Following on the heels of the essay that I wrote five years ago and reposted a few days ago, I wrote my final word on Hollywood in January of 2004, after a long ten days spent back home.

Here you go:

Hollywood Art Critic, Part 2

January 31, 2004
Michael Fallon

IT’S BEEN SAID MANY TIMES BEFORE, but California is a bizarre place. And I don’t mean the constant calamities. (Sure, it might seem unnerving that there was an earthquake up near San Simeon just this morning as I write from a coffee shop in Malibu–but that’s background noise here.) I’m also not referring to the endless stream of eccentrics who make their home in California. (San Simeon, for example, is the locus of William Randolph Hearst’s infamous castle; Hearst was once spoofed by an outlandish and vastly overweight filmmaker in the movie “Citizen Kane;” the filmmaker later in life shilled for cheap California wines before dying of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1985. Strange enough stuff for most places, but rather quotidian for here.) Rather, mostly what makes California strange is its endless taste for make-believe.

If one had time, one could read Boorstin and Borges, Baudrillard and McLuhan and perhaps Sontag, and somehow come to understand the state’s Hollywood-borne penchant for fancy. For example, why does the state’s electorate continue to elect actors to play the role of the chief executive office? (We all know from our experience with the wrestler that this just doesn’t work in the end.) Or, in more mundane life, why do Californians eat “teardrop” tomatoes, rather than what we more prosaic Minnesotans call “grape tomatoes”? (They’re the same thing, just different names.) Or, why, at the end of the day at Disneyland, do machines spew out “snow” over Main Street after the fireworks show to conjure up the magic of a winter wonderland to an enraptured audience in 60-degree weather? (This stuff turns out to be some sort of detergent foam that, if you’re not careful, can sting the eyes.)

And speaking of winter, the fashion rage in Malibu this December seems to be knee-high mukluks. Since I’ve been sitting in the open courtyard of the Coffee Bean Café in a strip mall a block from the ocean, I have seen nine women, and one man, wearing this displaced garb–often with short skirts and midriff-revealing tops–as they wander from store to store (Malibu Lifestyles, Indiana Joan’s, Planet Blue) looking like extras from a Klondike gold rush movie. I came from the direction of Hollywood this morning via the Ventura Highway and Mulholland Drive, through the Malibu Valley and the scrubby Santa Monica Mountains, but this is definitely the deepest suspension of disbelief I have seen all day. Consider how impossible would be the diametrically opposed phenomenon: bikini-clad lifeguards on the beach at Lake Harriet in late December.

If you think California is so strange, you’re probably wondering, why are you even there? Well, I could talk to you about the true reason–preempting the winter blahs that have tended to afflict me every year since moving to Minnesota seven winters ago (yes, I count my time in winters) through contact with sun-warmed Pacific Ocean salt air–but that’s not terribly interesting. Instead, let’s talk about the reason I’m going to present to my accountant at tax time: I am here to research further the potential of becoming the Hollywood Art Critic that I dreamed of becoming in my column of August 29 of last year (see link below).

LET’S BEGIN AGAIN. On my third day of my recent trip to California, just a week before this past Christmas, I made my way to “The Brewery” just east of downtown Los Angeles. I had been hearing a lot of buzz lately about how this artists warehouse commune was the ground zero of L.A. art activity these days, and while it turned out the complex was not much more than what’s going on in Lowertown or in the NE arts corridor, the visit was revealing nonetheless.

At the Brewery I bumped into Mat Gleason, the editor and publisher of a ten-year-old underground arts zine called Coagula (see link below), a low-tech, slash-and-burn gossip rag that art regulars from coast to coast seem to hate even as they can’t help but read it. (To give you an idea of Coagula’s attitude, a book compilation of its first five years is called Most Art Sucks and is billed as the “only honest book about the world of contemporary art.”) Gleason himself was a fast talker who relished keeping tabs on who’s been stroking whom in the back rooms of the art world. Indeed, when I came on the scene he was busy complaining about the Coagula compilation book. It turns out Most Art Sucks didn’t sell particularly well–despite the fact that David Bowie wrote a glowing book review of the text for barnesandnoble.com, and that a Bowie blurb was included on the book’s back cover.

