Mr. Creosote in "Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life" (film still), 1983.

Mr. Creosote, the morbidly obese character of the 1983 comedy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, is a picture of gluttony never to be forgotten. Upon taking his seat in a fancy French restaurant, he begins to vomit, showing no concern for the people around him and the dreadfulness of his action. Throughout the skit he continues to project ridiculously large streams of matter onto the floor, into buckets, on the maître d’, cleaning woman, and himself. Between upchucks, he heedlessly orders and consumes copious amounts of food. In a darkly humorous ending, the character explodes, showering the restaurant and its patrons with human viscera. The camera pans back to Mr. Creosote, who is now a hollow carcass with a still-beating heart. The maître d’ presents him with the check.

The same year that audiences were introduced to Mr. Creosote, the art world was entering a period of phenomenal excess. The wealth enjoyed by upper and middle class Americans in the early 1980s brought about rapid growth in the art market. The resulting bubble would, like Mr. Creosote, eventually burst. At the present moment, we are acutely aware of this bulimic pattern: after the buying binge of recent years, the market (along with the larger economy) again purged, and given the latest art fair reports, is back on the rise. Might Mr. Creosote be the perfect metaphor for the contemporary art world that is always hungry for more?

Gluttony in art consumption and our craving for new things was at the center of a provocative panel discussion held earlier this month at The Independent art fair. As one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity, gluttony is of course loaded with notions of repulsive and immoral behavior. It suggests hedonism in food and drink while denying it to those less fortunate and in need. Of course, this idea is not universal. Gluttony can also be a sign of status, wealth, or desire unburdened by beliefs and moral principles. Panelists of “On Gluttony” expressed the full gamut of interpretations. Organized by Kreemart Salon (the group responsible for Haunch of Venison’s New York Cake Party), the program featured painter Will Cotton, food artist Jennifer Rubell, Rachel Lehmann of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, art advisor Raphael Castoriano, and art journalists Anthony Haden-Guest and Linda Yablonsky.

Jennifer Rubell, "Old Fashioned," 2009. Dimensions unknown. Photo: Elizabeth Jones / Eat Me Daily (via eatmedaily.com).

Jennifer Rubell — organizer of the now infamous gala dinner for Performa09 and the upcoming Brooklyn Ball — acknowledged that her work “looks a lot like gluttony,” a term with “an extreme moral component.” Yet morals around food are not what interest her as an artist. Rather, she is drawn to the aesthetic and psychological properties of food. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, where sin and pleasure are inseparable, came to mind when she referred to her interactive food installations as “erotic engagement with plenty.” Her last big installation for Art Basel Miami Beach (an event known for surfeit) involved a great wall of Dunkin’ Donuts. Passersby were invited to indulge at will. In Rubell’s view, using food as medium is akin to collectors buying art: it is a means of extending the material’s life. By that token, gluttony is to make something (or someone) endure. Rubell argued that “there would be no art to filter down to the public trust” if it weren’t for the gluttonous nature of collectors. Meanwhile, Linda Yablonsky expressed concern over collectors and dealers who hoard, keeping all the work of a single artist in one place and away from the public. I sensed that others in the room (including myself) also found that idea nauseating.

Will Cotton, "Insatiable," 2008. Oil on linen, 24 x 34 in. Courtesy the artist.

Rachel Lehmann clearly wanted to shift the notion that overindulgence is inherently harmful. She spoke of the excess of information that defines our current moment and supposedly drives the pressure for artists to create more, bigger, and faster—collectors want new art to buy, museums new objects to show, and viewers new things to experience. (We all partake in the gluttony of the art world.) Lehmann seemed to suggest that gluttony of late has had its advantages. She reminded the audience that this is the first time in history that so many people are able to make a living as artists. That got a mild nod of agreement from Will Cotton.

Known for his pastry and candy-strewn dreamscapes, Cotton expressed that his own interest lay not so much in gluttony but desire and consumption that “doesn’t involve deprivation.” As an example, he showed an image of Pieter Bruegel’s Land of Cockayne (1567), in which three men lie prostrate, incapacitated by a visible wealth of food. The scene is based on a medieval mythical land of “extreme luxury,” where the severity of peasant life is unknown. Gluttony here, as in Cotton’s work, is to emphasize the pleasures of gratification rather than the grotesque. At the beginning of the discussion, moderator Jovana Stokic recited a quote from anthropologist Claude-Lévi Strauss, in which he addressed the gluttony of French society, saying, “every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth.” To this, Cotton replied, “we should want more.” I believe he meant this in the best way possible.

Al Pacino in "Scarface" (film still), 1983.

The discussion was injected with a much needed dose of humor and cynicism when Anthony Hayden-Guest began projecting images of gluttony and greed from popular culture, such as Al Pacino in Scarface, having just pulled his face out of a mound of cocaine. (An interesting image choice, given the context and the drug’s association with art world affluence.) If you’ve seen Scarface, you know that protagonist Tony Montana’s unquenchable thirst for more led to his own end. Of course, the contemporary art world is not going anywhere. But while watching Montana self-destruct I, for one, thought the same poignant (though unanswerable) question Yablonsky asked: how much is enough?

When the art market was hit by the current recession, critics cheered, arguing that the days of bombastic art and overindulgence were coming to an end, activating a shift in focus to art production (where it should be). I didn’t get a clear sense, from “On Gluttony” or this year’s art fairs, that things have changed to the degree that critics suggest. From where I sit, the contemporary art market continues to look a lot like the gluttonous, insatiable Mr. Creosote. As he said, somebody better get me a bucket.

