If You Can't Beat 'Em...You Can Still Be Self-Aware

Headlines confirm it, the recession is either here already or about to land, and even the nation's #1 economic cheerleader, President Bush, noted finally there were challenges ahead (that must have hurt). Indeed, it seems as if so much has all been leading up to this. The conventional wisdom, I mean, regarding this era and what it means to "Art" that there's been so much freakin' money spent on contemporary work lately...the conventional wisdom that has held that "things will change" (and presumably for the better for true "art lovers") once the money dries up. We're about to see, it seems. And yet, as complicated as the economy has become over the past 10 years (i.e., why no one knows for sure what to expect), the relationship between art-making and money, on a conceptual level, has become just as complicated.

Ben Davis has a good hard look at the state of the uneasy relationship between art and commerce in a recent article on artnet.com. Money quote:

Most often, critics...just tag everything that involves commerce as "capitalist" and leave the analysis at that. But the fact is there are different ways to relate to commerce, and the production and distribution of "visual art" is defined by particularly middle-class relations, not by large-scale wage labor at the service of massive conglomerates. Just ask the animators whose work was shown in the "Pixar" show at MoMA a few years back what a difference this makes (they don’t have an individual claim on the creativity that goes into the work; it belongs to Disney). Contemporary art’s position in the world forms the basis for the quirky values -- the fetish for low-fi, child-like creativity, the questioning or ironic attitude, the attention to the individual touch or "statement," etc. -- that are associated with it.

Even when individual productions go beyond these terms, the climate of being resistant to mass culture values must be preserved. In December, Paul McCarthy transformed his New York gallery into a factory for producing chocolate miniatures of a signature image. Though the project would seem to be a fairly full-throated replication of commercial-scale production, McCarthy takes esthetic refuge precisely in the fact that, as a straight-forward commercial enterprise, it is a money-losing deal....

Davis also dives into what this means specifically for today's working artists in terms of what Johanna Drucker calls "complicit esthetics":

In a useful recent book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, Johanna Drucker offers the term "complicit esthetics" to describe contemporary art. Art today, she argues, is distinguished by its embrace of commerce and the values of the mass media. According to Drucker, the familiar notion of "oppositional critique" is now largely a relic of academic writing, which has been reduced to justifying artwork based on its political correctness.

For Drucker, Vanessa Beecroft’s practice of staging fetishistic tableaux of naked women in high heels is the rock that high-flown art theory runs aground on. While critics persist in looking for a political kernel in the work -- Drucker cites one who calls it a "post-feminist critique of the catwalk" -- Beecroft is clearly not attempting to resist the values of fashion. She is replicating them in the space of the art world. And this loss of art’s distinction as an alternative to media spectacle, Sweet Dreams argues, is not just one artist’s choice but an existential condition for all artists, and therefore something that should be embraced.

An "embrace of commerce and the values of the mass media" can mean many things, though. There are degrees of complicity (from what the existential philosophers termed "lived reality" to the more capitalism-specific state that Peter Sloterdijk calls "enlightened false consciousness" [in which one dutifully accepts the reality of one's professional obligations despite one's inner-socialist's better judgement]) that are distinguished by degrees of self-awareness. Perhaps raging against a tidal wave as powerful as Capitalism will strike some as a waste of energy, but that doesn't mean one has to embrace all of its excesses.

I was happy to find a new blog devoted to the role of the artist in all this the other day. Launched by the sculptor Deborah Fisher, the blog "Sellout" is dedicated to a more practical approach to what's become an increasingly impractical profession:

Artists face all the problems the consumer citizenry faces. We eat and drink and drive and buy things. We need health care; battle 30% credit card interest and stupid little fees; are having a harder time getting a full return on a gently used power tool at Home Depot. We will retire or get sick one day. We hate to admit it, but sometimes we need jobs. And at the same time, we are all trying to pull off a career that makes our parents feel just a little sick with worry.

What does it mean to be an artist in this era of corporate feudalism? We may talk about that. But this blog will focus on what it takes and how to do it better. Less painfully. With more dignity.

It's off to a great start, with posts ranging from marketing oneself as an artist to talking with your gallery about money, and plenty of links to incredibly practical financial sites. I can hear artists across the globe groaning at the thought. As Deborah notes, though, "I am not entirely sure why money feels so profoundly dirty to me. It shouldn't, and this harms my career all the time, in thousands of different ways, and if I could change one thing about myself, this would be it." Do check it out.