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2 years ago
Follow-up Questions (revised): NEA/Fed Arts Policy panel at WESTAF
1. As a working artist do you see yourself more closely aligned with the nonprofit arts sector or with the ‘for profit’ arts field? Why?
“I think you have to just let the art world be what it is.” - Jerry Saltz, Intelligence Squared US series at Rockefeller Univ., Reported 2/7/09 in Scene & Heard, Artforum
“Of course the art world is corrupt. It always has been. So what?” - Peter Frank, from my notes on “Just Another Critical Day in Paradise: Art Writing in Los Angeles,” panel discussion at CAA Conference 2/26/2009
“Pioneers of computer art have regularly noted – in varying tones of resignation, defiance or complaint – the neglect of computer art on the part of museums, galleries, art historians, critics, and mainstream art publications.” – Paul Hertz, “Art, Code and the Engine of Change,” Art Journal, Spring 2009
To begin, let me specify my response: I am a working dimensional artist. Alignment is a technical issue/term that has concrete production implications in several dimensional art applications. Some of these applications focus on social – or more tangibly - human factors. Others are logistical. I’ll start with the social ones.
I have chosen to align with art, artists, democracy and community, roughly in that order. I’ll leave my personal life out of it (a significant choice). How does this affect alignment with profit/nonprofit corporations?
Corporations are artificial people. They align with each other. “Best Practices” is a euphemism for this process. Sarbanes-Oxley is legislation that mandates corporation-to-corporationalignment to – according to its advocates – promote the best corporate practices. This panel contains many suggestions along these lines, even though S-O emerged from an accounting scandal (Enron’s) that had nothing directly to do with art.
In my experience, support from corporations – either in-kind or material - was in fact support driven by individuals employed by corporations. Typically, the support occurred in spite of corp-org culture and practices, not because of them. These corp-employed art supporters often had to leverage their organizational power/capital, and sometimes strain it precipitously, in order to provide support for my collective or solo productions. I have undertaken collective projects involving accomplished European artists who find the state of things here incomprehensible, in the same way they find our health care system incomprehensible and woeful. The main issues are the hierarchy of power/wealth production and the prioritization of art in free society.
What of corporate alignment? Corporations are aligned with shareholders (profit) and mission/stakeholder/fiduciary responsibilities (nonprofit). In both types of corporation, free speech is impinged. For-profit corps can establish workspaces legally that contain anti-Constitutional infringements of privacy and expression. By law, NPs must be apolitical in their speech/public positions. In good conscience, due to my chosen alignment, I cannot therefore choose to also align with either org structure. Because corp-orgs increasingly dominate the art field, an artist of my description finds fewer and fewer opportunities to exhibit and sell work. After significant study of the phenomenon, I would suggest that this is an intended outcome (if artificial people can be attributed “intent”).
For-profit corporations focus on messaging, a facet of marketing. Messaging is not free expression. Those aligned with these corporations will stay on-message. Artists should not be on-message for artificial people, I believe. Corporations are typically monopolistic in their competitive trajectories. This means they commonly practice the eradication of competition. With respect to competing messages, it is in the corporate interests to annihilate competing or contrary messages. I mentioned Shepard Fairey and the Yes Men in other forum question/answers. For verification of my point about corporate messaging practice: Witness the AP’s campaign against Shepard Fairey; and observe the tactical approach of the Yes Men.
Nonprofit corporate art-orgs throughout the domain are trending to hybridization (another term that has very different meaning in dimensional contexts). In the art world, this is described variously, from improving management skills to “blurring” (another dimensionist term, relative to time-based optics) the boundaries between nonprofit/profit. The Irvine Foundation is actively engaged in developing a practicum for the latter. There are many other coded terms for this campaign.
Where is the corporate art world heading? The ultimate corporate goals have already been achieved, although – and this is essential for all Americans to recognize – not permanently or irreversibly. I would cite two recent indicative instances as confirmations. The first is AIG founder Eli Broad’s interventions at LACMA and MoCA (and Board membership at MoMA). The second is described in this New York Times article: “And Now, an Exhibition from our Sponsor,” by Robin Pogrebin, August 21, 2009. Basically, we are seeing the appropriation over a several-decade arc of the pearls of the Democracy - our best contemporary art museums – by the very multinational corporations (and the individuals who are their prime few beneficiaries). The object is to consolidate the arts field to align it with corporate messaging systems. This phenomenon spans the field, from the top-down. The goal is message control, and the effects are fundamentally anti-(US)art, anti-(US)artist and anti-democratic. On a side note, NEA critic Patrick Courrielche’s ad firm engages primarily in tactical operations designed to blur the boundaries between the art world and corporate messaging. His is only one of a growing number of such firms, who claim to act as “curators” or whose agents identify as “artists.”
