.

Or, according to a NYT article titled “In London, Art and Commerce Scratch Backs“:

Seven artists were commissioned by Frieze to create projects that “respond to the social and economic dynamics of the fair,” according to its catalog. These included Mr. Prince’s car, Ms. Favaretto’s note and a piece by Gianni Motti, “Pre-Emptive Act,” in which an actor dressed as a police officer does yoga as a way to subvert expectations about authority and security.

Another commissioned artists, Kris Martin, hit on a novel concept: stop Frieze for an entire minute on Wednesday, the day the fair was all but groaning with important art-world figures and important collectors like Charles Saatchi, Frank Cohen and Eli Broad.

The idea was to “succeed in temporarily stilling the wheels of commerce,” the catalog said.

“To be honest, I never thought it could work,” said the fair’s co-director, Amanda Sharp. But the announcement came across the loudspeaker: please stop buying, stop selling, stop talking and switch off your cellphone “in respect of the moment.”

Shockingly, everyone obeyed. Silence reigned. The wheels of commerce were stilled. “It was actually quite beautiful,” Ms. Sharp said.

The great thing was that Mr. Martin’s piece, titled “Mandi XVI,” would probably have worked even if it hadn’t.

“If it failed,” Ms. Sharp said, “it would have been an experiment in failure.”

“For my generation, artistic self-expression was high on the list of things that would make life worth living. But generally most of us failed to do that. I know so many people who feel they have failed. We are a massively deluded generation. We all wanted to be pop stars, indie film-makers, poets, painters, conceptual artists. Out of 300 people I know, who I have grown up with, there are four who have managed to do that. It seems crazy that that means there are 276 people who are living a life of resentment. We have a set of unrealistic expectations about sustaining a creative life in the midst of a consumer culture.”

-Scottish author Ewan Morrison, who  describes himself as “very much a part of the Gen X mindset that art and culture can liberate you from the mundanity of your all too predictable life. “