What “Work of Art” has Done

Abdi Farah

This week, the season finale of Bravo’s art-related reality TV show aired, knighting the 23-year-old Abdi Farah as what the tagline calls “the Next Great Artist,” which comes with the benefits of a solo show in the Brooklyn Museum, and a piece to be auctioned at Philips de Pury. Also, every inch of that sentence has been violently protested by a surprising hoard of passionate dissidents, many of whom preface their comments with “I don’t call myself an art person, but–.” That in itself has proved the show to be successful to me.

I mentioned after the show’s premier that I foresaw this as a valuable experience in showing a larger public more emerging art while demystifying the exclusivity of art insiders. I’d like to add now that the show has done something I didn’t fully expect, and that was only possible through the medium of a tv show: it given people a space and greater comfortability to discuss art.

To understand the magnitude of this, we have to start in the museum and gallery. These two institutions need to have a sheen of completion and some incontestability to survive; their very exhibitions defend that which they are displaying. This defensiveness on behalf of the institution becomes another barrier between the non-frequenters and their ability to feel confident about their individual aesthetic judgement. I do not mean to exaggerate the strength of this barrier or diminish the will of the individual, I simply mean to comment on the feeling of awe and intimidation, however slight, that is built into our museum and gallery spaces.

What this show has done, therefore, is to remove that barrier of intimidation by taking the viewing process out of its usual institutionality (albeit by putting it into another one). It takes works that are decently representative of some emerging art now, and brings them to the viewer in his own space, in which he is comfortable making and defending his judgment. And because thew viewer sees the artists talk, and watch these pieces come into being with no previous scholarship or criticism attached, he participates as an equal in an open forum. Jerry Saltz, famed art critic and regular judge on the show, wrote in his final of many blog posts throughout the season that the show has given birth to a different kind of art criticism. I’ve pulled an excerpt below:

“I wanted to see if art criticism was porous and supple enough to actually exist on a different stage….[and] It happened in the tens of thousands of words that all of you wrote in the comment sections at the bottom of the recaps. An accidental art criticism sprang up, practiced in a new place, in a new way, on a fairly high level. Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism of art criticism seemed to turn itself inside out; instead of one voice speaking to many, there were many voices speaking to one another. Coherently. All these voices became ghosts in criticism’s machine. It was a criticism of unfolding process, not dictums and law – a criticism of intimacy that pulsed with a kind of phosphorescent grandeur.”

Mr. Saltz has my utmost respect for recognizing the potential of this new kind of viewing process, and honoring the reactions it can elicit. He and his fellow judges, all of whom blog regularly on the show, have called this an experiment, and rightly so. It was an experiment in diffusing artistic knowledge and authority through an atypical medium, and for that it was immensely satisfying to witness. I will be curious to see how an institution like the Brooklyn Museum further engages with this, when Farah’s show goes up.

A (belated re-)Visit to Art Basel

In the week that has passed since I’ve visited Basel, I’ve mulled over the question of what would make this fair the opposite of what Thornton would call a “well-thought-out museum show.” After all this time, I can think of distinctions, though nothing to warrant the need to seek the refuge of a museum. It is easy to point out that at Art Basel each room represents a different institution and thus has an overall incoherence, unlike the museum. I could also say that the atmosphere is charged with commercialism, unlike the museum. One look inside would also note the substantial lack of explanation in the form of labels or educational tools (like books, audioguides, public tours), unlike the museum. Yet each of these surface differences obscures a deeper similarity between the two forms of display.

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Sarah Thornton’s Art Basel

In preparation for my visit to Art Basel, I want to look at Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, and its mention. Her treatment of Art Basel is consistent with her treatment of all of her subjects, emphasizing the singularity and totality of each component in the art world. There is a neat and self-assuming wholeness to her exploration, beginning at the title (she makes her art world in seven days, God makes his world in seven days), down to the chapters (THE Auction, THE Magazine, THE Biennale). Someone else (I think Paddy Johnson) has said this already—what she describes is not THE art world, but AN art world. The book is an attempt to itemize and make routine these days, suggesting that they stand in for each of many, and necessarily leaves out other (harder to define) nooks in the art world. What, for example, about a gallerist’s day in the gallery? An art historian’s day? Or (equally relevant at this point) an art blogger’s day? Her focus also over-emphasizes the art market and the well-established, which then become analogous to the art world. (Takashi Murakami’s studio operations cannot stand for the experiences of an artist living in a collective, sharing a 20 square-foot room with three others.)

She devotes one of her seven day-long explorations to Art Basel, which she calls “The Fair,” connoting simultaneously the uniqueness and quintessentiality that its reputation carries. The word “fair” conjures two meanings: of display, and of sale. The second disproportionately obscures the first in Thorton’s chapter—most of the buying happens on the single day before the fair opens to the public for the week. Art Basel is described, in fact, as almost everything but a display of art. Its focus is on the politics, the commercial consequences, the competition, the etiquette, and the central players.

