The Long Silence

I almost need to steal the title from Franklin's latest post: Patience With Everything Unresolved.  In fact, I almost need to steal Franklin's template.  Being is becoming, and blogs are becoming something else.

It's not that I haven't had anything to say.  I've shamelessly blogged my way through several major life transitions; maybe it's in the nature of the current one to be different.  In any case, I'm not making any promises. 

Briefly, the news is this: I've decided to become a physical therapist.  It's a doctoral degree that will take me five or six years to complete, including prerequisites.  Although I've got two bachelor's degrees already, they're--surprise!--virtually useless.  I recently sent for my transcript, and its dominant theme is 'Course Of Study Undertaken By An Adolescent Mind.'  People under twenty-five should not be allowed to go to college, I swear.

What this means is that I will be broke and working my ass off for the foreseeable future, which will not be a big change.  What will be a big change is that when I'm done, I will be employable at a solid middle-class salary for the first time in my life. 

This could not have happened if I hadn't become thoroughly and irremediably disgusted with the state of the art world.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am an idealist--stubborn, possibly naive, certainly foolish.  Art represented part of an ideal to me, and I invested a big chunk of my soul in it, along with considerably more money than my actual income. 

And 'art,' as practiced by the self-styled elite of the global art scene, is a giant confidence game.  I used to think I could either change it or create a niche for myself within it; now I think that my values are incompatible with its founding principles.  Continuing to sacrifice my time, money and attention to this cynical game doesn't make me a dedicated artist, it just makes me a chump.

I've long been aware that I have three vocations--artist, writer, and healer.  For the last couple of decades, I've been weighting the 'artist' as the primary part of my identity.  Letting go of that is a wrench to my ego, but necessary to my soul.  I will have a studio again, I will paint again, but maybe not for a good long time.  Now is the time for exercising my lazy but adequate left brain, and taking the adventure that comes.  

The Consciousness Painter

 

'Sunset Holocaust,' Elisabeth Condon, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

Every now and then I meet an artist who reminds me that with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, art can still be a meaningful occupation.  When I do, I often notice that artistic mastery is a non-linear process.  Elisabeth Condon is the real deal, and in the last couple of years her work has hit an exponential curve.

Over a year ago, I was lucky enough to visit Elisabeth's studio in Brooklyn with my critique group.  I'd seen her exhibition at Lesley Heller Gallery in 2008, and one painting in particular had impressed me; it started to become metaphysical jazz, blurring the boundaries between space, time and consciousness.  But it was hard to tell if this was an accident or not.

During her crit, it became clear that Elisabeth throws the entirety of her heart, mind and soul into her work, and she's got a lot of these things to throw.  The details of her trajectory make up a respectable résumé--influences ranging from Chinese scroll paintings to Dr. Seuss; trips to China, residencies in Miami, Spain, Yaddo and Taiwan; figure painting intensives, architectural studies, paint pouring. If I were a real art critic, I'd feel obliged to trace these influences in sober detail.

But I'm not.  I'm just another painter, who believes that great art transcends both biography and intellect.  "The Chinese believe that paintings must have chi," said Elisabeth, and her paintings have tons of it.  They come at you like a tidal wave, immersing you in the full experience of color, sucking you into spaces which twist and bulge and drop away, altering the fabric of your mind.

 'Gaoxing, Beijing', Elisabeth Condon, 2009

Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

The paintings she was working on when I went to her studio were a quantum leap beyond the work in her Lesley Heller show; bigger, freer, less literal and more graceful.  One of them, an enormous blue poured abstraction, was half finished.  In standard crit group fashion, we suggested she leave it that way.  She replied, "I can't, I just can't."  Elisabeth doesn't hold anything back.  Art doesn't occupy a cool, political corner of her life; it IS her life.  And her life is a joyous and generous one.  

Since then, things have only gotten better.  In her best work, the distinction between abstraction and representation becomes meaningless--form, space, color and architecture dance among themselves as limpidly as thought.  Standing in front of one, you find yourself remembering experiences that aren't necessarily yours.  Elisabeth's work communicates directly, without any need for translation. 

The Art World is Dead. Long Live Art.

