It is becoming more and more popularly acknowledged that the art exhibition as a specific experiential format has played a large role in enabling art’s maintained, perhaps rising status, often more so than then content of the artworks within.  In a paper delivered at Serpentine Gallery in 2009, Dorothea von Hantelmann argued that the exhibition format, from the salon to the biennial, has ‘performed’ a crucial favor (the word favor being my particular elaboration on her idea) for art, of creating a psychologically empathetic relationship between audience and artwork, in which the audience has an expectation of democratic subjectivity, and therein affords the work automatic value.  There is plenty of precedent, of course, to the idea that meaning in art is constructed at least partially by the expectations the audience brings to the work, going back at least to Hans-Robert Jauss’ reception theory of the 1960s.  It has become fashionable, at least in curatorial circles, to place emphasis on the role of the curator in helming the viewer’s experience with an exhibition – and to remind others, as Boris Groys notably has done, that the word curate originates from the Latin verb, curare, to heal, it is a more specific development to examine how the multiple experiential characteristics of the exhibition as a device in itself, can perpetuate art’s economic, political, and social status.

In view of this, selfportrait will launch a new project, beginning next week, that aims to respond to the often overlooked experiential nuances of the contemporary art exhibition.

Recommended Reading:

The Triangulation of Value – Nav Haq – Afterall 23

Politics of Installation – Boris Groys – e-flux 2

David Carrier on Art Power

Reception History, from U. Toronto

Doug Wada - Untitled (Bags, Winter) - 2008 - oil on linen, from Look Again at Marlborough Chelsea

Enwezor: Well I don’t think that art making was ever a capitalist endeavor. The marketing of art is a capitalist endeavor. But we must be very careful that we do not demonize the art market. The art world as such is a complex ecology. There are many different aspects playing a role in our ability to have access to the most challenging ideas that artists are putting forth. The art market is one of the entities that enables that, that supports artists so that they may make a living, to produce, and so on. The museums represent another one. There are many different mechanisms that enable art. My fear is that a collapse of the market might not simply just affect the ability of dealers to sell work, but that it might cause the erosion of resources that support experimental ideas that support younger artists. We’ve already seen that. Now there are very few philanthropic support networks dedicated to the arts, and this inevitably effects institutions. Institutions become more conservative. They become less daring. So the implications of this economic recession have the possibility of being very severe. I am very concerned for my students and their ability to have confidence that they will have a chance to present the public with their work. You know, we critique all of these biennals, but when they disappear, what replaces them? I can tell you that without these biennales, the shape of the contemporary art field will be very different from what it is today. We have the opportunity to see a greater number of artists than ever before. The recession affects the support for those networks in the same way it affects the support for the art market, in the same way it affects the support for the acquisition of works by museums. The endowment of curator postions is already affecting the support for research. Institutions have taken out moratoriums on programs which require research and travel. . . How do we gain an understanding of whatever this new art that is being made? How do we gain an understanding of this work? This is far more complex for me, in this sense. This is the concern I have.

-interview with portlandartnet.net April 24, 2009¹

1. http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2009/04/interview_with_4.html [↩]

Recently, we posted a short history of artist-executed iconoclasm, that is, iconoclasm where the vandalistic act was done by either an artist in ostensible dialogue with the original author, or at least by an artworld insider (a la Tony Shafrazi).  Well, here we have a bizarre new case to add to the genre, if you will.  Title This is the sometimes clever and hilarious, sometimes acerbic and discomforting, art gameshow by Mark Kostabi, in which art critics and other art professional types appear as a ‘celebrity panel’ and take shots at naming Kostabi’s latest paintings, which are always overflowing with symbolism and consequently really fun to try and name.  Kostabi awards cash prizes (usually $20) for the best names, voted on by himself and the studio audience.  In the latest episode, featuring Glenn O’Brien, David Coggins, and Carlo McCormick, Kostabi improvises an in-studio auctioning of one of his paintings, which O’Brien joked that he’d pay $20 for.  Kostabi plays auctioneer for a minute, and though he’s having a good time, there’s something sinister in his delivery.  Midway through, he produces a carpenter’s blade, and, when the painting fails to garner a $300 bid, he slices it six ways to Sunday, and puts it over his head, appealing to the audience that failing to get $300 for a painting could ruin his market.  Enjoy.

link to video

I don’t care if this is old news.  This site is called Hot Chicks At Art Openings, and it is exactly what its name promises.

So … yeahhh … I am going to go ahead and “uncritically reinforce” this site’s existence.  Sorry, Liam Gillick [I am determined to turn Liam Gillick jokes into a 4chan meme].  This site is run by The World’s Best Ever, which I guess has a modicum of distinction among the tens of millions of generic, flattening art/culture/design blogs out there.  Well, at long last they have produced something meaningful.

I’m categorizing this post under events, because this is an event in the Badiou/Deleuze/Heideggerian sense for sure.

