A Crystal is Cracked. By J. S. FB

(A too long post, but I forgot how to post a Note.)

I don’t understand something. Every morning I read a bunch of art blogs. I check out a batch of updates and press-releases from magazines, museums, galleries, and other news sources. How come there’s so much about the prices of art in these things. Who the fuck cares about who bought what work for how much? Good for everyone making money. What does it matter which auction house is selling what works, when, and for how much? None of this has anything to do with anything other than money. Why has the art world gotten so obsessed with this? It’s like there are only 35 viable galleries and 45 viable artists. Most of them male.

During big art fairs, like Frieze week that just started in London (and FIAC in Paris next week), these reports only come faster. We’ve built a worm into the system. The system is self-supporting and draws its power from everyone. Many galleries can no longer survive without art fairs. Some galleries make as much in a week at a fair as they do in a year in their regular galleries. More curators and collectors come to see their art at Fairs than they do at their regular galleries. This is infinitely twisted. But it’s where we’re at.

Yesterday my good friend, the excellent writer Linda Yablonsky, wrote a post about Frieze that made me wince. Not just because I may be jealous I’m not in London, having fun, breathing in all the pheromones. I know that connections are made at Frieze (and other art fairs) that are important for the survival of artists and art galleries. Yet when you read about it it’s like you’ve had enough of this. Here’s a sampling from Yablonsky’s Frieze post. "No sooner do planes land than the VIP program kicks in, meetings convene, the fun begins... the social calendar fills with openings, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners as well as alternate art fairs.... the elegant company proceeded to dinner at Café Anglais, where collectors like Devi Art Foundation cofounder Lekha Poddar and appreciative American Dylan Cohen could rub shoulders with Miliband, Zaha Hadid... as Nicolas Logsdail put it, “at least one Rothschild and one or two princesses.”... upper VIP previews... the atmosphere genteel, the lighting romantic, the general tenor of the work geared to bourgeois tastes .... an explosion of peak painting in both Duke Street galleries..."

This isn't about Yablonsky. Or Frieze. Or Art Fairs. Or blogs. Or people with money. It's not a geezer rant (I don't think). Something I wrote a few weeks back describes how I feel.

Here it is. “We now have this enormous top-heavy operational apparatus… a hundred art fairs and international biennials, galleries growing larger as artists work in smaller spaces, skyrocketing prices during a worldwide economic contraction. The art world’s reflexes are shot; its systems so predetermined that they’re driving us; we’re no longer driving them. The system is less susceptible to paradox, discovery, ambiguity, and all the exquisite deviations and orphic oddness that brought us to art in the first place.

We all need to ponder the massive expense and effort that must go into all of this, the making, dismantling, shipping, storage, and reinstallation of it all someday in a public or private space. The system may be too big NOT to fail. It is telling us what we already know: A crystal is cracked. It is time for mutinies, forging new topographies and plotting other courses."

And I said....
 True art has nothing to do with the cash, it has everything to do with the content. Cash, as we know, is propaganda- it determines value, it sculpts ideology, and to some degree that's also okay, but I work for a collector, I am a museum educator, and first and foremost I am an artist, and I see first hand the clash in belief between the artists voice vs. the taste of wealth. Individuals are generally given power by their attachment to institutions and it is the wild, solo, lone-wolf artist who reminds us of our own agency as a person, that thoughtful inspiration can breed new pathways for understanding and action. This instigation of meaning is at the heart of why we make work, and it should be at the center of what gets reported. The feeling of helplessness at the bottom that I have heard as a battle cry in some of the smartest people I have ever met, all artists, would be given a better opportunity to be heard if there was a true support system for the ideas themselves. Art is education, it should be a way to become what we have never been before, it is alchemical. It is the responsibility of the media, of the institution, to not just throw up their hands like children to the authority of money, but to fight like the leaders they are for the freedom to be free, for the power of thought, for the friction of saying anything that needs to be said, and with the right intention to have an ear open to what no one has ever said before. The money will follow their lead.