Photo by Flickr user Badger 23

The San Francisco Bay Area is still new to me. I am still trying to learn as much as I can about both the history of art in the area and look forward to the future while taking in the present. My interest in the global/local dynamic as well as the concept of having art world centers means that I’m always trying to assess what kind of art city San Francisco is within a larger context. Glenn Ligon certainly isn’t the first or only person to claim that New York is no longer the center of the art world. While New York is still host to the largest concentration of galleries and museums in the US, it is also just one of many art world centers around the globe, and Los Angeles is developing quickly as another US center. At the same time, locations such as Berlin have become incubation grounds for artists who want the freedom to experiment outside the art market pressures. Then, there are cities like San Francisco and Chicago that are somewhere in between.

San Francisco is often perceived as a city whose regional artists and local nonprofits dominate the city alongside long-standing galleries. As a recent transplant from Chicago, this structure and attitude is familiar; however, this time there are different forces behind why the city’s art scene has developed or is perceived in this way. San Francisco is home to the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts—schools that attract curators and teaching artists such as Jens Hoffmann, Hou Hanru, Trisha Donnelly, and Kota Ezawa, among others. The schools also graduate a large number of emerging artists and arts professionals. But, like Chicago, many leave after graduating because the market is not big enough to support them all.

The collector base here is small but strong—and most importantly, values discretion. The flashiness of nearby Los Angeles is not present here. As Ratio3 gallery owner Chris Perez noted in a recent conversation, the collectors in the Bay Area are relaxed but in touch internationally. And it seems that more collectors are looking at work produced in the region now than previously.

So what is it about San Francisco that drives some to call the city’s art scene “eternally becoming”? And is it approaching another moment of “becoming” now that many people from the New York art world are moving to the city and opening spaces? And what does “becoming” allude to? Certainly, San Francisco’s scene (or any other) shouldn’t just be judged on the commercial art market.

I don’t have the answers to these questions yet, but as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve come across a few interesting articles that I would like to share, as well as some links to exciting new spaces in the city. I’m excited to be in a new city with such a vibrant and complex diversity of the arts.

1. First, a thoughtful assessment of Chicago by writer and curator, Anthony Elms in May Magazine.
2. A feature in SF Magazine about the “young and hungry” in the SF art world
3. Recent New York transplant Claudia Altman-Siegel’s new space: Altman Siegel Gallery S/F
4. A small (in size) gallery that is building a big reputation for their thoughtful shows: Jancar Jones Gallery

Bergen Biennial Conference

In September, the Bergen Kunsthall hosted “To Biennial or Not to Biennial” in Bergen, Norway. The goal was to gather a group of people in the arts to discuss the effect and the potential of biennials on a global scale. Here are a few observations noted by Quinn Latimer (who blogged for Art21 not too long ago!) in a two-part article in Frieze Magazine (full articles here and here):

Noting that our current biennials are structurally indebted to these perennial exhibitions of the past, [MIT art historian Caroline A.] Jones argued that at the same time the biennial form has created key structural shifts – that, essentially, ‘biennial culture is the term we can use to describe this appetite for art as experience.’ One of her most interesting points was that the 21st century’s emphasis on experiential art works – now sometimes derided as ‘biennial art’ – is an echo of the 19th century, suggesting that the 20th century’s emphasis on form ultimately failed. If videos and installations are the genre of the new millennium, Jones claimed, then biennials are ‘their regulating salons.’ Since biennials have changed the art world, we must acknowledge that the ‘placement of the art object inside a world picture produces both the object’s and the picture’s significance.’ She then laid out her central philosophical question: ‘What are the conditions of possibility for the global work of art?’

Laura Steward, the Phillips Director of SITE Santa Fe, offered perhaps the funniest observation of the conference. Sighing, she asked: ‘Do you think it’s possible to exhaust your local audience?’ Pointing to biennials in ‘exotic’ locales like Santa Fe, Tirana or Bergen, she cited her own biennial, for which international artists often want to do site-specific works with the local community. ‘The Navajos are telling us: enough with your German artists already!’ To laughter, she offered an example for Bergen: ‘Will there be a work about the fish market in every biennial?’

