The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

The following is a quotation from a brilliant exhibition essay for a brilliant exhibition curated by my brilliant friend and colleague Glenn Gordon. You can read more of his exhibition essay on mnartists.org, and you can find out more about the show, called “Functional Sculpture: Furniture from the Upper Midwest,” on Charleton College’s website.

EVERYTHING IN THE CURRENT WORLD OF ART and design seems to want to be what it is not, or at least not what it used to be. Contemporary craft wants to be thought of as art. Art, disdaining the fuss and preciousness of craft, wants to be conceptual. Photography wants to be painterly and painting wants to be photographic. Architecture wants so much to be sculpture that it shoulders actual sculpture aside. Sculpture, meanwhile, maybe in self-defense, wants to be about the creation of sites—it wants to be architecture. Furniture, like other fields of design, is restive with its niche and pushing against the limits of genre. You could look at this churning of old categories as a symptom of ferment, or as a sign of confusion, or both. With imagery streaming freely in all directions, formerly unrelated ideas are combing through each other and giving rise to hybrids that would have been unimaginable as recently as 10 years ago.

–Glenn Gordon

I will get back to the subject of the civic exploitation of artists, and I will describe the interesting life story of my promised second example of an exiled artist, in a day or two. Stay tuned!

England has got it going on these days, at least in terms of national dialogue about art.

Here in America it’s been 18 months’ worth of presidential elections, punctuated by the occasional reference to whatever Britney, Paris, Lindsay or the latest (sh)it girls are doing out on the free range. Of art and other cultural subjects, these days we hear f*ck-all (so to speak).

But an alert FoF (Friend of Failure), Rich Barlow, who’s just back from a long holiday on the Isle of Crumpet, notes that there’s a major national discussion going on currently in England regarding how to foster and support “excellence” in that country’s art (as opposed to merely subsidizing art target levels).

A report called “Supporting Excellence in the Arts,” that was written by Sir Brian McMaster, a former director of the Edinburgh International Festival, and commissioned by the culture secretary, James Purnell, asserts that the arts “have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today.” McMaster argues for a new “appreciation of the profound value of the arts and culture,” and a “reclamation of excellence from its historic elitist undertones.”

I can’t even imagine such a debate happening in America, where one of the most burning questions in recent years is whether or not the average Joe Schmoe is as smart as the average ten-year-old. No, here, in our great Democratic nation, all you have to do is suggest that maybe—just maybe—we could be doing a little bit more to foster our smarts and raise our cultural discourse and you suddenly have every Tom, Dick, and Harry Arse who knows how to write his own name screaming “elitism” and “pomposity” at the top of his lungs.

One good reason no one will probably ever write a song called “English Idiot.”

Somebody get me a Snakebite & Black, stat.

The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America garnered a few mentions from fellow art bloggers this past week.

First, Sharon Butler on her blog Two Coats of Paint linked to my previous post about Artists Falling Through the Cracks. I’ve linked to Sharon’s writing in the past, as I’m an admirer of her writing on art-world issues, so I appreciate the return gesture.

Then, Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett, whose work as a daily art critic I’ve read and admire, picked up on the buzz. In a post called Down In Lovely Muck I’ve Lain, she suggested that readers looking for a “gloomy start to the New Year” might find CAFA interesting. Now, I won’t repeat my self-justification about how looking at artistic failure is really a hopeful, forward-looking, and optimistic exercise (because it supposes that once enough art-world people know exactly how art is failing in this country they’ll be able to make positive changes). Instead, I’ll point out to you that as good a writer on and observer of art as Regina Hackett is, she is also, sadly, one of a dying breed: the everyday art critic.

Yes, art critics are dying off. Whereas every moderate-sized newspaper in every middling city in this country once had art critics on staff, and often took occasional submissions from critical stringers, now it is the rare newspaper—even in the largest metropolitan areas—that even deigns to publish any local arts writing at all. According to studies numerous city papers have, over the past ten years, cut their arts critical writing staff and curtailed arts coverage. The Twin Cities very nearly lost their last remaining critic a few months ago in the recent round of layoffs at the Star Tribune, and the Strib’s sister paper—the Saint Paul Pioneer Press—stopped publishing any sort of local art critical writing several years ago. Last year, I spoke with the long-time art critic at the Chicago Tribune, Alan Artner, and he said he had never seen, in thirty or so years of working for papers, arts coverage at such a low point. “I have a stack of press releases on my desk that goes to chest high,” he said, “and I have no hope of writing about a single one of these things. The editors don’t want any of it. It’s just that bad these days.”

Why does the culture care so little about art criticism now? Every answer to this question that I’ve considered or heard mentioned in recent years, and some I never thought of, are collected in a 2006 collection of essays edited by Raphael Rubinstein called Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. Some of the essays in this volume blame the decline on the various sins of modern artists—from their tendency to shift styles weekly and avoid creating work that is meaningful to the wider society to their enthrallment to the entertainment industry. Other essays blame larger forces—recent deep shifts in the art market and the art “power structure,” the globalization and rampant commercialization of art, the rise of authority granted to curators and museum professionals (and resulting loss of authority granted to critics), and the disappearance of critical publications and their committed readership. Still others blame problems that are internal to contemporary criticism. In particular, they point to the tendency among critics to resist passing actual judgment or any sort of discriminating appraisal when they write about art.