“You would think a publicist might be able to get us some publicity based on this fact,” says Gleason. “But what do I know? She couldn’t get us a write-up anywhere.” This leads to a litany of further invective. For example, as it turns out, the aforementioned publicist now works for Viggo Mortensen’s nonprofit “charitable” organization that is charged with funding art. “Really it’s a scam,” says Gleason, “It exists for Mortensen to take a write-off and to filter money to his artist friends.”

Eventually I make my escape (but not before hearing more complaints–about Gleason’s landlord, about how cold the studios are, about some art by a dead artist he’s been saddled with and that no one wants to take away), intrigued that he brought up the issue of publicists. According to the New York Times, Hollywood these days is all but ruled by publicists. A recent article by entertainment columnist Frank Rich quotes journalist Peter Biskind saying: “The disconnect between appearance, as it is presented in the media, and the reality of what actually occurs behind the scenes is as great in Hollywood as it is in Washington, if not greater.” And in fact, as I discovered when I first began researching what kind of art a “Hollywood art critic” might end up covering, the lion’s share of the art buzz out here was more of the same-old same-old California penchant for unreality. That is to say, if you look for info on California artists what you get is a lot of guff about Hollywood stars who act the part.

To mention just a short list of Hollywoodians who have gotten press for their artistic pretensions of late–there’s Tony Bennett, whose sailboat scenes have been collected by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kathi Lee Gifford, and Arsenio Hall. Beyonce Knowles was quoted as saying of her painting habit: “It takes me away, and it’s really peaceful.” Dwayne Hickman, star of the 1960s TV show “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” says painting “is an expression of art that you can sit down and do anytime you want. I can’t go downstairs and act, but I can go downstairs and paint.” Couple Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson hang their own work on the walls of their sunny L.A. home. Michelle Pfeiffer wishes she “could paint like Renoir.” And Jane Seymour; Jennifer Anniston, Brad Pitt, John Waters, and the aforementioned Viggo Mortensen and David Bowie have been among those cited in the “trades” for their art habits.

I’d let this hoopla pass me by as just so much dabbling by people who have too much time on their hands if in turn the real California artists–the ones worth watching–were getting their due as well. But the simple fact is, the truth beyond the glitzy Hollywood portrait of the pursuit of art is the life of the artist here, as elsewhere, is bleak. Artists in California who do not happen to be Hollywood actors struggle to survive against the terrible ambivalence of society.

I know this first hand, as I spent the rest of my Brewery-excursion in the studio of 70-year-old artist George Herms, a local mainstay since the 1950s. Herms came up with the Beat Generation and has been collected by most of the major museums (including the Walker Art Center). At this point in his career, he should basking in success, coddled by art patrons, happily retired and secure in his finances. But in fact, I discover, Herms is struggling to survive at the Brewery, unable to pay his bills despite all he’s accomplished, and recently sued by the Brewery’s owners for back rent.

“I’m just an idiot,” Herms says, as the afternoon light fades in a studio that is filled with nearly fifty years worth of art and art materials, some of which he’s recently had to raffle off just to pay lawyer’s fees. “I get up and work everyday. I’m more into what I’ve just started than in taking what’s finished and turning it into the coin of the realm.”

If only this were a Hollywood story: The upstart pretender to the throne, looking like a fashion model in his mukluks, would lead a ghost army of nonprofit granters and art patrons from across the sea just as a light foamy snow begins to fall. All would arrive just in time to save the debt-ridden artist from near-certain calamity. Ah, wouldn’t that be something?

Here are some more of my (slightly more cogent) thoughts on what’s messed up about Hollywood, written nearly five years ago by a younger (slightly less jaded) version of myself.

(*Note: Just so you know, I grew up in the shadow of Tinseltown and am quite aware of what LaLaLand is all about.

**Note too: Just so you know, I’m a critic (on art, culture, etc.). I critique. It’s what I do… This doesn’t mean I hate Hollywood. Actually, I critique because I love. Things that I hate, I don’t write about…)

Hollywood Art Critic, Part 1

August 29, 2003
Michael Fallon

HOLLYWOOD LIKES A GOOD YARN—especially a tidy tale that’s been telegraphed in advance, hits all the right emotional points, and plays out exactly as expected.
Consider the recent hit summer flick Seabiscuit. Never mind that the truth of the story of this 1930s-era race horse—as told in Laura Hillenbrand’s book, on which the movie was based–was much more intriguing than the movie version. The producers/writers/consultants/test audiences couldn’t help but keep the story satisfyingly predictable for the glazed but touchingly unjaded eyes of moviegoers.

