wondercabinet

The Long Tail of the Art Market, and Artists' Fantasy Lives

I'm bucking my long-term resistance to reading mainstream economics and business books (books which look at economics and business without taking into account social justice issues and class oppression usually drive me nuts), and deciding to go ahead an research my way towards having a better understanding of the big picture of how the Internet has changed the economics of cultural production and distribution. Why?

Because I am an artist. An artist trying to figure out making a living while keeping my somewhat non-commercial sculpture practice at the center of my life. And like many artists, I battle with a love/hate relationship with the traditional models of the art market, and am intrigued by the opportunities current technologies provide (cheap, easily accessible means of producing and distributing our own work, which for so long was not possible in many forms of media). These days millions of people are able to make their own skits, films, songs, books, articles, photos, video games, TV shows, talk shows, radio shows, remixed music, animations, videos, and more and more, and distribute them to millions of other people, with a desktop computer and increasingly affordable hardware and software. This is wonderful. It opens up the “Long Tail” of the art world for all to see, in all its stunning diversity, mind-boggling crappiness and inspiring genius. What does this mean for those of us with the “artist” identity? What is the role of artists now?

These are some of the questions I plan to explore in this blog for a while, and I hope you will join me. Comment, email me, pass the blog address around.

 The place I am starting for myself has to do with my own long-held fantasies about being an Art Star. C'mon fellow “fine” artists, we all have them. One day, someone in the inner sanctums of the art market will discover you, put you on the cover of ArtForum, and suddenly you will have all the resource and recognition you could ever need to work full-time on your art without worrying about money, and you will travel the world meeting other fabulous artists and collaborating, etc etc. You will wear rad sneakers while giving irreverent lectures at art universities, for fun, not for money. You will buy a house in India/Italy/Berlin/London. You will marry Bjork. You will see your art in coffee table books and gallerists will pay you lots of money to make installations in their NY white boxes, and of course, this will continue for the rest of your life, and you will die knowing you Have Made a Great Contribution To the History of Art. You will live on forever in the Canon.

Of course, it's not really like that for 99% of the famous artists. And, its not important to achieve that recognition from an art market which represents an ideologically and culturally narrow sliver of the overall production of interesting or significant art being made in the world.

It works for me like a lottery fantasy. I fantasize about what I will do with my giant eventual lottery winnings, even though I don't buy lottery tickets and have a strong distaste for the lottery system and refuse to support it. Some part of me refuses to give up on the dream of the lottery, and its the part of me that doesn't quite believe that I will build a life of financial security for myself as an artist, facing all the hardships of economic oppression (health insurance, anyone?) and figuring out how to survive anyway, and live the life I want. It's hard, people. There is a reason we're all buying lottery tickets, or not buying them but dreaming about it anyway.

With the art world. I find myself fantasizing about being an “art star,” though I do not actually find myself working towards it as a goal. My goal is to make art, to make GOOD art, to find ways to keep making good art, and to surround myself with those crazy geniuses I know who have made similar decisions. And most artists, successful artists, employ a number of strategies to piece together financial resource, artmaking time, creative community and public visibility/recognition for their work. Many teach and hold down other jobs. The real “Art World,” the one we call that, the one with Art Stars on the Front Pages, is also way more complex and full of a billion gray areas than the fantasies permit. The Art Star fantasy is a sham.

But like the lottery fantasy, the Art Star fantasy confuses issues around money, career, real creative satisfaction. When I decided to start to sell small-scale artwork online at affordable prices (thereby taking control of my own distribution and sales of my work), I was told by people in my art community invested in the traditional art-market way of doing things not to use my real name in my online dealings. It could compromise my chances in the “art world.”

(Which got me thinking how in a funny way, the Art Star Fantasy is like an abusive lover. The one that says “I am not going to give you any love. Well, maybe I will, if you do everything perfectly and the wind blows in just the right direction and all the stars line up just so. But don't leave me, because you will never make it on your own. You're stuck here.” )

As with the lottery, which keeps thousands of people hoping for a big break instead of (another fantasy, I know, but here goes) organizing to make the changes necessary so that all people are protected from poverty and oppression, The Art Star fantasy keeps us artists competing, separate from each other, and all working on our “individual” careers in hopes of being noticed at the right time and the right place, rather than organizing together to create the networks and communities necessary to fill all our needs as artists. That's what the fantasy does.

