Eliza’s Father: Abstraction and the Refusal to Work

As Slavoj Žižek is fond of repeating, the contemporary threat against pleasure does not come from its proscription but from the insistent, pervasive injunction to enjoy, which poisons pleasure at its root by turning it into a social obligation (reflected in the injunction that for the good of the economy, consumers have a duty to consume, if necessary beyond their means.) It is in this context that Matissean aesthetic pleasure came to seem a quaint notion. In a culture of immersive, obscene scenography (as Giuliana Bruno has called it), the pleasure of the visual has been enfeebled by surfeit. What could abstraction deliver to a culture already mainlining ever-more potent synthetic visual stimulants?

It seems odd, therefore, that this rhetoric of visual pleasure should be so prominent in the discourse that sustains abstraction. All the more so in that abstraction originated in a milieu in which its formal operations were understood as performative gestures laden with radical political meaning.

The notion of abstraction as a purely formal project was a fiction invented by Clement Greenberg who in the guise of safeguarding abstraction from the encroaching miasma of totalitarian kitsch performed a Stalinist airbrushing of its history that disconnected it from the explicitly revolutionary aims that were the source of its greatest intensity. Deprived of this connection, which is to say deprived of its traction in the social field, abstraction could not but degenerate into a symptom of the vapidity of a spectacular capitalist culture, mirroring that culture’s endless generation of dazzling surface effects that give the system the appearance of constant mutation while hiding the brute constancy of capital’s impoverishment of everyday life. We begin with Malevich—whose Black Square (1915) originated as backdrop for the Futurist opera Victory of the Sun (thus forging an originary link between the nonobjective and the performative) and after the October revolution would become an icon of the militant erasure of author and of both compositional and class hierarchy—and end up with what at the beginning of the ‘80s, Benjamin Buchloh dismissed as Frank Stella’s “corporate brooches,” an oeuvre paradigmatic of the straining after formal novelty to which this depoliticized abstraction condemned itself.

What Greenberg did not foresee, is that in reducing modernism to a depoliticized aestheticism he guaranteed it’s occlusion by the very machinery of kitsch production that he claimed to be defending it against, since the generative power of this machinery (which Greenberg failed to appreciate) far exceeded that of the bohemian brotherhood Greenberg designated as the avant-garde. Trapped in the formulaic equation of kitsch with industrialized academicism, he failed to register (as Marcel Duchamp had) that the industrialization of design, communication, and entertainment amounted to the industrialization or automation of formal innovation itself. The abolition of content and the fetishizing of form would come to be realized in their most extreme form in bourgeois ideology wherein even politics would be subsumed into formal discourse (“perception is reality”). Far from providing a basis for avant-garde autonomy, Greenberg’s depoliticization of the avant-garde facilitated modernism’s convergence with the capitalist spectacular economy. Within this economy, aesthetics reigns supreme, reducing all discourse to an argument over style and history to a succession of makeovers, each of which, whether it be the latest flavor of toothpaste or a focus-driven retooling of a presidential image promises to be revolutionary—a formal rupture—but whose accumulation is the tedious iteration of the same hegemonic frame that is the limit of the discourse.

Greenberg’s enduring legacy in the arts, rarely acknowledged as such, is the belief that the meaning of art works resides “inside their edges” to use Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s apt phrase. Certainly, as Malevich made explicit by proposing Black Square as a negation of the visible and not merely a withdrawal from it, abstraction’s refusal of representation was not an assertion of the autonomy of the nonobjective work but, quite the contrary, an indication that the nonobjective derives its meaning from the discourse (as opposed to the individual) that authorizes it. This is what enabled the black square motif to germinate as a stage backdrop, be realized as several paintings, and also circulate as an agitprop emblem among Malevich’s radicalized students. It was only when the discourse that gave abstraction its allegorical or performative function was repressed that the discourse of beauty became its default and specious support. (Black Square is exemplary in that when removed from its historical moment it reverts to a dumb, unbeautiful object whose materiality is almost repellent, the corpse of a signifier.)

Abstractions refusal of mimesis was always registered by the naive bourgeois public as a species of dereliction or shirking of the proper labor of art—a suspicion that abstraction’s formalist apologists have countered by harping on the arduousness of invention and formal rigor: the by now familiar refrain of “It looks easy, but it’s not.” In case the Philistines demanded proof of competence, there were always Mondrian’s paintings of trees (and numerous other representational works by abstractionists) on hand to supply it.

But I think the naïve public was on to something that got closer to what was radical about abstraction: its refusal of the bourgeois work ethic. This refusal is sometimes flaunted (as in those early abstract collages of Jean Arp whose titles assert—against the visual evidence of their careful construction—that they were composed according to the laws of chance); it is often unremarked; and just as often only manifest negatively, as a straining after virtuosity. That abstraction makes possible almost effortless production is a secret that its institutionalization required to be suppressed. In the case of the monochrome, which is the one abstract genre where this secret practically leaps from the surface, it is only by dint of the labor conspicuously expended on its finish or else the imputed conceptual rigor that informed its design that the monochrome can retain the authority required of institutionally validated art. Occasional succès de scandales, such as Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s invention of Industrial Painting in the late ‘50s (whereby abstract paintings were created by the yard on an assembly-line basis by roller-wielding volunteers) or the activities of the French BMPT group later in the ’60, were exceptions that proved the rule, scandalous precisely by virtue of their indiscreetness. For the most part, as in the work of a number of artists in this show, discretion is maintained without the secret being actively suppressed. Whenever the aleatory is invoked (as in Lita Albuquerque’s Red Paintings) or dumb process becomes performance (as in James Hayward’s monochromes) the absence of labor is folded in the absence of authorship: These works made themselves, as it were.

Of course, to say that abstraction refuses to work is like saying of the fictional Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s ne’er-do-well father in My Fair Lady, that he did little, when his doing little was an act of dissent (“I’m undeserving and I aim to go on being undeserving”). Abstraction’s mimetic poverty like Dolittle’s enforced idleness is most pointed when it performs itself as lack rather than what might compensate for the lack. “Keep moving, nothing to see here,” as the police are fond of saying. But who can resist seeing nothing?

Published: A version of this essay accompanied the exhibition, “Framing Abstraction: Mark, Symbol, Signifier,” at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, 2011

MOCA’s First 30 Years

The sprawling two-part exhibition of MOCA’s permanent collection on view at MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary is notable for the diversity of work it incorporates into one show—everything from a Mondrian to a paint turd left by Paul McCarthy. Of course, there are also plenty of omissions, but they don’t take away from the sheer breadth of the material on display. Whether such curatorial broad-mindedness can be sustained or whether it will narrow into mere Broad-mindedness now that Eli Broad’s millions are the only ladder out of the financial hole the institution dug for itself is a topic much speculated upon over the past year. It is not a discussion I want to add to. More interesting to me is how the pieces on display relate to others and how they function as cultural symptoms.

To be sure, the collection has gaps, omissions, and redundancies that reveal a combination of curatorial and regional biases and the limitations of the collectors who’ve donated to the collection. Everybody I know has a list of these things. Some of what’s missing pops in your head when you think about the historical lineage of what’s on display. If you’re looking at Zoe Leonard’s crotch shots from the early ‘90s displayed alongside a couple of Kippenberger’s portraits in a bad boy/bad girl pairing, you might wonder where the “cunt art” produced by Judy Chicago and other feminist art pioneers here in California disappeared to. And following that line of thought, you might also wonder why Mary Kelly (“cunt art’s” conceptual nemesis) is not in the show. Both Chicago and Kelly, incidentally, were in MOCA’s 2007 WACK show but that show did not depend exclusively on MOCA’s holdings. Consider that, and you begin to appreciate why a contemporary art museum cannot simply rotate its collection but has to have the financial and curatorial wherewithal to collaborate with other institutions and collectors to stage thematic and historical exhibitions whose scope exceeds the limitations of any one institution.

As far as omissions go, it’s important to keep in mind that even this “largest-ever installation of MOCA’s permanent collection” does not display everything the museum owns. Still, anyone with a reasonable acquaintance with what’s been going on in Los Angeles in the last couple of decades will notice one or several omissions. Off the top of my head, I can name several who are not exactly unknowns in this city: Manuel Ocampo, Liz Craft, John Knight, Kim Jones, Meg Cranston, Tom Lawson, Tony Oursler, Skip Arnold, Monica Prieto, Lita Albuquerque …

But let’s consider what’s there.

One of the nicer moments going through the MOCA Grand Avenue installation is catching a whiff of chocolate as you approach what you discover to be a re-creation of Ed Ruscha’s Chocolate Room (1970). The work debuted in the summer of 1970 at the 35th Venice Biennale in Italy, and originally consisted of 360 sheets of paper silk-screened with chocolate and applied to the interior walls of the gallery space. The story goes that the work attracted anti–Vietnam war protesters who etched anti-war slogans into the chocolate-covered surfaces of the prints so that the installation became a spontaneous anti-war monument. It turns out that MOCA’s ownership of the piece means that it reprints the paper panels lining the room every time the piece is exhibited. In theory, this means that the public could be encouraged or at least allowed to reenact the public intervention that with the artist’s blessing transformed the Biennale installation into collaboration between him and his audience. However, when I visited, which was the same week that President Obama was giving his war is peace Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the room was pristine and there were security guards keeping a sharp eye on visitors. In 1970, I suspect that the presence of the guards would not have prevented a less docile public from leaving a comment or two linking Afghanistan with Vietnam. As it is, the room might as well be a chamber in a Pharaonic tomb: the price of preservation within a museum has been the work’s mummification. Its function has been reduced to a purely art historical one, grandfathering Kelly Walker’s use of silkscreened chocolate in his work.

Contextualization sometimes works backwards. For example, Richard Prince’s Untitled (White Car Hood) (1992), displayed at the Geffen gestures toward the car-culture machismo that informed the material practices of the “Ferus Studs” who defined the Finish Fetish evident in the work of Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken. Because of the chronological arrangement of the artworks on display, Irwin, Kauffman and McCracken are all at the Grand Street building. You have to make the connection in your head. Prince’s Marlboro Man in the meantime has come to seem prescient of the cowboy posturing that replaced American statesmanship after 9/11.