The very emotional climax of the film—the race with War Admiral–was a complete put-on. Oh, I don’t mean that the race didn’t happen, and that Seabiscuit didn’t win, but in reality War Admiral’s owner didn’t exactly shy away from the challenge, as the movie implied. Both War Admiral’s and Seabiscuit’s owners attempted to gain advantage by setting and canceling the meeting for over a year, and in fact Seabiscuit cancelled more races with War Admiral than the other way around.

Even more egregious a falsehood is Seabiscuit’s depiction as a tiny colt up against the majestic and massive War Admiral. Though the real War Admiral was the more stately and beautiful animal, Seabiscuit was actually the heavier horse. What was odd about Seabiscuit was his shape—he had short splayed legs, and a wide massive chest; but he certainly was no puny runt, and this was no David vs. Goliath race. And, absolute truth be told, Seabiscuit and War Admiral were actually close relatives. War Admiral’s sire, Man o’ War, was Seabiscuit’s grandsire—making War Admiral half-uncle to Seabiscuit. None of this was revealed in the simple underdog-makes-good sweep of the Hollywood plot.

Our culture today is pre-programmed to expect Hollywood-style narrative. There is little room for messy exposition or explanation. I have to believe this is what’s behind the gubernatorial candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger in my home state of California. Why else would a guy with no experience and few qualifications suddenly be a front runner in the race to govern the biggest state in the nation? It’s all for the sake of the story—Arnold, the humble immigrant with a dream. Arnold, the boy who overcame his father’s fascist past. Arnold, the party boy who made good (Married a Shriver! Rules the cutthroat world of Hollywood!). Even Gray Davis recognized the Tinseltown quality of the race., He said on August 15: “This election has turned into a Hollywood movie, and I assure you it will have a surprise ending.”

Simple stories seduce us—just ask your average Minnesotan who got sucked into the bad-boy-made-good narrative of the Jesse Ventura show. No need to remind you that the movie didn’t turn out as had been advertised, and our fair frozen state was left with a pretty bad taste in its collective mouth once his term ended. The real world often trumps the fantasy narrative.

“SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ART, Mr. Art Critic Man?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve been wondering lately why art gets so little play in the national discourse despite the ever-growing number of people claiming to be artists. To cite some statistics, the most recent population survey revealed that in the U.S. in 2001 there were 2,108,000 people who claimed as their primary career one of the 11 artist occupational categories established by the National Endowment for the Arts. This equaled 9.8 percent of the labor force—nearly one out of every ten worker in this country. In comparison, engineers and surveyors accounted for 2,145,000 U.S. workers, and scientists/mathematicians/computer scientists accounted for 2,685,000. If you add in the extra 315,000 workers who were employed in secondary jobs as artists, and the 88,000 artists who were unemployed, we end up with a whopping 2,511,000 million American artists cluttering the labor force!

Yet despite the numbers, artists have relatively little national cachet. Ask anyone off the street to name a favorite living artist and you’ll no doubt get a blank look. Ask anyone to name the latest contestant to be eliminated on The Bachelor, meanwhile, or, more to the point, to converse about the differences between the porn peddler and the ex-porn star who are running for California’s governor, and you’ll be in business.

More and more I think this loss of prestige in the fine arts—even as the practice of them has grown exponentially–has to do with the Hollywoodification of our culture. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at art over the years, grappling with the complicated issues and trying to describe them to an audience, and I, and the sixteen people who read my writing, get satisfaction out of this. But the rest of the world, I’ve come to realize, just doesn’t care. Art doesn’t make a sexy enough story. Sure, there are exceptions–Picasso, Warhol, Pollock, Kahlo–but not every artist lives a made-for-Hollywood life, despite what Hollywood would have you believe. Artmaking is a rather mundane and tedious (read: unsexy) practice on the whole.