Knowing that most of this will be inaccessible to my visit, I found her reaction to the fair something I could see for myself. What interested me the most was her closing statement, that afterwards one “crave[s] nothing more than a well-thought-out museum show.” I am surprised she ended on a controversial and loaded statement. What does it mean to identify a well-thought-out museum show as its opposite? My goal tomorrow is to find an answer to that question.

Art Basel from a previous year

Presenting “Work of Art”

I approached the idea of Bravo’s new reality TV show Work of Art with some disdain and apprehension. The idea of artistic competition, fenced by deadlines, assignments and criticism, is not new in the art world. I mostly had reservations having the ability to maintain artistic integrity within the framework of a reality TV show. After watching the season premier, I found myself pleasantly surprised. There is a value to seeing artwork in the context of a TV show like this one. It also helped that the art was really good.

The show becomes an unexpected way to bring art to a viewership that might not necessarily have access to emerging art. It lends itself to a gallery experience, showing both the art and how other people interact with it. In fact, the critical segment of the show, featuring some of the most famed art critics in New York, becomes a crash course in how to talk about and see art. It contracts the two-part process of reading an art critique in print—seeing and retaining the work, then understanding what the critique is referring to. It inadvertently trains the eye to discriminate not only based on presentation but also based on process.

There are, however, elements to the show that I still feel unsure about. Though each critique is preceded by a gallery show, in which the work has a chance to interact with a selected public, I want to see how other venues and contexts will affect the process and the work. (Art is never just the object itself, but what it is presented in, and how.)

Also, because of the set-up, the show overstates the role of critics in determining the success of a work. The reliance on this might just be a function of keeping the show efficient and moving forward. The deeper debates of art are relegated elsewhere. It is easy to see that the judging might become tricky because aesthetic preference has always been a touchy subject in our culture, which begat the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  The show might have a hard time identifying and consistently justifying criteria that define a successful art piece throughout the season. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this avoided entirely for the sake of keeping it digestible.

On the whole, it has something for art lovers, and drama lovers. I am optimistic.

Work of Art airs Wednesday nights, 11/10c on Bravo.

The Life Cycle of Street Art and Graffiti

I just an article titled “Banksy Mural Threatened With Destruction Moved”
off of Clancco, an art law and news blog. Though the article was short, the title conveys the sentiment behind the municipal duty to preserve art, contributed to in no small part by museums and historic institutions. With cultural artifacts and historical objects, the moral certitude of preservation becomes hazy and debatable, but in the case of street art and graffiti, the preservation works against the ephemerality at the basis of the art.

In street art and graffiti, the conditions of its creation define its content, much like performance and installation art. It is necessarily site specific and has a life span. Unlike more traditionally studio-created work, street art and graffiti are impermanent and their contexts cannot be managed. This art is an homage to the process of creation in opposition to rampaging object fetish, and to the individual life of the art after its creation and beyond the control of the creator. When I worked with Gawker Artists last summer, I had the chance to meet the street artist Billi Kid, who put this in perspective for me. Regarding his work, he says to “Take a close look at it, smile at it, tear it or cover it with something new.” That is the rhythm of art in the street–perpetual fleeting motion.

The want to preserve Banksy’s mural above defy the nature of and remove the power of the work. The particular piece in question, ironically, is about impermanence, and retains its magnitude from also having a limited lifespan, if not from destruction then from natural forces of weathering. The threats made against the work of being defaced that prompted the gallery to remove the work from view do not destabilize the work so much as reveal the skewed objectives of an institutional setting.

This Banksy piece gives me an excuse to say what I feel is true of many street, performance, installation, conceptual art forms sheltered and protected by museums and viewing spaces. The work is meant to be transient and subject to the forces and itsaudience without mediation from a third party.

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For Thirty Days in New York

Tonight is the opening party for a new gallery and a new gallery concept, Thirty Days Gallery. (See site for details on attending the party.) Curated by Family Bookstore (I believe it is this curated bookstore in LA?), the gallery is located in Tribeca and will be on view, as its name suggests, for only 30 days, now through May 7th.

Looking at the lineup and the calendar, it seemed that the planning and effort were disproportionate to the length of the display. But maybe Thirty Days is not meant to be looked at as just another gallery, but a total work in itself. While their page does not say this, I believe the gallery project is an homage to the art forms it will be presenting, and the under-appreciated ephemerality of art and art spaces of New York.

The gallery, like the art it will house, exists and can only be experienced aesthetically for a set amount of time–installation, film, music, and (the act of reading) books. Thirty Days seems to want to respect the temporality of these art forms by aligning itself with their organic cycles of coming into/disappearing from the public eye, rather than transcending it with permanence. This is a gallery project that respects the nature of this art, and perhaps suggests that a gallery is defined by its composite parts.

Thirty Days also shows its affinity for its fellow gallery spaces, many of which have closed in the past year due to economic pressure. While art (categorically and historically) is considered to be eternal, it is clear that those that struggle to build lives around it are not. In its graceful entrance and exit, Thirty Days honors whole gallery practice and struggle.

I am disappointed that I will not be able to see this gallery at all. Please if you have the chance, pay a visit.

Thirty Days Gallery
70 Franklin Street, between Church & Broadway
Tribeca, New York

Through May 7th, 2010