Interview with Jackie Battenfield
As our Flash Points topic of Art and Economics comes to a close, I sat down and spoke with Jackie Battenfield, whose first book The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love was just published.
Jackie has supported herself from art sales for over twenty years and currently teaches career development at Creative Capital and Columbia University, helping artists flourish and sustain their creative practice while focusing on the professional skills needed to face the challenges and frustrations that all encounter in their careers. The Artist’s Guide presents valuable tactics that Jackie first learned head-on nearly 25 years ago as the founder of Brooklyn’s Rotunda Gallery, and taught for 15 years as the facilitator to the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) program. The guide offers many lessons that most artists (including myself) never even heard of in an arts program—from writing a proper artist statement, to planning budgets, to time management and exhibition negotiation.
Jackie will attend a reception and signing for The Artist’s Guide on Wednesday (July 1) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, from 5:30-7:30pm. Click here for more information.
No Preservatives: The Clocks’ Tic Tic Tic …
Spearheaded by Richard McCoy, a conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, this site’s newest column, “No Preservatives,” seeks to define the conservator’s role in the conservation of art in the twenty-first century. Every third Tuesday of the month, McCoy will discuss current issues, approaches, and decisions surrounding contemporary conservation projects at the IMA and a host of other institutions.
Nam June Paik, "Who's your Tree," 1996. Installation view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1997. Accession number = 1996.321. Now and Future Purchase Fund and Robert and Ina Mohlman Art Fund. The Estate of Nam June Paik.
Last April, I heard the former US Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, give a reading at Butler University. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the poem “The Clocks of the Dead.” Simic introduced this poem by telling a story about how analogue clocks used to be everywhere in his house but, as we all know, by the mid-1990s many of these clocks had gone digital and, for the most part, silent. For better or worse, the domestic audiological landscape changed in a matter of a few years.
Sure, this poem could be read as a meditation on remembrance of lost loved, but there are a few lines that I think operate to produce a metaphor for some of my work as an art conservator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art .
Once there were clocks like that
In every kitchen in America.
Now the factory’s windows are all broken.
The old men on night shift are in Charon’s boat.
The day you stop, I said to the clock,
The little wheels they keep in reserve
Will have rolled away
Into many hard-to-find places.
Though I feel a little guilty excerpting just this part of the poem to make my point, I do it because some days it seems like part of my job is to examine contemporary artworks and identify the “wheels” to the “clocks” that have stopped, or work to try understand which parts of the clock will most likely stop in the near future. And due to the increasing speed of technological advances and the variety of components used in the creation of contemporary artworks, much of the time it seems like these wheels are rolling away beyond my reach at an increasing speed.
As an art conservator, I value art for what it represents and how it’s represented when on display. I value art so much that I’m working to help keep it viable now and in the future; that is, when it is designed to be kept around for that long. But that’s a whole different post.
Today, I believe the value of art is directly tied to the notion of authenticity of representation. By this I mean the accuracy of representation of an artist’s idea(s). As can be seen in the following example of Nam June Paik’s Who’s Your Tree, even when guidelines are established as to how an artwork can change over time, the concept of authenticity and correct representation is still complicated and open to some level of interpretation.
Some artists have anticipated this issue and have put guidelines in place that will describe how their works can evolve alongside technological advancements. Many art conservators have begun working within interdepartmental teams to prepare for the transition and migration of components of artworks. At the IMA, we created the “Variable Art Team” to discuss and strategize ways to ensure artworks are well-documented and ultimately represented authentically when on view. Our team is led by the conservation and curatorial departments, but has members from nearly ever department playing key roles.
One of our upcoming projects for this year is to find 34 replacement televisions for a work commissioned by IMA in 1996 by Nam June Paik. Who’s Your Tree originally consisted of 31 13” CRT televisions and 3 25” CRT televisions, three laser disc players, and the corresponding three laser discs. While you can’t see it in the image at the top of this post, this 1997 installation view shows the artwork exhibited with the 3 laser disc players (they machines are encased inside the black aluminum base). It also shows metal stanchions that are not part of the work and are no longer used in its current installation.
Nam June Paik, "Who's Your Tree," 1996. Installation view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2009. Accession number = 1996.321. Now and Future Purchase Fund and Robert and Ina Mohlman Art Fund. The Estate of Nam June Paik.