What’s an art-lover to do then?

I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit tired of butting my head up against the wall of Hollywood. If you can’t convince ’em otherwise, I figure, you might as well pander to ’em. So, below is my working draft for all of my future artist profiles. I can only hope this offering will help make art more palatable in this age.

Profile of Artist X :Artist X is standing on the verge of a great (choose one) dilemma/chasm/turning point/hitch on the road to fame. It is _______ (list time of day) in the (choose one) noisy/stultifyingly hot/rather placid/dirty confines of ________ (list place). Artist X is (choose one) pensive/nervous/eager/ambivalent about the tasks that face him/her as we watch the (choose one) people/cars/wildlife/clouds pass by.
But this isn’t the first (choose one) obstacle/opportunity of this sort the ________(list age)-year-old artist has faced. In fact, Artist X is used to the (choose one) ambivalence/hostility/snide mockery/jeering of society at large. “I can’t count how often I was (choose one) misunderstood/mistreated/ underestimated/dismissed as I was learning to (choose one) sculpt/take photos/paint in the Telemark style of Norwegian rosemaling/be a performance artist,” he/she says, as we hear the distant and (choose one) plaintive/harsh and edgy/warbly/sonorous strains of (choose one) Eminem/Tori Amos/Jewel/Johnny Cash from someone’s (choose one) car radio/boom box/open window/bar mitzvah.
“There was only one person who ever believed in me, despite that I suffered from (choose one) dyslexia/a profound lack of self-confidence/ a horrible physical disfigurement/ rickets,” Artist X continued, looking once at a photo of his/her (choose one) cross-dressing roommate/dog/imaginary friend/great aunt Esther before (choose one) releasing it in the wind/tossing it into the river/setting fire to it/placing it on a ritual altar. “He/she always told me that my work would eventually reach (choose one) the Whitney Biennial/a Paris gallery/the White House front lawn/the Edina Galleria…. And now I have a chance to prove that he/she was right.” &c…Am I ready for Hollywood or what?

So I guess the Hollywood writers are coming back to work soon.

Yay.

I had been intending, for weeks and weeks, to write something about the plight of the writers, to compare their lot to the lot of all the everyday artists in the country who are slowly working their fingers to nubs for an occasional bone thrown by an uncaring public. Etc. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do so.

I mean, this is Hollywood we’re talking about, not art. And these are corporate workaday hacks–correction, well-paid corporate workaday hacks–who are fighting for a bigger share of the tons of money you and I stupidly throw at them year after year. This is not something of any sort of lasting cultural value…

All the stories I read about this strike went on and on and on about how “devastating” was the strike to the entertainment industry, and how “demoralizing” it was to the struggling writers. They cited the number like a running stock-ticker—$1 billion dollars lost and counting… $2 billion dollars lost and counting… And Bingo! $3.2 billion dollars lost (*according to Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp).

But you know what? The strike wasn’t really that devastating really, at least not to the people who matter— i.e., you and me. The world did not stop turning. People did not go into withdrawal. No one suffered any lasting effects. The juggernaut industry that is our modern bread-and-circus distraction was not really missed all that much.

Of course the bitter strikers and the even bitterer globocorporations that produce this tripe will trot out all the positive cliches, if only to get the river of money (our money) flowing back where they want (their pockets). “At the end of the day, everybody won. It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp.”These advances now give us a foothold in the digital age,” said Patric Verrone, president of the guild’s West Coast chapter. “Rather than being shut out of the future of content creation and delivery, writers will lead the way as television migrates to the Internet.”

Fine fine sentiment. But we, who will be ponying up for all this bonhomie, know better.

Truth is, we’d be much better off without all the distraction and crap. Or at least we’d be just fine. And we’d certainly have more money and more time to focus on something more meaningful–the paintings made by the minor genius who lives at the end of the block, the song written by your cousin the burgeoning cafe-folksinger, the short one-act play written by that cute girl at work.