By now, anyone who cares is well versed in the Tragedy of Becky Smith's Bellwether.

Once sales dried up by the fall of 2008, Becky called three of her largest collectors, pleading for some business — “I tried playing it cool, and then I tried playing it direct,” she said. She recounted a typical conversation: “I need to sell you something to continue to be here,” she would tell a collector.

“I’m just not buying,” was the reply.

“Did you hear me? I have this artist you collect who will have to get another job. If I can’t sell you something right now, I’ll have to close,” Becky would say, but the response was the same. “I felt forsaken,” she recalled. “All these collectors who supported me and my artists, they just disappeared. They didn’t care.”

Although I was not the kind of person who ever registered on Becky Smith's radar, I feel about as sorry for her as Chris does. She was something of an idealist; even as she careened into a business that, at its peak, cost her $75,000 a month in overhead--more than most artists earn in two or three years--she thought that it was at least partly about the art. About ideas, creation, passion, beauty, humanity, exploration, the pursuit of excellence, originality and insight. That stuff.

I guess we all do.

I can count on one hand the number of Chelsea art dealers who have ever been polite to me. Polite, as in acknowledging my existence when I say "Hi, I'm Stephanie. You are..?" instead of blankly looking through me for a second before speaking to the person next to me. Polite, as in offering me a glass of champagne and allowing me to accept it, instead of moving it past my outstretched hand to the couple ten feet behind me. Polite, as in saying, "that would be lovely!" when I offer to show them my portfolio after visiting their gallery regularly for a year and a half, instead of "It's a waste of time for me to look at your work."

(Actually, not a single one has ever said "that would be lovely," even though that's my usual response to other artists. As far as I know, there's not a single Chelsea dealer who has any idea what my art looks like, let alone an opinion about it.)

That hasn't stopped them from sending me press releases, once the 'art criticism' business imploded and the art blogosphere took off. Talk about wasted effort. Dudes, get a clue: once you have been egregiously, offensively, unnecessarily rude to me in person, you can inundate me with hype and schmoozing for fifty years and I won't come back. I won't come back to interview you, have a glass of wine, or sneeze on the art. I will ignore you. You are a waste of my time.

But what I realized, after the Fall of Bellwether, was that some part of me still believed that there was some reason to respect these people. That no matter how idiotic, banal, frivolous and inane was the majority of the 'art' I saw in their galleries, nevertheless the New York Art World stood for some sort of quality. Some kind of allegiance to the life of the mind and the exploration of the spirit.

Then I thought, "$75,000 a month in overhead?" That's not art, that's fashion. Fashion, corruption, and excess.

Because a business that generates a $75K monthly overhead for a white room filled with arcane, useless objects can only be sustained by the kinds of people who happily pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses in taxpayer money after their personal actions torch the global economy. It can only be sustained by the kinds of people who are driven to accumulate infinitely more than everybody else, no matter how many others go sick, hungry or unemployed. It can only be sustained, in other words, by sociopaths.

It's no mystery that I and the New York Art World don't get along. My interests lie in the direction of timelessness and balance.

'Twisted lotus mandala' (study), Stephanie Lee Jackson, 2009

Thus, I have realized that if I am to maintain my integrity as an artist, I have to forget about galleries. Instead I will seek to hang my work in wellness centers, yoga studios, doctor's offices, spas, churches, and any other place that exists to heal and nurture the human spirit, not crush and deride it.

I'm pretty sure this is the right direction to take, because immediately after coming to this conclusion, I started working steadily, despite being blocked for over a year, despite being broke and stressed and taking care of an infant all day.

Does that make me a kitsch artist? Well, it could, except that I'm not going to change into someone else. If people think my art is kitschy, they're not looking very closely. And if there's one thing I've discovered about New York art dealers, it's that very few of them actually know what they're looking at.

Dash Snow Dies; Nobody Notices

Dash Snow, the artist who is best known for creating a hamster nest out of shredded phone books in a London hotel room, is predictably dead of a heroin overdose. Tragically, not only was Michael Jackson's funeral the same week, but global infatuation with trust fund brats who bite the thousands of hands which feed them is at the lowest ebb of the century. Timing is everything.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly

and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

It was only after speaking truth and listening for a few decades that I realized a couple of things; first, that you have to repeat yourself a lot, matching your actions to your words, before anyone believes you about certain things. And second, the reason the dull and the ignorant are dull and ignorant is that they don't listen back.