Glenn Ligon

The New York art world is a shell of its former self. And I think that’s because New York is such a hard city to live in, that it is really difficult to imagine advising a young artist to move here. And I think, in a way, that has been good for the art world because it has decentered New York. New York is no longer the center of the art world. I think the NY art world is Berlin.

— Glenn Ligon, Interview Magazine, October 2009

Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates is an artist living and working in Chicago. Labeling him an artist certainly does not capture who he is and what he does, though. He is often referred to as an activist, community organizer, and performer, among other things. When asked about his art practice and all the labels attached to him, he responds by saying he is a problem solver. His interests are broad, and his solutions lead him into a variety of genres and material. Lately, he has been giving public lectures and presentations. Many times, his work is presented in exhibitions.

Gates’s work often takes place in the public arena with public gatherings or lectures. When asked what draws him to this method of engagement, Gates’s response is that, “there is a type of power in the public”—either in the ability to voice one’s opinion and know that it is being heard, or through the social aspect. As he explains, “I accept that the byproduct of me getting people together is that people might call it art or call it an activist moment, and that’s just fine. The part I’m trying to concentrate on is this: if I have a set of relationships that are broad and wide, how can I bring those relationships into conversation with each other when necessary or when I’m curious?”

To that end, Gates’s latest project confronts a variety of issues through gathering people around a meal. Gates and I spoke on October 28, 2009 by phone to discuss this developing project. His upcoming projects include Theaster Gates: Resurrecting Dave the Potter at the Milwaukee Art Museum (April 15-August 1, 2010) and an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Kelly Huang: Food has been a reoccurring subject in your work. Back in the spring, we spoke about a soul food project that you will be hosting on the South Side of Chicago in the near future. You describe how food is an important part of every culture—how it shapes people’s memories of place, speaks to history, and has the power to bring people together. Could you tell me more about the project you are working on and how you first conceptualized it?

Theaster Gates: I was approached by Stephanie Smith (Curator of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum), who was thinking about a project called Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art. Feast was to be an attempt at surveying the history of food practices in contemporary art. She asked me pretty simply, “What would you want to do?” And I said, I am feeling pretty good about doing things outside of museums and I would like to try and relocate a food space outside of your museum, and concentrate on soul food, because it has such a rich history on the South Side. I decided to acquire a building on my block and over the next one and a half years, slowly build out that space into a sort of soul food temple, where—in the spirit of critical discourse on art practices and social practices—one could eat really good food.

But, it’s not just about food to the extent that food is a signifier of certain cultural behaviors, rituals. Food acts as a material I can play with to tease out certain rituals inherent in black people, Koreans, Chinese, white people, middle Americans. I think that the project has always been my labor and I will benefit from the fact that there are museums and other types of museums that are interested in what you call the “gastro-arts.”

KH: The role of food in this project is then, more about the gathering of people. Is that fair to say?

TG: Yes, I think it is partly about the gathering of people and partly about my ability to put a very specific finger on a certain kind of cultural activity so that just when one thinks they have soul food figured out, it actually reveals itself in all these other ways that have nothing to do with eating—

KH: It’s about the culture that surrounds it.

TG: It’s about the culture and it’s about a history of obesity; a history of slave labor and production; a history of the plantation. The space will allow me to slowly unpack the relationship that black people have had to rice in relation to Asian people’s relationship to rice. We can eat rice, but how can I unpack rice so that people start to see, then, that rice is an extremely loaded food? Rice is extremely broad and deep and political, and I want to see what’s there. If I choose to think about rice a lot, what new friendships might I gain in the cultural sphere? Who else wants to talk about rice?

KH: Locating the project on the South Side is deliberate. Why the South Side in this particular location, and who do you imagine as the visitors or consumers?

TG: My first response to “Why the South Side?” is “Why not the South Side?” That in fact, where we imagine things should happen, most of the time makes absolutely no sense. Part of what I’m trying to do is to say that there should be other centers. Cultural centers deserve to be wherever people are, as arbitrary as it is that I live on the South Side. I feel like that’s my protest to the cultural community. I’m not going to have everything I do happening in what people imagine to be the center of the universe, wherever that is. My center of my universe is at the corner or 69th and Dorchester and everything emanates from that place.

KH: In past interviews, you’ve talked about your background as an urban planner and how that has affected the way you think about and imagine your block, and what effect these projects can have. How does all that factor into choosing to do these projects there?