Art, people. Not mindlessly distracting entertainment. Art. (Or at least a better balance between the two…)

It’s become rather common, perhaps even boringly so, for critical writers to kvetch about their craft’s growing obsolescence and looming demise. (I myself am guilty of such an act.) Such a glut of self-obsessive hand-wringing by critics is easy to dismiss, since it is so self-serving at heart and since none of it really addresses the heart of the problem (which I humbly submit is that art itself is failing in America)…

Still, in all the critical hand-wringing you have to believe there is some cogent thought and valuable information. This piece, written by Terry Teachout in July, 2007, examines with cold-eyed objectivity the disappearance of quality regional critical writing (in press publications). The article starts by quoting a veteran NY drama critic: “We’re the last generation of newspaper critics, you know. After us, everybody will be online,” and then it enumerates the situation on the ground at that time–loss of book-review sections in papers across the country, loss of classical music critics in the Chicago and Minneapolis papers, loss of regional movie critics across the country…

Teachout goes on to give a simple explanation for the situation: “Newspaper circulation is declining, driven downward by the rise of the new Web-based media, and many papers are trimming their staffs to make ends meet. Whenever times get tough at an American newspaper, fine-arts coverage gets thrown off the back of the sled first.” He also mentions that a number of critics, as well as some arts advocates–both up in arms over the cutbacks—blame arts bloggers for this situation. Teachout somewhat disagrees with this last assessment about blog critics, saying that “some of them do it better than their print-media counterparts,” but he also laments the loss of real critical perspective about the fine arts in regional print publications.

One of the most important civic duties that a newspaper performs is to cover the activities of local arts groups — but it can’t do that effectively without also employing knowledgeable critics who are competent to evaluate the work of those groups. Mere reportage, while essential, is only the first step. It’s not enough to announce that the Hooterville Art Museum finally bought itself a Picasso. You also need a staffer who can tell you whether it’s worth hanging, just as you need someone who knows whether the Hooterville Repertory Company’s production of “Private Lives” was funny for the right reasons.

In the end, Teachout concludes with two points that I happen to agree with. One, though he is now prominent NY critic, widely read and widely admired, he still worries about the loss to the overall quality of criticism now that print publications are abandoning it. After all, he says, he got his “start reviewing second-string classical concerts for the Kansas City Star 30 years ago. Now that such entry-level jobs are drying up, I fear for the future of arts journalism in America.” Just this week I had lunch with a young arts writer in his mid-20s—who’s been writing short and pithy arts preview pieces for a side-publication of one of the Minnesota dailies—and he’s begun to seriously wonder after two years at his craft whether or not there are any options for him to have an eventual career doing this thing that he’s surprised he likes so much. “I don’t know what to do,” he says, putting his finger on a certain Gen-Y dilemma. “I’d love to keep writing, but I’m at my capacity between my day job and the freelance writing gig and all the shows I end up going to. I’d also like to have a job someday that allows me to make more than 12 dollars an hour…”

Finally, Teachout warns any artist who is prone to bid glib “good riddance” to the critic: “Any artist who’s been side-swiped by a lame-brained critic will doubtless be tempted to cheer this news. Before such aggrieved folk break out the Dom Perignon, though, they should pay heed to the warning of Virgil Thomson, who dominated American music criticism in the ’40s and ’50s: ‘Perhaps criticism is useless. Certainly it is often inefficient. But it is the only antidote we have to paid publicity.’ If you think you can do without that antidote, more power to you — but you’d better be prepared to buy a lot of ads.”

As a self-serving, Minnesota-Art-Failure-Tale (MAFT) aside: I’ve been attempting to address this issue (of the death of criticism) in Minnesota since early in 2002, after a downturn in critical writing staff at the metro’s weekly and one of its daily newspapers led me to start a local art critics’ association called VACUM. I have to admit that my efforts haven’t done much good, and today, six years later, Minnesota continues to be a shrinking market for arts critical writing.

A guest column by Roger Valdez in the Friday, January 25, edition of the Seattle Times tells a story familiar to artists (and to CAFA readers). Arts organizations there are getting squeezed out by a callous market and an uncaring local community.

Over the past decade, several local arts organizations, … have folded because of space issues. Today, tenants of the Odd Fellows Hall on Capitol Hill are struggling with the possibility of rent increases that will make it impossible for them to do business.

The crisis faced by small- and medium-sized arts organizations in Seattle comes down to two words: real estate. How to acquire, renovate and maintain one’s own home isn’t something taught in art school. Arts organizations produce art, not facilities plans.