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Episode #098: Artist Jeff Koons discusses themes of money, desire, perfection, and moral responsibility. Filmed in his busy New York studio and surrounded by numerous assistants at work on paintings and sculptures, Koons describes how the practicalities of running a business are often in service to creative ends.

Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.

Jeff Koons is the curator of two exhibitions currently on view in New York: the group show Skin Fruit at the New Museum (through June 6th, 2010) and a survey of the work of Ed Paschke (a mentor of Koons) at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, through April 24th, 2010).

Jeff Koons is featured in the Season 5 (2005) episode Fantasy of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online via iTunes (opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Brian Hwang, Clair Popkin & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Mark Mandler. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: Jeff Koons.

William Powhida, "How The New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality," 2009. Courtesy Schroeder Romero+Shredder and the Artist.

I’ve drawn myself into a debate over ethics and morality with my work, How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality (view the high-res version here). I threw a brick through the window of the museum and people want answers. My first problem with this is the assumption that I have them. I don’t. I also don’t envy the New Museum’s position. It is dependent on a few wealthy individuals instead of broad public funding to run its institution. We share the same paradoxical over-dependence on a limited number of wealthy individuals to maintain our independence from political and ideological interference. Assuming public funding, even from the NEA, can bring unwanted political scrutiny of the moral content of the art. This is a paradox the art world faces in its efforts to make art accessible, while remaining free from the kind of traumatic, political interference caused by the politician Jesse Helms, who famously tried to cut funding from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1980s.

My second problem with the demand for answers is the conflation of ethics and morality. Art critic Jerry Saltz and blogger Tyler Green have engaged in a protracted public feud over the terms. Tyler is an advocate for stronger ethics in the art world, while Jerry seems intent on defending the relative tolerance and heterogeneity of the commercial side no matter how dysfunctional it may appear, even lovingly referring to the art world as “Babylon.” I agree with both of them. I can because they aren’t talking about the same things. Advocating ethical practices and tolerance are two different positions. This difference is key to understanding that freedom of expression is different from maintaining an ethical buffer between the market and the museum.  When Jerry accuses Tyler of engaging in a witch hunt, I believe Jerry does so to protect artists and their freedom of expression. However, perhaps this is at the expense of the New Museum’s questionable ethics.

Similarly, when Jerry and the critic John Yau got into a public spat over their definitions of “America,” I believe that neither of them would side with our previous administration, which used moral authority to justify both immoral and unethical behavior. Ben Davis argues, in his “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” that the art world is not separate from society or its class structure. But I believe that the general character of the art world is far left of center. Artists are an educated class of cultural producers who routinely challenge “moral authority” and share a tolerance for minority perspectives. That this vision is supported by a wealthy elite is also paradoxical, but there aren’t many alternatives at this point in our late-capitalist democracy.

I think Ben’s document is important and I hope you will read it and consider the implications, but I would argue that Tyler’s, Jerry’s, and John’s public non-debate is really a fraught defense of the art world from twin assaults on its integrity and independence. Increasingly it is dominated by a plutocracy, represented in the New Museum controversy by the collector Dakis Joannou, while simultaneously trying to maintain its independence from the moral authority of conservative America, currently represented by the likes of Glenn Beck. While the politics of the plutocracy certainly includes conservatism, I don’t believe we are talking about the same kind of ideological drive and religious fundamentalism that motivates Beck.

The art world is not reflective of any entire society. It represents the tolerant and pluralistic factions that encourage—and even celebrate—difference and dissent. On one hand, as Davis points out, this can be a symbolic release valve for class differences, but it is also reflective of the moral and ethical differences that fracture the societal landscapes of diverse cultures, from Iran to California. Western culture is no more monolithic than American culture, where morality and ethics vary from community to community, as the Helms-led furor over Mapplethorpe’s exhibition in Cincinnati revealed. In Europe, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad published in the Jyllands-Posten spurred Danish Muslim organizations to protest and riot. Freedom of expression and religious tolerance often collide spectacularly around the morality of art. The sign of a healthy society is that these two can co-exist. The art world certainly privileges freedom of expression above all else, allowing for a plurality of moral perspectives. This may make it seem amoral or immoral depending on where you live and whether or not you understand expression to be a right or a privilege.

The art world’s paradoxical support of radical newness and originality also runs counter to its role of preservation and reliance on tradition. The two aspects are representative of society’s contradictory desire for progress and stability. Art museums are charged with preserving history and presenting an image of continuity even as they acquire, omit, and discard art works in a glacial state of constant change. The art museum is a contested site where cultural value is established long after the market has determined the art’s economic value. For the New Museum, simply displaying work validates its cultural worth, if not its economic value, even if it does not maintain the illusion of a “permanent collection.” In the exhibition Skin Fruit, it is defining art by the tastes of one wealthy individual with minimal curatorial and critical intervention.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about the ethical and moral divide in art is the paradox itself. As an artist I am to both invent and preserve, challenge and perpetuate, be new and responsible, for the past and the future. It is not territory for anyone who cannot grasp the possibility that there might not be a past or future, but a continuous present. The New Museum and its director Lisa Phillips need to recognize their role in historicizing the role of the plutocracy in art by not mounting a significant challenge or raising questions about a co-dependent relationship.