This is how the artwork looks in the gallery today. The images on the televisions are no longer produced by laser disc players, but by 3 DVD players. The 3 video files were migrated from laser disc to DVD in the early 2000s with consent and guidance from the artist’s letter below. Of course, we are storing the original laser discs and players.
Money Changes Everything
Webpage from the redesigned MoMA.org, with images from the Online Collection
I remember, back when I was in art school, walking into a lecture hall where someone had scrawled on the chalkboard, “The only true artists are amateurs.”
That was the 1970s, when the object was dematerialized and the gallery system, for the avant-moralist, was integrity’s sinkhole. Extremes beget extremes, and after Vietnam, Nixon, and Kent State, a rage against authority of any stripe channeled young artists toward ideological purity and radical form. It was fun while it lasted.
The other day I revisited the exhibition, Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, at the Museum of Modern Art, which I reviewed for the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The show had left me with such a negative reaction that I began to second-guess myself – which I’d never done before – on the validity of my response. I came away feeling even worse but while I was there, I overheard a couple discussing a wall of drawings by Per Kirkeby, Luc Tuymans, Rosemarie Trockel, H.C. Westermann, and others, solely in terms of what they would fetch at auction.
I’m not sure why this surprised me, perhaps some lingering, willful naïveté about what ultimately matters in a work of art. It’s probably the same reason why I kept looking through the various Flash Points entries on the value of art for one that would discuss it in terms of anything other than price (though, to be fair, this was how Beth Allen framed the question in her original post).
Although the notion that the only true artists are amateurs is flagrantly impertinent, it does strike at the core of the question. It certainly lies beneath the ongoing fascination with outsider art – that the pressure of passion (or obsession or compulsion) must be expressed at all costs.
Incandescent passion – no matter how unpleasant or fatuous – is surely what is drawing such large crowds to the current Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, while on the other side of the building, the deliberate avoidance of emotional commitment among the artists of The Pictures Generation succeeds in turning that show into a suffocating bore.
But to return to the Museum of Modern Art, what bothered me about many drawings in Compass in Hand, particularly the more recent work, was their disregard of shared experience in favor of esoteric, often hermetic pursuits. By shared experience I’m not referring to social exchange (indexed by monetary worth) as discussed in the previous Flash Points posts, but to the personal and communal rituals that mark off the progression of our days.
Taking the escalator to the fourth floor, I stopped in front of Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes from 1939, which hangs at the entrance to the permanent collection. Never my favorite Picasso due to its cartoonish over-stylization, I was nonetheless struck by the tension between the universality of its theme – the eternal search for food from the sea – and the eccentricity of its formal invention; the former provides intelligibility while the latter does all it can to subvert it.
This is the gist of modernism – distrust of appearances, truth revealed through distortion, exploration of the medium as its own reality: qualities that existed in the work of the School of Paris, including the amateur painter Henri Rousseau, before anyone put a price tag on it.
Money may be a shared commodity but it fractures perception; not only is it the most unreliable historical indicator of aesthetic value, but when art is rendered into a trophy and displayed as such, its role as a piece of communal experience, owned by all, is diminished. Nowhere is this more graphically demonstrated than in MoMA’s 2004 expansion and reinstallation, where masterpieces of the 20th Century hang like caribou heads in barnlike, one-size-fits-all galleries – not connecting, not conversing, not communicating anything beyond their spot in a predetermined timeline, as independent of one another as the thumbnails on the museum’s website.
It’s a sorry state, but not the end of the game. Artists will continue to find ways to inoculate themselves against the confusion of price and value, the conversation will proceed apace, and the golden calves and diamond skulls of our recent, benighted past will inevitably fade into obsolescence.
Economic Sur-realities: A Conversation with Bjøernstjerne Christiansen of SUPERFLEX
Danish art group SUPERFLEX has been exacerbating the art world for over a decade with its irreverent style of questioning, which hits hard at the foundations of the West’s economic system. But unlike traditional critiques of economics that are rooted in 19th- or 20th-century ideology, SUPERFLEX is able to generate seemingly new explorations into our economic dysfunction with projects that delve deep into our contemporary consciousness and our evolving relationship with copyright, environmentalism, global consumerism, and the Internet.