Against the backdrop of events since and specifically the invasion and occupation of two distant countries by a rampaging American military, Paul McCarthy’s performances now seem like attempts to alert an indifferent world to the savagery that hides under the Disneyfied façade of American culture. The Tokyo Santa from 1999 featured in the Geffen building installation is a cross between Pere Ubu and Freddie Kruger. The association of this figure with that of the hyperphallicized expressive artist gifting the world with his effusions suggests that artist bad boys invert rather than dismantle the authority of their fascist fathers. I don’t think McCarthy ever gets beyond that bind. And in a sense the art world has been complicit in making sure he doesn’t get beyond it, since McCarthy’s productivity as an artist is of a piece with his compulsion to repeat.

This imperative to ceaselessly produce stuff and fill the large empty spaces of institutions like MOCA is for me one of the most oppressive features of contemporary art. Jim Shaw, who is himself one of its victims (and who has a number of his drawings included in the show), once referred to it in an installation by the clinical phrase Horror Vacui, a fear of empty spaces.

I cannot help but think that this horror that drives artists to incessant production is the apprehension that the time of art is over. Duchamp announced as much with his ready-mades but we’ve pretended that those were just provocations. We’ve read Benjamin on the death of the aura and technology’s reduction of art to distraction. But the aura of the artwork , which was its connection to the sacred, couldn’t be allowed to evaporate because, strangely enough, art cannot be commodified without some remnant of the sacred remaining associated with it, the paradox being that we need art to have something like a “soul” in order to trade it at a price above what mere goods fetch.

The last purchase that art had on something resembling spirituality was through the much-abused notion of criticality. That too is now used up thanks to the postmodernist conflation of critique and complicity. And despite attempts to reinvent the idea of community through subcultural affiliation (see Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait (1993)), community would seem to require a foundation that exceeds the atomizing power of capital, which ceaselessly uproots and disperses people.

The signs are that MOCA’s financial difficulties can eventually be overcome. The larger question of what art’s purpose might be beyond amusing jaded rich people or contributing a veneer of sophistication to a city that has long billed itself as the entertainment capital of the world will remain. Bill Viola’s installation Room for St. John of the Cross (1983) at least has the temerity to suggest that in Bob Dylan’s words, even art “gotta serve somebody.”

Published: Artscene, January 2010

Rebels Without a Cause

Those who help the despairing
Are the scum of the earth.
We are the scum of the earth.
Bertolt Brecht

The monotonous regularity with which the art world conflates authenticity with self-destruction, visible yet again in the wake of Dash Snow’s heroin overdose early this summer, had me wondering about just what function it is precisely that the figure of the self-destructive artist plays in our hopelessly corrupt cultural economy.

By turns, psychopathic, narcissistic, self-mythifying, charismatic, goatish, beautiful, repellent glamorous, poetic, and boorish, this figure, almost always male, seems to embody the fantasy of an uncastrated male beyond all law, something akin to a priapic pagan deity. At least, this is how the culture industry tends to position these figures, whose self-destruction renders them both immortal and interchangeable, as if each of them were the latest incarnation of the same, ever-youthful god. But the question for me is who gets what out of this fantasy.

Having posed the question, I immediately recognize that it is trite. It is doubtful that anybody past pubescence actually gets off on a trope that has been around the block so many times and has reached such a stage of decomposition that you can smell it coming a mile away. The real cultural phenomenon here is not why the figure of the artiste maudit still has legs, but why despite it not having any, despite its having been used up and drained of all its libidinal energy by the relentless commodification of bad manners and petty criminality, it remains in service.

Even the star-struck New York Magazine feature that a couple of years ago brought Dash Snow and his pals Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley to the attention of the latte-sipping public could not entirely hide the flimsiness of what was being presented. The article was peppered with tortured, preemptive paragraphs such as this:

If you were going to hate these guys, here’s how you would do it: You could hate them for using the word artist so frequently and so shamelessly. Or you could hate Snow for coming from money—mountains of it!—and being a cop-taunting, Saddam Hussein–fetishizing petty criminal. If you are an aging punk, you could hate Snow in particular for going over old ground and thinking it’s something new. (Iggy Pop puked on his audiences a long time ago.) Or you could hate all three of them for being so enamored with penises and what comes out of them. How much talent does it really take to come on the New York Post, anyway?

Well, why instruct us in the proper way “to hate these guys” if not because failing to at least hate them, we might not even notice them.

Anyone familiar with the Situationist critique of the “spectacle” will readily inform me that the repurposing of the vacuous into the spectacular (or the prseudo-provocative) testifies to capitalism’s cunning ability to make lemonade out of lemons. Where once suffering provoked real protest and real revolt, now revolt itself has been virtualized into the photogenic gesture of revolt, which transforms revolt into eagerly consumed pornography.

That is all well and good, except that Snow’s provocations, most notably his ejaculations on the pages of the New York Post, themselves had the character of Situationist detournements. Wihout necessarily knowing it himself, Snow was in several respects a distant child of the Situationist International, or rather, one of its decomposition products. With the Situationists, art and politics were supposed to converge. In reality, as with much that can be traced to the New Left, the Situationist stress on “desire” and negation had as its (unintended?) result the elevation of masturbation into radical gesture (literally so in the case of Snow, and before him, Vito Acconci).

If we understand masturbation as, at least in part, a kind of self-expenditure, we can discern a possible connection in Snow’s work between the autoerotic and the autocidal. But why waste time psychologizing behavior that actually conforms to what is expected of young artists on the make as the paradoxical proof of their “individuality”? The whole routine is as codified as a DMV driving test. Let’s instead consider why it is that “authenticity” is such a big deal in art.

Until the advent of Romanticism, artistic authenticity was not an issue because the worth of an artwork was not measured by how expressive it was of an artist’s individuality but rather by how rhetorically effective it was. If you were painting a portrait of the king, you were successful if you produced a painting whose every detail was infused with majesty.

Authenticity became valued in art at the moment that it was felt to be disappearing from everyday life, the moment, that is, when what today we call “alienation” came to be felt as a widespread condition. The displacement of the largely rural population of Europe and its concentration into cities, the resulting destabilization of identity and the rise of anonymity, and the devaluation of artisanal craft and the transformation of production into mechanized factory work, were all contributing factors to the modern fear that life was progressively losing its meaning even as it gained in tempo. In this context, art became a refuge for everything that seemed to be on the verge of extinction in the modern world: feeling, beauty, sublimity, and depth, and the connection between feeling and gesture (the actualization of feeling) that we call authenticity.

Why should authenticity become associated with artists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for their art? The question might better be turned around: How could art that aspired to be authentic demand anything less? In a world in which everyday things had ceased to make present (represent) their makers, art was expected to make up for this loss by embodying the life force and genius of the individual who created it. To hold anything back was to compromise the authenticity of the work, that is to risk making work that failed to elevate itself above the banal.

Willy-nilly, artists became the guardians of meaning in the modern world. Along with this exalted and onerous position there developed the notion that the purpose of art, and specifically avant-garde art, was to somehow redeem modern existence by reuniting “art” with “life,” thus making life more artistic (meaningful) and art more ordinary.

What has come down to us as modernism was this hope that art could regenerate the world. What we have observed over the past century or so is that art, on its own, does not have the power to do so. By the middle of the last century, that impossibility had become sufficiently clear that various artists shifted their focus to using art to alter themselves either by using their own bodies as raw material or by devising rituals and ordeals that would alter their own and their audience’s perceptions and consciousness. A lot of these actions, from the rites performed by the Viennese Actionists to Chris Burden’s self-puncturing performances to an entire genre of performance art that involves the artist subjecting him- or herself to something resembling torture, may well contain an element of attention getting. But the fact that attention getting should require this ritualized self-punishment is significant in itself because this demand foregrounds the anxiety that not merely meaning, but the very sense of being embodied is under threat in contemporary experience.

Nonetheless, in the tendency to make a spectacle out of physical endurance and the mortification of the body, we must recognize the implicit internalization of defeat: The world not being amenable to modification, the only object over which I retain power is my body. In every other sphere I am reduced to passivity, but in relation to my body I retain the ability to act.

Therein is the clue to why self-destruction is something the art world continues to shamelessly encourage (not overtly, of course, but through the canonization of self-martyred artists.) Self-destruction continues to be romanticized because it is a form of “self-empowerment” that has no social consequences whatsoever, a mode of transgression whose victim is the transgressor himself, and which not only leaves the social order untouched but actually strengthens it by providing yet one more demonstration of its unchangeability. Invariably, the postmortem mythification of the self-destroyed artist presents us with a picture of an individual who was a “free spirit,” “lived life to the full,” “broke all the rules,” and yet somehow never posed the least threat to the system.

Brecht’s point about “those who help the despairing” being the scum of the earth is that transgressions worthy of respect aim at permanently removing the conditions that make transgression necessary. As such, those who undertake to alleviate despair, as opposed to those who want to make a fetish out of despair, are more likely to be ridiculed as out-of-touch boors than celebrated as free spirits. People like Dash Snow are useful to the art world because they help hide the vacuity around which most of its frenetic activities revolve. The figure of the artist martyr helps sustain the illusion that something more than greed, vanity, and blind ambition are at stake in contemporary art. If there is, it appears to have something to do with the male appendage. Call it authenticity.

Published: Artscene, September 2009

Lost and Found

He hated the new generation with all the energy in him. They were frightful clodhoppers who seemed to find it necessary to talk and laugh boisterously in restaurants and cafés. They jostled you on sidewalks without begging pardon. They pushed the wheels of their perambulators against your legs, without even apologizing.
—J.K. Huysmans, À rebours

Back-to-back visits to the Peter Saul retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Sterling Ruby show at MOCA at the Pacific Design Center got me wondering if grief might not be the real taboo in contemporary art. Transgression and irony are staples. But in a country where antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs, the representation of loss seems more problematic.