The story follows a familiar path. A local arts organization without much money finds space in an older building where the rent is reasonable. The owner is willing to allow the group to knock out a couple of walls, make as much noise as it wants, and start doing what it does: art.

The owner isn’t interested at that time in selling the underutilized property for high rise-condos or other development, and the arts organizations, taking heart, sign or extend leases.

But, the day comes when the economic lure becomes too great, or family dynamics change, and the owner decides to sell. Faced with a changing use of the property, the arts tenants put out a call for help, but it’s too late.

Does it have to be this way?

Some arts organizations in Boston recently, on January 13, staged a “die-in” in response to a report on the arts economy of Boston published by the Boston Foundation. Called “Vital Signs,” the report, which was released on December 19, suggested that the directors of “struggling arts groups” should perhaps be seeking “exit strategies.” According to the study, while large institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Museum of Fine Arts remain healthy, smaller groups are “losing audience and struggling to balance their budgets.” The Foundation suggests that an organization “whose vision has either dissipated or lost its resonance with its audience or supporters” should consider shutting down.

Apparently, at the “die-in,” which took place in an alternative gallery space in Cambridge, a self-proclaimed group of “artyrs” drank Kool-Aid as a symbolic protest to the report. According to Boston Globe reporter Geoff Edgers, leaders of Boston’s small arts organizations had a lot to say to the Boston Foundation.

“The report takes a very naive position in the end,” said Jurgen Weiss, executive director of Snappy Dance Theater. “What I take from it is, ‘Look, here are these big organizations. They’re big. So they must be good. And all these small organizations are having trouble keeping afloat. So by some kind of Darwinian process some of them should die off.’ ”

Kathy Bitetti, an installation artist who heads the Artists Foundation, [said]:

“They don’t fund us, they never have, and they have no sense of who we are… Unfortunately I think this report does more harm than good. They’re looking at a corporate model. Instead of spending money on these reports, they could actually be funding organizations.”

I met Dean Fleming in the summer of 2005. Driving through the Sangre de Christo mountains about 40 miles south of Pueblo, I realized the weather in Colorado in August is about a perfect you’ll ever fine. Heartbreakingly beautiful. The sky is a pearlescent blue ocean hanging over the sage green ocean-bottom valleys and the distant coral-reef mountains. On each side of the Huerfano valley, the landscape rises up into scrubby chaparral then disappears into rocky murky mountaintops.

Dean Fleming first discovered this region in 1966. At the time, he was feeling increasingly stifled in New York. “Art was a profession,” he said, “like playing football. You get together a resume and a portfolio. You work to get the critics to do a review… The structure of the profession was not something I ever worked at. I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. In New York, there’s a lot of pressure to repeat yourself and do the same thing. In New York I was the ‘parallelogram’ painter, which I thought sucked beyond belief. I didn’t want anything to do with that. I wanted to do what I felt like.”

 Dean Fleming, “Untitled,” 1965

Fleming took a get-out-of-New York trip to California in 1966 with composer Steve Reich and painter John Baldwin. On the way, they stopped Ignacio, Colorado, to catch a Native American Sundance. “I found it magical,” said Fleming. In a letter to New York gallery owner Paula Cooper in July 1966, he wrote:

Dear Paula,

Excellent mustanging across country spending 4 days with the Colorado Utes sun dancing, basking in stars & Rocky Mountain blaze of sun, cleansing chunks of Manhattan funk & generally changing. Steve playing tapes, John the trumpet & me giving out books & buttons, we Johnny Appleseeded culture across the land…

Fleming’s suggestion that he was changing was revealing. It was difficult for him to adjust again to SoHo when he returned: “When I went back to New York, ” he said, “to my loft on Broom Street, I had a dream that I was supposed to be in the country, surrounded by friends. That was the impetus to come back to Colorado.”

In 1965, some artists, filmmakers, and philosophical types from Lawrence, Kansas had started—in Trinidad, Colorado—what would become known as the first rural “hippy commune,” Drop City. The founders of Drop City had hope to continue working on an art concept—Drop Art—they had developed earlier at the University of Kansas. Drop Art was informed by the “happenings” of Allan Kaprow and the work of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and R. Buckminster Fuller—a professor and inventor who pondered questions related what would later become known as the “sustainability” movement. (Fleming knew “Bucky” Fuller, as he called him. In fact, he learned to make the geodesic dome that is his Libre Commune studio/home from him.)

