The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Loretta Bebeau, a Minneapolis-based artist, emailed her thoughts recently (quoted below) in response to my post on What Artists Are Thankful For and my paean to Grizzled Art Warriors. She started by explaining there’s a “story” waiting to be written about her friends Marge and Ed Bohlander.

Marge is one of the few women who did air brush in the 70s/80s/90s. Ed is/was a fantastic metalworker. We have a friendship that goes back to Hopkins and the early arts activism in that town. (In fact they called me and asked me to show.) It’s not the big, hot space like Flanders or T.Barry, but it is a friendship and they know their art. (They’re from the same era as T. Barry.)

Bohlanders went to NYC for awhile and returned to Hopkins, MN. After a successful stint there, they bought the building on 36th Ave. South. Here’s where we pick up their story. After a string of health problems they are now returning to their orginal career goals……….. this is what happens to artists as they go through life. Should we prepare the younger group?

…We ask “where are all of those art students after the age of 30?”

Additional topics:
Where do the older artists show when they want to develop new work? new audiences??
Why is it so awful to be showing from a studio? especially when “galleries are pulling back” due to budget problems. Who is creating “chatter” to build public awareness of visual arts? Who sees the artist as someone over 30?
Does the mature artist exist “out of” academia??? Why should we be proud of them???

Let’s compare visual art with the music world. The enthusiasm of Elvis cannot be recaptured, the Beatles represented the 1960s, and visual arts also represents a time period that cannot be regained. Therefore, earlier, older art still is valuable and continuous chatter about visual art creates awareness of the value.
Let’s compare the athelete over 30 to the artist over 30. Where do the old ballplayers go? Better yet, where are the UofM musicians from Bob Dylan’s era??? Let’s compare them to the local visual artists from that era.

I don’t need responses to the above questions, my purpose is to get something stirred up…. brainstorming…was the old term. During the down times, visual artists have always created a new “drive” for community attention. The drive also raises community spirit and health, aimed at a community pride in their artists.
It’s the time for the 40 year olds…

Then she shifted to explaining the hard realities of her artistic life.

I just read the tales of the “Grizzled Artist.” So, you have it. Onceuponatime I could just skip into a corporate file/admin/secretary job and pick up cash. But this no longer happens over age 50; bright young 30ish people rule the world.

Hey, I have children in that group and want them to do good, but the reality of food and shelter is reality. Also, painting was a habit that sustained me during that nurturing part of life. Artmaking is/was a basic part of my daily thinking. What do we replace it with??? Should I rock back and forth in a chair, or sway to imagined music?

Now the medical community mentions that creative arts keeps the mind from falling into Alzheimers and dementia.

Do I continue to spend amounts of time and money making art that no one wants to see, or do I actually fix the plaster on the kitchen wall and buy paint for it??

This just in, from the St. Paul artist Walter Albertson (in response to my query regarding what about art are you thankful for):

Back when I was trying to get a discussion going on the MN artists forum, I posted a reply to an art pundit (not you) with who I was trying to spar with about topics involving being a better art businessman.
I said artists must be true to a feeling, an inner directive I called “verve” and if you depart from this for whatever reasons including practicality or business, you may loose your way. 

Then later, when reading an essay by Curtis White, (who I highly recommend) he expressed a similar concept although with more clarity and directness. I can’t quote directly here now but it was something like:

The value, or one of the values in art is awareness of the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead.

And that is what I’m thankful for in art.  That’s what I respond to in art by others and that is what keeps me going in my own art making.  Not always easy in a world seemingly at the mercy of mechanical thinking.

To follow up on my previous post, about what we are (despite it all) thankful about in art, I’ve posted an homage to Grizzled Art Warriors on the Thousandth Word blog.

Here’s a bit of the crux:

…make no bones, the range of committed and long-suffering arts denizens in this hardscrabble metro area of ours—without whom there’d be scant art worth celebrating today—while not terribly broad, is very deep. Just sit down and make a list, and you will see. My own list of local artistic heroes, whose grizzled tales I have often found myself drawn to, is split in two. It starts with dozens of artists who, while I don’t always love every work they make, are to be admired for surviving through thick and thin and continuing the battle. Then it moves on to those few purveyors and supporters of art—gallerians mostly—who’ve survived the wars from their front-line positions, under constant assault (mostly from needy artists) and with terribly unreliable supply lines to sustain them.

Once again, I invite anyone with thoughts or memories to share–about parts of the art world that you are thankful for, or grizzled arts figures that you appreciate and love–to do so. You can comment here on this blog, email me at admin@artisticfailure.com, or comment on the Thousandth Word blog.