I would like to believe that ethics are a humanist ideal, based on logic and reason, and drawn from observation and experience of the world over time. I would argue that morality is very similar, but draws its authority from beliefs and faiths connected to metaphysics and a priori knowledge. What I am left with is the idea that strong ethics are more important than a discussion of morality or immorality because they are the internal criticism of any system, discipline, or institution. They are not laws from the state or god. They are our guidelines for participating in late-capitalism — a system that increasingly operates on the premise that success means maximizing profits, reducing waste, and improving performance. The New Museum and other nonprofits need to realize that their ethical guidelines buffer the art world from the influence of the plutocracy, as well as defend it from social forces that would deny it its greatest assets — tolerance and difference. When those guidelines fail or become skewed in favor of the plutocracy, it opens the doors to governmental regulation and political interference. I think this is the point where the art world can appear elitist because it relies on the funding of a wealthy minority to defend its perspectives from the majority. This is also a paradox of democracy. While a majority may rule, it should not suppress the rights of a minority population. This is a challenge that requires discussion, compromise, and empathy.  My definition of late-capitalism doesn’t include any of these words, because it’s just a system. Only its participants can make sure we include promoting tolerance, empathy, and understanding, while not only offering the taste and art of mega-rich collectors like Dakis Joannou and his inner circle as the alternative. It is a delicate balance that the New Museum has tilted further towards the plutocracy, and in the end, this becomes another limitation to the freedom of expression.

Matthew Broderick in "Election"

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What’s the difference between morals and ethics anyway? Anyone?”
— Matthew Broderick, Election

If there’s a tipping point in the minds of those casually interested in contemporary art, it’s almost always on moral or ethical grounds. “He/she did what to a dog/sold what for a billion dollars/did what to a dead cow/did what to a crucifix??” your amazed friend asks, and suddenly all credibility is leached from the subject. You’re embarrassed; you get your coat. Later on, you blog resentfully at your friend’s apparent narrow-mindedness (and defriend him: take that!). Art’s leapfrogging of moral and ethical niceties is a Romantic hangover that once was noble and exciting – Courbet, Baudelaire, 2 Live Crew – and now reeks of ghettoized cliché. It’s the thing people don’t like about contemporary art. And the less contemporary art complies with “real world” ethical and moral structures, the less it is of the “real world.” And yet this is what we value in art (in its current late-Romantic state): its ability to discuss the things avoided in the mainstream imagination. To ask difficult questions. This is the double bind of contemporary art’s relationship with ethics. Its purported snubbing of conventional (Judeo-Christian) ethics both allows it to discuss the undiscussable and removes it from the discussion.

When Santiago Sierra created a gas chamber in Pulheim, Germany, in 2006 – filling a synagogue with exhaust fumes from six parked cars, accessible only for five minutes to visitors wearing gas masks – he whipped up a predictable furore. That most critics of the work (including me) never experienced the work doesn’t really matter: that it raised ethical questions does. This is the unfortunate situation contemporary art gets itself into when tackling sensitive ethical or moral issues: the media storm generated by the work is the work, and the original piece itself is drowned out by the buzz of voices. Art of this kind negates its own irrefutable trump card, its visual singularity. The problem is that visual art’s status as chief cultural question-raiser has been gradually usurped, not just by other more immediate cultural products, like cinema or TV (Inglourious Basterds treats the commercialization of the Holocaust in a far more successful – read, “widely seen” and “aesthetically enjoyable” – way), but by the multiplicity of dissenting voices made possible by the advent of the Internet. Why bother jetting in an internationally recognized artist at spectacular fiscal and environmental cost to raise ethical questions when you can do so yourself, sitting at home, with Doritos crumbs all down your shirt?

Jeff Koons, "Art Magazine Ads (Artforum)," lithograph, 1988. Courtesy the artist.

Or take Andrea Fraser’s 2003 performance/video Untitled, in which she had sex with a collector for $20,000. The video – which is the entire “performance” shot from a CCTV camera above the bed in a posh hotel – does the rounds every so often, and featured in Tate Modern’s Pop Life show last year, a show which itself raised, inadvertently or not, certain ethical issues. Fraser’s video is, of course, about ethics. Neither of the parties involved were knowingly exploited, unlike the majority of paid-for sexual encounters (but those don’t raise questions, do they?). Fraser’s work, like Sierra’s, is made with an eye to its afterlife in text; it doesn’t need to be seen to be known. In the Tate’s Pop Life catalogue, Untitled is described thusly:

Fraser challenges the idea of access as a literalised pun – she is “in bed with the collector”…[she] brings our attention to her deliberate reversal of conventional power relationships by exaggerating the strength of her own position…[she] radically mak[es] visible attitudes of complicity…[and] problematise[s] the ideal of artistic autonomy upon which the art market hinges…

“Problematise,” “brings attention to,” “radical” — this is the sound of art talking to itself. Contemporary art such as Fraser’s and Sierra’s seeks to absolve itself from ethical responsibility by preemptively defining its own ethical framework. The dead language of contemporary art becomes the means by which this is achieved. A work of art might perform in a way that in “the real world” would be considered unethical, immoral, or criminal, but within the nested discourse of the academic write-up, it’s not unethical; it’s raising questions about ethics. And in order to do so, art must think of itself as existing outside of – perhaps even above – the moral framework that structures ethical decisions in other cultural arenas.

