Art Business Magazine http://www.culturenet.ca/artbusiness

Too far to the left?

In the art world, it's better to be malevolent than corporate.

 

by Tony Merino.

Mr. Merino works as a ceramic artist and freelance critic. He has published in journals in North America, Australia, and Europe. Mr. Merino is a cynic with a wry sense of humor. His writing is distinguished by an irreverence from which no doctrine is safe, and no taboo off limits. Mr. Merino holds an MFA from the U. of North Texas and BA from Augustana College Rock Island, Illinois.

 
During the autumn of 1993, I decided to kill a Friday night by attending an art opening at a local community college in Baltimore, Maryland. I have two memories of this episode. One was a confirmation of an observation that I had made a long time ago: the remarkable consistency with which community colleges hire sadists to lay out their campuses. This observation came to me as I spent half an hour on the campus in my Hyundai, trying to find the art gallery. I have been to community colleges in California, Illinois, Maryland, and Texas, and have yet to find a single one where the art gallery was easily accessible.
 
Once at the gallery, I spent a most of the my time being schmoozed by the artist, who seemed quite impressed with the fact that I was a critic, despite my obscurity at the time. I do not remember much about his work. I have a faint impression that it was clever, and had religious images. But here is the other significant moment: during the conversation, a woman approached and asked a rather curious question of me. She wanted to know if religious images were becoming more acceptable with the advent of post-modernism.
 
I thought for a second and answered with: "Well the art world ghetto-izes some artists, I mean if you are a Hispanic artist it is almost expected that you will do religious images, but if you are a white male you are supposed to be hip to the fact that Nietzche was right and God is dead."
 
But I had been too hasty in my sarcasm. Later, I discovered more in her comment than a person absorbed by the maze of artspeak. Her question sparked an epiphany, or at least as close a thing to an epiphany as a cynical man like myself can get. Together with my own hipper-than-thou Dennis Milleresque throw away line, I discovered a common and perverse phenomenon in contemporary art. The contemporary art world will openly encourage unmarketable forms and subject's from narrow segments of the community that would be taboo and unsellable to the community as a whole.
 
Perhaps the most infamous example of this dynamic was the art world's defense of Robert Mapplethorpe. The acceptance of his explicit depictions of cruel sado-masochism in art circles was largely dependent on its homoeroticism. It is unlikely that Mapplethorpe would have been equally encouraged if he was doing heterosexual images. High gloss, fashion photographic images of a man urinating into a woman's mouth would not be embraced as a courageous depiction of the author's sexuality. It would be condemned as paternalistic anti-feminism.
 
Mapplethorpe's art is "outsider art": it is difficult or impossible to market the art in the broader community. Within the art world, however, outsider art is embraced by a socialist pastoralism which assumes that this kind of art is pure, can never be corrupted by commerce.
 
This dynamic is most clearly and unabashedly detailed, with a bit of socialist anti-market bite, in Suzi Gablik's book HAS MODERNISM FAILED. In one of her chapters, Ms. Gablik goes into a long lament. She discusses the phenomenon of graffiti artists becoming integrated into the New York art scene. Gablik then concludes that these artists began to reshape their imagery to conform to the taste of this new market. To Gablik, this is very bad. Prior to being incorporated into the market, their work was more purely human. The market had deprived the work of its primitive essence, once whored never a virgin again.
 
Part of Gablik's lament is centered on a very patronizing view of these artists. She seems to assume the stance that the art world is the only society that edits the creative instincts of its artists thus presuming first of all the graffiti artists were not driven by anything other then a pure artistic want. This ignores the most profound social function of graffiti in the inner city. It is used to tag territorial lines for urban gangs. This presents a tricky problem for Ms. Gablik, one which she never directly addresses.
 
Gablik seems to ignore the fact that these gangs may exercise authority over these artists. The fact that gang culture is violent, harsh, and vulgar and that many of the images done by graffiti artists are equally violent, harsh and vulgar may be just an interesting coincidence. If anything she seems to decry the loss of these qualities as the artists adjust their images for the
more subdued taste of corporate America.
 
One can read a very anti-capitalism vein in Gablik's writing as she views the artists' transition from street-wise to chic. It is not that she ignores the influence that urban gangs exercised on these artists, she would just assume that this influence was less corrupting. Ms. Gablik seems to assume that the market is the most anti-libertarian institution ever invented by man. This prejudice is reflected in her tendency to ascribe capitalism as the source of all evil in American culture. This socialism assumes that the ends of capitalism are far more detrimental to the development of the human spirit than any other social structure. Any governing society is better to the artist than corporate America. While gangs may be malevolent, imperialist, misogynistic, homophobic militia, at least they are not run by IBM.