It’s a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground.
It’s the time for play, it’s a whipped cream day,
I wait for it the whole year round!…

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favorite girl.
It’s a sugar date, so what if spring is late,
In winter it’s a marshmallow world!

By now, you art lovers all know the story: the local (MN) visual arts infrastructure (and the national one too, including the museum where I cut my young, art-grad school teeth) is quickly crumbling. As endowments shrink and paying customers stay away, drying up the support money like so much Cobalt drier-spiked oil paint, staffs are being hacked at big arts institutions, longtime professionals are heading for the hills, museums are shutting down, and galleries are going dark.

But fuck it. It’s Christmastime, the most self-delusional time of year, when we turn up the lights against the shorter days, put aside every realistic expectation, and demand that people give us the things we aren’t willing to buy during the rest of the year. Ah, Christmas. So full of false promise, marshmallow wishes, and yum-yummy whipped cream exhortations of love! Now is when we lovingly proclaim how much we appreciate all the people and things in our lives—smugly satisfied that now we’ve done our yearly duty we can forget them until this time next year. In this spirit of Christmas, I thought it might be appropriate now to ruminate on all the things we appreciate about art. In a few days, I’ll post one thing I’m truly thankful about, in that Christmas-sort-of-way, as we approach the hinge of the year (meaning I’ll probably promptly forget about it, as is our way in this culture, soon as January 2 arrives).

If you’re thankful about something that has to do with art, you can post your holiday thankful wishes below (in the comments box). Or else you send them to me at: admin@artisticfailure.com.

Hope, that all too scarce commodity of late, made a brief, mild resurgence earlier this month, only to suffer setbacks to late-November fear and panic. (November is just that way, or so I surmise in my latest piece on the Thousandth Word.)

But hope, as we all know, even if it often gets beaten down and left for dead never goes away. (I remarked on this tendency too, in two recent pieces on the local arts, again for the Thousandth Word.)

But you don’t have to take my word about hope. One of my favorite recent arts commentaries—a piece from the Art Newspaper earlier this month called “Tough Times Will Provide Opportunities“—suggests too that hope springs eternal, even in a collapsed economy, even in a bottomed-out market, even in the dismal contemporary art world. “So what’s next? Is the future of the art market that bleak?” the article asks.

No, this will be a market for new opportunities. Major collectors are waiting for prices to come down 30% to 40% from their peak, a correction that was already evident in the latest round of auctions in London in October… Further pressure on prices is expected, and it will take some time before the market has reached equilibrium… Now the question is: which artists will survive the adjustment? We all know what the last crash in 1991 did to hotshot artists such as David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Francisco Clemente and Sandro Chia. Their markets took 15 years to recover, and in real terms (adjusted for inflation) are still considerably below their peak, but at least their markets survived… The primary market is also likely to regain the balance of power compared with the auctions. The auction houses have dented their credibility as money-making machines, and would-be sellers are realising that the liquidity is quickly evaporating. In a falling market, the focus will again be directed towards the galleries that have proved their commitment to their artists… In the end, a correction is healthy for the sustainability of the future art market. The interest in art will not disappear, art and artists will not disappear—if anything, a tougher environment will be more conducive to artistic creativity, and hopefully the market will go back to focusing on what constitutes the real value of art, as art history is rarely made in the auction rooms.

While I haven’t been the most active poster over the past three weeks, I have been following one story carefully (and collecting multiple links on it)–i.e., The Meltdown of the Current Art Market. For your enjoyment, then, I’ve put together a Cavalcade of Links tracking the falling fortunes of the art market over the last month:

• Tapped Out? (Big New York Auction Houses Brace for a Slower Dance at the Fall Sales), New York Times, October 26

• Economy Shrinks with Consumers Leading the Way, New York Times, October 31

• Our False Oracles Have Failed, We Need a New Vision to Live By (Huge financial success has hidden the moral bankruptcy in our civilisation, we must rediscover our lost values or perish), London Times, October 30

• The Medici Meltdown (What was true then is still true now), Forbes,  October 31

•  Jeanette Winterson on What Art Means to Us in Times of Crisis, London Times, October 31

• NYC fall art auctions open against gloomy backdrop, Associated Press, November 3

• Auction Season Opens With Little Enthusiasm, New York Times, November 4

• Art Market “Corrects” as Lots Go Unsold at Sotheby’s, Bloomberg.com, November 4

• Gris Sets Record in Slow Christie’s Auction, New York Times, November 6

• A Dreary Night for Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, New York Times, November 11

• Bottom Falls Out of Contemporary Art Market, This is London, November 12

• Contemporary Art Stars Plunge to Earth in Auction, AFP, November 12

• Fall Auctions Still Getting Paddles, Conde Nast Portfolio, November 12

• Hirst Painting Flops at `Brutal’ New York Art Auction, Bloomberg.com, November 16

• In Faltering Economy, Auction Houses Crash Back to Earth, New York Times, November 16

And, my very favorite link of all:

• Hirst on the Art Market: “What Goes Up Must Come Down,” ARTINFO.com, November 17

Apologies to this site’s regular readers for my lack of postings these past few weeks.