TG: I think over time, it just became more and more evident that the reason why poor neighborhoods fail is because people who could contribute to the cultural fabric, and the economic fabric, and physical fabric of a place leave as soon as they can afford to leave. It isn’t even a deep urban planning theory. If you keep your money where you’ve grown up, then those neighborhoods that you grew up in would have more money as you made more. I decided that I would commit to this. All of that feels like the framework. What I’m finding is that other people want to live on that block because of my commitment to it. My neighbors who have always lived on the block love the fact that there are other young people who are willing to live there. Maybe their kids who make $60,000 or $80,000 or $100,000 salaries, can do something significant in their grandmother’s place. And I think that’s all I’m doing. I’m trying to cry to people who have a little bit of change.

KH: Seeing the value of your own neighborhood and investing in that.

TG: Yeah! And it feels really simple to me. And it doesn’t feel like art. I cannot honestly have this conversation with you and say my art practice is at the nexus of this and that. It ain’t. Most of the time I’m just glad to have an affordable place to live. But, I’m clear though that I do projects that echo between my block in Berlin, that echo between my block in NY. And if there is something about these objects I make or the performances I do that lend more resources to Dorchester, then I’m going to take advantage of it. So, I kind of get a kick out of inviting people to my block because a lot of times they’re scared or they’ve never been invited. And not to be cliché, but just to say that I have maintained a certain type of dignity in the face of this type of economic difference. My house is a home, too. And I think that invitation to eat allows for people to cross racial lines and geographic lines that they normally don’t cross. And I’m excited about that. There is room and reason to traverse.

Tino Sehgal rehearsing with interpreters

German artist Tino Sehgal recently spoke about his practice in a discussion with Jens Hoffmann at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Sehgal has been showing his work in the contemporary art context since 2004. It was in 2005 that Hoffmann curated an exhibition of Sehgal’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that caught the attention of the art world. Since then, the duo has remained connected through an ongoing exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute, where Hoffmann is the director.

I have been interested in the work of Sehgal since reading an article about him in The New York Times in 2007. Examples of Sehgal’s work include museum guards singing “This is so contemporary” in museum galleries (2003) or a couple locked in a passionate kiss (Kiss, 2002), or a person writhing on the ground in the corner of a museum (Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things, 2000). Sehgal does not allow any documentation of his work, but the pieces can be purchased nonetheless through passing along oral instructions (if he can’t eliminate capitalistic exchange, at least he can change the nature of what is being exchanged). Sehgal recruits and trains people, whom he calls “interpreters,” to carry out the works.

Sehgal’s work is rooted in two main ideas: 1) sustainability and 2) exploring the “technologies of interconnection.” By using interpreters to carry out his works, Sehgal challenges the conventions of experiencing artwork while also eliminating the waste that naturally comes with object-based work. He cites the events of May 1968 with instilling in him the notion that exchange or transactions needs to be challenged.

I’ve personally encountered two works by Sehgal. The first was Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things at the New Museum in the exhibition, After Nature, in 2008. At the opening, there were crowds of people, and most did not notice the woman writhing on the floor in the corner near the stairwell. If you looked at her, she stared back. Her motions were derived from the experimental videos of Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, but looked more like she was experiencing a seizure or was in pain. You quickly understand that the way you react, internally or outwardly, is part of Sehgal’s work.

Some critics like to trace Sehgal’s work back to the influence of the 1960s Happenings or Fluxus movements or to the Relational Aesthetics work of the 1990s. However, Sehgal’s work takes a significant departure from 1960s performance art in that it is presented in and created for institutions. Sehgal feels more comfortable seeing his work as a trajectory from Relational Aesthetics, in which artists used object-based works to create a dialogue or other type of interaction with the viewer. Sehgal pushes the practice forward by eliminating the object, shifting the focus onto the “technologies of interconnection,” defined by him as the exploration of the space that exists between two people.

Hoffmann is quick to declare that Sehgal’s work is equally as paradigm-shifting as that of Duchamp’s readymade. It is difficult to predict what the next trend or contemporary art movement will be, but it is true that Sehgal is a pioneer in the techniques he employs. As sustainability and the environment become bigger issues, and with the increasingly mediated ways in which humans interact as communications technology continues to develop, perhaps there will be a turn toward Sehgal’s modus operandi.