On the occasion of Saul’s inclusion in MOCA’s “Hand-Painted Pop,” back in 1993, Michael Duncan wrote of “wacky canvases like Bathroom Sex Murder (1961) [that] leap out of the Ab-Ex era with the taboo-toppling energy of contemporary bad-boy art.” The show at Orange County fleshes out that glimpse of Saul’s early work with a range of paintings from throughout his career, and reveals the sharp stylistic shift that took place in his work at the end of the ‘60s. If his early work was by the standards of the day, lurid and vulgar, it was, nonetheless, still rooted in the painterly language of Abstract Expressionism. Its real, poke-in-the-eye vulgarity emerged when Saul dispensed with the sensuality of the earlier paint handling in favor of a pitiless three-dimensional clarity. The results were sharply-delineated, acid-hued cartoons, the unpleasantness of whose subject matter is magnified by the unpleasantness of the facture, a precise, obsessive stipling derived from pulp illustration.

A few choice samples: Ethel Rosenberg in the Electric Chair (1987) depicts Rosenberg at the moment of electrocution with flames gushing out of her eyes. Subway 1 (1979) is a Rube Goldberg-like sequence of wounding and mutilation. The Execution of O.J. (1996) shows the sweating accused murderer strapped to a chair and being injected with battery acid as his heart leaps out of his chest in the form of an enormous, Johnny Cochcran–headed erection encased in a hot dog bun. A pair of breasts (Nicole’s?) depend from the underside of the bun as the famous missing knife, still in O.J.’s hand, gashes the cleavage. The more recent Bush at Abu Ghraib (2007) shows the grinning frat boy prez sticking his finger into a prisoner whose face has been literally rearranged into a mess of gristle and bullet-pierced flesh. The overall effect of these paintings recalls the Beat-inflected, jivey sadism of James Ellroy.

Young male artist friends who’ve seen the Saul show tend to affect the standard hipster response of cool bemusement. Christopher Knight professed to discover in the Abu Ghraib picture “a haunted meditation on the depths of human cruelty.” I beg to differ. Cruelty for Saul is merely the propulsive force of cartoon slapstick. It is a dehistoricized and depoliticized cruelty, the universal constant of mayhem. Judging from this show, history from the fall of Constantinople to Abu Ghraib is a marathon cartoon festival. Biff! Pow! Wham! Splat! Thud!

Despite the provocative nature of his subject matter, Saul is a resolutely antipolitical artist. And, I imagine, this is the source of his work’s hipster appeal: that implicit smirk behind every image of horror, that smirk that invites the viewer to enjoy the spectacle and smirk in return.

This is Saul’s shortcoming as an artist and it is a shortcoming that eclipses his considerable strength as a painter. A truly great artist like Goya could unflinchingly take in and record the spectacle of human ignorance and barbarism without condescension. Goya does not smirk. That is why when he does offer a smirk, on the banner that is held aloft in The Burial of the Sardine (1812-19) the effect is unsettling: because it is not the artist smirking, reassuring us that we are sharing a joke. It is the picture itself, a thing, that gazes back, petrifying the voyeurism aroused by the spectacle of debauchery, and through that immobilization, opening up a space for melancholy, which is the beginning of compassion. Goya, too, like Saul, eschews political moralizing and prescriptions. He believes in reason but he knows reason is weak when pitted against fear and the violence of demagogue-induced paranoia. But Goya registers loss. The perhaps sleeping figure in the famous etching from the Capricios, a self-portrait of the artist, is at the same time a credible representation of a man in grief. Goya’s integrity as an artist consisted in his willingness to own up to grief and to struggle to give it unsentimental representation.

Sterling Ruby’s show at MOCA at the PDC takes for its theme a subject that has preoccupied the artist for several years: the convergence of carceral architecture and what he calls Minimalism, which for him means the antisepticism and blankness of corporate architecture in general, in opposition to which Ruby has elaborated an aesthetic of amorphousness and defilement patterned after the territorial marking of taggers, gangs, and prisoners.

To that end, he filled the MOCA space with scuffed and inscribed formica-faced architectonic forms, wax-like “stalagmites” made by repeated pourings of hotly colored polyurethane, stuffed fabric teardrops hung from the corners of the skylights (explicitly anthropomorphized into prisoners’ eyes), grungy ceramics, and a variety of collages, marbled papers, and splashy or spray-painted abstract paintings and drawings plastered on the walls. The title of the show, “Supermax 2008,” refers to high-tech maximum security prisons like the notorious Pelican Bay facility. But one could also suppose that “Supermax” doubles as a moniker for Ruby’s appetite for sensory overload. To hammer home the Foucaldean underpinnings of his work, Ruby included a collage that drew an explicit comparison between the architecture of the Pacific Design Center and that of Pelican Bay.

This is all well and good but in taking in the objects that Ruby has stuffed into the MOCA space, you quickly realize that what you’re looking at is Abstract Expressionism repurposed as institutional critique. The drips, the organicism, the defilement of surfaces, the graffiti, the smearing, the constant invocation of the “primitive” (be it through references to cave painting or prison culture) in binary opposition to the sterile and the authoritarian—all these are tropes that go back to Ab Ex and, indeed, to an even older Romanticism.

The artist’s resourcefulness as regards sources and materials is admirable. Where others similarly drawn to gestural abstraction might settle for oil paint, Ruby will do Twomblyesque drawings with nail polish. He will use unrecognizable sections of images from slasher movies to make grid collages. He notices the readymade abstractions on the plywood barriers that paintball players use for cover. But in the end, this manic collecting and the equally manic intensity of production leave no opening for a deeper consideration of what all this activity covers up: the depression that anyone willing to acknowledge the hollowness of modernity must risk. T.J. Clarke has referred to the evacuation of meaning from the modern world as “the disenchantment of the world” and has nimbly mapped how modernism conflictedly responded to this desecration, either by withdrawal into aestheticism (art for art’s sake) or by the seemingly masochistic glorification of the machine (Futurism and Constructivism). In Clarke’s formulation, modernism is an attempted flight from the present (either into the primitive past or the utopian future) that results in an oscillation between expressionism and a disavowal of subjectivity, fascism and communism, organicism and geometry, none of which can extract their followers from the technocratic nightmare.

Ruby’s oppositional logic remains caught up the movement of this oscillatory modernism. The terms have been slightly altered: the enemy is Minimalism, the righteous primitives are criminals. But the product, shorn of its Foucauldean pretensions, is a return to an aesthetic that predates Minimalism, namely, gestural abstraction with hints of surrealism. The need to resort to the rhetoric of transgression to facilitate the making of the work and its positive reception and the foregrounding of sheer quantity as a defining aspect of Ruby’s practice suggest that the anxiety that underlies his work is the anxiety of coming up empty.

How might an artist confront this anxiety more directly? Perhaps, by turning to grief instead of running away from it, by acknowledging emptiness instead of trying to plug it up, by gnawing on the bitter sweetness of nostalgia without wallowing in it, by allowing loss, which is inseparable from the experience of time, to register.

The group show “Against the Grain” at LACE yielded some examples of what can be accomplished along these lines. Curated by Christopher Russell, the exhibition looks back at another exhibition from LACE’s history, “Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men (1988)” that was curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins. To quote from the press release:

Cooper and Hawkins’ original show looked at decadent seclusion and syphilitic deterioration as modes of social rebellion and was informed by J.K. Huysmans’ novel À Rebours. This exhibition exposed the margins of the already marginalized world of gay men. The curators translated Huysmans through the lens of AIDS in a politically and socially conservative era, and displayed rich, decadent and inherently morbid work. They reacted against aesthetics that seemed polemically overwrought, privileging activism over the individual.

Russell’s show is billed as an attempt to look beyond AIDS activism and engage the gothic and the decadent in contemporary art.

Wary of the half-baked esotericism that the term “gothic” often denotes, I was a little apprehensive of what I would run into at LACE. The ploddingly mannerist paintings in this show tended to justify my wariness. other works proved engaging. Bruce Kennon’s reproduction of an exquisite Bruce Hainley review of Richard Hawkins in Artforum was remarkable for the sheer economy with which it teased out, made use of, and multiplied the erotic implications of appropriation. Robert Fontenot yellow silk procession banner embroidered with the last words spoken by President Garfield’s killer could have come out straight from Des Esseintes’s collection of curiosities.

However, in light of the thoughts stirred up by Sterling Ruby’s work, it was John Knuth’s Building (2008) that left the deepest impression. The work is a collection of shabby weathered-and-warped cardboard skyscraper scale models set down in one corner of the room. Where the walls meet behind the cluster of pigeon-shit-stained doll-house sized buildings, a small pile of salt preserves the desiccated remains of several rats. Without any of the overblown rhetoric that accompanies the Ruby installation, Building deflates the hollow phallicism that props up the modern dream of hygiene and control and, conjuring up the ultimate flaccidity via the dead bodies of the rats, allows the melancholy beauty of the arrangement to suggest that it is not striving but letting be and letting go that yield the most meaningful gestures.

Published: Artscene, September 2008

It’s All in Your Head: The Aura of Transgression

To Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936 and responding to Marinetti’s glorification of war as aesthetic spectacle, fascism represented the consummation of the principle of art for art’s sake. “[Human] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Fascism, Benjamin concluded, is politics turned into aesthetics, the triumph of image over substance. Against which, the declaration that abruptly terminates this most famous of his essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” has the defiant force of a raised fist: “Communism responds by politicizing art.”

In the late ‘80s when I first started writing about art, it seemed to me that what then passed for the politicization of art had more to do with careerism than communism. The politicization of art seemed less a response to fascism than an adaptation to the narcissism of a self-congratulatory liberal elite. All those newly minted dot com millionaires and advertising moguls and their brokers, lawyers, and plastic surgeons needed art that would advertise their superior urbanity and all-round coolness and give their wealth the gleam of intellectual capital. Identity politics and the dreary art that it spawned, long on attitude and little else, enabled an entire class of arrivistes to play act at being cultural radicals without risking anything. Identity politics made this possible by making the mere appearance of difference a radical act thus obviating the need for any radical action more taxing than journaling. It was vapor politics for people who sold vapor ware. You took your tics and kinks, magnified them into a full-blown self-caricature the size of a Macy parade balloon and sent it aloft in front of an audience eager to certify its own outrageousness by applauding yours. On occasion, if you played your cards right, you attracted the attention of some outraged yahoo on the other side of the cultural divide and your balloon could ascend a little higher on the updraft of hot air generated by the controversy.

