From Chelsea to Madison Avenue in 0.4 Seconds Flat

Advisory: this post is a bit of an exercise in stream of consciousness...I'll try to tie it all together, but these are ideas I'm just formulating. You've been warned.

Making the rounds of openings in Chelsea this past weekend, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the new Monique Prieto paintings at Cheim and Reid. They're awesome and totally unexpected, which is rare and thrilling itself, and, in my opinion, one of the highlights among the new crop of exhibitions.

The more I studied them, the more connection I saw with her earlier works, but unfortunately, the more I studied them, the more I also realized their art context shelflife (i.e., how long it will be before this vocabularly is co-opted by advertising or other commercial ends) is probably much shorter than that of her older work. It's partly the inclusion of text (always a short cut over to Madison Avenue), but it's also how incredibly well this vocabulary lends itself to design.

So I'm walking around with that idea wandering the echoey corridors of my mind the past few days and then this morning I read this aricle on architecture exhibitions in the Times. One passage jumped out at me:

[S]hows of the last several years have focused on standard historical fare - like the two Mies van der Rohe exhibitions jointly organized in 2001 by the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, both invaluable works of scholarship. But the Mies aesthetic, sleek and functional, is today about as threatening to the status quo as, say, a show on the Baroque master Borromini - and less relevant to current debates.

The status quo's accelerating ability to absorb the new vocabulary it takes artists ages to develop is a growing interest of mine. I think architecture has bought itself a few years of breathing space with its current exploration of the fold (i.e., I can't see the public truly absorbing what many architects are barely able to get their minds around), but fine art is looking more and more like the music industry, where bootleg versions of new songs are widely available via the internet before the artists' CDs are even unpacked at the stores.

A few years back, some enterprising soul printed up t-shirts of art stars and had folks hawking them throughout Miami Beach during Basel. I later saw the same t-shirts in Venice. I haven't seen them since, so I'm guessing the market wasn't as big as the entreprenuers had hoped it was, but a few of the t-shirt images were actually quite up to the second with regards to the art star's imagery (perhaps suggesting nothing more sinister than that the t-shirt printers knew their stuff). I was happy to see that effort fade away, but what if it catches on?

I suspect there's little fine artists can do to stop folks from stealing their vocabularies (hell, they can't even stop other artists), but I wonder if this doesn't mean that the fine art community could use a bit of new territory to explore? Some wide-open space where, like in contemporary architecture, it will be years before they can fully understand what it is they're working with, what its limitations are, and further down the road, what its symbolic significances are. Otherwise, the day is likely to come when a painter will see folks wearing t-shirts of his/her new work at their solo show opening.