Finally, my two conclusions attempt to turn to the aforementioned optimistic side of Marxist thought. Chapter 15 reflects on how one might engage constructively with the professional “art world” in the present while escaping its biases. Chapter 16 tries to go beyond a critique of art in the present, to sketch what positive contributions political struggle might have to offer visual art.
For whom, finally, have I written this book? I have two audiences in mind. One consists of artists, writers, and other art lovers. The world of contemporary art may be distinguished, from the outside, by its glamour and sophistication, but those who engage with it up close will find, to their sorrow, that it is unceasingly petty, full of unexamined exploitation and willful social ignorance. Year after year, it chews up and spits out idealistic people, leaving them disgusted and heartsick. And yet I firmly believe that the encounter between idealistic notions about what art can be and the far-from-ideal realities of art in the present can be a profoundly politicizing experience. For those navigating this terrain, I hope that this book is a useful tool.
Second, I have in mind a political audience looking, from the outside, for some kind of sympathetic guide to the strange flora and fauna of contemporary art. I have occasionally heard activists whose political wisdom far exceeds mine offer blanket dismissals of contemporary or even modern art as being wholly inauthentic. Given the field’s overwhelming association with the titans of the One Percent, this may be understandable. I hope that the essays assembled here can help do justice to the complexity of their subject. Contemporary art’s sometimes baffling character may be partly due to its decadence, but it is also partly due to how visual art has preserved middle-class values of independence and creative autonomy more than other spheres and has thereby held out hope for constructing an alternative culture in our capitalist world. Or—a third option—art’s strange forms of expression might just be something like the garbled sound that comes when you need to say something but haven’t quite figured out how to say it yet. As my own experience attests, sometimes it is worth being patient as well as critical.
I do not know if I have always been successful in writing in a voice that speaks to both audiences. But if this book plays even a small role in bringing them closer together, then it has done its work.
Brooklyn, New York
March 2013
Art and Class
Artist William Powhida during “#class” show at Winkleman Gallery. Photo by John W. Beaman
ONE
Art and Class
It was an article in the New York Times in December 2009—art fair season in Miami—that touched off the chain of thoughts that led me to assemble my ideas on art and class in a systematic way. Damien Cave’s profile of Brooklyn artist William Powhida tracked him as he moved around the aisles of Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual stew of art commerce and excess in balmy Florida, recording Powhida’s reactions to the spectacle as he went. It struck me as a strangely poignant snapshot of that particular troubled moment in art history, describing an artist trapped somewhere between longing and disgust. “A lot of us go back and forth about wanting to destroy this model, and wanting to support it,” Powhida said.1
If people cared what he had to say, it was because of How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, an outraged and off-the-wall drawing produced for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail earlier that year. Powhida had used this platform to vent his anger at the New Museum for agreeing to host a show of the personal art collection of titanically wealthy Greek businessman Dakis Joannou. Rather than being curated by a member of the institution’s staff, the show was to be assembled by Jeff Koons, an American artist known for shiny neo-pop objects who also happened to have been the best man at Joannou’s wedding. The widespread perception was that the New Museum, which had begun life as a lively alternative institution, had sold its birthright for a mess of pottage.
In his drawing, Powhida weighed in like an Internet-age Daumier: the curators, collectors, artists, and art dealers associated with the New Museum were caricatured, their incestuous interpersonal connections mapped out and set alongside quotes from pundits who had weighed in on the matter and commentary from Powhida himself. How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality became something of a touchstone, pushing Powhida into the role of social commentator within the New York art scene. The slew of moralizing denunciations about the Joannou show took me a bit by surprise—the influence of the wealthy on art was, after all, not particularly new, as American as Solomon R. Guggenheim and J. Paul Getty. I found the outrage inspired by the New Museum show salutary but trivial. In 2009, there were bigger problems in the world.
The minor revelation in Cave’s profile was the glimpse it gave into the background that informed Powhida’s art-world satires (for the occasion of that year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, he created a drawing called Art Basel Miami Beach Hooverville, depicting the art fair as a teeming Depression-era shantytown). “Mr. Powhida is not comfortable in this world,” wrote Cave. “He was reared in upstate New York by a single mother who paid the bills with a government job, and he has earned his own living for the past decade as an art teacher in some of the toughest public high schools in Brooklyn. He said his artwork brought in only about $50,000 over the past three years, and that he was still repaying his undergraduate loans from Syracuse University.”2 Those fleeting biographical details hit home for me what should have been an obvious point: Powhida’s satire of art’s institutional politics drew its outrage from experiences rooted outside that sphere, even if this outrage was channeled into something that felt, to me, fairly inside baseball; to understand the cathartic snark of the work, you had to grasp something about the situation of the contemporary artist, about the promises an art career held out and failed to deliver.
In an article summing up the controversy, I suggested that Powhida curate a response to Skin Fruit—the vaguely leering title of the Koons-curated New Museum spectacle—and in the spring of 2010, the gallerist Ed Winkleman invited Powhida and another artist, Jennifer Dalton, to curate just such a response show at his small outpost on the westernmost reaches of Chelsea. They conceived of it as a kind of freewheeling workshop or brainstorming session, with anyone who wanted to take part in the discussion about money’s impact on art invited to do so. It was called “#class.”
Scanning the proposed contributions to the event’s program in advance, I was struck by how many of them seemed to be jokes or simply off topic (for example, a debate between artists and dealers staged as a game of Battleship, or a performance for which everyone entering the gallery was photographed as if they were a celebrity). It seemed to me that artists were struggling—and failing—to find a language with which to engage with the topic of artists’ economic position. I wrote the short pamphlet 9.5 Theses on Art and Class over the course of a weekend as my contribution to the show. During the opening, I passed out copies and taped the text to Winkleman’s front door. A few weeks later, I returned to participate in a discussion of the text with Powhida and Dalton, which attracted an eager though eclectic crowd (including one clownish commentator from the conservative New Criterion magazine, who suggested that the problem with contemporary art was that government art subsidies were too lavish). Yet, as with most debates about art and politics or art and the economy, the conversation felt strangely centerless, as if we were all searching for a common framework upon which to draw.
Years later, the feeling that the game is rigged, which gave birth to the New Museum controversy, has only sharpened. The air of decadence has become so claustrophobic that even pundits not particularly known for their radicalism find it intolerable. In mid-2012, Sarah Thornton, author of a breezy bestselling piece of sociology, Seven Days in the Art World, and art beat reporter for the Economist, penned an extraordinary text entitled “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Write about the Art Market,” announcing that she was abandoning coverage of the market altogether. Her list of reasons included, “The most interesting stories are libelous” and “oligarchs and dictators