In retrospect, the effort I put into trying to deflate some of these balloons appears as a huge waste of time. It was a waste of time because I naively overestimated the part ideas play in art and in so doing I lent myself to the very scam I thought I was opposing. Despite the belief inculcated in art schools that art is propelled forward by abstruse theoretical concerns, the reality (jarringly evident when you actually talk to artists and collectors) is that the motor that drives art is the same that drives music and entertainment in general, namely, ego: On the one hand the artists’ desire for stardom and on the other the desire of their fans to identify with people cooler than they are. The reason this isn’t more readily evident is that a vast academic/critical/theoretical apparatus encloses art and translates every plain-spoken utterance into a footnoted doctoral thesis. Imagine the same apparatus brought to bear on a Britney Spears song. Why not? Imagine what depths might come to light if sufficient effort were put into rationalizing her vapidity as cultural critique. Those who go looking for deep meaning always find it in the shallowest places because shallow puddles like mirrors reflect everything that passes in front of them and, thus, potentiallly contain the whole world.

The only reason a Spears song is not Art, but a signed urinal is, is directly related to the reproducibility of the item. Once Duchamp signed the urinal (with a false signature), the urinal became an authentic Duchamp, an absurdly generic object miraculously transformed into a singularly unique work of art. I have referred to Duchamp’s urinal before. It is an absolutely fascinating object. Why? Because it is pure, unadulterated aura. It is famous simply because it was signed by an artist who became famous by signing it.

It was Benjamin who came up with this concept of aura. In the now quite famous essay I cited above, he set out in orthodox Marxist fashion to draw a parallel between the dialectic that propels capitalism toward crisis and eventual extinction and a dialectic that pushes art toward its own radical transformation. While the title of the essay refers to the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin explicitly situates mechanical reproduction within the context of automation in general.

Automation has changed social life. It has brought into being an organized, regimented labor force (the proletariat) concentrated in vast metropoli. In so doing, capitalism has created a class of workers whose labor it exploits but whom it also endows with the solidarity and discipline that will transform the proletariat into a formidable army against it. Or so Benjamin could still hope in those days.

Up front, Benjamin recognizes that just as in social life, so in the sphere of art, automation and mass production threaten wholesale debasement. One-of-a-kind objects made by hand, be they rugs or paintings, seem imbued with a quality that machine-made objects made in quantity lack. This quality, Benjamin calls “aura,” a word deliberately chosen for its association with the sacred. The aura of the work of art in the secular age is the residue of the magical/spiritual properties ascribed to cult objects in earlier times. A painting by Manet and a piece of wood that in the middle ages was supposed to be a fragment of the holy cross share a common quality. Their aura exceeds their visible value. It is based on their authenticity. Just as the piece of wood would be a mere piece of wood if it did not come from the one and only holy cross on which Jesus died, so Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe would be just a picture if it could not be indisputably linked to Manet’s hand. Some would say that even then, we would still recognize it as an extraordinary work. Perhaps. But what if Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe had not been created as a painting but as a fashion shoot for the cover of a supermarket magazine. Would it retain its peculiar “authority”? Benjamin’s point is that it wouldn’t, that its authority is inseparable from its author-iality.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, and even more so in our age of digital reproduction, this loss of aura makes works of art invisible as such. The mass-made, mass-consumed work of art, be it a popular song or a tabloid image of Paris Hilton in tears is passed over as mere entertainment because it lacks the aura we associate with “real” art objects.

In the course of an all-too-brief panel discussion on the impact of digital media on art held at Artscene’s 25th anniversary bash at LACMA, Marlena Donohue made reference to Benjamin’s concept of aura and its pertinence to the topic under discussion. And she posed an intriguing question: Benjamin had predicted that in the age of mechanical reproduction, the aura of the art object would evaporate. But if the art market is anything to go by, exactly the opposite has happened.

But has it?

Benjamin foresaw that one reaction to art’s loss of aura would be nostalgia. This nostalgia is capable of an almost infinite number of shapeshifting forms from outright dismissal of the value of anything “modern” to a taste for retro gadgetry and styling, whose patina substitutes for the missing aura of newly minted objects. In light of this, the argument could be made that the art market is actually a vast nostalgic enterprise not altogether different from the fake Main Street at Disneyland.

Keep in mind—this is sometimes lost sight of—that Benjamin situated his critique of aura within a larger Marxist critique of capitalism. To Benjamin the persistence of capitalism itself is a form of nostalgia. As he sees it, capitalism is overripe, historically untenable, and this overripeness, blocked from giving birth to a new society, instead produces fascism, which mobilizes the regimented working class into mutually annihilating armies squandered on imperialist adventures. Fascism achieves this mobilization by giving the masses “expression” in lieu of rights. Instead of redressing the real causes of working class frustration—unemployment, falling wages, degrading working conditions, poor education, the breakdown of family and community, the exorbitant costs of housing and health care, the incessant stress of overwork and poor nutrition—fascism exploits the masses’ worst fears and hatreds and directs their aggression against mythical, made-up enemies against whom unrelenting wars must be waged. It happened in Benjamin’s time. It is happening today. We can’t go forward. So we go around in circles.

The cultural form of this historical blockage is the fetishization of whatever aura still remains attached to art. This takes two mutually reinforcing forms: on the one hand, the denial or depreciation of the artistic value of works that are widely disseminated and easily reproducible, and on the other, the hypervaluation of those few, specialized works that retain the aura of uniqueness. The absurdities that this fetishization can reach are known to all of us. A miniscule pellet of Tom Friedman’s shit set on a pedestal is a work of Art. But CheapyD’s “Xbox 360 Towel Trick” video clip on YouTube and the hilarious responses it generated are just raw material waiting for some “real” artist to come along and shape into a suitably ironic product that the cognoscenti can view in a gallery.

Benjamin did not specifically foresee phenomena like YouTube and MySpace but they nonetheless embody what he saw as the positive aspect of art’s loss of aura, which is its liberation from tradition (and consequently a newfound vigor) and its availability to community. What art loses in cult value, it gains in what he called “exhibition” value. It becomes useful. Or as we might say today, it ceases to be authoritative and becomes appropriatable, valued for the degree to which it lends itself to an exchange of creative responses. What we decry as attention deficit disorder, Benjamin described as the appropriate form of perception for an age when art, no longer a hallowed object demanding worshipful contemplation, could be engaged with in a state of distraction. “A man who concentrates on a work of art is absorbed by it. . . . In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” And in absorbing it, transforms it for its own use, turning images and words into tokens that can be put to new uses, as when a kid uses a popular song as a soundtrack for a home video uploaded to YouTube in which the camera employs panning techniques he/she absorbed while playing video games and watching music videos. The key is the unselfconsciousness of this appropriation. It’s what makes the work flow and the community vibrant.

As Benjamin notes, from Dada onwards, the avant-garde has repeatedly attempted and failed to divest Art of its aura. He imputes this to the limitations of the traditional media employed by Artists (i.e. artists whose work is taken seriously as Art). He notes in a footnote that what the Dadaists tried to achieve in performance, Charlie Chaplin achieved more “naturally” on film. But we know that the avant-garde has not been slow to adopt new media as they became available. Yet the aura of Art remains attached even to works (such as Duchamp’s) that go to extraordinary lengths to shake it off.

Something other than the choice of medium has thwarted this divestment. And the fact that Art is a hot commodity is not solely to blame either. Avant-garde art has been defeated by the very critical apparatus that promoted it. Warhol provides a very good example. There are numerous statements by him that reveal his genuine affection for the banal Americana that he recycled in his work. Nonetheless, the established critical dogma is that his work is “ironic” and hides a depth of signification underneath its too matter-of-fact presentation. In other words, it just can’t be what it is, because if it were, it wouldn’t be Art.

As I write this, the L.A. Times is reporting that controversy is brewing over MOCA’s inclusion of a Louis Vuitton handbag boutique as part of the upcoming Takashi Murakami retrospective. Murakami is a third- or fourth-generation Warhol clone who in true Warholian fashion has garnered a reputation as a radical by indulging in the very unradical practice of merchandising his designs as various high-end tchotchkes. In so doing, he has exploited the fact that the critical community can be depended on to always invert absence into presence. Like Warhol’s, the aura of his work is that it has no aura. It is explicitly designed as merchandise, but its very presentation as merchandise is interpreted as conceptually significant, or, as the well-worn phrase goes, as “breaking down barriers.” Never mind that this assertion itself erects the nonexistent barriers that it relishes seeing broken down.

Contrast this critical fixation with transgression with what happens in psychoanalysis, which is also a discipline dedicated to interpretation. The difference is that analysis aims at diminishing not intensifying the symptom. In analysis transgression is always recognized as an affirmation of what is transgressed, and the effect is ultimately deflationary. Psychoanalysis deprives symptoms of their aura. Art criticism exists almost exclusively to preserve art’s transgressive aura. And to that degree its function is reactionary, no matter how radical its pretenses. Because as Benjamin so prtesciently understood, the only radical step art could take would be to stop being Art and become instead the currency of a new community.

Published: An earlier version appeared in Artscene, September 2007

Picture Imperfect

Narcissus looks into the pool and is captivated by an image. We assume that the image he sees is of himself and so does he. That would seem “self-evident.” But as Lacan noted, the idea that what appears in the mirror is the self, is a profound misperception, albeit one so common as to seem perfectly natural, even though it is at the root of everything that is unnatural about being human. For this captivating mirror image (captivating to the point of enslavement) is everything that subjectively we are not: complete, undivided, coherent, autonomous, detached, cool. It is the greener pasture on the other side. On this side, the place where we live, we are needy, febrile, self-soiling junkies of the maternal breast. But having glimpsed the seeming perfection of the image that passes for the self, we are like Narcissus driven to pursue it so as to close the wound in our being that separates who we are from what we want to be. We embark on a lifelong, shape-shifting quest to achieve the glacial coolness of a fixed image, to become the succession of fictions that at any given moment constitute the ideal, oblivious to the necessary inachievability that makes every ideal an ideal.