The wide range of notions about what’s wrong with art criticism today reveals that, just as no one has figured out how to keep art from failing in this country, no one really has any idea what to do to keep art criticism from fading away either.

“Ninety percent of everything is crud.”
–Theodore Sturgeon

“The art schools… you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.”
–Leonard Baskin

“That’s the reality of rock ’n’ roll: Just about every band is absolute shit. Listen to any disco compilation or punk retrospective. Listen to 98 percent of the ska bands that emerged in the mid-1990s (or most of the originals, for that matter). The overwhelming majority of what you’ll hear will be wretched. And it generally seems that fans know this, even though they might not feel comfortable admitting it. Few people listen to entire albums, even when they’re released by their so-called favorite band.”
–Chuck Klosterman

And then there’s this:

21 big blocks of crap in the current exhibition, “This Entrance is Strictly Prohibited,” by Santiago Sierra at the Lisson Gallery in London.

Here’s an interesting little story from the BBC‚ about a side-result of the recent overheated international art market. Apparently, for about two decades in Britain—until they were recently caught—a son and his elderly parents made fake artworks and artefacts worth millions of dollars.

Shaun Greenhalgh made sculptural objects and paintings that were often flatfooted copies of originals he had found in catalogues. The artists and family also created fake letters to provide provenance for the objects that fooled multiple museums and collectors.

The police became suspicious when the letters contained misspellings and incorrect samples of cuneiform script. After raiding the family’s home, the police found that the artist’s forgeries went back at least seventeen years and had netted the family at least half a million pounds—the amount found in the family’s bank account. But police said the family’s crimes did not appear to have been motivated by money.

“They didn’t own a computer or live in luxury,” said the police. “They were living in abject poverty, a very poor lifestyle, very basic.”

So why did they do it, according to police? “They had a resentment of the art market and wanted to prove they could deceive it,” said one police official. “Greenhalgh felt he was a better artist than he would ever get recognition for and he developed a general hatred of the art market and the art establishment.”

Hm, possibly true. But just about every artist thinks the same—that he’s a better artists than just about everyone else—and most don’t end up going criminal.

Or do they?

There is a serious problem with our model for arts education, and indeed for education in general. By focusing on “esteem building”—rather than, say, achievement—we are doing a great disservice to generations of burgeoning young artists, who emerge into adulthood naturally expecting the world to love whatever they make. At the same time, these self-regarding young people have never learned empathy for and appreciation for others’ work, leaving a world with exploding numbers of artists (300+ % increase since the 1970s) and a declining audience for art in real numbers over the same period.

Compounding the problem is the fact that students are getting this message—that everything they do and make is golden—even as a recent study by the Center on Education Policy indicates that school time spent in art classes has decreased by nearly half since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. This is mainly because NCLB focuses so intensely on the teaching of measurable skills—arguably a necessity, since achievement in reading and math has continually declined over the past 40 years or so. The result, however, is schools are forced by this to siphon time away from other non-tested subjects such as music, art, and dance.

Now that we’ve been teaching “self-esteem” for more than 25 years, the main problem seems to be that even as measurable skills decrease, students’ self-regard for their own skills and their own worth has actually increased. This disconnect is driving a generation of poor achievers who are irrationally proud of what they do. This leaves policy-makers, and critics like me, somewhat at a loss, or as Sandy Kress, Bush’s former education adviser, put it, while it’d be nice to give students  “a broad education,… it’s hard to study art history if you can’t read well.”

Because I was attached to an anthropologist back in 1994, I had heard of and read parts of libertarian researcher and author Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve–which argued, controversially, the genetic superiority of the affluent classes (i.e., the plutocracy) in America–but I had not heard until recently of his 2003 book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.

In this, Murray argues that world progress in the arts and sciences has declined since around 1800, and this has happened despite the fact that “wealth, cities and their cultural endowments, communication, and political freedom have…improved in recent centuries.”

According to the Wikisummary of Human Accomplishment, the decline is the result of a diminishment of four conditions that Murray says are necessary for people’s creative work to reach their full potential. Achievement is best stimulated, he says, in a culture:

1. “…in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.” Moreover, Murray writes: “Human beings have been most magnificently productive and reached their highest cultural peaks in the times and places where humans have thought most deeply about their place in the universe and been most convinced they have one.”
2. that “encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals.”
3. where “organizing structures” are rich and old. Such structure can include “theories, styles, and techniques…such as the spectroscope in physics or the grand piano in music”.
4. where people have “a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental good relevant to that domain.” Such a good can include truth, morality, or beauty.

I will have to read the full text of Murray’s Human Accomplishment, if only to see how his arguments about the decline of human achievement in art mesh with my ideas about the rise of artistic failure. There were large swaths of the Bell Curve that frustrated me by failing to show true causality for what was being argued. Granted, Murray is a master at manipulating statistics to prove a point that seems intuitively true, and apparently he does so again in this book, ranking great figures in several fields of human accomplishment from 800 BC to 1950 using various statistical means. We have to remember though, while many may be convinced that the arts are only getting worse, Disraeli’s adage about stats (”there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”) and the old adage about nostalgia (”that nostalgia is to memory as a diet soda is to a fine wine”) reveal that collective human belief is often faulty.

Still, artistic failure is real enough in America… I’ll stake my steak on that much.