Joseph Beuys's "Action Piece," 26-6 February 1972; presented as part of seven exhibitions held at the Tate Gallery 24 Feburary - 23 March 1972. © Tate Archive Photographic Collection.

You’re not really supposed to discuss moral and ethical matters around contemporary art, though. Disdain for moral squares is so entrenched that those questioning the morality of works of art are jeered at from the ramparts as backwards or unsophisticated. Express discomfort at Sierra’s synagogue or Fraser’s fornication or at a range of diverse “question-raising” activities (Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers, etc.), and your contemporary art membership card is permanently revoked. They tear it up in front of your face and leave your headshot with the Art Basel bouncers. It’s a measure of contemporary art’s insecurity that discussions of ethical issues are relegated to the sidelines. No amount of furious Rachmaninovian typing about the New Museum’s show of Dakis Joannou’s private collection, for instance, was ever going to slow its tank-like inexorable forward motion. It’s worth reading some of (not all of; it’s time you can never get back) the wildly disproportionate back-and-forth on that show by New York art bloggers (it’s barely known about outside of New York, by the way). Ethical in-fighting looks comically pedantic to art world outsiders, and it’s easy to forget there’s any art actually involved. And isn’t that what we ought to discuss — the possible ethical dimensions of a post-Romantic art? Anyone?

Bueller?

Alec Soth, "Donald and Tamara," from the series, "NIAGARA," 2004.

The practice of photographic portraiture is rife with ethical implications – from the subject’s awareness of the project, to the artistic choices made throughout the session, to the work’s resulting place within the art market. The process behind the portraiture is particularly interesting to me, especially in how the relationship between the artist and subject can impact the ethical considerations of the project. The artist Alec Soth’s frank style of portraiture is realized through his ability to make his subjects feel comfortable in front of his camera. In an article last year in the New York Times, Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum, was quoted, saying that Soth “communes with his subjects and his environment through the ritual of the photographic act. He’s a very natural type of communicator. That’s part of his magic formula for having his subjects turn themselves over to him.” Soth was kind enough to allow me to interview him about the relationships he builds with the subjects of his portraiture, and how it affects his resulting work.

Rachel Craft: I’d be curious to learn more about your process leading up to the photography session. When you find a subject, what are your first steps?

Alec Soth: My approach really varies from project to project. When working with a large format camera, I’ll often approach people while leaving the camera in my car. I’ll just talk to them, explain what I’m doing and ask if they’ll pose. In terms of the explanation, I try to be as honest as I can about what I’m doing. But sometimes this is made difficult by the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been working in a really free-form intuitive way and I’ve been having a hell of a time communicating this to the people I photograph.

Alec Soth, "Sunshine, Memphis, Tennessee," from the series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.

RC: Does your relationship with your subject, and how easily he or she accepts the idea of your project, influence the resulting work?

AS: I wish there was a formula for great pictures, but there absolutely isn’t. Personally I don’t like to be too close to the people I photograph. If I could, sometimes I think I would take their picture without us ever talking. I like to imagine their personality based on their physical attributes. For this reason, it is really rare that I photograph family and friends.

RC: Your portraits always feel like a very honest portrayal of the person. To what extent do you allow your subject to choose how they represent themselves and to what extent do you project your own perspective on their portraits?

AS: It’s really hard to say. I mean, I don’t go out with a bag of a costumes and ask people to perform in my play, but I’m not comfortable saying that I’m entirely neutral. I choose the people, I choose the moment to snap the shutter and I choose the final picture. All of these little decisions add up to a lot of power in terms of how the person is represented.

RC: After the subjects confirm that they will participate, what kind of agreements do you make with them? Has there ever been a disagreement or objection to a photograph after it’s complete and how do you handle those kind of situations?

AS: With the slower, large format portraits, the subjects sign releases and I send them a picture. This release is very short and doesn’t really cover much. For me, it is just a way to confirm that they are okay with me using the picture. But lately I’ve been doing a much faster kind of photography that doesn’t allow for releases. We’ll see what happens. I’ve only had one situation that has blown up in my face. This was a rather exceptional situation and I prefer not to go into the details. But in the end, everything got worked out and I’m free to continue exhibiting the picture.

RC: I know that you interview many of your subjects. Do ethical considerations influence your decision to conduct these interviews? And how do their stories factor into your work?

AS: My work is all about wandering around in hopes of connecting experiential dots into a larger picture. These little informal interviews are all about finding ways for me to make connections. The interviews are rarely visible in the final project, but they help form the scaffolding for the project.

Alec Soth, "Adelyn, Ash Wednesday, New Orleans, Louisiana," from the series "Sleeping by the Mississippi," 2000.

RC: In the text that accompanies your photograph of Sunshine in the Sleeping by the Mississippi series, you returned to Memphis to give her a copy of your work. Is this a typical part of the process?

AS: It is rare, but it sometimes happens. Oddly enough, it just happened. I photographed a woman named Adelyn on Ash Wednesday in New Orleans ten years ago. She recently contacted me by email and we had a nice little chat. She’s currently living in Austin but told me she was going back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. So I flew down and photographed her again. It was a thrill. The funny thing was that the encounter was only about fifteen minutes long. We didn’t talk that much. I don’t really want a transcript of those ten years of her experience. I want to look at the picture and imagine those ten years.

RC: Do you discuss the resulting location of the artwork (art market, museum, gallery) with your subjects?