As a young artist, Sehgal’s work is ever-evolving and is continually-tested. For example, how is the work experienced when the viewer expects to encounter his work? The students at the CCA have the most experience in this, as they have become accustomed to encountering a Tino Sehgal work when they visit the Wattis Institute. Once the expectation of seeing a work of his in the galleries sets in, the space between Sehgal’s work and the viewer becomes more like that of an object-based work and viewer. In response to this reaction Sehgal created, That absence (2009), which was the lack of an interpreter-based work. The regular visitors were, then, preoccupied with where or what the Sehgal piece was in the exhibition.

Sehgal’s next project is a major solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (January 29-March 10, 2010). I am curious to see how Sehgal approaches the exhibition, and how visitors react. A rotation of Sehgal’s work is permanently on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

I’d like to start my guest blogging with Art21 by bringing up a series of questions surrounding globalization and artistic representation. My primary research interest is in the art market and the forces that shape it. With a background in cultural studies, I tend to approach the market through multiple lenses—analyzing it through its cultural, economic, and social contexts and impacts. In the next few weeks, I hope to present some interesting talking points surrounding this very issue, explore how arts communities are built, and feature artists working in exciting, new ways.

Not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.

— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Artforum, October 2009.

Last week, the San Francisco Art Institute hosted a panel discussion titled, “Global Art in the Downturn.” Panelists included Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. My first question upon coming across the announcement was, what is the definition of “global art”? This is exactly the question that was first addressed by moderator, Dominic Willsdon of SFMOMA. The agreed-upon definition during the panel discussion was that “global art” included the genres and forms of art that are more popular across the globe, and that it is work presented in biennials, art fairs, and internationally-known institutions, and publications.

There are no set terms or definitions or categories for the levels at which artwork is produced, but what became clear to me in my two years of researching art world ecosystems for my master’s thesis is that artists make conscious decisions about how they want their work to be seen and by whom. At the same time, their agency is limited or co-opted by other art world players, such as curators and dealers who control access to major institutions and exhibitions.

There is no doubt that globalization, or the more nuanced French term mondialisation, has affected the art world as a whole—from the expansion of new markets, to the ability for artists to more easily travel, explore, and present a wider range of ideas, or to the proliferation of biennials and art fairs. How, then, does defining “global art” as the work endorsed by the international art community affect how non-endorsed works or artists are read within a globalized art scene?

During the panel discussion, both Hou and Christov-Bakargiev reflected on their roles as curators of biennials. Hou was the curator for the 10th Biennale de Lyon and the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, and Christov-Bakargiev curated the 2008 Biennale of Sydney and is artistic director for the upcoming Documenta 13. Each feels the desire and need to ensure local artworks or cultural groups are integrated in these international exhibitions, but each also agrees that those works are viewed through a different lens. While biennialization has been blamed for creating pressure for artists to create works that appeal to a Western aesthetic as a result of the mainly-Western curators that direct them, it also has allowed for cities like Havana and Istanbul to host exhibitions that showcase local or regional artists and create value for a non-Western aesthetic. One must think about the makeup of the audience for biennials. Who is looking, who is judging, and what are the expectations?

Documenta11, Kassel, 2002. Photo: Werner Maschmann.

With the release of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, which follows their highly-influential book, Empire (2000), globalization is again at the forefront of a debate about how aesthetic judgments are made and how cultures are being shaped by them. In the October issue of Artforum, Okwui Enwezor discusses the effects of Empire on the art world. Specifically, Enwezor discusses how the book influenced the way he decided to approach being the artistic director for Documenta11 (2002), which he felt was historically, “one of the epicenters of the imperial regimes of cultural control; it constituted (along with the old circuitry of the museum institution) a type of cultural sovereignty that brooked little tolerance of the hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges to which Hardt and Negri would gravitate.” Enwezor’s curatorial approach to Documenta11 is still discussed today for the successful multiplicity of ideas and cultures he was able to cull together. Enwezor gathered a team of six curators to organize programs and exhibitions in Berlin, Lagos, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Vienna.

With Christov-Bakargiev at the helm for Documenta13, what should we expect? Her usual “smuggling in of chaos”—referring to the inclusion of artworks that may not fit into the term “global art” or of artworks that challenge certain ideologies or hierarchies—as she describes it?

