Friday, March 15, 2024

Essay: Art and Social Risk

 There's an increasingly troubling political weaponization of art shows. Numerous mainstream art media channels increasingly normalize taking advantage of the art ecosystem as an exclusive and private political echo chamber and sandbox for an intolerant cohort of "collaborators".

The opportunity for true terrorism to be staged in the subterfuge of a Contemporary Art show is growing and may be breaching a dangerous critical mass.

The concern falls into a number of categories;

  • The use of art shows by political cohorts to communicate, co-ordinate, or orchestrate illegal or terrorist activity 

  • The use of art shows by political cohorts to smuggle or otherwise exchange weaponry or other materials to disrupt social stability 

  • The use of art shows as a means to trigger or otherwise alter the behavior of a patron that results in a spontaneous reckless act of aggression or trauma

 The show and artist who inspired these observations is Tania El Koury who talked about her work in a Brooklyn Rail "New Social Environment" zoom call event.  

There is nothing about Koury's art to indicate anything but sincere aesthetic considerations but the implementation of her installations is worth examining in the context of this essay. 




This piece, Cultural Exchange Rate, is of particular interest.  It consists of locked Cabinet spaces that are opened by patrons with a key that's distributed by whoever is responsible for sitting the show on any given day. Khoury's work deconstructs some personally archival material that is distributed piecemeal among these cabinets. 

The patrons pictured have a relatively autonomous and personal experience but, obviously, there is no transparency as to the contents of any of these containers.

Given the global aspects of shows such as these shows - international special interest groups promoting their own agendas - the potential for ethnic and geopolitical intrigue is certainly a consideration worth discussing. In a violent world, Contemporary Art shows that feature coded political agendas or provide hidden opportunities for the exchange of contraband, or can co-ordinate private, exclusive access to designated spaces is problematic.  The list of abusive examples is much longer than my shortlisted items.

The artistic ecosystem needs to re-calibrate its attention to artistic concerns and reject the normalization of art as politics as religion in a world so polarized as to promote mutual distrust and harm. 



 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Avant-Grind - Making Sense of Juried Art Shows in the 21st Century

It is a long standing convention for Juried Art shows to solicit a call for artists to submit their entries to the show based on work realized in the past, say, three years. The temporal requirement will vary and may be based only years or social event such as the Covid social isolation period. 

I bring up this topic because of the assumptions that never are questioned about the practice.

In a society in which individuals are living longer and more capable lives, artists who are older often have a large inventory of material to choose from with the last n number of years representing but a small fraction of their intellectual contributions, curiosities, and development.

Last century which was dominated by the romantic notion of the "avant-garde" - the notion that each professional artist is willingly or unwillingly enrolled in a race that represented progress as establishing a unique stream of theory or practice both different and theoretically plausible than the next artist. Furthermore, the act of being a professional artist was neither as crowded an occupation as it is today nor as fiscally viable. Compound all of that with uncertain health and lifetime expectations and often artists of that time became hostages to the choice of aesthetic rabbit hole "ism" they decided to pursue and call their own.

And as a consequence, galleries, curators, dealers, and patrons became accustomed to uniformly demanding the latest, greatest progress along these lines.  The "new", the "cool", the avantiness of the work is what everyone was tapping their foot waiting to be delivered.

By the end of the last century though the avant-garde had largely run its course, intellectually burying with the widely hailed "Death of..."  all things Modern. And today with the smoking fumes of PostModernism still fresh in the air, galleries still cling to and promote juried shows whose metrics and expectations are artifacts of a culturally unfamiliar past.

Unlike museums, galleries that solicit calls for art are precisely where local communities can find and freely access the diverse cacophony of artistic talent our political identitarians claim to look for.  

Contemporary Art is a big tent that straddles fine art and everything else that somebody/anybody considers "art" and heaven forbid you question any of its worthiness.

The pretension of an avant-garde in the 21st century simply has lost its veracity. Art is less a matter of developing an "ism" as it is a cult like devotion to believing one's identity cohort is in need of a space so safe as to deny any and all forms of discussion or criticism as unwelcome or even an assault on their personage.

And this brings us back - in a roundabout way - to questioning the virtue of requesting that artistic submissions to juried art shows conform to a newness metric - something completed in the last n years.

Today, the result is not a harvest of originality or innovation.  The result is both politically correct and politically policed conformity. The galleries are aesthetic echo chambers of empty virtue and antiseptic craft competitions.  The temporal constraints on these shows artificially create a bubble of illiberal conformity.

If an avant garde exists today, it is practiced not with ideas but in aesthetic delivery systems - digital, virtual, and augmented technologies abound.  What is persistently a vacant opportunity is the ability to present new ideas, thoughtful  contradictory musings, or -gasp- original material that has no Contemporary comfort zone.

Let's spitball some alternative curatorial possibilities.  How about juried shows that ask for a current piece and a piece from ten years ago to compare and contrast. Or why pursue temporal bounds on show entries at all?   Long practicing artists have plenty of unseen and underappreciated work worth presenting.