This is life in the Matrix, if we can set aside the idea of the Matrix as some paranoid scifi fantasy and recognize it as the prison of every ego, as the unreal made more real than real by the narcissism that generates our unstable, insecure sense of identity. Narcissism, at its most fundamental, has nothing to do with self-love as it is commonly understood. It has to do with a fatal enslavement to the image. It has to do with enslavement to mediation as the basis of the real. What is narcissistic is the sense that things aren’t quite real unless they have acquired the distancing quality of images, typical of which is the sense that I haven’t really been to Paris unless I’ve taken a picture of myself in front of the Eiffel Tower or that I’m not having sex unless I can visualize the act in my head as a pornographic show (that will achieve even greater reality later when confessed on a talk show or over a drink with a friend).

From a Lacanian perspective, narcissism is the foundational surrender to the lure of identification, without which the very idea of an “I” would never arise. This means that identity and the certainties that prop it up are in themselves pathological because they require a disavowal (disembowelment) of subjectivity. And insofar as the enabler of this disavowal is always an image of some sort (an image in the broadest sense, an ideal), art in the service of the ideal has consistently exalted alienation. From Botticelli’s consumptive Madonnas to Warhol’s Marilyn to the doll women in the pages of W, there is an unbroken tradition of hiding abjection behind icons. Such is the mesmerizing power of the image that even The Matrix, which is superficially a Baudrillardian critique of the dream world of late capitalism, quickly renounces this critique in favor of giving the audience what it really wants, a revenge fantasy featuring a new (Neo) invulnerable hero garbed in black who having achieved “illumination” can turn himself into a human missile and destructively penetrate the bullies that formerly tormented him.

But there is another tradition in art, and one to which I owe my introduction to what might lie beyond the closet of the ideal. My first glimpse of it was in the graphic work of Cy Twombly, which I first saw at an Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition in Toronto, Canada. I’ve alluded to this in the context of a preview of Twombly’s photographs at Gagosian, but that occasion did not permit the filling in of the autobiographical context that gave that original encounter with Twombly’s work its peculiar resonance for me. Here I mean to remedy that omission and at the same time reveal how closely tied aesthetic receptivity is to the ability to acknowledge the truth about oneself.

This is what I wrote just over 10 years ago in this magazine:

When I first encountered Cy Twombly’s work, in the form of a small show of works on paper at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1982, I was staggered. And I do not use “staggered” as a figure of speech. I mean that I actually had to seek a bench in the dimly lit, empty gallery so I could recover from the turmoil into which the artwork had plunged me. What caused this had a much to do with what Twombly’s notational drawings disclosed about an attitude toward the world as it did with what they proposed about the pictorial possibilities of the “writerly” gesture.

Through these epistolary drawings/paintings I got a hint of what it means to possess an aristocratic spirit. Several of them consisted of little more than the artist’s spastic signature scrawled large across a surface distressed and aged through repeated erasure and obliteration. Here, evidently, was an artist whose profound appreciation of his own oddness could transform the least promising, most awkward of gestures into the perfect expression of his superior grace and infallible sophistication.

I read this today and I smile at the haste with which I summarily closed up (“sutured” in Lacanian parlance) the breach that this encounter with Twombly blew open in my psyche. What I had stumbled upon in Twombly was the signifier of my own queerness. Yet I insisted on reading it as the signifier of an “aristocratic spirit” because that now transparent euphemism was more palatable. More specifically, what I had seen in the “spastic,” possibly left-handed scrawling that is characteristic of Twombly, was something which connected with my own sense of being “defective,” a sense that I have harbored for most of my “adult” life and which derives from the indeterminacy (“wobbliness”) of an identity that has never managed to align itself with the conventional expectations of either adulthood or manhood. What I admired in Twombly was, in essence, what I could never bring myself to admire in myself, childishness and effeminacy, qualities that Twombly’s flagrant embrace of transformed into something like haughty eccentricity. In other words, Twombly had made his “defect” work for him and this I deeply envied. It was as if in looking at his almost empty drawings, I had positioned myself in front of a mirror that revealed far more than any mirrored piece of glass ever could. For in that mirror I could also register a transposed exile: Twombly, born in America, had found refuge in the world of the Mediterranean whereas I, born in Malta, had traversed the world in the opposite direction. His defectiveness was his strength. My strength was wasted hiding my defectiveness.

The strange exquisiteness of Twombly’s touch is really the exemplary affirmation of what is indefensible in oneself. This affirmation, by its very nature, cannot be modeled on that of anyone else because it is ultimately not the adoption of an identity but the refusal of any singular identity. It is a refusal of the lure of identification, a turning away from the mirror, an end to the fixation on an image and the craving to possess the sculptural solidity of a mannequin. This is a delicate maneuver to sustain and unsettling to those who derive their sense of identity from the hard contrast their own strikes against others. Freaks are tolerated in this culture as long as they agree to be clowns. (Two outstanding examples would be Divine and Marilyn Manson.) Perversity is acceptable in its thousand and one varieties but not as the amorphous eccentricity of the introverted. Shared vices are lifestyles but a desire for solitude can prompt psychiatric intervention. Thus, the simultaneous proliferation of exacting subcultures each nucleated around some highly specialized kink and the mass flight from what was once valued as privacy. It is now politically incorrect to express distaste for any consensual sexual practice but a matter of widespread indifference that the government may have unrestricted access to all our phone conversations.

In Twombly’s work, the affirmation of the indefensible took the form of an idiosyncratic artlessness. This is a quality that defines the entire paradoxical tradition of modernist antiart, paradoxical because every deviation from the established conventions of artistic practice is doomed to itself become a convention upon its acceptance, at which point its ability to convey or evoke the indefensible becomes nullified. For years after I had encountered Twombly, I felt that he had left me high and dry. You can copy Twombly but to emulate his example, you must repudiate him. In Zen Buddhism this is expressed in the adage that when you meet the Buddha you must kill him, something far more easily parroted than done. A life without ideals would seem to offer only the monotony of minutiae. When, reluctantly and with a great deal of foot dragging, I started making art about and with minutiae, I had to fool myself with the thought that the experiment was a joke. As George said to Jerry in Seinfeld, “It’s a show about nothing.” But the joke has proved to be fruitful and emancipating.

I don’t have standards anymore, merely interests. I accept that my tastes are unreliable and given to sudden shifts. Far from wanting to have the last word, I am relieved by the thought that I never will, for otherwise I would have to watch my unruly prejudices a lot more closely.

Published: A version of this essay appeared in Artscene, September 2006

Fresh Paint

On a rainy ray in April I trudged along Wilshire Boulevard and then up Camden Drive in Beverly Hills–which for me has all the charm of a facelifted celebrity face in premature rictus–to take a gander at Christopher Wool’s latest paintings at the Gagosian Gallery. Inside I moved from painting to painting leaving a snail’s trail of water on the polished concrete floor. Wool’s monochromatic smeared paintings evoked the rain-swashed streets outside. I looked at the paintings while listening to the disembodied voice of a particularly loud woman coming from the partitioned but not soundproofed sanctum upstairs. She could have been discussing money or somebody’s mental health. The timbre of her voice conveyed more than her words. It was the clamor of the banal and it shattered the decorum of the white cube far more effectively than any work of art, however “low,” ever could. This was a day when the “outside,” the beyond the frame of art, was not going to be denied.

I could have been put out but I wasn’t. I was actually grateful. The social machinery that supports art takes great pains to not reveal itself. It’s there. It’s always there. Paintings don’t get on walls by themselves. And those walls, especially in Beverly Hills, don’t rent themselves for free. But just as the military-grade logistics needed to create the illusion of naturalness on the movie screen are always outside the frame they construct, so too the dealings and machinations that make possible the gallery experience. When you walk into the white cube you enter a bubble. Even the air is different: it’s scented with the ever-present traces of drying latex paint, the hospital smell of art. And in this bubble, everything conspires to induce amnesia, to make you forget what you were before you entered the cube and what you were thinking about and how it might connect with what you are seeing framed by all that white space. It’s like an alien abduction! Except that in alien abductions the focus is on you. People who fantasize about alien abduction are fantasizing about achieving the status of art and becoming objects of intense scrutiny, thus momentarily enjoying an extraordinariness denied to them in real life. In the gallery, it is the objects on the walls that have been abducted, and it is their ordinariness you are supposed to forget.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. This abduction, this removal of images and objects from the seamless continuum of the ordinary is how art enables us to experience the ordinary as, well, a little less ordinary. Duchamp’s famous inverted urinal, Fountain, is the perfect illustration of this. Yes, you can read it as a smart-alecy provocation, but once you’re over that you are perhaps also prepared to recognize that a urinal is a receptacle for more than one meaning, as indeed all objects potentially are. Witness the roles they play in dreams.

But as the arrest of the man who earlier this year took a hammer to a copy of Fountain at the Pompidou Center demonstrates, the revaluing of the ordinary as art is also in the context of the market the realization of the alchemist’s dream of turning lead into gold. This particular urinal, one of several that Duchamp put R Mutt’s signature on, is now valued at $13.6 million. It is this sleight of hand, whereby a conceptual maneuver furtively elides into a commercial one, that reveals how the decorum of the white cube is also a marketing setup. A $13.6 million Duchamp makes a con artist out of Duchamp. It transforms an act of liberating subversion, which conferred dignity on the lowest objects (and by extension on the humblest forms of labor), into something like stock market manipulation.

Which is why on the afternoon I was at Gagosian I took pleasure in the unintended leakage of the inane into the hallowed space of the marketably significant. But the greater pleasure, an unexpected one, was that the paintings held their own. The whole context was loaded against these paintings and yet they somehow overcame it. We connected.

