The Lost Lifestyle

An issue that's been coming up in conversations with artists lately is the notion of a lost lifestyle. It may be a romantic notion of a time that never really was, but I'm hearing it enough to wonder if perhaps there's not something to it. Essentially, the argument is that there was a time in which the decision to become an artist was a voluntary vow of poverty for decades if not one's entire life, that in order to make art of any importance it took years of undying passion and excruciating trial and error. The notion of exhibiting, let alone being paid for one's work, before age 30 or even later was seen as unrealistic. The romantic aspect of this, of course, was the hope that one day it would all pay off and one's peers would recognize and appreciate one's [important] achievement.

In his interview with Joe Fig (which we recently exhibited in the gallery), Chuck Close noted (pdf file):

Contrary to what young… what’s happening with undergraduates and graduates today where collectors are buying work and they are in shows while they are still in school… I actually had a number of opportunities to show my work and I chose not to until 1968 and that was a very conscious decision that had to do with the work. I had a very strong… I still do, belief, that the act of going public is a very important decision and everything we do from the point in which you go public is part of the public record and is out there and you cannot get it back. Anything before that time you go public is nobody’s business and you don’t have to talk about it, you don’t
have to show it, you’re not responsible, you can destroy it all or whatever. But there is something about that decision, okay, I think I can put my neck on the line for this work and I feel strongly enough about it that I will live with however I feel about it later.

And more than just going public or putting the work out there, the sense I'm getting from artists I've been talking to is that a way of living is being lost. Our quintessential cliche of an artist is the paint-splattered, cigarette-smoking, philosophy-reading, early drinker who splits his/her time between the studio and the cafes and bars where other artists meet to debate and/or conspire. But that's not what I'm hearing them lament. It's more a sense that it's no longer acceptable to build one's life around one's artmaking. Instead one has to build one's life around one's career.

What gets lost in that, of course, is Art that comes from a lifestyle that's built around one's artmaking. Oh, there are a few artists who manage to still do this---Andrea Zittel is a good example---but she's an extreme case. And of course there's the crop of hipster artists whose work about endless partying and amatuer rock bands may capture a moment in time very well, but how's that gonna serve them when they're sixty? (I suspect they'll be making excuses for that earlier work similar to the ones Madonna's now making for her "Sex" book, if they're still making art at all.)

Taking a longer view, perhaps the careerist focus is simply a natural evolution in the history of artmaking. The lifestyle I'm hearing artists bemoan is a realitvely recent development, I believe (wasn't the earlier model of long-term apprenticeships even more careerist than what we see today?). In an age of hyperspecialization, that Left Bank slacker model may serve more to close doors for artists than build up to some perfect coming out point.

Then there's also the question of what's raised by Faith Ringgold's image (above) as to whether that culture was exclusionary and we're better off without it for reasons that transcend nostalgia. Still, what both the apprenticeship and incubating models had over the grab-em-out-of-the-cradle model is a proven commitment to the pursuit, let alone some evidence of maturity. But we've been all over that terrain several times. What I'm most interested in here is whether a lifestyle has been lost and if so does that matter and if so why?