Truthful statements with which I tested these propositions: "I'm an artist." "I'm moving to Mexico." "I'm moving to New York." "I love you."

It was a full decade before my nuclear family stopped tacitly expecting me to get over this 'artist' delusion and go to medical school. I had lived in Mexico for three years, and Brooklyn for two, before people stopped sending me invitations to events in Northern California with 'RSVP' on them. And some people I just stopped loving.

One thing I've learned, from running doggedly against the wind of other people's expectations for years, is that 'individualism' is a myth. Success requires community support. Look at the 'acknowledgments' on any CD, film, flyleaf, or program; the more financially and artistically successful the creation, the longer the thank-yous. The visual arts are no exception, except that visual artists tend to be even more bashful and egoistic than the average actor. Thus we have trouble asking for help, and resist acknowledging the help we get.

Moreover, the institutions which are allegedly in place for 'supporting' visual artists, such as schools, museums, galleries, and non-profit organizations, act as parasitic forces on the vast majority of artists. The art school I attended sucked its students financially dry while sabotaging their careers. Most juried exhibitions are funded by the application fees of rejected artists; grants and residencies are often awarded for political reasons rather than artistic ones; museum collections are still heavily weighted toward the white, the male and the wealthy.

It's easy to say that all of this shouldn't matter. A Real Artist will transcend all of that. And this is, to a certain extent, true. Creative people will find ways to survive, albeit not always comfortably.

But I drove myself to the verge of exhaustion, bankruptcy and despair by believing that people believed me, and now I'm wondering if it's worth it. Because if 'art' is not assessed according to the values with which it is created, it might as well not exist.

To be continued.

How to Sell Your Art In Manhattan for Free

Rumor has it that certain Chelsea galleries are renting out space by the hour, in a sort of Recession Special that is allegedly going to help artists make ends meet in these desperate times. They must suppose that there are still a few thousand artists in the city who have not figured out that the only people who come look at, and occasionally buy, your art when you are not represented by a Big Important Dealer are your friends, and you can invite your friends to your studio for free.

But what if your studio happens to be in a Scary Neighborhood, as so many studios are, and your friends with disposable incomes refuse to visit you there? It so happens that there are other options than renting out six feet of blank wall in a failing gallery on a weekend when all the collectors are in the Hamptons. So here is some practical advice, from an artist who has Actually Been There.

On the sidewalk at West Broadway between Prince and Spring, Saturdays and Sundays year-round, that is. You might also try Fifth Avenue near the Met, or Union Square, but I don't personally know the scene, so don't blame me if you get roughed up by the regulars.

1) Stake your space before 8:30 AM.
You will need a folding table or a display rack to do this. Set it up on a section of sidewalk between the foot-traffic zone and the curb. Do not set up directly in front of the doors of any retail establishment; they will call the police and have you removed if you do. Do not leave any objects of value, such as art, on the rack or table while you are off napping in the car or sitting in the café.

2) Do not expect any foot traffic before 11 AM.
Tourists and other people with disposable income sleep late on weekends, rather like you used to do, when you had a day job and a dealer.

3) Shiny, shiny, shiny.
Artworks that catch the eye of tourists and fashionistas need to be bold, colorful, and executed in a recognizable (read: retro) style. Picasso knock-off prints do very well, as do photographs of NYC landmarks. Small paintings of dogs and flowers are also great sellers, as long as you put in enough consecutive weekends to build up a following.

4) Simplicity of display is essential.
Remember, you are competing with the chaos of a Manhattan retail district sidewalk, and all that that implies. Don't try anything subtle or fussy. Use a simple black backdrop and a vertical display format; sandwich boards are the most stable. Bring folding chairs, suitable attire for the weather, a friend and a sense of humor. Make sure that everything is firmly anchored, especially on windy days; find or bring a few large rocks to chain your table to.