Left: photo of SUPERFLEX by Nikolai Howalt (Courtesy the Artists). Right: my Skype conversation with Bjørnstjerne Christiansen
I caught up with Bjøernstjerne Christiansen, one third of the Danish art trio, over Skype (he was in São Paulo, Brazil) to discuss the group’s work and his own thoughts about the latest failures of our global economic system. This transcript has been edited with the permission of the artist.
Hrag Vartanian: Were you surprised by the recent economic crisis?
Bjøernstjerne Christiansen: No, that’s the nature of economic systems. There is always someone thinking that he or she can develop a perfect system but it never works. Systems are doomed to collapse and restart in other ways and forms. It is interesting for us to examine and challenge the systems; that’s part of our work.
Flooded McDonald’s from SUPERFLEX on Vimeo.
HV: Can you tell me about your Flooded McDonald’s film, where you recreated the interior of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant and videotaped it being flooded? I noticed that it went viral on the web. I also felt that it comments on the economic meltdown.
BC: The film is open to interpretation, so we don’t want to point to McDonald’s as evil or anything too obvious, but it very much has to do with mass consumerism and the responsibility to deal with that. We wanted to make a film that would have several outputs and interpretations. We chose McDonald’s because it is one of the major brands of globalism. Even if people never go to McDonald’s, they know how it looks, smells and works. We made a replica of a classical McDonald’s, and the associations people have with that are important.
One can go into many interpretations about this…when things go wrong or too high-speed in our global economy, where is the personal responsibility? Also, it touches on the environmental disaster that mass consumerism creates. The strange thing is that recently in Europe, McDonald’s announced it will hire 15,000 new employees; it doesn’t seem much effected by the downturn.
HV: Is the Flooded McDonald’s the first SUPERFLEX project to go viral?
BC: No, the Free Beer project went viral. It is an open-source beer; it is free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of “free beer.” We published the recipe and branding elements of Free Beer under a Creative Commons license (attribution: ShareAlike 2.5), which means anyone can use the recipe to brew their own and make money from it, but they have to publish their changes or improvements for others to benefit from their work. It has to do with intellectual property rights and how an idea or system from one context can be applied to another via this change—normal patterns of, in this case, production and innovation. When Free Beer was created, it was on the front pages of the New York Times, BBC, etc.
SUPERFLEX, "Free Beer," 2005. Courtesy the Artists.
Free Beer is about the battle over the system of rights. This is particularly important since it impacts the issue of people taking our rights. We look at the copyright system, the patent system, and we try to challenge all those systems because they have become too much part of our society. When someone has an idea, their first reaction is to run to the patent office and trademark the name or idea and 200 variations of it so that others have difficulty working on something similar. People haven’t been challenging this system much and we think it is a dangerous thing. We are locked into this and people aren’t thinking critically about what that means and what the consequences are.
HV: How does that viral aspect impact your work? Do you plan for it now? Does it impact the production of the work?
BC: If you are the kind of artists we are, then you have the ambition that your art is going to be discussed. You don’t have to be a populist, but you are aware of the power of global media and how issues are going to be discussed. You become aware of how to talk about it. So when you send out a press release, you talk in a different way with the media than with an art gallery crowd.
You don’t have to be political but engaged, and as an individual, you should have an interest in how our society is developing. If you have something to say, then you try to get it out there.
Inside the Artist’s Studio: Seoidín O’Sullivan
Seoidín O'Sullivan standing in her bedroom with work space on the right
Seoidín O’Sullivan is an artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her art practice investigates sociopolitical and ecological narratives, which she represents in critically engaged and poetic ways.
Working within a group—an art community or with a fellow artist—is an essential parameter of Seoidín’s work. Her creative manifestations are tangible and serve as the departure point for our conversation. Seoidín’s energy is invested in sustaining her collaborations and projects by sharing her views, beliefs, and ideals of a creative society with an extensive community.
It gives me great pleasure to talk to Seoidín about her practice, as I have been following her work for a decade now. Seoidín opened her home to me and generously let me into her world. Read on and acquaint yourselves with this artist.
Georgia Kotretsos: What’s the main focus of your work?