What did I connect with? I would say a species of intelligence whose hallmark for me is the sense an artwork conveys of its author’s awareness of its potential futility. Not the certainty of it. Certainty is always either delusional or fake. It is, at any rate, a foreclosure, a defense, even when it is powered by nihilistic rage. If you are certain that what you’re doing is pointless, than the only honest thing is to stop. No need to fill warehouses full of art about the death of art. Just dig a trench and bury it and move on to something else.

Wool’s paintings from the time he started stenciling letters on his canvases to his current practice of composing by decomposing, painting by wiping off what he has painting, accreting by erasing, have always seemed to have as their underpinning an obsessing over the nature and viability of painting and beyond that of the viability of language itself. It has therefore been easy for critics to tag his work as painting about painting. Which is accurate enough as far as it goes.

But the question is: why such agony over painting? What is the nature of the trauma (whose name is Warhol) that painting can’t get over?

The standard answer, of course, is mechanical reproduction, but that is only half an answer, and indeed, it is an answer to a misphrased question. Painting doesn’t suffer. Painters do. And of those who do, most seem to be men. It took the impact of Wool’s paintings to reveal to me how deeply gendered this question of painting’s viability is.

The question “What is a painting?” is code for “What is a man?” Were it not so, it would be impossible to explain why the spectacle of someone like Wool mopping up his effusions (or can we come straight out and call them ejaculations?) like a self-effacing Pollock would be so affecting to someone like me. Painting and the painter’s putative virility have long association. I would even hazard that the association between the phallus and the brush go all the way back to cave painting. By the same token, the disdain for painting evinced from Duchamp (who used the phrase “bête comme un peintre” typically translated as “as stupid as a painter” but loaded with the association between “stupid” and “bestial”) through to Warhol has an implicitly queer subtext, a disaffiliation from painting’s machismo.

Wool’s example is proof that the de-machoization of painting need not equate to its extinction. In fact, if anything, the notion that one can no more know a priori what a painting is than what a man is opens up hitherto unsuspected possibilities. And perhaps one of those possibilities is a return to styles of abstraction that predate Abstract Expressionism.

This is the impression I took away when I checked out the Fascination show at Cal State’s Luckman Gallery. “(keep feeling) Fascination” (named after a 1982 synthpop hit by Human League) is a survey show of what is billed as recent L.A. abstraction. Over the years I’ve been to a number of similar shows and this one at first struck me as on the whole oddly conservative. With the exception of Amy Wheeler (who was also at Shoshana Wayne Gallery through April 22), whose color and facture seem to reference digital processes and chromas, the other artists in a show anchored around a couple of Steve Roden’s larger paintings appear to be rediscovering Kandinsky, Klee, the School of Paris, Arthur Dove, and the Symbolists. But perhaps what at first glance might appear retrograde is actually the emergence of approaches to abstraction unburdened by the ponderous rhetoric of transcendence and existential angst. Roden’s visual “transcriptions” of music (of which a number were also on view through April 1 at Susanne Vielmetter) seem strangely static and mineral-like. And yet their oddness makes them memorable. Portia Hein’s liquid forms set against atmospheric grounds employ the fluidity of paint to suggest floating botanical forms on the verge of rebecoming paint blobs. David McDonald, perhaps better known as a sculptor, has a painting of what looks like a mustachioed head. Others in the show make reference to forms that can be read as representational and indifferent to the “purity” of abstraction. That’s one thing these artists have in common. The other is that none of them seem to be terribly perplexed about what painting is or can or can’t be. They’ve moved on.

Kids these days. They just don’t know how to suffer.

Published: A version of this essay appeared in Artscene, May 2006

Stepping in It: The Excremental in Art

When I paint, what am I really doing? Freud’s answer would be that I’m redirecting the complex of sadistic impulses related to what he called the anal stage toward a different object. Instead of playing with my shit, I smear paint on canvas or paper. To sublimate according to Freud, is to channel the libido and its infantile fixations into activities that yield socially valorized objects.

One of my earliest memories is indeed of standing up in my cot and taking advantage of being left unobserved for a brief period to smear the closest wall with my excrement. I must have had indulgent parents because I don’t recall any severe repercussions. Every painting since has at bottom (if you’ll excuse the pun) been a repetition of that first one.

I’ve been thinking about this because after a hiatus of some six or seven years, I recently started painting again, and this time with the full acknowledgment and acceptance that painting is “dead.” I used to be deeply wounded by that assertion. Now, it seems liberating. But we will get to that in a moment.

In truth, it is not just painting but all the plastic arts considered as media, which is to say as efficient vehicles for disseminating ideas, that are dead. The tendency to regard the plastic arts as media reflects the ubiquitousness of advertising. But it dovetails with the romantic notion of art as primarily a means of “self-expression.” Even putting aside for the moment the problematic of the self, the self-consciously expressed content of art is rarely the most engaging. What we typically get is: “Love me because . . . I’m a primitive . . . I’m conversant with the latest theory . . . I’m hip . . . I don’t care about being hip . . . “ and any number of variations on and permutations of these themes. Art that bears more than passing attention speaks with a fractured voice or with several conflicting voices at once. And it may well leave one unable to decide whether one loves it or hates it. At this level, if art functions as a medium it is a medium of a hard-to-pin-down subject that evades the censorship of the official facade we call the ego. And at this level, which is not the level of communicating what one already knows or thinks one knows but the level of bringing to light what one would rather not know­—awkwardness, fear, isolation, perversity‑the choice of medium itself, which is actually not a choice but something akin to a fatal attraction, is significant in itself.

Fundamentally, all media, like all languages, are dead structures haunted by living ghosts. Nobody is born speaking English any more than they are born speaking Latin. When a language is officially dead, however, its materiality is unveiled. And so it is that the obsolescence of the plastic arts as media brings into play that very inertness that artists formerly had to struggle against to create the illusion of life.

For better or worse, this dimension of art, the material side, or if you want to do without euphemisms, the excremental dimension, is what excites me. In my mind at least, poetry, pottery, and potty are concepts that are intimately related, to a degree that has not always been easy to acknowledge. When I gave up on painting, one of the reasons was that I had convinced myself that none of the things that “should” interest a painter interested me. Not light. Not the figure. Not the tradition. Or at any rate, none of these things directly, in their own right. The thing that made painting available to me was the ability of a surface to hold dirt. At a certain point that didn’t seem like a sustainable reason for making paintings. It meant that my ambition was to make crap!
Well, I got over it. Now, the trick is to work without pretensions or expectations, avoiding any ambition except the extremely modest one of making something that resembles a painting in the very rudimentary sense of being a paint-covered surface.

In the meantime, I’ve been rethinking some of my old prejudices. Being a latent coprophiliac can make you queasy about the manifestation of the same tendency in other people. That would account, for instance, for the negative reaction I had when I first came upon Mike Kelley’s stuffed animal sculptures. (That and my aversion to the monotonous regularity with which the artworld manufactures new sensations.) Upon recently seeing an image of one of these things on the web, what struck me was the gamut of excremental connotations that they manage to pack. Conjoined from discards, the no-longer-wanted “babies” of children who’ve outgrown their childhood or at least their toys, they work every possible excremental metaphor: shit as penis, shit as baby, shit as gift, shit as viscera. Their real kick, though, comes from the incongruous associations Kelley sutures together. In their “normal” context these toys symbolize the innocence that adults attribute to children, in denial of both their own memories and what Freud and Melanie Klein uncovered about the anarchic perversity of infantile fantasy. Kelley’s provocation consists in remaking them into the playthings of that denied fantasy, which he reactivates as his own return to infantilism.

The excremental manifests in art in various guises. The references can be direct, oblique, or entirely unconscious. It can manifest as poverty of both content and means. Pop, for instance, is often associated with the consumption side of the economy. But its iconography typically focuses on the most used-up (evacuated) of visual clichés. To that extent it betrays an impulse to revalorize the excremental. Earthworks and the postminimalist fixation on the processing of industrial materials from which the earthworks aesthetic developed revalorize the excremental by associating it with the constructive and destructive energies of heavy industry. Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown is a big dump. His Monuments of Passaic are a colonoscopy of New Jersey’s industrial wastelands.

Sometimes the excremental manifests in forms that are at once both more direct in their reference but which, thanks to their exploitation of viewers’ presumptions, also more veiled. Nothing could be more fecal as an art material than clay, and the forms Linda Benglis (who has a long history of making art by dumping stuff on the floor) recently exhibited at Frank Lloyd practically declare themselves as piles of shit. But the high-art context, the cutesy titles, and the omnipresent memory of abstract expressionist gesturalism all conspire to hide what would otherwise be obvious. In this case, the revalorization of the excremental relies on granting viewers covert satisfaction of their coprophilia without disturbing their decorous denial of it. This is perhaps the oldest of art strategies. The excremental, after all, is contraband in the very manipulation of the materials of the plastic arts. Yet we typically overlook this. When I previewed Carlos Estrada-Vega’s modular paintings some time ago, I mentioned their resemblance to confections. That placed them at the oral entrance to the digestive tract. But these things are almost literally stacked logs. They are colored turds. Nonetheless, the connection escaped me because, quite simply, I didn’t want to see it. On the other hand, something that has never escaped me, and of which I was once again reminded by a show of works on paper at Manny Silverman, is how unmistakably (at least to me) Robert Motherwell’s black shapes in his “Elegy” series resemble turds.

With other artists, it is the poverty of their materials that is immediately striking. The tactic here is to redeem the excremental by elegantly reconfiguring it. This is something that Steve DeGroodt does all the time. The aesthetic is transmutative. It coaxes the exquisite out of the mundane. But sometimes the exquisite is but a detour that eventually returns, perhaps unwittingly, to the excremental. An example is supplied by Lynn Aldrich’s Serpentarium, which consists of a coiled garden hose held together with cable ties and made to assume the shape of a pot. The allusions to serpents and pots are already fecal but if you mentally invert the sculpture, the connection becomes impossible to evade: you end up with a plastic pile of doo-doo.
These and countless other works reveal the prevalence of the excremental theme in art that foregrounds its materiality.

