The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

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!

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.

In an art world that is ever more beholden to the NEW—to new art, new fashions, new trends, new money, new everything—a very common phenomenon is for artists to fall through the cracks. Artists who, at one point are successfully established in the art world in the end fall through the cracks of changing fashions and fickle tastes. They fall through the cracks of a career that is cut off by new, rising trends. They grow old, making art into old age that was once popular, once part of the rising wave of fashion, yet forgotten because they were inevitably overshadowed by the NEW.

I wrote once about an artist named Sonia Gechtoff, whose rapidly rising career trajectory led her to move to New York City from San Francisco around 1959. In 1960, she was at the top of her game—showing work at the Whitney, obtaining gallery representation, selling enough art to survive. Her future success seemed assured. Then, in 1961, Gechtoff saw a sea-change in the art world—away from expressionism and toward the new “Pop” Art—and her career quickly bottomed out underneath her. Although she survived many years as a painter by teaching classes at this or that school and showing in occasional Abstract-Expressionist retrospective exhibitions, she fell through the cracks of the art world, forgotten in the end.

A current traveling exhibition, called “High Times/High Times: New York Painting 1967-1975,” takes as its subject a generation of painters—many of whom who are relatively unknown—who continued painting in their native styles, mostly abstract, into old age even as those styles were deemed increasingly passé by the art establishment.

A subtext of the dismissal of the old by the NEW in art is much of this, of course, is a power struggle. That is, the art establishment that determines fashions has long been ruled, generally, by rich white men who get ever richer by their machinations and manipulations. Not to be too paranoid and conspiracy-theorist about this, but there’s a reason why women and people of color are legion among those artists who fall through the cracks. Or, as the exhibition description of “High Times/High Times” puts it:

Most art-historical accounts of the late 1960s and early ’70s say little about painting,… [y]et many artists during these same years were exploring radical new directions in abstract painting: pulling painting apart, moving it off the stretcher and onto the floor, creating new shapes and structures, using an entire room or the human body as a canvas. Influenced by social change and the burning political issues of the day, [a number of] artists… created works of great joy, passion, fury, and imagination, expanding conventional concepts of what “painting” could mean. Nearly half the abstract painters whose work is presented in High Times, Hard Times are women, many dismissed at the time by influential art critics, who saw them only as creating an eccentric expression that had some limited value and not as leaders in the renewal of a medium as important as painting. African-American artists such as Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, and Jack Whitten, and artists from other countries who lived temporarily in New York (Kusama, Blinky Palermo, César Paternosto, Franz Erhard Walther), were similarly denied official recognition. (emphasis mine)

In the great waging war that is the art market, certain artists are the expendable footsoldiers, and curators, critics, gallerians, and museum professionals are the generals who callously condemn them to their fate.

“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.

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.