But here is the Long Tail of the art market; in other words, the big diverse cultural outpouring of a million forms of art, as seen on the Internet, overwhelmingly by people with little investment in the Art Star fantasy and little connection with the New York – centered Art market. Online galleries and collectives and shops and networks abound, and emerging from the morass of mediocrity, there are works of great intelligence and beauty popping up everywhere, just existing, not asking permission to exist. For those of us who were conditioned (in childhood, or in universities, or in art communities) with an expectation or dream about the “Art World”: can we give it up and join the bigger stream? Can we be one of many, happy to make our art, empowered to make money from it, without the hope of being a major celebrity? Comfortable in the niches and micro-communities we call home?  What can we gain from jumping ship? What is lost?

Is Political Art Useful?

I went to a discussion at Space 1026 about “radical art,” in conjunction with the  JustSeeds Visual Resistance collective's show “Out of the Shell of the Old” (installation shots here). The panelists were Naima Lowe, a friend of mine and a brilliant film/installation/performance artist, http://ramshackleenterprises.net Beth Nixon, another friend and puppeteer/performer and art facilitator,  Erik Ruin, a puppeteer and printmaker and JustSeeds member, and Theodore Harris, a collage artist and painter. Their presentations were inspiring, as were their discussions about “radical art” - including their questioning and critique of the term.

So...who decides what is radical and what is not? Is the term about what you fight against or what you fight for? Beth talked about how the things she fights for (for example, a respectful environment for the children she teaches, which requires her to play a really different role than many teachers) may be labeled “radical” but is in fact, for her, “normal” (or should be considered normal). Naima talked about how as a black, queer woman, radical for her might look really different than radical for someone else; and in many “radical” circles, her kind of “radical” isn't particularly welcome. Reactionary for one woman might be radical for another. Theodore Harris questioned the historical use of “radical” - were civil rights workers labeled “radical” as a way to denigrate them, make them seem insane or unreasonable? Erik's take seems to be more about taking back the term from all the forces that would co-opt it, make it exclusionary, etc. - and not be afraid to identify ourselves as people who want total transformation of society. Can the term be inclusive of the huge ideological diversity in our approaches to this kind of transformation?

Each of these artists showed work that integrates the parts of their minds (and lives) that are concerned with social justice and civic engagement and politics, while being fully engaged in the formal and creative process and practice that makes all excellent art satisfying. This, I think, is the potential of good political art – nothing is sacrificed. Not, especially, the freedom of the creative process, the open-ended nature of it, the parts of it which can't be boiled down to direct political message.

Because here is the tricky thing. Art and politics demand different approaches and different strategies. Good political action demands direct messages, a very pragmatic kind of creativity. Artmaking demands the inclusion of forces that refuse to be constrained to this kind of pragmatism. Art is at its best when it is unruly.You can't build a good work of art around a slogan. You have to allow the ambiguous to play a big role, to allow all the beings and creatures of past and present and future to sneak through the doors and into your work. You have to relinquish control over what appears (though you might make conscious decisions about what to do with what appears). And you have to not take too much stock in your own opinions, even your own identity as a political person. Ultimately you are going for something bigger and more complex than a political issue.

But the potential is, we can discover that most political issues are much bigger than political issues...that the BIGGER is all of humanity, all of what we want and dream of, all that could be, free from oppression. And this is where art and politics can talk and play together.

A big discussion came up on the usefulness of art, an issue debated as long as there has been an “art world” in the west, and a question which I think is completely beside the point. Art is useful and important because it is a deeply human activity, it is our voices, and there is no expression of a human voice which is not important in some way. To not do it would be to be silenced (by oppression). To do it is to take a stand for life in a death culture, a stand for creation in a consumption culture. To ask if it is useful betrays how we have been confused about ourselves in an individualistic culture. It is the same as saying “am I significant? Does my existence matter?”