Seoidín O’Sullivan: I am interested in collective dreaming and believing and issues of land ownership; collective organizing and the commons emerge. I am interested in grassroots forms of organizing, in communities feeling empowered and taking ownership and responsibility in and for their localities. I wanted to see these ideas in practice rather than as mere theory, so I created The Community Garden project. I felt so much relational art that I saw and read about was tokenistic. It seemed to coopt ideas from grassroots collectives and activism—take a photograph of this community and move on. I am interested in sustainability, so my projects are long-term and often blur the line between art and activism. Having grown up in Zambia and South Africa, I want to make a connection between a wider dialogue of North and South. Art provides a perfect space to bring these questions and projects together in creative ways. I hope through my practice to challenge the art world and market, and find and create more sustainable ways that we artists can operate. I think with the current economic collapse we are all hungry for ideas. Creative alternatives can begin to emerge.
GK: May you please walk me through your current studio set-up?
SO’S: I have a home studio and I work in other spaces during residency awards. I use a room that operates as an office, workspace, and guest bedroom. It’s where I answer emails, plan projects, apply for funding, and apply for studio residencies. The making of artworks mostly happens outside of this space. I would like to have a long-term studio space in Dublin but simply cannot afford one right now.
GK: How about your fellow Irish artists, how do they sustain a studio practice?
SO’S: A decent-size studio—which is about 6m squared!—costs €240 ($340) in Dublin. Many artists share spaces to half the cost of rent and then allocate days of usage. Or they are on unemployment assistance, which covers the basic cost of rent and living, and then they work part time to subsidize their studios. They have teaching jobs if they are lucky; otherwise waitressing and retail. Artists are creative people. They figure things out, but I’d say most of us are living precariously from month to month.
GK: Artists are indeed creative people, yet are often left to pave their own way by exclusively relying on that very quality. Is there a helping hand on the horizon besides the artist’s own?
SO’S: There are a few avenues that Irish contemporary artists go down in order to support a full-time practice. The first one is to get a gallery to take an interest in their work, thereby helping to build up their reputation. The gallery takes on the role of finding shows and increasing the commercial value of the artists’ works. The second route is to develop a more project-based practice where you are supported through public art commissions.
The Irish Arts Council, which is state-funded, is very generous in its support of artists. It runs twice-yearly bursary awards and also has a new work award and once-off award scheme. The awards are pretty competitive, as you can imagine, but once received, they do buy time to concentrate on a full-time practice for a few months. There are also some subsidized studios, which are equally competitive. In order to get them, you have to develop a good working practice, be visible, and pretty proficient in putting budgets and proposals together. It becomes a lot like running your own business; artists become technocrats and practice makes it easier.
When it comes to private funding, I think most artists look for this if they want to put on a show and need extra support. I have not heard of wealthy patrons supporting individual artists in Dublin, but I should get on Bono about that (laughs). Artists also receive tax exemption, which was recently capped for top earners. (You can ask Bono about that too; U2 moved their bank account to the Netherlands in 2006.) So there are opportunities for artists to get by and concentrate on their practice here in Ireland and be able to pay rent for a while. Then it’s back to proposals and applications. Very few artists survive off their art practice alone.
Reflection in the Porcelain Pond
Pilar Tena and Ilana Percher, "Jell-O Bog," 2007
In the fine art world, the story of the thing is the stuff comprising the thing. Paint, bronze, steel, video, screenprinting, mud, written language—the work is about the medium. And it’s also about another medium, its cultural context—movies, comic books, advertising, written language, or the art gallery itself.
But the point of a piece of art is primarily its social role, rather than some physical or symbolic essence. Melting into its environment, its audience, and its constituent pigments, the modern artwork tries both to command and to disappear, leaving us with volitional interrogation, an expensive insistence of excess matter. In doing so, it comes to represent another medium—a medium of exchange.
In a market society, art’s function, content, and exchange-value are all connected by the idea of excess. Art, like the rest of us, announces its place in the world in predominantly economic terms. In the dreams and desires of the unconscious mind, as in an unfettered free market, boundaries are meaningless, and enough is never enough. As we consume and produce, the excess currency—the profit we create—is another form of what is left over when we consume. Depending on how you take “consume,” this could mean sacralized cultural fetishism. Or, on the other hand, excrement. Either way, we long to contain it or to manipulate it.