What is it that keeps artists orbiting this theme? It has to be, in some part, a need to address a trauma that is actually universal. If a child’s first gift is shit–the gift of its insides, prototype of all later “expressions”–then one of its earliest traumas is the discovery that others do not value this gift as highly as it does. Its precious gift is literally wasted. An artist, presumably, is someone who never gets over this disappointment but spends the rest of his or her life trying to make shit that others will acknowledge wanting.

At a deeper level, the value of the excremental may lie in its ability to evoke what Lacan called the Real, which is the world in its uncategorizable fullness, the world unmediated by language, and, therefore, also the world that is beyond our grasp. This Real, which we imagine we knew once as a state of Edenic wholeness, is a fiction, for the simple but not obvious reason that prior to our acquisition of language and simultaneous fall into alienation, the self that could experience and enjoy this unity did not exist. Unity, by definition, does not permit individuation. The paradox is that this blissful Real comes into view only at the moment when it becomes unattainable, there being no way to be unborn to language once you have been cast into it. Subsequently the Real attains the status of what Freud called the Lost Object, which we relentlessly seek in other people, blind to the fact that the idea of its being lost is itself a consoling fiction designed to give us hope by constituting the lost object as capable of being refound.

Were we to actually attain this Real, impossible as that is, we would experience psychic obliteration in the same way that the Greeks imagined that humans exposed to the unbearable effulgence of the gods would instantly burn up. The beyond of language is a realm of suffocating, crushing fullness. From a distance, an aesthetic distance, this beyond of language has the same allure as the aestheticized excremental. From this distance, the Real is the allure of plasticity and the beauty of color and texture. Up close, at the point where mediation approaches its limit, the Real and the excremental become overpowering. At that point, shit becomes a nasty reminder of death, decomposition, and reincorporation into the impersonal.

Art that concerns itself with its own materiality inevitably preoccupies itself with transfiguring the excremental, the heaviness of death that weighs upon life, into aesthetic presence. The gift artists give to others, it turns out, is not a specific object, but the spectacle of sublimation itself.

Published: Artscene, December 2005

Art Dot Com

According to Mapquest, the distance from my house to Bergamot Station is 24.21 miles, which, under ideal driving conditions, I should be able to traverse in 27 minutes. The corresponding distances/times for LACMA and MOCA are 12.45 miles/26 minutes and 11.35 miles/15 minutes. (The figures for LACMA bear out the well-known fact that no matter what freeway you take, a substantial part of the journey will be on surface streets.)

Given a choice between hauling a 2810-pound car on a 50-mile roundtrip on LA freeways or shifting a four-ounce computer mouse a fraction of an inch and clicking, my hand reaches for the mouse more often than for the car keys.

The reality is that in the last three or four years, I and everyone else with an Internet-connected computer have indeed been given this choice. Artists, in vast numbers, have made the Web their venue of choice, and the growth of weblogging has fostered an online art community more vibrant than anything to be found in a city as vast and amorphously entropic as LA. The Web has revealed that communities are networks rather than physical entities tied to specific locales. It has dematerialized communities and in so doing it has created the infrastructure for the dematerialization of art as part of a broader dematerialization and globalization of social intercourse.

In the early `70s the notion of the dematerialization of art was associated with Conceptual art. The impetus came from different sources. Nonobjective art seemed to point in that direction as its own logical conclusion. Coming from an entirely different direction, Pop suggested that art was a matter of attitude and framing. If, as Warhol famously said, everything is art, then an artist’s job is to induce in others the requisite level of alienation that transforms the world into a huge museum of itself. From that standpoint, art was never farther than a slight shift in mental perspective. Duchamp’s readymades had already seemed to argue such a position, but unbeknownst to many of his Pop admirers, Duchamp’s conceptualism was rooted in something closer to alchemy than cold logic. One could even argue that Duchamp’s antiart was radical not because it was new but because it was a resurrection of a conception of art that harkened back to the very origins of art, when art was less an aesthetic pursuit than a magical one, namely, a means to manipulate reality by manipulating symbols. In that sense, paleolithic art is already conceptual. It simply took Beuys to make the connection explicit by modeling his performances on shamanic ritual. But, I would also argue that even the driest, semantic-obsessed Conceptual art trades on this connection between art and magic and the unfamothable strangeness, when one pauses to think about it, of the relationship between words and what they signify.

Of course, there was also a political dimension to Conceptual art and its insistence on the dematerialization of the art object. If art is not an object, it is ungraspable. Or at the very least, untradeable. In the minds of many of its apologists, the dematerialization of art equated to its decommodification. And also its democratization, since Conceptual art demanded little in the way of craft and put the premium on intellectual acuity. Post-Conceptual/Postmodern artists and theoreticians took this line of thought farther and questioned the value and meaning of such hallowed concepts as originality and authorship. Feminists critiqued the macho underpinnings of production-oriented, agonistic art practices like Abstract Expressionism and proposed alternative procedures based on collaboration and the inclusion of subject matter and materials formerly disdained as inherently unaesthetic.

But all of this remained a largely academic exercise until the advent of digital media and the Internet. As long as artists were constrained to communicate with each other and their audience and disseminate their work through galleries and print, logistics defeated good intentions. An artist without a gallery or an artist with a gallery whose work did not get reviewed might as well have been chopping trees in Bishop Berkeley’s forest where nobody heard the sound of their falling. If anything, in the course of the `80s the commodification of art reached obscene proportions.

The Internet has changed all this by supplying the missing link: a gallery or soapbox for anyone who wants one and a potential audience that spans the globe. As I write this, domain name registrations can be had for as little as $8.95 a year. Good web hosting costs $7.95 a month. In an essay titled “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurisation of Publishing,” Clay Shirky explains that this means publishing has become so efficient that it can no longer be a professional, paying activity. Writes Shirky:

Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value [of publishing], because they are a platform for the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.

Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality. A book’s physical presence says “Someone thought this was worth risking money on.” Because large-scale print publishing costs so much, anyone who wants to be a published author has to convince a professionally skeptical system to take that risk. You can see how much we rely on this signal of value by reflecting on our attitudes towards vanity press publications.

What Shirky says about publishing applies equally to art exhibiting. Welcome to artistic communism! (And in case you think I’m joking about the communism bit, consider how apoplectically the music and movie industries have reacted to online sharing networks.)

So what exactly has this translated into on the Web?

Well, for starters about a zillion photoblogs. Photoblog.org keeps an updated list. L. Brandon Stone, who runs the site, keeps the definition of photoblog simple: “Something is a photoblog if: it has photos, it’s on the web, and it is a log of some sort.” By that definition (which specifically excludes what Stone calls galleries, which are mere collections or portfolios of images) 6,120 sites in 69 countries and 33 languages qualify. Of those, 1,057 are American. By some fluke, the second-ranked country is Canada (222 photoblogs), followed by Japan (187).

Moblogs are a subcategory of photoblogs but an increasingly significant one. These are blogs of pictures taken with mobile phone cameras. One Japanese site worth mentioning is Pocket Publishing and it’s worth mentioning because apparently the whole site is produced, maintained, and meant to be viewed on a mobile phone. Mobile phone cameras got attention in this country during the Abu Ghraib torture-pictures scandal but in Japan researchers Okabe Daisuke and Mizuko Ito of Keio University note that camera phones are changing the very definition of picture worthy by transforming things like a miniature milk carton on an airline tray or the escalator in a train station into “neta” or news shots, even though the news may be shared with only a few friends. Closer to home, camera phone images were this past summer the subject of SENT, an exhibition mounted in a downtown L.A. hotel.

The photoblogs that tend to catch my attention typically focus on what seem like utterly trivial and perhaps even stupid things. Call it abject minimalism if you will. One such is an anonymous French site dedicated entirely to objects held together by brown ruber (sic) tape. Another, A Polaroid A Day, Everyday is maintained by Brooklynite Christopher Stangland, who confesses that “There are PLENTY of pictures in here that I think really suck, and would love to’ve re-shot, but that is not how it works.” My absolute favorite (though it might not qualify as a photoblog) is Lori Ann Napoleon’s collection of personal maps drawn by other people. These and sites like them reveal the extraordinary freedom to reframe the ubiquitous that taking art out of its precious white cube gives artists. Art is indeed everywhere, but until digital cameras and scanners and the internet combined, that was just a proposition. Now it’s a demonstrable and shared fact. And the same is true of that once terrifying notion, the obsolesence of authorship. No, artists have not disappeared into some black hole but on the Web at least there seems to be a healthy sense that barring a lawyerly cease and desist order everything is up for grabs and can be appropriated to one’s own ends and passed on to be used by somebody else.

What about the Web as a medium? By that I mean the Web not just as a showcase for pictures but the exploration and exploitation of the total resources of Web design to create sites that are a work of art in themselves.

You will find some impressive examples of this at Turbulence a project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) that has the backing of heavy hitters like the Andy Warhol Foundation and the NEA among others. A couple of examples:

Apartment by Marec Walkzak and Martin Wattenberg: “Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships.”

Infecter by Shannon Kennedy: “Infecter creates abstract visual interpretations of computer virus source code. These visual systems are based on the gridded structures that scientists use to map out and read genetic sequences in biological organisms.”

Apartment is collaborative and interactive and like Infecter, which uses Flash for animation, was clearly not coded by an amateur. Here professionalism rears up its head again and I have to say that while these and sites like them reveal the potential of the Web as a medium, I personally prefer the raffishness of the more technologically limited photoblogs, which like music in the early days of punk remain in the hands of relative amateurs.

To me the beauty of the Web is in the way it takes art out of its hothouse enclosure in the white cube and forces it to rub elbows with everything good, bad, enlightening, and dumb that the web has to offer. Hothouses breed exotic plants and for most of the past century that’s what art has been, a fragile exotic tended to by a priestly caste of academics, connoisseurs, and arts administrators. On the Web, images are out of the bubble, infected by and infecting the larger context, and thereby possibly inoculating each other against myopia.

