The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

One of the earliest art feature stories I ever wrote, in 1998, was about the (very common) civic practice of exploiting artists. Here’s how it works:

1. Take a blighted or economically diminished section of your favorite city, preferably with a wide array of large warehouse or mixed-use industrial buildings;
2. Inherit, steal, or buy up a bunch of real estate in said blighted area;
3. Invite people who have few other options for finding cheap urban real estate—namely, artists—to inhabit your warehouses and old factories;
4. Watch the artists turn your blighted area into a hip area where lots of young, up-and-coming people hang out;
5. Watch new businesses like galleries, art stores, cafes, restaurants, and so on develop in formerly empty spaces;
6. Kick the artists out of your buildings, sell to investors at a huge profit, retire fat, happy, and with a spotless conscience.

I wrote my story about Northeast Minneapolis, just north of the downtown of Minneapolis, which, back then, was the hub of arts activities in the Twin Cities. Here’s a sampling of the crux of the story:

Roughly defined as the Central Avenue corridor running between 3rd and 37th avenues, Northeast Minneapolis has historically been a confluence of working-class residences, light-industrial parks, warehouses, and low-rent retail shops. At present, several art galleries (including Acme Visual Arts and Icebox Gallery) and a number of large studio complexes (including the S & M Tire Warehouse, the Tyler Street Studio Building, the California Building, and the Northrup King Studio Complex) can be found around the Central Avenue corridor, where the low-rent warehouse and industrial spaces began to attract artists and gallery owners about 10 years ago….

….Although Northeast Minneapolis is arguably the art center of the Twin Cities these days, that distinction may be ending as the neighborhood evolves. Like AØSO, two other Northeast galleries have closed in the last six months, and another in the last year. At the same time, rising rents and new neighborhood development threaten to displace some of the artist occupants of warehouse studio spaces.

Of course, this story is not unique to Minneapolis. It’s been going on for ages all over the country. (The cycle has repeated in the Twin Cities at least once more since I wrote the story in 1998.) This book, for example, tells the story of the rise and fall of the great arts colony in Manhattan’s SoHo district. And this was way back in the 1960s, before they’d even invented urban blight!

And, as you’d expect in this great age of Artistic Failure, this story continues to play today—except now, as this story by David Freedlander in Am New York relates, the cycle of artistic exploitation-rejection can encompass entire major metropolitan areas.

The story starts by quoting Robert Elmes, who recently very nearly moved his gallery, Galapagos Art Space, out of New York (to the more favorable climes of Berlin):

“The cultural ecosystem is under incredible threat right now,” Elmes said. “The word spreading back across the country to young, creative people is that New York is incredibly expensive and there isn’t the opportunity to experiment with new work. The best and the brightest are going to other cities.”

It’s a common refrain among those who work in the creative industries and follow the cultural scene closely: New York City, which has incubated a century of the world’s leading artists, musicians, and performers, will cease to be a place where art is made.

“New York could easily become a museum city like Paris or Rome that doesn’t produce much in the way of relevant culture,” Elmes said. “If you take emerging and cutting-edge arts away, the city becomes dramatically less interesting. That was always what New York was about but we are not protecting our brand.”

“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.

“The subject of the failed artist is one that’s never far from most of our minds, and in all likelihood, many of our futures.”

–Jerry Saltz, in a Dec. 2001 review of an installation by Michael Smith and Joshua White called “The QuinQuag Arts and Wellness Centre”

CONSIDERING THE QUIXOTIC NATURE OF MY QUEST TO UNDERSTAND ARTISTIC FAILURE, it is perhaps fitting that the “Essential Services for Aging Artists” study (which I linked to in full in a previous post), which has the potential to affect the lives of many artists, sits today—one year after its completion—untouched on my desk. The complicated set of political ploys and power plays that doomed this report on artistic failure is an entire story unto itself. Suffice to say at least, for now, I had a few answers: Life for artists isn’t as bad as one would presuppose from the anecdotal evidence, but at the same time the situation regarding artistic failure in this country is actually worse than one would guess.

So why do I continue to write about artistic failure if I have an answer, especially since my various efforts thus far regarding artistic failure have never done me, or anyone else, much good, and since this writing only seems to get under people’s skins?

This is a good question.

Aside from the political turmoil created by the report on aging artists, my stories on this subject tend to be like so much poking at an open wound, and as a result of my writing in the past I’ve been attacked and called many things in my day. One writer (in a letter to the editor) called me “ignorant,” and suggested I was doing a disservice to artists. A gallery owner called me “unnecessarily antagonistic,” suggesting a better, more promotional and community-focused (if rosy-lensed) tone to take be to discuss how galleries and artists regularly “work together to promote the arts.” After a piece I wrote later criticizing local advocacy efforts for the tendency not to serve individual artists very well, a young arts organizer wrote that my writing was a “flaming bag of dog excrement tossed on the arts advocates’ collective doorstep.” And after I profiled an ailing and down-and-out aging abstract expressionist artist in New York named Sonia Gechtoff, her daughter wrote a complaint letter to the publication, claiming I lied about many of the details of her mother’s life and accusing me of slandering the artist.

The daughter demanded an apology: “Shame on you Michael. Examine your own agenda, disillusionment with the world of art and dangerous assumptions.”

Disillusionment? Dangerous assumptions? There’s much about the failure of art that I’m uncertain about still, but I do know that I don’t seek answers about artistic failure out of disillusionment, vindictiveness, or to rile people up. I feel for the single artist like Gechtoff who gets profiled as a failed artist and is embittered by the characterization or the gallery owner who thinks his business is under attack. However, as I wrote to Gechtoff’s daughter, what she interpreted as my “disillusionment with the art world”—i.e., the portrayal of her mother in less than a positive light—is actually an attempt to point out that artistic treasures like her mother are not well-treated in this country, and they deserve better. Profiling a failed artist like Gechtoff is essentially optimistic, because it presumes that such a portrayal will do good for the overall welfare of art and artists. It will reveal to young and naïve artists what could lie in store for them as they age, forcing them to seek early solutions to their eventual problems. It will shed light, for the sake of the otherwise ambivalent art viewer around the country, what has happened to favorite artists from the past, perhaps spurring them to rethink some misguided values and to retool some unfair policies. It will reveal to any and all interested parties what may well lie in store for artists if we fail to do anything about it.

In a word, I write this stuff because artistic doom and failure will continue to occur unless we are spurred to do something about it. I write for the greater good of art in this country.