I will leave you with a series of questions that I hope can be discussed in the comments.

This socio-economic moment demands introspection and a reassessment of the hierarchies and modes of organization and presentation in the art world. With the global economic downturn, should we expect to see less market-endorsed artists and more experimental or previously overlooked work to enter into international exhibitions? Will there ever be comfort in a truly multiplicitous diversity? As Hou argued during the panel, “all places want to be part of the global map, but they don’t want to necessarily be part of a monoculture.” Is that the path on which globalization has put us? Can art transcend the paradigms set by the political and market structures that permeate the art world?

David A. Ross, best known for his directorships at the Whitney Museum of American Art and SFMOMA, has taken on a variety of leadership positions in the art world. Besides the Whitney, he was also the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and SFMOMA, a board member and former principal of Artist Pension Trust, and was, until recently, director of Albion Gallery New York. As the economic downturn continues, arts administrators and artists are looking for ways to weather the storm and make the best of the current situation. Ross provides a unique perspective because of his involvement in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors, but especially having been the leader of the innovative firm, Artist Pension Trust (APT). APT’s members (artists selected by a curatorial board) invest 20 works of art over a 20-year period. Upon investment, APT cares for the works and promotes them through a variety of means. When the work is sold, the profits are split—40% to the artist, 32% to the collective whole of artists in the trust (a maximum of 250 artists per trust), and the remaining 28% to APT for management and operating costs. APT has trusts in 8 locations, globally. Here, Ross talks about APT, the intrinsic value of art, and what effect the economic recession may have on the rest of us.

Kelly Chen: The model of Artist Pension Trust is one that is artist-focused, providing artists with a type of financial stability that many do not have. On the other hand, APT also prides itself in the fact that it is amassing one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world (and mostly by artists under the age of 40), and is both duty-bound to its artists to grow and divest the collection. How, then, in this economic downturn, does APT reconcile its promises to and expectations from its artists with the necessary conservatism in the care of its collection?

David A. Ross: One of the premises of APT was to allow artists to hold back from the short-term ups and downs of the market and give them a relationship for the long-term value of their work. The economic downturn, in fact, has no direct impact because the trust is not even remotely ready to return works to the market. On the other hand, the rapid decline in the art market has made many artists more aware of the fact that they should be taking more care in terms of planning their own financial future—whether it is using the APT to help them keep work off of the market or doing other things that we encourage but don’t directly enable. We certainly encourage artists to be buying real estate to own their studios, to save money as basic thrift. It is all part and parcel of an approach to help artists—especially young artists who have come into the art world during a moment where there seems to be a gold rush—to recognize that the art world is anything but that. In order to sustain a long career and to remain in control (as much as one can be in control), certain prudence must be taken.

Artists are like anyone else and they need to generate income. If you’re broke and you have a picture someone is willing to pay $3,000 for and that’s all you have, and someone is willing to pay that, then you may have to sell it. It would be a shame to not be able to hold onto it until the value increases over time. But the risk is, of course, that any particular artist and any particular work may not increase in value over time. That is the reason why the trust is built on the particular formula it is—where income accrues from both the individual work of art and its growth in value over time, as well as the shared piece of the overall growth of all the works of the artists in the trust. That is the hedge, in a way.

KC: What strategies are in place for APT to ensure that the works in the collection build in market value?

DR: Well, the strategies are simple. One is that the works are conserved for the artist. It is very important that they are kept in perfect condition, especially for artists who are young and move studios a lot and don’t have money for storage or even for proper moving (where a lot of works get damaged). That’s a very important strategy, even though it doesn’t sound very sexy. Second, which is a lot sexier, is that exhibitions—both virtual and actual exhibitions—are organized by curators, guest curators, or curators who happen to be under parts of the various curatorial arms of the trust. Third is that the trust actively promotes the work by producing an online magazine, by participating in art fairs and conferences, and by opening up the database to curators who are looking for a work—in that respect, taking a page out of the playbook of Artists Space or any number of other organizations that have for years maintained artist files. In this case, they are all online; the work is available to be borrowed, if the artist agrees. The trust does not lend work to a show that the artist doesn’t want to be in, so it’s another example of where the artist retains control of his or her work and the image he or she may want to create. We recognize that it is not the trust’s job to build value—artists work with dealers to do that and artists do that themselves. But the trust wants to participate in that and help in whatever way that is ethically appropriate and that is fair. So APT doesn’t just help one group of the artists, but helps in a way that is equitable.