“The Ultimate Painting ,” by Drop Artists, 1966, acrylic on panel, 60″ x 60″

Fleming first stopped at Drop City with a few friends for a short stay, coming to think of the place as a “touch chaotic.” “They had this open-door policy thing that was untenable,” he explained. “Artists need their own space to think and get work done. They were doomed for failure.” (Drop City was abandoned by its residents in 1970.)

After a few months, Fleming and his group discovered a plot of acreage on a mountainside near Gardner, Colorado. Somehow they scraped up the money to purchase it ($6000), and thus began the Libre Community, a continuously existing commune that has expanded and contracted through the years—with various artist microcommunities popping up then fading away. Amazingly, the commune still exists today, forty years after its founding.

“It’s a funny mix here,” said Fleming, who these days possesses deeply lined face and a long mane of white hair. “There have always been Native American practitioners, Buddhists, wine drinkers, pot smokers. Theater artists. Photographers. Artists. Everyone, each in their own area. Some of the groups overlap. But for me, it’s always just been a great place to work.”

Fleming’s life as a working artist in Colorado has been long and rich—even removed as it’s been from mainstream currents. “I don’t have a lot of money. I never have. But if I have a place to stay, it works out.” Still, like anyone, he seems to have his share of regrets. “I worry about not having health insurance,” he said several times over the course of my stay.

Fleming still paints every morning, first thing—”even when I’m traveling,” he said. Behind his geodesic studio, a good-sized shack holds a large cache of paintings reveals the results of this fifty years of effort. He is pensive about his legacy as he shows this trove to me. “My situation (as an obscure artist) is deliberate. It doesn’t matter in the long run if people like my work or not. I seek a place always where the painting takes over. I’d hope the observer would have that experience, but that’s very individual. It’s the nature of people to like a different painting for different reasons. I think of painting as being a mirror for people—where they’re at.”

“DH: …my particular age of the critic is just over. There are no influential midcareer critics today. I think part of that is circumstance, in the sense that a whole generation of critics died of AIDS in the ’80s. It was like the plague that wiped out two generations of Neapolitan painters in the sixteenth century. They’re just gone, and those dead guys from the ’80s should be writing most of what I’m writing now, and I should be left to play blackjack.

SH: OK, so what are the supposed art magazines interested in hearing about, if not about art?

DH: They want touting. In twenty years we’ve gone from a totally academicized art world to a totally commercialized art world, and in neither case is criticism a function. We’re all supposed to be positive about art. Nobody plays defense! I mean, my job, to a certain extent, is to be in the net. My job is to mow stuff down.

SH: So in what kind of structure would there be a place for criticism?

DH: Well, I came into an art world of volunteers—six thousand heavily medicated, mysteriously employed human beings who were there because they wanted to be, you know? And all they wanted was to be right—not safe, not rich, not fair, but right! Now we have this vast bureaucratic structure of support. Everybody’s a poll watcher. Nobody’s a voter. We’ve got millions of people devoted to the whole idea that art’s supposed to be fair and good for you. But art’s not too fair, you know? Why should you be publishing books and not your friends? Because it’s not fair, that’s why.”

–Dave Hickey, interviewed in The Believer

In a previous post, I described—in an oversimplified, somewhat glib six-point plan—how artists are exploited, over and over, by cities around this country. The sixth point of the plan read:

• Kick the artists out of your buildings, sell to investors at a huge profit, retire fat, happy, and with a spotless conscience.

Since you’re likely not one of the conscienceless exploiters, you probably wonder sometimes what are the results of this callous manipulation of artists. What happens to the artists once they’re turned away from the hip and happening urban district—and from the spacious studios and accommodating galleries—they’ve helped create? Well, as it happens, I’ve profiled a couple of artists through the years who have faced exactly those circumstances, and I’ve seen the fallout. It’s not pretty…

In the spirit of open information exchange, I’ll share two such profiles. In the first, I write about Frank Gaard. He was one of perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands, of artists displaced and removed from their studio and living situations during the artist-spawned regentrification of Northeast Minneapolis.