AS: Well, in the case of Adelyn, when I photographed her ten years ago, I was a complete nobody. I never imagined that this picture would be on a museum wall. Nowadays I do sometimes explain this, but in a limited way. The odds that the picture is good and will be seen is still awfully slim.

Guillermo Vargas, "Exposición No.1," 2007. Galería Códice, Managua, Nicaragua.

What are the ethical implications of using live animals in art?

In 1974, Joseph Beuys caged himself with a live coyote for a performance piece called I Like America and America Likes Me. The artist spent a week living with the coyote, eventually learning how to co-exist with the animal. His intention was to highlight the strained relationship between the coyote and European settlers in America, and its representation of the damage done to the continent and native cultures.

Joseph Beuys, "I Like America and America Likes Me," 1974. Photo: Caroline Tisdall. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

In 1993, Damien Hirst presented In and Out of Love, filling a gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies hatching from white canvases, feeding on sugar syrup, mating, laying eggs and dying, to illustrate the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. Years later, the artist had a tiger shark killed to be used in his work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

In 2003, the graffiti artist Banksy painted live animals from head to hoof in an exhibit called Turf War, causing an animal activist to chain herself to railings surrounding a decorated cow, despite the animal’s conditions being approved by the RSPCA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).

In 2007, artistic freedom and expression was challenged in an exhibition by artist Huang Yong Ping, entitled Theatre of the World at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lizards, scorpions, tarantulas, and insects were exhibited in conditions deemed improper for the animals by the SPCA, an organization whose mission is to advance the well-being of animals. The artist decided to remove the animals from the exhibit in protest, in order to maintain the integrity of the artwork.

As much as these works outraged animal rights activists, perhaps no other exhibition has caused as much controversy over the ethical use of live animals in art as Exposición No.1. A show of work by Guillermo Vargas, a Costa Rican artist also known as “Habacuc,” took place on August 16, 2007 at Galería Códice in Managua, Nicaragua. Written in dog food on a gallery wall was the statement, “Eres lo que lees,” meaning, “You are what you read.” The center of attention was a sickly-looking street dog tied to a metal cable bolted to the wall with a short rope. The animal was supposedly captured in the alleys of Managua by some children who were paid by the artist. According to hundreds of blogs and news articles circulating on the Internet, the artist intended for the dog to starve to death during the course of the exhibition. Vargas intended to raise awareness of the public’s hypocrisy by comparing what happened to this dog to a burglar named Natividad Canda Mayrena, who was mauled to death by two rottweilers in Costa Rica while the police and onlookers watched.

The outrage that ensued over the Internet and via mass media outlets culminated in a petition that was signed by over four million people worldwide, calling for the artist to be boycotted from the Central American Biennial Honduras 2008 and for criminal charges to be filed against him. Filled with outrage, I signed the petition as well. Later I read that Vargas also signed the petition, claiming that an artist always signs his work. This seemed curious to me, so I decided to investigate the facts behind the exhibition and was surprised by what I learned.

Guillermo Vargas, "Exposición No.1," 2007. Galería Códice, Managua, Nicaragua.

It helped that I could read in Spanish, as I soon discovered that not one blog or news source that covered the exhibition could confirm whether the dog actually died. The outlets were getting their information from the same source, a blog published by a friend of the artist, called “El Perrito Vive,”or “The Dog Lives.”

Throughout my research, it became clear that this work was part of an Internet art project. Exposición No 1 is one component of a larger work of art called Eres lo que lees, which employs misinformation and manipulates mass media via the Internet. One of the aims of this project was to demonstrate the hypocrisy in real world and art world ethics. Take a dog off the streets and put it into a gallery and it becomes an ethical phenomenon, while stray dogs and most real human suffering are ignored or given minimal attention.

Another purpose was to incite a reaction, making the spectator, like the dog, an unwilling participant in the work. This illustrates how easily we can be manipulated into believing what news outlets want us to. The title, “You Are What You Read,” illustrates this point very well. If one artist can manipulate over four million people around the world, imagine the ability that governments, corporations, and religious entities have to do the same.

According to the gallery owner, the dog was in the gallery for nine hours a week, and was well-fed with dog food supplied by Habacuc. One night after being fed by the night watchmen, the dog escaped by passing through the iron gate at the main entrance. In an interview, the artist clearly states that the dog died in the artwork, but he never said that the dog died in real life. Ambiguity was his intention.

The use of live animals in art has raised many ethical questions regarding what art is and what art should be. Should live animals be used as art objects at all? An art object may have aesthetic value regardless of whether it is ethical or not, but an artist should be held accountable if it can be proved that his or her actions deliberately caused inhumane suffering.  Through the image of a starving dog, Guillermo Vargas’s artwork Eres lo que lees opens our minds to the hypocrisy of real world and art world ethics, and the lack of attention given to both human and animal suffering.