I’ll leave you with one last site that humorously negotiates the border between professional constipation and amateurish self-indulgence. It is a clean, professional-looking site dedicated to the one thing professionals fear the most: failure. It is the site of the Institute of Failure, on which, among other things, you’ll find Mary C. Wilson’s Private Lives/Public Disposal, a strangely affecting work that consists of what appear to be images of decayed tape cassettes accompanied by typed phrases culled from the recordings, a young girl’s memoire retrieved from a San Francisco’s garbage landfill.

The Web is itself a kind of landfill, the showcase and sinkhole of an endless stream of ephemera. Everything that could be said in favor of it as an art medium could also be held against it as a limitation or failure. I’ve been on both sides of the fence myself. But the Web is a viral in its cognitive attack. I’ve been infected. So I’m going to stay home.

Published: Artscene, November 2004

The Color of Money

A Guardian piece about Eric Schlosser’s new book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, got me thinking.

Schlosser’s book is about commodities that Americans “publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts,” namely pot, porn, and migrant Mexican labor. The figures cited are a kind of forced confession of unacknowledged American compulsions:

• At an estimated $25 billion a year in revenue, marijuana is now the country’s largest cash crop. Bigger than corn, which nets $19 billion a year.
• Porn nets $10 billion a year, on a par with Hollywood’s take at the U.S. box office. Hollywood turns out approximately 500 movies a year. The porn studios turn out 211 movies a week.
• An estimated 8 million illegal immigrants live in this country. This vast underpaid labor force saves the average American household $50 a year.

Taken together, these stats tell us something about what American priorities are. But they also say something about the telling power of numbers. At any rate, they made a string of questions go off in my head. What about art? How does it fit in the picture? What are the numbers?

Now the interesting thing is that I’ve been writing about art for more than a decade and I never once delved into the economics of it. Part of the reason for that lack of curiosity is the sheer repugnance I have always felt toward anything that has to do with money. The other, dovetailing reason was the effort entailed in researching the issue in the pre-Internet days. Before the information highway came along, one had to make do with informational equivalent of wheelbarrows. Questions popped in your head. You briefly mused about them and left it at that. That was in the antediluvian days before Google became a cyber oracle you can consult about everything from nocturnal leg cramps to . . . well, the meaning of life. (Type “meaning of life” into Google, and it returns 3,780,000 answers.) Nowadays, you just let your typing fingers do the stalking.

Okay. So I wanted to know how much money is spent annually on art in the U.S. Simple question. But getting the answer proved a little more complicated than I expected and led me to unearth some interesting data.

First of all, when you ask how much money is spent on art, you have to specify who spends it and how. Federal and state governments support the arts to the tune of $1-2 billion a year, depending on whether or not you want to count funding for such “cultural” institutions as the Smithsonian and military bands as arts funding. [Source: Americans for the Arts] That tells us that our elected representatives’ enthusiasm for the arts does not quite match their enthusiasm for pumping up America’s “super-duper-power” status (Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay’s phrase), toward which they allocated $400 billion in defense funding, but it’s not a figure you can use to compare America’s appetite for art to its appetite for porn and corn. So I pressed on.

A publication titled “Consumer Expenditures in 2001” gave me hope. Published in April of this year (yes, it takes more than a year to compile these figures) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it surveys consumer spending across a dizzying array of categories. Alas, art is not among them. The closest included category to art is entertainment, but then that might also cover watching porn while stoned. Still, this document is a gold mine of information. Want to find out how much the average consumer with a master’s degree or better spent annually on alcoholic beverages compared to the average high school dropout? Answer: $505 vs. $175. (Which raises the question: Does that mean that education promotes alcoholism or just beverage snobbery?) Since it is a sample survey of approximately 7,500 “consumer units,” the consumer expenditure survey doesn’t reveal total expenditures, but it does give a breakdown of what Americans spend their money on. Not surprisingly, the largest portion of expenditure (32.9 percent) goes toward housing, followed by transportation (19.3 percent), food (13.5 percent), health care (5.5 percent), entertainment (4.9 percent) and clothing (4.5 percent). Interesting, but not quite what I was looking for. The same could be said of the annual National Endowment for the Arts publications that track admissions to performing arts events, the latest of which notes that in 2000, opera/concert/play goers shelled out $9.8 billion.

My big break came when I turned the question around and instead of asking about expenditures started asking about sales. In 2002, the European Fine Art Foundation published a survey that put the global art market at $23.5 billion in annual sales. [Sources: Artnet, Daily Telegraph, Kusin & Company] According to the survey:

• In 2001, the U.S. owned 47 percent of the global art market, which translated into just over $11 billion in sales. Auction houses accounted for about $6 billion, art dealers for $5 billion.
• European countries accounted for 45 percent of the market, or $10.6 billion.
• The top three art markets in Europe were the UK (56 percent of the European market), France (16.8 percent), and Germany (6 percent).

Presuming these figures are trustworthy, they reveal that the art market in this country is bigger than the market for movies. Also,

• In 2002, the top 10 hottest-selling artists worldwide, ranked by auction sales were, according to Artprice, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Leger, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Gerhard Richter. Only the last mentioned is still alive.
• Ed Ruscha came in at number 26, Jasper Johns at number 28, Cy Twombly at number 33, Paul Klee at number 45, Norman Rockwell at number 46, Mark Rothko at number 51, Georgia O’Keefe at number 54, Jeff Koons at number 55, Wayne Thiebaud at number 70, and David Hockney at number 81.

In the European Union, artists and their estates are entitled to from .25 to 4 percent of the proceeds when their works are resold. The sliding-scale levy, known as the droite de suite, applies to artworks sold up to 70 years from the artist’s death. [Sources: E-zine, European Journal] Dealers and auctioneers are adamant that it drives business to Switzerland and the U.S. In practice, because the artwork has to reach a minimum price before the levy kicks in, not many artists or their descendants benefit from the droit de suite. Still, it is odd that the idea of royalties–taken for granted when it comes to books, recorded music, and movies—should be so alien to the art world. I know of no serious proposal to introduce a similar resale levy in the U.S.

Having determined the general size of the art market, I wanted to look at the finer details. Help came in the form of an NEA paper published in 1998 that used 1992 economic census data to analyze the regional components of the U.S. art market. Some of the salient findings, which I’ve supplemented with data from the 1997 economic census (the latest available):

• In 1992, there were 4,543 art dealers in the U.S. In 1997, the number was 5,698.
• In 1992, total art retail sales came to just over $2 billion. In 1997, the number was $3 billion.
• How big is the retail art market as compared to other retail markets? In 1997, total retail receipts came to $2,480 billion. Auto dealers had $553.6 billion in sales. Department stores reported $223 billion in sales. At $3 billion in sales, art dealers pulled in slightly more than camera and photographic supplies stores ($2.25 billion) but less than half what florists pulled in ($6.6 billion). Admittedly, there were a lot more florists (26,600) than art dealers.
• In 1992, the states with the highest number of art dealers were California (612), New York (515), Florida (330), Texas (230), and Illinois (177). Ranked by sales volume, the top five markets were New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.
• The real story, however, is that dealers in the New York City area racked up almost double the amount of sales of the next four metropolitan areas combined. In 1992, the NYC area accounted for 26.9 per cent (equivalent to $560 million) of U.S. art sales, as opposed to the LA area’s 4.6 percent (equivalent to $95 million). In 1997, NYC-area dealers numbered 470 and sold $856.5 million worth of art; LA-area dealers numbered 183 and sold $105 million.
• Looking closer at Southern California, a city-by-city breakdown reveals the art hot spots of 1997.

City	Number of Dealers	Sales (in millions)
Los Angeles	77	45.9
San Diego	52	28.5
Santa Monica	28	19.7
Beverly Hills	16	16.7
Laguna Beach	21	15.0
Palm Springs	7	7.2
West Hollywood	15	7.0
Santa Ana	4	2.6
Pasadena	3	2.4
Huntington Beach	4	1.4
Newport Beach	3	1.4
Long Beach	6	1.3

Inevitably, the next question was: what do artists get out of the art biz? An NEA study published last year reported that in 2001 the median income of fine artists was $31,190. That means there were as many artists making more than that amount as there were making less. That figure slightly exceeds the $30,489 median income of bachelor degree holders nationwide, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2000. Twelve percent of artists said they had secondary jobs, which seems like a very low figure to me.

So the art biz is an $11 billion industry. Or if you prefer, a $6 billion auction business and a $5 billion retail business. And who knows, maybe only half of the retailed art sold is “real” art and the rest consists of mass merchandized “limited” print editions with near unlimited runs. Given more time, I could probably find out. To borrow the X-Files motto: The truth is out there. But personally, I think these distinctions are just ways around the gauche fact that art is a business. And it’s only a gauche fact because the art biz has a stake in sustaining the belief that when it comes to art, money should be no object. What is different about art is that its mystique, upon which its exalted commodity status depends, is founded on the obfuscation of its commodity status. This is how you end up with a porcelain figure of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles for which somebody is willing to pay $5 million. Because if art is not “mere” commodity, it is well-nigh priceless, but priceless in the context of capitalism only means very expensive. So the entire speculative hoax is based on dissociating art from money, which is the classical marketing strategy behind all luxury objects.

The salutary effect of reconnecting art with money is perspective. It helps us avoid veering off into the swamp of contextless discourse that breeds the perennial myth of artistic subversion. The brute reality is that artistic subversion is a marketing strategy. It’s the engine that drives the cycle of novelty that propels consumption. We understand this perfectly when it comes to attention-addicted pop stars like Madonna, but when it comes to art the tendency is to impute vast subversive potential to mere rudeness.

In 2001, the recording industry netted $12.4 billion in retail sales. That makes it comparable to the art industry in size. Since the days of Andy Warhol and the Factory, the two worlds have converged. Music stars have become artier, art stars have developed rock star ambitions. Perhaps the convergence of pop journalism and art criticism will follow. It wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would help us take art less seriously.

Published: Artscene, June 2003