The ephemeral abstractions of high finance and the primeval repugnance and joy in bodily processes are joined in modern visual art—a talisman to the sublime force of individual will (will being a faculty, sayeth Freud, that we discover during the period we learn to control our bowels). While visual art remains far from the mainstream, mostly by choice, it is in some sense the most dramatic result of humanism, the ideological bedrock supporting the motivational matrix of our society commonly known as capitalism. A visual icon—like a flag, religious symbol, or work of art—is a deeply affecting “interpellation,” a term coined by Louis Althusser for an ideological signifier that hails me and to which I respond. It addresses me like my own face in the mirror, without any acknowledgment of the assumptions and connotations of the icon. Artwork in the last century has teased out many of the implications of the current core dogma of the First World. which I sum up below in three motifs: autonomy, transparency, and the new man.
Jacques-Louis David, "Patrocle," 1780
Autonomy, the principle of individual freedom that insists on choice and rejects interpellation, is the hallmark of the commercial gallery, as well as the classical avant-garde. The artwork reveals the anointed maker in a way that words never could, in the retentive tableaux of Jacques-Louis David’s paintings, or in the explosive cartography of Jackson Pollock. The writings of Clement Greenberg and Dave Hickey offer lengthy modernist apologies for having anything at all to say about these ineffable things, whose solipsism admits no error. Purity is the only experience, and the market frequently rewards this work. The anal retentivity that Freud associates with the miser can simply replace one unspeakable medium of exchange with another. Damien Hirst’s preserved animals, much like the gleeful food-based artwork of Surrealist sculptor Meret Oppenheim, depict a closed statement, decay forever suspended, echoing the food-smeared African idols that have served as touchstones of authenticity since the height of European imperialism.
Piero Manzoni, "Merde d'artista (Artist's shit no.066)," 1961
Transparency connects art to writing, but in modern times has rejected interpretation, or any other form of exegesis whose gaze turns away from the hideous fascination of the Thing itself. This oracular reading is enunciated in the symbolism of the cultural and pedagogical institution. Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag are noteworthy haruspices of this post-war tendency, in which images and words are allowed to taint one another as multiple expressions of a single perception, and art starts to attempt depicting the conditions of its own legibility—often using empty spaces and vast grids. National Endowment for the Arts culture-wars martyr Andres Serrano has been displaying closeup photos of stool as signifiers, much in the same way Wim Delvoye created a defecation machine, Piero Manzoni canned his offal for sale, and Marcel Duchamp anointed a urinal as artwork—all in self-aware gestures that try to realize our alchemical dream of turning filth to gold.
The best is not quite over…
"Economic Times Hit The Nat Hist Museum" by uncleboatshoes on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncleboatshoes)
One of the first rules for the nouveau riche is to save a little for a rainy day. Unfortunately, in the doom and gloom that has come with daily announcements of museum staff layoffs, slashed exhibition budgets, and shrinking endowments, a common thread between the High Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, amongst many, many others, is an attempt to live beyond their means. Each institution emptied the piggy bank to take on an expansion, a downtown satellite space, or a $275 million Frank Gehry “Transformation,” respectively. And what exactly do we expect these new editions to become—international tourist destinations on the scale of the Guggenheim Bilbao? Above all, the greatest disservice trickles down to the artists, who are overshadowed in wake of the starchitect. Now without a staff to enliven them, these spaces will morph into nothing more than mausoleums of past ambitions and egos.
Most astonishing are the museums that are witnessing the current upheaval, yet seem determined to stay the course. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recently laid off 12 employees while fundraising for a $140 million expansion; the Miami Art Museum has announced reduced operating costs, staff cuts, hiring freezes, and a mandate to host less temporary exhibitions, but will not let fear affect their upcoming $220 million (gorgeous) Herzog & de Meuron designed expansion; and, incredibly, the Art Institute of Chicago has taken creative solutions towards paying off their new $300 million “Modern Wing—similar to a bunch of college roommates in the winter, they’ve lowered the temperatures in the galleries to reduce their Exelon bill. Thankfully, not all institutions are living in the moment, as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Austin Museum of Art have postponed groundbreaking ceremonies until the economy hits an upswing. The Parrish Art Museum, situated in the wealth of the Hamptons, set its eyes on its own Herzog & de Meuron, but director Terrie Sultan vows not to have a groundbreaking until 80% of the target has been achieved.