Jeff Koons, "Girl with Dolphin and Monkey" (The Whitney Museum of American Art 75th Anniversary Photography Portfolio), 2006. Courtesy Whitney Museum

The eerily small, closely watched world of New York art criticism experienced some infighting earlier this month, following the publication of February’s The Brooklyn Rail. “I think that there are some things you shouldn’t do, and promoting Jeff Koons is one of them,” wrote Rail editor John Yau, picking a fight with critic Jerry Saltz, who had championed Koons (featured in Season Five of Art:21) as “the emblematic artist of the decade” in New York Magazine’s end-of-the-00s issue. Saltz had also declared Koons’s work emblematic of America—it’s “crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized…” It’s this last part that Yau resented; he titled his editorial The Difference Between Saltz’s America and Mine. “In Saltz’s America,” he quipped, “Puppy is great public art and Tom Cruise is the good, handsome German with an eye patch, trying to save the world from Hitler.” Saltz retaliated via his Facebook page, calling Yau “dickish,” “incoherent,” “self-satisfied,” and “irrelevant.” It wasn’t a pretty moment for art writing.

Jerry Saltz. Courtesy Kevin Wick/Longview Photography.

John Yau, taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003. Photo: Gloria Graham.

I care about what Yau and Saltz say — partly because I’m a writer, and knowing what other, more visible writers write is part of my job — but also because both of them have influenced me. Yau’s Corpse and Mirror gave me new entry into abstraction, while Saltz taught me that Charles Ray can be likable and that lush adjectives can join with austere conceptualism. A lot of other writers and artists care too. So much so that I’m noticeably late to comment on the Saltz-Yau tiff. Art21 contributor Hrag Vartanian “broke” the story; Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes spoke up for Yau; artist William Powhida invited the critics to debate at #class; C-Monster, art blogging’s straightest shooter, kept tabs on the squabble; poet Michael Leong wrote that Saltz hadn’t found “enough critical distance to say anything productive” (and received a retaliatory comment from Saltz). Some — Vartanian, Leong and Green in particular — did justice to the ethical problem Yau had with Saltz. But there’s another more frustrating ethical problem integral to all of this. This problem has little to do with either critic’s ultimate point. Those were actually reasonable: Saltz said that Koons embodied an era in American culture; Yau said Koons didn’t, and that saying so evidenced tunnel-vision. The problem has to do with how they went about arguing.

Jeff Koons, "Puppy," June 6 - September 5, 2000 at Rockefeller Center. Steel, soil, plants.

Saltz spun into his essay with characteristic zest, presenting an art decade that began with seemingly utopian “happy complacency” (while offering no examples of this complacency), but quickly turned hierarchical. As the shadow of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq settled over America, producers like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Koons (all of whom had been well-established by the end of the ‘90s) came to reign in a sort of high-priced boys’ club. Koons wasn’t a full-blown member of the club, however. It’s hard to tell exactly why, since the way Saltz describes him—“one-at-a-time perfection,” “theatricality,” “almost sick”—seems equally applicable to the artists of the diamond skull and the Superflat. But, says Saltz, Koons’s 40-foot, flower-laden, internally irrigated Puppy, stood apart as an embodiment of the American id. Saltz’s argument soon becomes a swirl of strangely incongruous but passionate observations, a let-loose pontification that might make for a gripping performance, but seems ill-equipped as cultural criticism: Koons doesn’t go in for “art-about-art gesture” yet Puppy is still a “virtual history of art”; Koons attempted to make something “beyond criticism” yet Puppy occupied that loaded, critically vulnerable space at Rockefeller Center; Puppy inaugurated “this decade’s public-spectacle art” yet it had been prominent throughout the ‘90s; Puppy ended bliss and announced the coming deluge yet, if the deluge hit so early, what role did Puppy play during the remaining nine years it supposedly embodied? The stakes are high when a high-profile critic sets apart a single artist as emblematic of anything, let alone a decade, and the stakes are equally high when another only-slightly-less-high-profile critic uses 2000+ words to object.

Drawing by Phong Bui, Editor, The Brooklyn Rail.

Yau’s essay, like Saltz’s, begins energetically, comparing the offense Yau took at Saltz’s “paean to Jeff Koons’s Puppy” to Bill Hicks’s outrage when already-famous Jay Leno sold Doritos. What good does that sort of shilling do anyone? Yau quickly points out that, mainly, he objects to “[Saltz's] blithe characterization of ‘our America.’”  Yau does briefly describe the America Koons represents: “though [Koons] is spoiled, he is also ambitious and productive . . . no different than the CEOs and real estate barons who buy his work.” He also describes the America he himself prefers, in which “people know that there are works that will not likely ever be shown in a museum or multiplex . . . but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be kept alive.” Yet he spends so much time scrutinizing Koons’s personality traits, equating Saltz with Koons, and quoting his own past writing, that he seems to be on the defensive, or at least bent on proving his own prescience. No unethical opinions exist in art criticism— believing that art should be crowd-pleasing is as justified as believing art should “afflict the comfortable.” But there are unethical ways of arguing. It’s a critic’s responsibility to try to glance past his own worldview—not to escape it (that would be impossible and uninteresting)—and invite conversation about more than what he thinks. Writing that settles for voluptuous, only half-substantiated opinion-making, however, does break the rules.

When I was a kid, Alice Cooper taught me everything I needed to know about art. So, ethics in art? For the most part I’m against it, but certain lines can be drawn. Tom Otterness shooting a dog? Not OK. Painting about Tom Otterness shooting a dog? OK. Probably not very interesting, but OK. Letting every single thought and feeling -  no matter its depravity or provenance – through the floodgates is an essential ingredient in the making and viewing of art. An artist needs to have his or her id wide open and a viewer has to be similarly receptive. This means that some weird, unregulated dirt is going to find its way into the carburetor occasionally. Sometimes the final audience will see the evidence (every Mayhem record); sometimes it might be a little more hidden (every Richter painting).