5) Be consistent and professional.
Don't share a display rack with an artist whose style is utterly unlike yours. Don't show art from every phase of your creative development. Don't show anything on unstretched canvas, unless you're just there to drink beer on the sidewalk with the other losers.

6) Package yourself.
Have business cards with your website and your etsy.com store available. Keep works on paper in plastic sleeves. If you can beg, borrow or steal a credit card machine, do so; people spend twice as much with half the consideration if they can charge it. Come to think, you may be able to use PayPal from your cell phone; do the research.

7) Cover your behind.
Go to the irs.gov website and register for an EIN. It should come in the mail within a couple of weeks; keep it to show to the cops if they pester you with talk of business licenses. Be nice to the other artists on the street, even the Chinese guys selling kitschy framed photos mass-produced in China, and stay out of political and territorial wars as much as possible. Remember: the fiercest battles are always waged over the smallest stakes. A few square feet of sidewalk is not worth a night in jail.

8) Do not expect to be discovered. Especially, do not expect to sell your work for anything like Art World prices.
Works on paper move for between ten and forty dollars; paintings for between fifty and a hundred and thirty. Feel free to price them higher, but be aware that you will be sitting there for a long, long, long, long time.

9) Tell your friends.
You may think you're going to display your brilliance for a world of ignorant strangers and bring them to their knees, but round about three o'clock you're going to be very glad to see a familiar face, even if it's only your brother-in-law the IT guy. Hey, don't IT guys make pretty good money? Do his walls need something on them?

10) Appreciate your day job, if you've got one.
Isn't it great to be getting a paycheck for sitting behind a retail counter in a temperature-controlled environment, or for washing dishes, or scrubbing toilets, or painting houses, or laying tile? Isn't being an artist kind of overrated?

Revenge of the Bourgeoisie

Q: "Do you paint portraits or landscapes?"

A: Only when I'm fundraising.


Face it: most people have no interest at all in contemporary art. I cannot count the number of times I have been asked this question when introduced as an 'artist.' It used to mean misery for all of us, as I embarked upon a condensed, tortuous and unappreciated précis of twentieth century art history, until I finally learned to answer with, "I paint with oil on linen. They're big. Here's my website if you're interested."

Moreover, as a painter who attempts to expand the boundaries of self with work that does not belong to a recognizable genre, I endure a significant amount of contempt and dismissal within the contemporary art world itself. Spokespersons from Big-Ass Art Institutions would never admit it, but there is a not-so-subtle bias against painters when it comes to awarding grants, residencies, solo exhibitions and places in the Whitney Biennial; the unspoken but loudly implied subtext is, "God, another painting. That's so boring, so bourgeois, so Been Done Already, so over."

Of course, painting still gets shown; the problem is that it is often shown as a conceptual conceit, as an interestingly retroactive quirk, amongst the sea of progressively quirky Conceptual Installations. The bigger problem is that such painting is often really bad painting, shown for political and financial reasons, not for any integral qualities of form or execution. The plain fact is that the vast majority of contemporary art impresarios have no earthly idea what a good painting looks like, and couldn't care less.

But now that the market is crashing, galleries are closing left and right, and funding for non-profit institutions is drying up, these institutions are perfectly happy to try to re-capitalize on the backs of the lowly portrait painter:

Don't get me wrong, I love Smack Mellon as much as the next guy, but isn't it a little ironic for an organization that cleaves toward site specific installations, and has little interest in contemporary painting, to rely on painters for fundraising? Please, tell me I'm wrong.

I used to assume, naïvely, that the contemporary art world was a hierarchy like any other--a climbable meritocracy. You'd start out as a student, learning technique and getting to know your peers; you'd exhibit in group shows, apply for grants and residencies, and as your work got stronger you'd win some of them. Art dealers and curators, always on the lookout for new talent, would discover your work in registries, open studios and group shows. They'd remember it from panels. Eventually, if you did good work and paid your dues, you'd build yourself a modest career--not necessarily Fame, but regular shows, a dealer, an income.

Ha.