A wildly productive artist of long-standing status locally, Gaard long has lived (as the story describes) on the edges in terms of financial, and mental, stability. As a result, he was in a terrible position to weather a sudden and unexpected change of living circumstance when he was kicked out of his apartment in 2001. In the profile, which appeared in City Pages in the fall of that year, I describe his conditions, after having moved to a dingy basement apartment in one of the roughest parts of South Minneapolis, thusly:

Gaard has a haggard look about him these days. His face is lined and sags heavily into his thick shoulders; his skin is pale and his wispy gray and white hair flies from his head in unkempt bunches. His eyes and his occasional smile still exude charisma, but the overall air about the artist is what doctors from another age might have called melancholia. The effect could also be that of stress stretched over a long, bleak period. Gaard had to leave his Northeast apartment this past summer after his landlord sold the building. (The artist had been providing paintings in lieu of paying full rent.) His new apartment contains colorful acrylic canvases leaning against walls and furniture, stacked on tables and counters. These may not be the best of times, but Gaard continues to work at an impressive clip; he is nothing if not a persistent man.

The happy coda to the story is eventually Gaard pulled himself back up by his easel legs. When I visited him at home in 2006, his circumstances had changed dramatically. There was light coming through the window of Gaard’s front living-room studio in the cute clapboard house he kept with his new girlfriend, and he looked many times happier and healthier than five years earlier. It probably helped too that he was also fresh from a triumphant, widely publicized local billboard project that had been commissioned by the Walker Art Center.

Still, it took a good four-five years after his exile from Nordeast for Gaard to get back to this stable ground. Four-five years of stress, unhealthy living, and lack of production (he only had one exhibition during this time) before Gaard was a viable artist again. It’s very revealing, after all, that at this moment of triumph, in the little Walker web-Q&A posted to accompany his billboard project, this is what Gaard has to say:

7. What advice do you have to offer young people today?
Enjoy your youth before the evil days draw nigh.

Another tip of the failure hat to Rich for alerting the Chronicle of the exhibition called “Failure,” slated to open soon at the Belmar Lab just outside of Denver.

Subtitle to this exhibition?: “FEEL FREE TO HATE THIS EXHIBITION”

Dates?: “FEBRUARY 14 - WHENEVER”

And after reading Executive Director Adam Lerner’s statement for the show, I’ve decided I have to find a way to get out there and see the show, come hell or February snows.

Failure is an exhibition that considers the artistic implications of disappointment, rejection, malfunction and breakdown. Sounds implausible, right?

That’s what I would have thought until about a year when I went to visit a friend of mine who is now a professor at Cornell University. Jason called me on my cell phone the morning of my visit, “If you drive to campus directly from the airport, you’ll be able to catch Judith Halberstam’s lecture on failure as a political strategy.” “What? Yeah, sure.” And as I sped through the winding roads of upstate New York, I thought, “Wow, I must be really out of touch.”

Speaking to an eager crowd of philosophically-hip Cornellians, Halberstam presented the notion of failure as a means to affirm marginal voices in our society, people who missed out on the happy social and economic networks of family and work. But, as I listened to her wrangle a political theory out of the concept failure, a flood of images came to mind suggesting that that failure is a wide current hidden in plain sight at the very center of contemporary American culture.

Like its opposite success, failure runs deeps through the fabric of our society from the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” creed of Timothy Leary, to the aggressive nihilism of the punk rock generation, to the identification with the beautiful loser among skateboard and graffiti generation. It’s seems to be the theme of every other story on Ira Glass’ radio show This American Life and Dave Eggers literary magazine McSweeney’s. American dysfunctionality is the very subject of American’s longest running sitcom, The Simpsons.

When I shared my academically inspired insights with artist Ethan Janzer, he convinced me that visual artists have a great deal to say about failure, so I asked him to co-curate this exhibition with me. The works we selected for Failure suggest different ways of failing, and by doing so offer a critique of what we are told is right.

Right on, Adam. Failure does run deep through the fabric of our society. And, I’d add, through the fabric of art!