Is it really that catastrophic to downsize, consolidate, or collaborate with other nonprofits? How much programming must be sacrificed in the name of projecting an affluent appearance? Is it a sign of weakness for board members, trustees, and managing CEOs (the professional title that replaced Executive Director) not to have a sleek new Zaha Hadid or Renzo Piano? Sure, it’s not glamorous to endow operating costs, but without healthy nuts and bolts, the sensation of opening night will be unsustainable. We mustn’t forget that many of these generous donors who have been whispering dreams of expansion in the ears of directors are often the same hedge-fund Wall Streeters that helped propel us into this nationwide hangover. And this disingenuous promise that the new square footage be filled with revenue-generating cafes, bookstores, and rentable black box theatres—we cannot base the future of our cultural landscape on the nature of speculative retail. The greatest mistake a small-to-midsized organization can make is to grow beyond original institutional model. Perhaps this unbridled growth is just another example of the American Dream, but the ‘mom and pop’ museums seem to be weathering the storm with fewer casualties. Or, in the case of the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art and Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, these two smaller institutions have realigned themselves with universities to emerge from the recession on more solid footing. Eli Broad has neither the money or, I’m sure, the interest in bailing out museums across the country, and passing on costs through higher admissions in the midst of rampant unemployment is just unethical and contrary to most nonprofit missions. We all want the biggest and the best, but at what cost?
What Goes Down Must Come Up: Talking with Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum
"Having Fun at the Museum," Uploaded to Flickr by katie killary on April 6, 2009. Background installation by Sun K. Kwak.
As the recession continues, reports of shrunken endowments, budget cuts, salary reductions, and layoffs pierce the headlines of museum news. The Brooklyn Museum is one of the most recent institutions to announce cutbacks in response to the weakened economy. Its plan includes a mandatory one-week furlough, a voluntary separation package, and the indefinite closure of an exhibition gallery. Reductions in staff and programming, of course, impact the lives of cultural workers. But they also effect the audiences and communities that museums serve. In the following interview with Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum since 1997, we discuss how an institution like Brooklyn upholds its mission in these economically trying times, as well as the difficulties that cultural institutions across the country now face.
Nicole J. Caruth: One of the reasons I wanted to interview you for this Flash Points topic is because the Brooklyn Museum’s mission is, in my mind, fundamentally concerned with economy in terms of the role it plays in a lack of access to art. I know that you are sincerely interested in reaching a diverse audience. So how do you maintain the museum’s mission when the institution is itself in a pinch?
Arnold Lehman: Well, it’s not a question of maintaining mission. It’s that you start with mission and everything has to flow from there. It can’t be one of several issues that you have to be concerned about. It is the issue. To develop strategies, they all have to come down to how they impact the mission and what the core values are. I think, actually, the Brooklyn Museum has been pretty good about that. One of the reasons why is because it’s not been all that long ago that we redid the mission. It’s not something that was developed 50, 100, or 150 years ago, where you have to sort of wiggle and squirm to make what you do pertain to mission. All of the strategic planning activities taking place at the museum over the past decade have gone to reinforce those issues. Our entire brand, as separate from mission, has been based on accessibility, diversity, inclusion, and seeking out new ways to explore art so that everyone feels welcome and smart about what they’re doing. Certainly, every time we have had these very serious conversations with the trustees and the staff, I always start, as does everyone else, saying, “Well, how does this relate to the mission?” Decisions have to be made on that basis. Clearly, [these decisions] are informed and impacted hugely by dollars and cents. You could look at those challenges either straightforwardly against your mission, or you could just apply those challenges and worry about mission later. That, I think, is disastrous.
NJC: What’s the process for making decisions about where to make cuts when you’re faced with such a deficit? Where does the conversation start?
AL: It starts always internally with senior management and the deputy directors. Then it broadens to all of the department heads and management who have to deal with the individual budgets and the operations of the institution; they’re sort of the cornerstone of this. It also begins very early on with the Finance Committee of the Board of Trustees. The board is one of our major contributors and, in a real sense, the much more perpetual stewards of the mission because the Trustees are always here, as opposed to staff that come and go regardless of their longevity. Trusteeship is something that is long-term. All of those people working together—which is still a relatively small group, maybe a couple dozen altogether—have initial discussions, come to some suggested outcomes, and then play back and forth until it sounds good enough to explore with larger audiences. Then it goes to the Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees. It goes to a somewhat larger group of museum folk and then we take in the full board and the staff and put forward what we think the right plan is going to be.