The truth is a lot darker. The real forces which determine the shape of the Art World hierarchy are simple: "I'm More Special Than You" and "Who's Got the Money." It is constructed of creative cul-de-sacs, mediocre minds, territorial spite and disingenuous protestations of 'fairness and equality.' This is why painting is despised, but never absent.

Because people like paintings. Ordinary, dull people go to look at them in galleries, and hang them in their homes. They get inordinately excited about the idea of having their portrait painted. They like beauty, and think that they have some idea of what it is.

This is well-nigh unendurable for people whose entire reason for being is to be Different and Superior. These people must seek out and produce the arcane, the cryptic and the self-righteous; they must speak and write in polysyllabic gibberish; they must, above all, look with contempt upon the bourgeoisie. At the same time, they must convince a handful of staggeringly wealthy people that they share this superiority of being and perception, in order that they may fund their lifestyles.

It wouldn't do for these patrons to spend billions on objects that a construction worker or a soccer mom might look upon freely, appreciate and enjoy; thus, the piles of inaesthetic goop, fortified by hermetic rhetoric and a total absence of standards. For if once you admit to the existence of Quality, what's to prevent hordes of outsiders from achieving it, and thus devaluing your investment in the Few?

So now that the sustaining patrons are much less wealthy, look for painting to come back into style. Or at least, look for affordable art auctions containing art that you, the Common Person, might actually like.

Vanity and Shame

Transcript of recent interaction between myself and Ico Gallery:

Dear Stephanie Lee Jackson,

I recently been introduced [sic] to your work online, and I must say I'm very impressed. After reviewing your website, I'm extremely interested in finding out more about you and the process of your work. I feel that your work would be a grand addition to Perceptions Of Reality, which is our September collective exhibition that uses the Surrealist ideology of entering a different cosmos, and combines it with that of abstraction and Fauvism, which in effect will create an alternate view of reality, previously unexplored by one artist. This exhibition will the inaugural exhibition in our new flagship location in our extravagant ground floor 3,000 sq ft gallery in Chelsea.

[two paragraphs of pretentious blather about "renaissance," which, in case you didn't know, is a French word meaning "rebirth."]

Upon perusal of the attached proposal, I found the real reason for this 'career opportunity': $2500 in fees. I replied posthaste.

VANITY. GALLERY.

Get a clue. And take me off your mailing list.

Vanity galleries are like Nigerian 419 scammers; usually they crawl back into the woodwork like cockroaches when confronted with the truth about their business practices. I was thus rather surprised to receive a reply.

You do realize why you're [sic] resume is non-existent, right? With an attitude like that, you will not make it in the business of art!

My first impulse was to press the 'delete' button and forget about it. But I have been making a habit, lately, of stating my boundaries when strangers try to shame me, even though this may come across as hysterical and overengaged; it is helping me eradicate the bad habit of taking jerks too seriously.

Hello, could you BE any tackier?

I know enough about the 'business of art' to know that artists who show with galleries that charge thousands of dollars in fees never get any artistic respect, and are unlikely to recoup their fees in sales, because galleries that charge fees have less incentive to build a collector base; their overhead is already covered. They also prey upon artists with 'non-existent resumes' because they are looking for the ignorant and the insecure who haven't yet figured this out, and are thus vulnerable to their scams.

Genuine, respected art dealers make studio visits, spend time getting to know their artists, and build a consistent program over time. They don't do online searches and send out flattering (at first) emails to every random artist they find. This isn't the first solicitation I've received from you; you need to keep a better database.

My 'attitude' is generally just fine, thank you very much. I am just sick of being an object of predation for every fool with an MBA and cultural pretensions. If you believe in art, put your money where your mouth is and start a real gallery. Select your artists for their skill, passion and commitment, not their economic idiocy, and treat them decently. Which means NOT charging them fees.

Good day.

This is pretty much the basic screed, which any artist ought to know by heart. What I want to point out, though, is the levers which predators of all stripes use to control people.