Things have been hectic and distracting in life, work, and politics, and I promise to get back on the Trail of Failure very shortly.

In the meantime, here’s a link to an excellent site that may interest you: the FAIL Blog. Apparently it’s not just the arts that are failing, it’s 90 percent of the rest of the world…

Enjoy (more to come)!

The Art Newspaper this past week has proclaimed that “speculation in young artists” is ending in the wake of economic worldwide meltdown.

The effect? I suspect that it will hurt the smaller galleries that sell emerging or non-blue-chip art the most. I suspect, but don’t follow it closely enough to say for sure, that it will also happen sooner or later with Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern art markets as well… It’s been kind of like buying internet stocks—and we know how that ended. With the high prices for younger art “established” by a speculative market where can they go, relative to demand, but down? But galleries never lower their primary prices, so these works will sit in gallery storage racks—with zero revenue-flow for non-brand name dealers. I call this the death spiral for art: sinking prices and sinking demand.

Is there a silver lining in the midst of this gloomy forecast?

Perhaps a return to the importance of museums, critics and alternative spaces for validation and the introduction of new art.

Hm. A return to the importance of critics? That doesn’t sound so bad… (Except where are these critics going to publish their writing?)

Meanwhile…

On a completely different note, please come to the Art Happy Hour this Sunday, October 19, at 9 pm at the Red Stag Supper Club. (Art Happy Hour is the only true antidote to America’s ongoing Artistic Failure!)

I’ve been reading and writing about Canada’s ongoing national back-turning on its artists of late, which apparently is a huge subject up there because it keeps coming up of late. This most recent story, from the Oct. 11 Globe and Mail, is interesting because it discusses an arts event that was highly praised in Canada—the recent triumphant visit of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to a sold-out Carnegie Hall—and describes how impossible it is, in our modern business-oriented economy, for an arts org to be deemed a success. “…the tour was an artistic and critical success,” writes Simon Houpt, “[but] those viewing it simply through a prism of profit and loss would call it a failure: The performance fee paid by Carnegie Hall didn’t come close to covering even half of the orchestra’s $466,000-plus costs.”

The author then looks closely at the upcoming budget for Volcano, a Toronto-based theatre company, which took the unusual step of opening its books to The Globe and Mail, and examines point-by-point how what people are willing to pay for art is vastly outstripped by the expenses incurred in mounting arts programming. The problem with art has long been noted by economists: The cost for the products of our economy become ever more based on the efficiencies associated with mechanization and mass production, so that a product like art that is impossible to make more efficiently (a painting will always take so long to make, a symphony always will involve so many producers) are regarded as too expensive to support in relation to cheaply reproduced good and entertainment (crappy cable TV, for instance). The arguments that people make against arts funding fail to take into account the simple human costs for art.

It’s interesting too to have read this story from the past weekend, from my own formerly artistically “enlightened” northern home state of Minnesota, just south of Canada’s southern border, about the impending doom facing pretty much all of our former artistic treasures. Art funders here, according to the story’s author Mary Abbe, are “bracing for rocky times.” Major arts orgs like the “Minnesota Orchestra, Guthrie Theater, Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts,” who are seeing their endowments rapidly shrink, are “braced for the worst.” At the end she quotes Jacques Brunswick, chief administrative officer of the Guthrie Theater, as he makes an (unconvincing) appeal: “It’s a rough time. I think the arts need people’s money now more than ever.”

And in response (in the Strib’s comments)?

Time to get back to the basics

When many are faced with homelessness, hunger and a lack of health care, it is time to get back to the basics. We have to pay off massive governmental and consumer debt that is strangling the country before we can make much progress. Also, we need to ensure our kids and even adults are getting adequate scientific and technical training so we can compete again in the global market. Given all this, the upcoming decides need to focus on basics rather than arts.

posted by rebeccalhoover on Oct 11, 08 at 7:29 pm |

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.