Friday, February 16, 2024

Bigotry at the Brooklyn Rail

 The Brooklyn Rail (BR) is a multimedia, Brooklyn based, arts social media outlet.  They publish a newsletter and provide a Monday thru Friday zoom to YouTube artist or arts organization interview that presumably anyone can participate in. Usually this involves one hundred or fewer live participants and a few dozen additional YouTube views. 

The Zoom meetings include the ability to hold a side chat between one another audience members. The principals in the Zoom conversation can choose to see or ignore these comments and these comments never show up in the YouTube exports of the Zoom call.

And these chat room conversations are moderated - presumably to eliminate any inappropriate remarks or malicious content in the chat room. One would hope that the moderation isn't intended to exercise bigotry against legitimate material being shared.

Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Rail podcasts are moderated in a way that calling it The Brooklyn Bus of Bigotry would be a more appropriate label for the enterprise.

The BR's subtitle claims "Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture" but doesn't really practice it. With few exceptions the editorial hegemony that governs all of its content is closer to an exercise in liberal fascism than Critical Perspective. The explicit allegation about their representation is that they represent and defend the intellectual voices of the marginalized, under-represented, and, well, the litany of victimization adjectives is far too long to list. Suffice it to say that no identity politic group is too small or ridiculous to be included in this community.

A practicing artist, minding their own business, and attempting to make apolitical art is not welcome in that cohort. 'Community' by their practical definition doesn't include anyone who isn't a victim (e.g. you or I). And therein lies not only the root of the bigotry but the weaponization of amplifying race, gender, skin color, sexual preference, and so on as a profit platform.

The editorial architecture of the BR guarantees a strict and unapologetic conformity of thought and opinion. The BR employs a number of editors whose specialty is the bigotry of low expectations. Their gender editors are gay, queer, or non-binary and their guests always identify by gender. Rare if ever is there a discussion about art that isn't a fawning, mutual gender admiration discussion. Art is always the collateral neglected topic.

Likewise with the Trump Derangement Syndrome editors. In these interviews the artist being featured must spend at least fifteen minutes showing their politically correct inoculation credentials. They hate Trump, love BLM, are not sexually straight, their personal identity is a mystery to everyone, they've been marginalized by the mythic patriarchy, they decolonize their lives with anti-Western bleach, and on and on and on.  No evidence is ever required and no logical coherency is ever offered.
dare to ask what any of it has to do with their art in the chat and you will be eliminated from addressing the chat group with all comments going to the null bin direct messages of the moderator of the day.

"The New Social Environment is a space for community and intellectual exchange. Please be generous with each other, and allow us all space to interpret and discuss."

Some BR editors constrain conversations to art and they are often richer and more generally worthwhile participatory fare.

As a platform, one of many problems is the fact that all of their Zoom moderators are young and female. Aside from Phong Bui, the publisher, there is not a male speaker to be found among the general staff.

The women find every Zoom participant "awesome", "generous", and "amazing".  And the experience of the Zoom calls is often that of an echo chamber with designated chat cheerleaders who elevate even the most mundane artistic exchanges as epiphanies. To offer any contradictory input is troublesome.

And therein lies the biggest problem the BR promotes.  that is that the so-called "New Social Environment" is not only no better than the old one but an insultingly condescending alternative.

If artists "of color" are looking for equality, one would think that treating them with equal respect would mean having adult conversations about their art and process.  Likewise, young women who claim an entitlement to privileged representation in galleries, museums, and shows need to provide some/any evidence that their art deserves such favor. They don't. In the New Social Environment they can freely vent their spleen full of alleged evils by men without a hint of proof.

Other groups all enjoy this non-critical pretense of victimization and birthright innocence while condemning the other - whoever they think they are.

All of this is to say that this echo chamber mentality ensures new generations of racism, victim-hood, and  needy narcissism that does nothing more than pollute a generous society that does its imperfect best to create a better world. And a better world lifts every aesthetic ship.


    

Monday, February 12, 2024

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Guerrilla Girls 2023 EOY Cumulative Body Count

 In 2023, in 17 juried or otherwise selected visual art gallery shows in the Northeast;


576 women were chosen to exhibit (65%)

309 men were chosen to exhibit (35%)

2 self-identified Trans were chosen (.2%) 

 

Two Foundations Opllock/Krasner & Joan Mitchell) awarded

55 women and 39 men grants


Collector spending via ArtBasel study: 

2.6 HNW collectors spent less on works by female artists in 2022 and 2023, with a ratio by value of 39% female to 61% male

In other words, galleries are losing money thanks to their imbalances.

Motivations of collectors.

In other words, galleries that don't account for who their patrons are miss the commercial opportunities.


The National Endowment for the Arts reports that 46.1% of visual artists are women.    Few highly reliable, least biased resources exist.

THE NEA report has LOTS of good, interesting, and actionable data that should temper the rhetoric concerning under-representation, "erasure", and other volumes of unsubstantiated discrimination claims.


Two shows include in this count had no previous mention and were researched by their conspicuous absence.


The 2023 Silvermine 'One' juried show:
 
27 women, 3 men accepted


The Hudson Juried Artist show:

 70 women and 60 men accepted