Recently by Peter Plagens
What's the word in Neo-Esperanto for somebody who's a schmuck, ingrate, lightning rod, traitor, party-pooper, egoist, troublemaker, and whiner all rolled into one? Find it, somebody, and apply it to me because here goes:
Something, it seems to me, is seriously wrong with NAJP.
Maybe it's the hay fever (I sneeze like a Looney Tunes character with a snootful of pepper at dawn and dusk), maybe a couple of writing deadlines in the heat, maybe tending to my own painting and resentment at having to tend to anything else. But there's something about an e-mail press release that I got from The 8th Annual Gwangju Biennial in South Korea that's crawled under my craw.
I've been to a lot of these international contemporary art extravaganzas--albeit my geographic range has been limited to Santa Fe to the west and Kassel, Germany, to the east--and they've always struck me as a bit beside the point. Works of art, to me, aren't supposed to be attractions in a sideshow, rides in an amusement park, snack stands at a county fair. They're supposed to be savored, contemplated. Granted, some great works of art were created deliberately to knock the viewer on his/her sensory butt, to inspire awe rather than affection, to perturb rather than soothe the savage breast. And, on the face of it, there's nothing wrong with some cultural bureaucracy (a hip cultural bureaucracy, natch) plunking a lot of it down in a park in Venice or a bunch of galleries and museums within easy walking distance in Rotterdam, so that you can be an art glutton for a couple of days.
But the quantity angle--budget, number of works, tonnage of shipped goods, pages in the unreadable catalogue, etc.--is usually, if only moderately, played down. There's something a little tacky about a biennial or triennial or quinquennial touting, with trumpets, how much of this or that. It's like that woman in Brazil determined to hold the title of "world's largest breasts" even if she has to expand beyond 38-KKK to do it.
That, however, is kind of how they're spinning it in Gwangju. Take a look at some of the braggy numbers (not all of them--why pick on the birthdate [1919] of the oldest artist in the exhibition?), and see what you think.
One of my all-time favorite "underground comix" panels is from a Gilbert Shelton "Fuzzy Furry Freak Brothers" strip. In it, a mouse who'd gotten into the Brothers' coke stash and snorted a huge strawful, looks at his hands and says, "I have hands! Why aren't I running this ship?" A similar, albeit un-narcotized, thought occurred to me when starting to type a comment on Douglas McLennan's "Castles, Version 2.0" post. Suddenly, a little voice said, "You're a blogger! Why aren't you running your own post on this?"
So, here goes:
A former colleague at Newsweek, a really sharp guy with some favorably reviewed books to his credit and a wider-ranging connoisseurship in music than anybody else in the Arts & Entertainment department, would gaze conscientiously at the press kit for a contemporary art exhibition I was showing him. After a few seconds of silent contemplation, he'd say quickly, but with the same flat lack of inflection one might reserve for announcing that it's yet again a problem of the pilot light being off, "He's a fraud."
Art critics often have to negotiate the gap between their own open-mindedness--instructed by a century and a half of the avant-garde's seeming excesses turning out to be right--about what's good contemporary art, and somebody else's seemingly commonsensical skepticism (to put it mildly) about an all-white canvas, a ditch dug in the ground, or having oneself shot in the arm with a twenty-two being regarded as, respectively, a good painting, a legitimate piece of sculpture, or a culturally significant performance. Most of the time, I'm on the side of the de trop work of art, and much of the time I can manage to make a dent in the skeptic's dismissal of it. But sometimes, I'm not down with the program and agree with the doubter. On rare occasions, something that I thought was hot stuff previously in my professional life reveals itself as, if not exactly the "fraud" my former colleague might label it, at least pretentiously near-empty. And once in a blue moon, when I happen to re-acquaint myself with the work of two very different artists, one example seems better than ever while the other causes me to utter to myself, "What was I thinking?" The blue moon was hovering in the sky last weekend in over the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
Mr. McLennan's post is exactly one of the kinds of responses to John Rockwell's two "Castles in the Sky" of which I thought there'd be a whole lot more, real fast. I also thought there'd be some "Well, Rockwell's OK as far as he goes, but here's an even better idea," but so far, I'm wrong. And other than the typically constructive comment from Laura Collins-Hughes, the only one I got was from a writer who said it was unreasonable of me to expect quick responses from "an extraordinarily busy group of people" (of which she is one), and that, having finally read John Rockwell's "Castles" post, didn't have anything to say because she didn't have "a spare $20 million or any ideas of where to get such a sum." (Sigh.) First, you've got to have the idea, the plan; THEN you go hustle the twenty mil.