Note in their first contact, the fulsome level of flattery; this is the sort of thing that every adolescent assumes will come as their just due--say, when they first upload their work to Saatchi Online. You have to be working a few years, and have your illusions shattered a few dozen times, before you truly understand that nobody will EVER come across your work online, or on the street, or in a restaurant, and be so blown away that they offer you a Chelsea exhibition and thousands of dollars per piece. (Unless you are Swoon, or Barry McGee. And I'm not even sure that both of these artists are solvent.) Our culture is too saturated with images for that to happen. Plus, anyone who thinks they truly understand what an artist's work is like from an online image doesn't understand visual art at all.

Then, of course, once their cover is blown, out come the nasties: "You do know why your resume is nonexistent, right?" People who use flattery as a tool are highly prone to use humiliation as a weapon, since these are two sides of the same coin. Simply, they're trying to shut me up by hitting my most vulnerable spot.

And the reason I'm posting about this at length, online, despite the fact that it showcases my lack of career success, is that vanity and shame are the forces which keep most of us isolated, helpless, and ultimately unsuccessful. Predators can only survive when they've got a steady supply of weak, ignorant victims who don't share information. Once we learn to step outside of our egos and ask ourselves, "hey, what's this person's agenda? What's the bigger picture? Who is profiting, and who is the loser?" it makes us much harder to manipulate. Then maybe the vanity galleries will disappear--not to mention the vanity governments.

Why I Am Not Renewing My Whitney Membership

Received today:

Dear Ms. Jackson,

It's been several months since your membership expired on October 31. Your support is crucial to the Whitney's vitality and I sincerely hope you'll consider joining us again.

Since its founding, generous individuals like you have helped the Whitney advocate for artistic innovation by responding to emerging trends...

After all, our exhibitions are not just the artists' stories. They are also your story.

Dear Whitney Museum,

It is true--my support IS crucial to the Whitney's vitality. The Whitney relies on emerging artists like myself, not only for direct financial support, but for the media attention, attendance and respect which allow the museum to retain its status as a major cultural arbiter in the contemporary art world. This is why I am not renewing my Whitney membership.

Because the 'story' of 'emerging trends' that the Whitney's curators have chosen to tell, as evidenced by the last two Biennials, is not my story; nor is it the story of the thousands of other emerging artists whose work is aesthetically rich, conceptually engaging, and culturally relevant in a wider arena than that of mere cliquish Art World politics.

Instead, the Whitney has consistently championed art which is conceptually banal and aesthetically bankrupt, selected almost entirely from a pool of artists who have already been filtered by high-profile galleries and cultural organizations, and justified by a morass of pretentious, impenetrable and obfuscatory rhetoric.

As a Whitney member, I receive regular newsletters, exhibition and lecture calendars, and fundraising requests from the museum. Never once in these publications have I seen the Whitney acknowledge or respond to the widespread criticism of its use of egregious 'artspeak' in the most recent Biennial, despite the fact that this issue was discussed in both the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. I see no evidence that Whitney curators are paying attention to the art blogosphere, which has exploded during the last few years with debate, commentary and original vision at a grassroots level. I sincerely doubt that these curators spend much time looking at artist registries, attending studio tours and alternative exhibitions, or combing through unsolicited submissions in search of unknown artists with powerful vision. The organization's stated goal of 'responding to emerging trends' is a disingenuous distortion of the reality--that its curators pander to the tastes and agendas of a small coterie of insiders, ignoring artistic arenas where passionate engagement is yet unbolstered by wealthy patrons, critical attention, or a curatorial agenda.

As I have come to see it, the Whitney and institutions like it have a vested interest in ensuring that the vast majority of living artists remain voiceless, invisible and powerless. It is our thousands of college tuitions, donations, fees, submissions and applications which keep major art institutions financially viable, and allow their agendas to supercede artists' visions. The aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of the art itself are literally the least important factors in whether or not the work gets shown, if the artistic quality of the past two Biennials is any indication. Far more important are the invisible machinations of profit and ego politics, which parasitically feed upon the resources of artists and art lovers, dependent upon the fact that artists work for free, and will pay for any slim chance at recognition.

After all this, the fact that the Whitney expects literate persons to swallow absurd curatorial verbiage in lieu of a powerful artistic experience is a slap in the face. Cancelling my own membership is the least I can do in the face of such institutional contempt for my intelligence; I can only hope that my example inspires many others to do the same.