Salvador Dalí, "First Cylindric Crono-Hologram. Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain," 1973

Alice Cooper staggered onto the scene huffing the exhaust of the hippie vans. Peace was over. It might have been showbiz, but people were not happy with the ethics of singing about dead babies, junkie shoe salesmen, black magic, serial killers, necrophilia and confused 18-year-olds. That Alice was legitimized by hit records and a Salvador Dalí collaboration spoke to the dark truths he had hit upon underneath all the glitz and stage antics. Things are messy. Lines are always blurred, whether we like it or not. In our daily lives, we have the luxury of rejecting that notion. Artists — if they are going to speak the truth — do not. So, years later, it’s Alice I blame for my love of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof cycle of paintings and all things Black Metal.

Gerhard Richter, "Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi)," 1965

Gerhard Richter’s work is all about failure and decay. Whether it’s human failure or the shortcomings of painting, some kind of bad gravity is always in full effect in the artist’s work. At its most beautiful, I still feel its menace. Conversely, at its most overtly menacing, I can see the beauty. In what is arguably considered one of Richter’s masterpiece series, the Baader-Meinhof cycle, the lines of ethics get even more blurry. The striking portrait of Uncle Rudi (1965) is a portrait of the artist’s uncle in his SS uniform. It’s difficult to look at the painting without seeing the mastery in Richter’s skills and his willingness to stare so directly into the history of his family and country. Uncle Rudi possesses clear internal poles of conflict (Nazis bad. Family good.). The Baader-Meinhof paintings crank up the blur because of the conflicted feelings of the painter’s fellow citizens and the murky details surrounding the death of Ulrike Meinhof. With this series, even from the greatest distance, we are immersed in gray.

On September 16, 2001, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the atrocities of September 11th as being “the biggest work of art there has ever been.” Most everybody I knew was horrified by the statement, except for a number of artists and writers I know. They were both horrified and understood what the composer was clumsily trying to say. When Mr. Stockhausen’s music was included in a program at Ground Zero in 2008, Bang on a Can’s David Lang defended the inclusion thusly: “Just by choosing the music that we love, without making this a foreground issue, we did end up choosing music that’s on both sides of this really complicated issue,” Mr. Lang said. “Maybe that’s the way it should be — the messy parts of human experience should get covered.”

And if there’s one messy mirror available to us, it’s Black Metal. The most extreme of the Heavy Metal genres (no slack accomplishment), Black Metal explores some of humanity’s darkest impulses and desires. It is a music that is violent, sad, ugly, and beautiful; often simultaneously. It taps into the shadowy side of life that modern culture seems so intent on obliterating — this, in spite of our near worship of war and ruin. All of our shiny lights are faded and bludgeoned to black. Even David Byrne has noticed the vein it so readily taps. In spite of its sometimes questionable approach to morality and ethics, Black Metal has been mined by artists from Matthew Barney to Glen Baldridge and Banks Violette.

Banks Violette, "Untitled," 2005 at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Banks Violette’s Untitled sculpture at the Whitney in 2005 brought a couple of my worlds together, linking directly to a few of Norwegian Black Metal’s most notorious events: the mid-90’s church burnings and the brutal murder of Øystein Aarseth, aka Euronymous. From salt, Violette built a large-scale model of a burned-out church and placed it on a reflective black riser, making it both idol and star. Providing the soundtrack for the piece was Snorre Ruch, the convicted accomplice in the murder of Euronymous, a member of the band Mayhem. The sculpture was an extreme indictment of our present-day culture and what we worship, which has nothing to do with church or any semblance of fullness. It was a reflective well of bleak emptiness, and without Ruch’s involvement, I don’t know how Violette could have shown his vision to the viewer or, more accurately, how the artist would have allowed the viewer to see himself and the culture in which he so readily participates.

In the Times, Violette spoke of his decision to collaborate with Ruch. Writes Randy Kennedy:

“Snorre was the accomplice in the murder, and I, in a way, am his accomplice by having him do this music for a piece that refers to the act,” Mr. Violette said. “And then the viewer essentially becomes the third accomplice in viewing it.”

The ultimate effect, he hopes, “is a kind of sympathy for the devil in the mind of the viewers,” who should leave the Whitney asking themselves, at least subconsciously, a disturbing question: “‘I couldn’t possibly do that, could I?’ Well, probably you could.”

Like I said, all the doors need to be open. Even if it’s the back door. When I saw the piece, I spent a good amount of time with it because I wanted to hear the entire soundtrack. I moved around it, looking and listening. At one point the guard — who I’m assuming had spent hours, if not days, in the room — said to me tentatively, “Is it moving?” That’s the kind of power this work held. It was something true and essential, a destabilizing crack in the foundation. It was something we needed to know. And it came from a place where all the channels were open, for both the artist and his audience. If the idea of ethics had gotten in the way for either of us, I would have had just one reply: Let it burn.

Dan Phillips, "Chateau," 2008. Courtesy Phoenix Commotion.

In my estimation, Phoenix Commotion’s ongoing project (founded around 1998 by Dan Phillips) does much more than simply supply a university town with a rich dose of local color. While Phillips and his crew are building upon traditions of southern vernacular art, which have made significant and often under-acknowledged contributions to the evolution of American art—perhaps most-recognizably through the work of Texas-native Robert Rauschenberg—their project simultaneously engages with issues enjoying currency in contemporary art discourse. Most notably, this involves the impetus to devote one’s art, including one’s artistic process and not just the finished project, to the goal of raising an ethical awareness of our interconnectedness to each other and to the natural world.