2. The "conversation" about arts journalism and a new (kind of) publication has doubtless been had many, many times before. But not on the new iteration of "ARTicles," which seems tailor-made as a site for it: by arts journalists and for arts journalists. It's on "ARTicles," I thought, that the possibility/discussion might take off and something might actually get done.
I'm rather aghast at the paltry response to John's potentially "Aux barricades!" posts about an NAJP publication. You'd think that there'd be dozens of NAJP'ers commenting, with their own separate ideas, or tweakings of John's & Robert's & Laura's idea, or some Garland-Rooney-musical offers to pitch in and help launch a publication, or some reasoned and passionate arguments against the whole idea, or something...anything! Instead, there's an overwhelming silence from a constituency whose very profession seems to be circling the drain.
What, we're all satisfied with arts journalism collapsing like a jack-o'-lantern left on the porch for a month, with sitting back and letting a few hard-working people set up and run "ARTicles" where we can post pro bono all those brilliant opinions nobody will pay us for anymore, where we can engage in endless shoptalk while the shop is being dismantled all around us? I mean, here are three people proposing something positive, something with perhaps even a little rescue value in it, something right in the wheelhouse of us who get off on writing about the arts, and a couple of posts about it are greeted with a huge, collective, "Eh?"
Come ON, people!
(If you want to tell me what an inappropriate post this is, or what a bad person I am, by all means comment here. If you're inclined, on the other hand, to do what you know you should do and contribute something to the discussion of an NAJP publication, comment on one of John Rockwell's posts.)
Yesterday, having miraculously and safely descended from a large metal tube that had transported me 7,000 miles in thirteen hours from China to New York, I walked, Willy-Lomanlike, with a bag dangling from the end of each arm, into my loft. Forewarned by my buzzing our buzzer to announce my return, Laurie, my wife, had Glenna Bell on the iPod dock as a greeting. Twenty hours later, after obsessively immediate unpacking, a fitful sleep, and four--so far--homemade extra-strength lattes, I'm ready to recount the rest of my adventure at the conference titled (in full), "China Contemporary Art Forum 2010: What Happened to Art Criticism?--Problems in Chinese and Western Art Criticism."
But first, a minor apology. The previously mentioned "German fellow who's a theorist at someplace in Vienna with a very long name that includes 'kunst'" is one Diedrich Diederichsen, a professor of a whole lot of things related to art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. (He commutes from Berlin, so yes, Virginia, he is German.) Herr Diederichsen is one of the most jovial, quick, unpretentious, and funny art academics I've ever met and I shouldn't have been so flip in my capsule description of him last post. He's so enthusiastically expert on American popular culture, in fact (he can discern individual Mickey Mouse animators), that I sent him while still groggy this morning a YouTube link to the entirety of Dos Equis beer's "The Most Interesting Man in the World" commercials. Would that Mr. Chen had been so hilarious.
Two things I was told never to do as a writer were 1) begin a piece with, "I am cleaning out Mother's room...," and 2) dateline a piece, in effect, as coming from way late at night in a hotel room, as though I were operating in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow broadcasting during the Blitz. But what is the privilege of blogging for, if not to indulge in thinly disguised travel brags and exacerbate them by being quasi-zonked for lack of sleep and so forgo not only editing but even clear-eyed rereading before hitting the "send" button? That, and playing the this-is-only-a-teaser-for-full-revelations-to-come card.