KC: Having been the director in three distinct areas of the art world, what is your opinion on how the value of artwork or of artists is judged? Is there such a thing as intrinsic value? Or do market value and network culture dominate valuation?

DR: Commercial value, to a large extent, is still a function of intrinsic value. From time to time, work that has no intrinsic value to speak of generates enormous commercial value. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, value even in the marketplace is a function of the direct mission of a work’s intrinsic value by competing players who want to control that work. So the primary issue is always the intrinsic value of a work, and understanding that in being able to predict it or see it and judge on a comparative level, the intrinsic value of works that are reasonably similar. That is a key issue in the art world, and that, of course, is the stuff of connoisseurship. And connoisseurship has to play the role both on the intellectual level—in terms of collection development and collection management and museological issues—as well as on a commercial level in terms of generating different values or understanding of different value propositions in the marketplace.

"Museums Speak! Funding, Exhibitions, Collecting and the Future," The Armory Show, New York City, March 6, 2009

KC: At The Armory Show this spring, you moderated a panel called, “Museums Speak: Funding, Exhibitions, Collecting, and the Future.” Museums are often seen as the most important form of validation—institutional validation—in the art world, and also as one of its most exclusive or inaccessible areas. During the panel, you asked if the panelists felt that the economic downturn would shift focus away from the recent commercialization and building of exclusivity and back to the artist and experimentation in artistic practice. The panelists were split in their opinions. Do you feel that this could happen? Do you see this as a moment parallel to what happened in New York in the 1970s, with the proliferation of artist-run spaces and nonprofits?

DR: Well if the downturn lasts long enough, I think it could do that. I do think that the turning way from an overheated market provides other options for artists. Some will take those options. And curators or others that may have gone into the commercial brackets now will not engage in a non-for-profit practice, even if it’s on a low-key level. What happened in the early 1970s with the evolution of artist-run spaces wasn’t just a response to the economic downturn of that moment. It was an evolutionary step that had been in development for a long time as artists gained more power in the primary equation of the artist’s relationship to the world. That hasn’t changed. Artist spaces and artist-run spaces are still very active. In fact, most of them are in their second or third generation at this point. And there are new ones that evolve and pop up all the time, and old ones that disappear. The ecology of the artist-run space or the non-for-profit kunsthalle space is a relatively healthy one. Like the fact that a forest fire ultimately is good for the forest, an economic downturn is something that is good for the art world. It isn’t something you want to be in the middle of because you can literally get burned by the unpleasant effects of the downturn.

KC: With the economic recession, which area do you feel artists will rely on the most—museums, commercial galleries, or nonprofit exhibition spaces?

DR: I don’t think one will outweigh the other. I think if artists are lucky enough to have commercial representation and the ability to sell work, or be represented by galleries that have the strength to put continue to produce exhibitions in the absence of a lot of cash flow, then those are indeed lucky artists and they are lucky to have dealers with staying power and good values. Of course, there will be fewer of those than before, but at the same time it is harder for alternative spaces to function, just like it’s harder for museums to function in a broadening way. So it’s a difficult time, especially for young artists. It’s a difficult time to be seen and it’s a difficult time to emerge. As the APT is fond of quoting, there are 30,000 new artists every year with graduate degrees in the U.S. alone, and many more coming out with just with undergrad degrees, and there are artists from around the world emerging from art schools. And that’s just new artists. The other ones don’t disappear—from last year, or from 2005 or from 1995.

So, it’s a very competitive environment that artists are entering into, and one that is under-capitalized makes it even more difficult for artists to sustain their career early on. At the same time, difficult times can sometimes produce remarkable art. One shouldn’t over-romanticize the bohemian myth, though. It isn’t pleasant to be poor; it isn’t pleasant to be struggling. And the reality is that for an enormous percentage of young artists today, making art full-time isn’t possible. A lot more artists are bartending, teaching, or taking day jobs, than before. And you’re lucky if you can teach—in public school or after-school programs or other kinds of programs—and those are the lucky artists going to fun jobs that at least let them continue to do art.

Kelly Chen is a curatorial assistant at The Renaissance Society. She recently completed her Masters in Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.