|
|
Re: The Value of Art
Posted:
Jan 27, 2005 8:40 PM
|
|
Thanks to all who participated in this in real time while I lurked.
I participated in a discussion of Galenson’s article and the transcript of an interview by Dave Hickey on the same subject last week with a group of artists, philosophers, and academics. Some of the people were affronted by what they felt was Galenson’s raw or crass or humanly diminished way of estimating artistic value. As an artist trying to get by, I think the questions raised by Galenson’s article and by Hickey’s subversive affection for the mercantile mechanics of the art world merit more candid discussion and perhaps less indignation.
Ann Klefstad, the artist and writer who suggested the readings to the discussion group did so in order to question "the euphemistic relation of art discourse to life in the artworld as a producer [herself]". This art discourse can hardly bring itself to use the word "money" in polite company. When we must talk about money as a manure necessary for the growth of art, the euphemism we use is "funding," thereby deodorizing the problem and wafting us safely back to the transcendent contemplation of higher matters.
The reaction of some in the group when money and market-determined status was proposed as a truthful mode of valuation was, as I said, to grab their skirts and reach for smelling salts. Even if this mode of valuation is callous, morally repugnant, empty in some core human way, the indignation at Hickey's clear-eyed candor and Galenson's detached observation of reputation struck me as absurd, in part because the "disinterested" academy itself, it seems to me, is in bed with the callow gallerists and cynical artist/careerists, the market-driven forces whose workings it purports to deplore.
For artists, the money/art perplex is chronically excruciating, and for most, always will be. There seems to be an underlying sense of entitlement in most artists. There almost has to be; it's of a piece with the presumption that we have something of unusual value to offer. Unlike doctors, lawyers, and theologians, however, we are self-appointed and self-annointed: we are shamans or seers or flanneurs or whatever. That the wider culture doesn't reflexively share this conviction of our value wounds us, of course, naturally; it alienates us and makes some of us go haywire. But this is where state-supported art can’t really help us. Art is not really an arena where the risk-averse belong. If it’s turned into a protected pony-ride, it is made trivial, even more superfluous to this culture than it already is.
I think Ann Klefstad was right in an observation she made that economic survival as an artist could have a great deal to do "with what… artists are able to do with charisma" -- Madonna, de Kooning, Disney, Matthew Barney, Tom Waits... how they present themselves is part and parcel of their successful presence in the marketplace and crucial to their continuing survival. At least if the ambition is to achieve global fame. Until the middle of the last century, and for all the eons before that, the only way an artist could gain support was through doing work too good to ignore (the sorrow is that sometimes the support pours in only after they are dead.) The estimation of a work's economic value doesn't consist (and this is my argument against entitlement and state support) in having done it, in merely being a committed practitioner (which some today consider a virtue in itself), but in others' sense of how much or little of a treasure the work is (and by "others" I don’t mean gatekeepers, insular curators alone.) In my opinion, inducing or arousing that sense is ultimately the artist's responsibility, not "the culture's" (whatever is meant by that). In the solitary arts, if not the collaborative ones, I don’t think handwringing over the dearth of institutional support gets us very far. For this reason, as a sometime critic, I'm less concerned to be an "arts advocate" (a term of bureaucracy) than to be an advocate for certain artists and certain works, one by one.
|
|