I'm in Beijing (where graduate art history students say they're attending The University of Peking; go figure). The causus aeronauticus was an invitation to speak at a conference called "What Happened to Art Criticism?--Problems in Chinese and Western Art Criticism." Speaking, as it turns out, is only part of the gig. There are two neighboring spaces in each of which a morning and afternoon session (one session = two speakers) take place. After the afternoon sessions finish, everybody convenes in the bigger venue for a "roundtable" discussion of everything that's transpired during the day. My earphoned duties, like those of all the Chinese and Western "scholars" (my own talk opened with, "I am not a scholar"), include giving my talk, moderating another session and summing it up for one of the "roundtables," and attending everything on offer for the four days of the conference. More than once the sentence "I'm too old for this shit" has popped into my head.
On Tuesday night at Christie's auction house in New York, "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (1964), a painting created in one day by Pablo Picasso, sold for $106.5 million, the most ever paid at auction for a work of art. Here are ten things to think about regarding the event:
1. Economically, most of the "arts" are about selling a million things (books, tickets, CDs, downloads, etc.) for a dollar. Art is about selling one thing (an art object) for a million dollars.
2. In contrast to, say, the prices of cars, "used art" (called the "secondary market" in the art world) costs a lot more than new art (called the "primary market" in the art world).
3. Buying something at auction means that you paid more for it than anyone else was willing to pay.
4. The worst art is usually bought for the most noble reason: Somebody wants to have it around to look at. The best art is usually bought for the least noble reasons: trophy-hunting or investment.
5. In an ascending market (and the high-end art market, over the long haul, ascends), the right old art at the right price is a good investment. It used to be said (in the pre-Euro days), that in times of great inflation, the French put their money on their walls.
6. There are always only three basic money stories in the art world: People are paying about the right prices; people are paying too little; people are paying too much.
7. Money stories in the art world translate something that most people don't understand (e.g., why is Picasso considered all that good?) into something they do understand--a sum of money. The bigger the sum of money, the "sexier" the story in the bargain.
8. Don't think too closely about the type of person who'd have a hundred mil lying around with which to buy a Picasso at auction.
9. The economist William D. Grampp pointed out in his book, "Pricing the Priceless," that the value of the work of 99 percent of artists promptly descends, at their deaths, to zero.
10. "Charlie Farquharson," the hillbilly anchorman on the old TV show, "Hee-Haw," would introduce that week's news by saying, "It's the same old news, only it's happening to different people." Likewise, art auctions feature the same old art, only it's being sold to different people.
Yeah, yeah, I know that bloggiquette says that you're not supposed to use the medium--especially a site with such a noble cause as "ARTicles"--as a dumping ground for previously unpublished work. But I plead two extenuating circumstances: 1) The piece, below, wasn't "rejected"; rather, the lit editor who greenlighted the essay decamped for foreign shores before it was irreversibly in the publication pipeline, and 2) I mentioned Bill James in my last entry, and want to post a fuller exegesis on his work. Anyway, it's not like I'm hogging finite space in a $5.95 magazine and depriving readers of that profile of John Tesh they were waiting for. So...
The first novel by Bill James (written under the name he was born with in Cardiff, Wales in 1929, James Tucker) concerned newspapering, his initial career. Titled "Equal Partners," it came out in 1959. His next-to-most-recent, "Making Stuff Up," published in 2006, is about what the author calls "the university creative writing industry." During the nearly half-century in between, James has constituted practically a novel-writing industry unto himself, concentrating on crime fiction, with a few diversions into espionage and, as though to keep himself literarily grounded, hatching a scholarly study of "The Novels of Anthony Powell" in 1976. But James's most successful project--and deservedly so--is also his largest: a 25-books-and-counting series of "Harpur and Iles" novels. The most recently published in the U.S. is "In the Absence of Iles," published in the U.S. by Norton in 2008.
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