I like what my friend Morgan from Puppet Uprising said about it. He said “Is art useful? Well, 30 of us are sitting in a 100 degree humid room at the end of a long day to look at some art and talk about it. Why did we come here? This is as important as food!”

New Sketches of junky inventions

I've been drawing a lot in my studio this week.

I do notice that when I make art with the goal of selling it there is some different kind of compromising that goes on in my head. Its too hard to be internal and free, I think about the results too much. So, Im drawing for a while, without knowing if these will be guoache paintings, or gocco prints, or just simply sketches.

Always the junky buildings, and with these newbies, more and more I think they are about humans trying to figure out a low budget, non-mass-produced, unprofessional, connected, elegant, silly, harmonious , sustaining (to body, land and spirit) relationship with our environment.

Can you see it? Its kind of faint. You can look at more on Flickr too.

So This Black Cowgirl and This White Nun Were in Love...

Everyone in Philly should go see Mary and Sarah and You and Me: A Series of Tiny Spectacles, a performance/video/puppet spectacle by Naima Lowe and Emmy Bean, on August 1 and 2 at the Parlor in Philadelphia. Everyone! From the web site:

WITNESS! THE ALL-TOO FAMILIAR LIFE OF STAGECOACH MARY, A BLACK COWGIRL, WHO LIVED WITH AND LOVED ONE SARAH DUNNE, WHITE, A NUN!

EXPERIENCE! MONTANA, THE PLAINS, LATE 19TH CENTURY FRONTIER! RENDERED MAGICAL FOR YOU IN WAYS THAT ARE FUNNY! ANGRY! STRANGE!

FEEL! THE FANTASTICAL CHANNELING OF A BLACK GIRL NAVIGATING THE FRINGES OF CLOISTERED (BUT OH SO WELL MEANING) WHITE SOCIETIES!

HEAR! THE PLAINTIVE WAIL OF A YOUNG WHITE GIRL RELIGIOUS, DOING ALL THE WRONG THINGS FOR ALL THE RIGHT REASONS!

CHEER! THE BATTLE ROYALE! THE STORYTELLERS ROCHAMBEAU, TOYING WITH THE LINE BETWEEEN EXPLOITER AND EXPLOITED!

A PUPPET SHOW, WITH PEOPLE, AN AMBULATORY VOYAGE INTO THE ARCHIVAL PAST OF THESE UNITED STATES, RACIAL, SEXUAL, AND IN ALL OTHER WAYS AFIRE!

ENJOY! TWO PERFORMANCES OF THIS ELABORATE WORK IN PROGRESS

WHEN? AUGUST 1 & 2
Doors open at 7:30, performance starts promptly at 8.

WHERE? THE PARLOR, 1171 BROAD ST, PHILADELPHIA PA

HOW? TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR OR BY CLICKING HERE.

I have been following this work in progress for over a year, and it's been a joy and an inspiration. I'll see you there!

studio fun and rainy city shadow puppets

I'm having so much fun playing in my new (finally complete) studio. My wall of  windows is a perfect shadow puppet stage, lit from within. Here I'm playing with papers and sculptures and light and shadow, wondering what comes next. The paper is an old scroll of player-piano paper which looks to me like rain. Extreme close-up:

recognize this little guy? Its the original drawing for Specimen No. 6!

there was a cooked artist and she worked in a . . .

I am almost done constructing my studio!

My studio is composed of Outer Space, which is the larger zone for making sculptures and making messes, and the Inner Sanctum, comprised mostly of old found windows, pictured here.

My big success came yesterday, when I hacked a hole in the outside wall of the building and installed a window! I have light! I can see a distance beyond my walls! I can see sky! I cant tell you what a difference it makes.

And best of all, I didnt make any huge mistakes that I would have to hire a carpenter to fix. Although any carpenter would laugh at my little effortful hack job!

Now I am only a mop and a bucket and can of paint away from moving in and setting up the inner sanctum.