What is at stake? The implications to the arts ecosystem are generative/geometric or exponential and profound – the integrity of the entire system is in jeopardy. First, make no mistake. It’s about money: a multi-Trillion Dollar global industry that acts as a closed and stable secondary market in which the huge sums redistributed upwards from the American people to the Super Class are laundered. It’s about fluid, mobile, international and exclusive prestige: as demonstrated in the global art fair system. It’s about message control: art affiliations improve corporate citizen imaging; provide a subtle apparatus for disconnecting the neo-serf-class from their prime expressive means; and – simply put – provide the Super Class with a useful tool for proving their immunity to public approbation.
As an artist, throughout my career, I have chosen consistently (tactically and strategically) to oppose these concurrently evolving developments and their drivers. I have paid the personal and professional costs for my position. …Which brings me to the logistical alignments I mentioned above. Fortunately, I have always managed to find or be found by artists and art advocates whose alignments are similar to mine, and largely in spite of a shameful lack of non-contingent support from corporations (profit/NP), the corporate-aligning government, and corporate-aligned individuals, we have found ways to successfully present meaningful democratic, technically excellent and innovative, conceptually rich artwork over two plus decades. Dimensional collective practice is not Corporate Hive Mind.
In a correspondence with Jerry Saltz just prior to his particicpation on the panel (see quote above), arising from my penning an essay critical of Saltz’s clownish ravings on behalf of Pipilotti Rist (“MoMA’s Sex Change,” Artnet/New York Magazine), I claimed to have outperformed Rist throughout my career. I suggested he review my online portfolio (70,000+ still images, 150+ moving images) for proof. He failed to do so. After an ongoing and at-depth dimensional analysis of MoMA over time, I understand the dynamics driving MoMA’s curatorial choice of Rist – a globalist art phenom/art fair favorite of the Super Class – over an American artist like me, of which there are at least dozens to choose from, like Joseph Nechvatal. Critics like Saltz and Frank, contrary to their cultivated reputations as independent artist advocates, are generally aligned with the corp-orgs that employ them and provide them access and prestige. This is prevalent across all corporate owned media.
The NEA is the only entity I know of that can step in, in tandem with other governmental agencies, to correct the mis-alignment (anti-art/artist/democracy) of the corporate-dominated art system. We in the arts field – like most other American industries – need a “public option” to survive, much less achieve the recognition we deserve/have earned. American free expression is what’s really at stake – in other words, the voices/visions of REAL people, not artificial ones.
2. What role(s) do you think working artists can play in arts education and how might the Endowment (if at all) help facilitate that involvement?
I would suggest here that critique-based art school education is an abject failure, and has been for decades – which arguably was its intended consequence. The problems of integrating critique-educated artists in schools are several:
• Many are incompetent craftsmen and –women, and so have little expertise to offer students incapable of discussing Foucault, due to their youth
• Critique is in many applications harmful to students, in their progression towards artistic competency
• Teachers don’t need critics in the classroom – they need assistants and capable practitioners for specializing students
Unionized teachers are under constant attack by the Corporate/MGT (“conservative Christian anarchist”) Right, because they constitute one of the few remaining American unions capable of effective collective bargaining. Teachers already have an NEA (The National Education Association).
The last thing a poorly paid, overworked, ideologically afflicted teacher needs is another critic. Artists should be advocating for (unionized) American teachers, instead of complaining about lack of access to educational positions. Artists, except locally, where their kids go to school, fail to organize to assist teachers against the forces that oppress both professions indiscriminately. Given that, artists, particularly critical discourse-oriented artists, should not be surprised when they are not welcomed as liberators in the classroom. We should either roll up our collective sleeves and get behind teachers, their unions and integrated K-12 art education within that context, or keep to the coffee shop, after work, to chat about Lacan and how regression therapy is good for painting, whatever that is.
To become useful again as teachers, artists must re-commit to representation, realism, craft and individual artistic excellence (the authorial prerogative or imperative debased by critical discoursers), but artists must do so dimensionally to be relevant. The primary historically-proven vehicle for transmitting artistic skill and prowess generationally is the apprenticeship. NEA must expand its education programs to fund individual visual art apprenticeships on a much broader scale, since the field is skewed preponderantly to other, less effective, models. This initiative only makes sense, if NEA is funding direct artist grants.