Phillips’s project, which decades ago may have simply been understood as an example of “outsider” art and the product of some “place apart” (psychologically, culturally, and geographically), is today implicated in an ongoing and evolving international debate. The members of the Commotion do not simply belong to a cultural group entirely removed from the reach of influences acting on other contemporary artists whose similarly-minded, if aesthetically-divergent projects, have received critical attention, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Foundation (begun 1998), Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West and A-Z East (West begun 1999 and East begun 1994), or Tyree Guyton’s The Heidelberg Project (begun 1987). The Phoenix Commotion shares with these projects an exploration of eco-friendly, low-cost solutions to design problems, and the commitment of one’s art to transforming local social conditions. But while Phillips has and continues to spread the philosophy of the Phoenix Commotion near and far, and while his project resonates with these other contemporary examples, the end products of his creative labors remain rooted in his homes of Huntsville. The Commotion’s ideas and methods may circulate in regional, national, and international circuits, but their final artworks stay resolutely put in a place that, in the end, is somewhat removed yet also intimately connected.

Dan Phillips, "Budweiser House," 2008. Courtesy Phoenix Commotion.

A retired dance professor, well-read intellectual, and skilled craftsperson, Phillips is himself more than a “naïf.” Like his project, he is a conglomerate of complex cultural influences. He is perfectly comfortable seamlessly shifting among multiple modes of presenting himself and his work. I have heard him eloquently discuss his creative process in relation to the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, elaborate on the political implications of building a house inspired by the Budweiser beer can design in the Bible Belt, and explain the relationship of his project to the historical examples of southern vernacular architecture from which it draws inspiration. Through such presentations, Phillips effectively demythologizes ideas of “the folk” that have problematically been associated with notions of essential cultural origins and that in American history have been used to construct and solidify perceptions of certain groups (often black people and poor whites) by relegating them to an ingrained, natural condition of unchanging “folkhood.”

Additionally, the “folk” elements that persist in Phillips’s project—in his use of the discards of the cultural mainstream and the privileging of a taste for making do rather than making perfect—are self-consciously celebrated and not an ironic point of reference. Phillips’s project reclaims a “folk” aesthetic as a positive identity for both the Commotion team and for those members of the community who occupy its homes. The project transforms vernacular style into much more than a cipher for naïveté, nostalgia, or anachronism. While resurrecting and creatively translating the promise of American homesteading (a “folk” dream?) for a diverse “working poor” population of Huntsville, Phillips, who has consciously chosen to take a step away from the academy and back into the region’s history, seems to have found a productive way forward. It appears to me that Phoenix Commotion offers a recession-weary community much more than a quaint throw-back to a better time. Rather, Phoenix Commotion’s project, like those of Zittel, Tiravanija, and Guyton, commits itself to a broader, brighter cultural future–a future not just for a small eastern Texas town, but for the planet.

Gordon Matta-Clark, "Bingo," 1974. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004. Installation photography © Francois Robert, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Gordon Matta-Clark works © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Today we launch the next Flash Points topic, The Ethics of Art. Ethics are defined as “a system of moral principles” which constantly factor into the choices we make. However, these decisions can become confused, making this system of principles more gray than black and white, especially when competing priorities are at work. Over the next two months, we’ll explore the relationship of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives and question the role that they should — or shouldn’t — play.

In the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark took a critical stance against the Hooker Chemical Company with his work Bingo, which highlighted the unethical — and as a result, dangerous — decisions they made in the community of Love Canal, New York. Throughout this topic, we’ll feature artists who make this ethical debate a focus in their work, from artists who question the role of the institution, such as Hans Haacke or Marcel Broodthaers, to artists like Alfredo Jaar, who examines the disparity between an oil-rich government and a poverty-stricken populace in his work Muxima.

Ann Hamilton. "Accountings," Jan. 22 - April 5, 1992 (installation view, Henry Art Gallery). Steel tokens, soot, steel, glass, cast wax heads, canaries. Photo: Richard Nicol.

Ethical decisions also factor into the artistic process. Does a photographer who sells a portrait owe anything, financially or psychologically, to the work’s subject? What kind of ownership does an artist have over reproduced images of his or her work? We’ll also look at the discussions taking place around the use of animals in art, such as the range of responses — from acclaim to criticism — received during Ann Hamilton’s exhibition Accountings (which included live canaries), or the severe case of Tom Otterness shooting a dog for his art (an act for which he has since apologized). Ethical issues can even come into play after an artist’s death, especially in the handling the artist’s estate and the management of his or her legacy.

Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, play a role in institutional practice. With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, deaccessioning practices…do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today’s museum studies programs?

Marcel Broodthaers, "Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Financière (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, Financial Section)," 1970-1971. Gold bar stamped with an eagle. Courtesy Galerie Beaumont, Luxembourg. Photo: J. Romero, courtesy Maria Gilissen.

Here are a few of the questions we’ll be addressing over the coming weeks. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have for additional sub-topics, in the comments below:

• How do ethics factor into institutional practice?
• How do artists address ethical issues in their work?
• What kind of ethical decisions are made during the artistic process?
• Are ethics emphasized in art education today?
• Must art be ethical?