Now, the right plan is not always necessarily the right plan in every instance. Every detail needs to flexible so that it can be enlarged or reduced so people understand what their role in that plan is going to be. When we do a plan that somehow reduces the scope of what we do, but focuses still on the mission, you can’t do as much in terms of programming. You may not have as many people to do what you need to do and all of that has to be factored in. You could say, “We’ll do exactly what we did. We’ll make exactly the same commitment,” but if you don’t have the key people to make that happen, then you have to figure out either to reduce the program, change the mission, bring in more people, lay people off or, for instance, the voluntary separation or buyout situation we are in right now. We have to sit back once we get that input, assess what’s going to keep the museum vital, and then [continue to] make decisions based on that.
NJC: For people of my generation watching what’s happening in the arts as a result of the economy, I think it might be the worst we have every seen it. Is this the worst you’ve seen in terms of museum hardships?
AL: Well, it is interesting. There’s a much, much higher level of expectation from the public on the part of museums. When the general public was not into museums 20 years ago, except for big blockbuster exhibitions from time-to-time, it never was as affected by museums. [Parents] didn’t know if their kids were [still] in an afterschool program. There were no afterschool programs [at museums]. Senior centers didn’t send their people here to enrich the programming they could offer. Whether or not museums were active in communities, in terms of being engaged in the economic development of their communities, was a moot point because very few were. People didn’t do First Saturdays and have the spillover literally make or break the week for restaurants, bars, and shops on nearby commercial corners and strips. There’s come to be an expectation that the museum hosts these programs and the spillover of those programs is going to fill tables, chairs, and barstools. There just wasn’t that before. There’s a much more direct correlation that people can see and understand today, because of the much higher valued affect of cultural institutions in their communities.
Members of the Cultural Institutions Group, of which I am Chair, report that their attendance is way, way up during this very challenging period. In an economic downturn, people are looking for less expensive ways to enjoy themselves and to enrich their families. Our own First Saturday program, for which we were very happy to have 6,000 or 7,000 people coming through the museum, has in the last couple of months been up to 9,000, 10,000 and 11,000 visitors. There’s an alignment today that makes what cultural institutions do—not all of them, but the many who have a sense that they’re in a community and part of that community—have a much more significant role. Therefore their absence is much more deeply felt.
The Fire’s Good for the Forest: An Interview with David A. Ross
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.
Free & Clear: Exhibition and the Free Store
Filip Gilissen, "Vamos," installation still, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Exhibition.
Is free sometimes the best value for art? Well, it certainly can be when artists and curators turn an inquisitive and critically-engaged eye towards the nature of exchange, regeneration, and artistic creation. Two recent projects in New York City demonstrate the value of free art, free imagination, free form, and free rewards.
I happened upon the fabulous Exhibition in Nolita when I met one of the 5 organizers of this temporary art space for lunch just last week. This six-month long continuous art experiment is being programmed by Elena Bajo, Eric Anglès, Jakob Schillinger, Nathalie Anglès, and Warren Neidich.
Ana Prvački and Boško Bošković, chocolate rabbits, 2009. Courtesy Exhibition.
One accounting of the simple premise is:
1. The site is a storefront lent by a luxury condominium development at 211 Elizabeth Street.
2. The site is open from March to August 2009, Wednesday to Sunday, 12 to 6.
3. The site hosts a single unfolding exhibition.
1. The work is not for sale and belongs to no one.
2. The work is an intervention upon interventions.
3. The work can be modified, parasitized and destroyed.
1. The artist is drawn from a hat.
2. The artist works in areas determined by a roll of dice.
3. The artist discusses these conditions in conversation and on-site.
Fantastic! At least every three days, there is a new artist intervention, and while they can make whatever manner of changes inside the space, artists may not remove their own art works afterwards. When it comes in, it stays.
Art21's own Trong Gia Nguyen! Intervention with divinity, toilets, graffiti, and beer, 2009. Courtesy Exhibition.
Last week, I took in an exuberant gridded landscape of colorful confetti on the floor by Liz Linden along with Filip Gilissen’s mostly deflated “Vamos” ballons, as well as sometimes cryptic pencil drawings and tracings on the walls…and that’s just what I noticed in a quick visual sweep.
In 2 months, Exhibition (which can also be followed by blog) has already invited over 26 artists to intervene and freely create in the space and they hope to work with up to a total of 100 by the end of August. In the meantime, I look forward to visiting the space as often as I can.