I plan to write a long article about the theoretical underpinnings of Hot Chicks At Art Openings.  Let me get back to my research…

Anonymous, via Hot Chicks At Art Openings

Jose Bove is a French farmer, syndicalist, far-left theorist, rabble rouser, and former candidate in the 2007 French Presidential Election.  He is probably best known to Americans for leading a group that dismantled an under-construction McDonald’s in Millau, France, in 1999.  What I want to figure out is how characters such as Bove fit into the rubric of artistic practice, if they do at all.  I am not pulling the art connection from thin air; I first read of Bove in the July/August 2002 issue of NYARTS magazine, in an article written by William Jeffet, a curator at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersberg Florida.  The article is really just a brief introduction to Bove and his anti-globalisation stance on food production and distribution (Bove coined the term malbouffe, describing the standardisation and global homogenization of food, at the cost of local agriculture, and cultural cohesion), but the context is what’s important.  Why Bove in an art magazine?

The complex web of connections between art and politics, aesthetics and politics, has to be one of the most theorized subjects in twentieth century discourse, touched upon by almost every notable thinker, and it is also one of the most self-evident, as the milestone artworks of the twentieth century are almost unanimously political in nature.  One can say that everything is political, and consequently every artwork will be, but there is also the matter of symbolic image making (ie. propaganda) in political campaigning of every sort that shares qualities with artmaking.  For instance, Jeffett describes (though I have not found this referenced in any other published accounts yet) how Bove “undertook the symbolic action of unloading a lorry full of potatoes on the entrance … the protest was not directed necessarily at McDonalds, but it was a symbolic act of resistance against both industrialised food standardisation and the unjust economic penalisation of a high quality French product [Roquefort cheese].”

To me, the dumping of the potatoes must be key in a legitimate connection with an image-centric conception of art, because it is the potatoes that produce an image that is both memorable, definable, and, in away, meme-able … without the potatoes, the act of dismantling a McDonalds in Millau is less vivid, and lacks the hook, the one sentence punchline that most of what I would call conceptual art (lower-case ‘c’, concept-centric art) possesses.  We cannot describe to anyone who has not seen any of Claude Monet’s water lillies what they look like, or why he was a “great” painter … but we can, in a few words, almost like orating a legend or an urban myth, say, or even whisper, that Tehching Tsieh “spent a year in a cage without speaking, reading, or making art”, or that Bas Jan Ader “jumped from a tree, and rode his bike into a canal in Amsterdam, to experience the power of gravity”, or that Marina Abramovic and Ulay “walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, only to say goodbye at the middle”, or that Mircea Cantor “put a deer and a wolf in a white cube gallery and filmed their interaction,” or even that Claire Fontaine fashioned a quarter with a blade concealed inside”.  And people, whether they think it’s art or not, somehow get it, because these are actions we can all intuitively relate to in that they are accessible to us, and that they leave an image imprinted in our minds.

Jose Bove carried away for destroying research crops

This Monday, everybody’s favorite downtown New York post-Marxist reading group, 16 Beaver, is holding a post-Marxist seminar on the post-Marxist causes of the economic crisis.  I will attend this, and then I will self-flagellate. No, seriously, 16 Beaver’s Monday Night series is excellent, and they’re doing work most of us are too complacent and/or fearful to do.

Here is the info, from the 16 Beaver mailing list:

What: Lecture / Discussion
When: Monday 08.10.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
When: 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all

This summer Loren Goldner and Howie Seligman have been running a weekly
reading seminar on the origins of the financial crisis, its relations to
Marx’s critique of political economy as well as some of the frequently
blackboxed aspects of contemporary global finance. Some of you may recall
our event in the spring with Loren and we are happy to have him back with
Howie.

For this upcoming Monday, we transfer their self-organized seminar into
our space and ask them each to give short presentations on the causes of
the economic crisis. Howie will deal with the financial meltdown from a
‘wall street/investment’ point of view and develop some of what was
contained in a recent talk he gave at Bluestockings.  Loren will speak on
the classical Marxist theory of the causes of the crisis.

We will use the discussion period to open to questions that are raised by
their presentations and to consider the current “status” of the crisis in
light of all recent attempts to convince the public that the worst has
been averted.

http://www.cashforyourwarhol.com/

I read about this *project* this morning over at dealer Edward Winkleman’s blog (posted at 7:49 AM!!!) and was surprised to see that Rhizome had not already covered this eons ago (that’s a complement to Rhizome).

Here’s what the website promises:

No one can help you sell your Warhol fast like Cash For Your Warhol™! Sell your print or painting for cash regardless of the size, price, or condition. Cash For Your Warhol™ has been in business for several months so you can concentrate on moving on with your life.

We can help you sell your art fast. Our nationwide network of investors has helped lots of art collectors in situations like yours. They can often make you a written offer within hours of contacting us, regardless of economic conditions, and have your problems solved within days.

The next step is yours. And confidentiality is assured! Get in touch with us… and <snap!> you could be in contact with the buyer of your Warhol today!

Contact info: cashforyourwarhol@gmail.com (24-hour service).

The site is a very clever bit of commentary, akin to some of the net art in the book At The Edge Of Art (2006, Thames & Hudson).

In the past I have found the pretend-functionality of net art projects like these to be a weakness.  The artist Dan Graham said, “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.” The connection for me has been that many non-artists are using technology to actually make a difference, in a committed sense and in earnest, without the pretense of artistic context, and without the acknowledgment that they’re going to walk away from it. In this way the “real world” often times outmodes the practices of artists engaged with the web.  This criticism could be misdirected; nonetheless Cash For Your Warhol is a cool idea.