Otherwise, the destructive myths arising from Beuys and Warhol (that everyone is an artist, and everything an artist makes is art) will continue to pervade and corrupt the fine art (visual) discipline and its craft traditions – and more importantly impoverish artists. This issue is directly related to the trends toward extinction of the traditional American artist studio. The definitions of art and artist (or lack thereof) by NEA and throughout the arts field contribute significantly to artist marginalization in America. This is certainly the case in American educational systems/schema. By failing to enter into the public discourse defining standards for art and artist, NEA cultivates and perpetuates anti-artist prejudices, without any accountability for doing so.
The NEA apparently is committed to apprenticeships in a number of fields. It is right to do so. The mentor/master-apprentice relationship is the most rewarding artistic exchange. That is my opinion, informed by teaching stints at every academic level through collegiate, and a student practice through MFA, supplemented by many kinds of work/study jobs, including some at the field’s best support shops (Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe as a picture framer, LA Packing Crating & Transport as a preparator). Having experience now as both mentor and apprentice, I would suggest that an individual who has not engaged in the apprenticeship process is handicapped as an artist. The caveat is that because so few American visual artists today have experienced apprenticeship/mentoring in their fullness, the field no longer expects maturity from its artists, or does so without cause.
Art academies that offer critique-based, careerist (corp/art-org-centric) “practices” as curricula are really Ponzi schemes designed to generate institutional/financial sector revenues. The Ponzi-value is illustrated by schools like Yale’s, which effectively promote exclusive professional networks as feeder systems for the Super Class-oriented art market.
Finally, with respect to art education and artist advocacy, NEA must confront the gutting of America’s artist “middle-management.” The standard corporate anti-labor/pro-CEO practice over the past several decades has also afflicted the American art ecosystem, to our collective detriment.
This is definitely the case in higher-arts education. Mid-career American artists are routinely being ejected from college programs and replaced by cheap, untenured replacements fresh out of MFA programs. The replacements typically have created a handful or less of significant exhibitions/bodies of work and possess few mature art skills. Most are happy to have arts-related jobs that enable them to pay down exorbitant student loans, even though income from a typical adjunct art teacher position is unstable from year-to-year and undermines the institutional pay scale for the new replacement crop’s much more accomplished, tenured colleague/set.
Further, museums and exhibiting institutions are choosing not to exhibit the work of older artists, especially those with advanced teaching histories, and instead are selecting group shows of mostly undeveloped artists/art for production, or “global” artists. Mid-career (American) art teacher/artists should be the nation’s prime resource for educating the next generation and for supplying exhibit programming throughout the field. What’s happening to these US artists and educators is a national disgrace.
Unfortunately, theirs is a common experience among workers in all fields, who have lost their capacity to sustain their families, lost pensions, have no health care protections, sustain diminished social value, and who can no longer contribute meaningfully within their communities through the craft they devoted decades to learn and earn. The phenomenon is a direct result of harmful corporate policies, enabled by a corrupted or co-opted government. We as artists should use our skills to push back and defend our communities. We would be teaching a very important lesson about art’s transformative power to generations of potential students in so doing.
3. What points or comments on any of the prior five panels of this discussion do you strongly agree or disagree with?
I am seriously disappointed that my artist peers failed to directly address some of the blatant anti-art/artist comments of the other panelists, or reinforce pro-art/artist perspectives, when they were offered.
4. How might the nonprofit arts sector better go about organizing the working artists of America into a cohesive public voice as advocates for more public support and other outcomes of benefit to artists, or is that not possible?
Please see answer 4 above or www.iau-usa.ning.com .
5. Much, if not all, of the NEAs funding and initiatives seems to be directed in favor of the arts organization ecosystem and infrastructure, though some would argue that most of the funding ultimately enables the creation of art. What services is that ecosystem providing that you as a working artist find valuable and would like to see extended? What services are not being provided that you would like to see?
I am answering both 5+6 below.
6. Part of the mission of the NEA is to increase public access to all of the arts – both as audiences and as participants in the creative process. In your estimation how successful have they been in achieving this goal, and have their efforts in this regard been beneficial to artists?
Having reviewed the NEA press release “National Endowment for the Arts Announces More Than $77 Million in Grants for the Second Round of Fiscal Year 2008 Funding,” I would submit to the panel that none of the trickle-down effects of the programming described in the release provided any artist I know, or myself, with any sustaining benefit. The John Cage/Merce Cunningham do-over looked interesting. The “American Masterpieces” seems positive, although a touring program does not a destination make (speaking to my proposal for a sited archive in the nation’s Capitol).
It is difficult to be enthusiastic, when one is excluded substantively from the action, and has been for decades.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be a participant on this panel. As Thomas Jefferson writes to James Madison: “You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.”
Best,
Paul McLean. Notes
