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[Curious minds will investigate ☝.]

I hate to share the end with you first, but it’s too poetically pragmatic to not:
“The fact that such strategies devolved inexorably into their own sort of market-friendly style just proves a point. On both sides, “traditional” and “conceptual,” the perceived ill of the other is actually just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything. Which should provide a lesson for critics about the kind of promises they make for art: There are no formal or esthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces — only political and economic solutions. Consequently, the only critical temperament that makes any real sense is an eclectic one that doesn’t build up one or the other side into the answer for problems that they both share.”
Please read the entire article, by Ben Davis, here. It’s highly recommended.

Here-in lies the implicit beauty of conceptualism and its relation to “the marketplace”: All the best conceptual artists are advertisers.

For some reason, artists like to imagine themselves as a band of outsiders [or just a single outsider], huddled next to the campfire of art history, letting it burn all sorts of psychedelic images into their behavioral corneas while they wait for a message from their gods to show them the way. The problem is that they don’t realize the gods have a relationship with “the market,” and that the art history flame has always burned a little brighter with the help of currency.

Thus, I’ve always been a firm believer in the position that any position, including that which is in direct opposition of another position, is still just that “other” position itself. Or, a little differently: the thing in which we hate is hate itself, embodied by the hater, being the hated.

The fact that we still have this conversation of The Conceptualist Vs. The Traditionalist is most likely due to the repetition of collective discomfort during times of shifting abstractions [otherwise known as The Crisis].

Unfortunately [because I'm an advocate], if I were to be critical of the current state of conceptual thought and practice, I might draw parallels such as “conceptual art is a blanket behavior of representational self-reflection, which is unfortunately, at this moment, more superficial than a landscape or a still-life.”

[Post prompted /in part/ by a conversation with Bradley Wester.]
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The following MP3 list is a short overview of some of the music I’ve been listening to lately, while making things. [Take note: one of the songs are a repeat of last month's sound post.]
Ghosts.mp3
05-Gardens-Of-The-South.mp3
03-Norway.mp3
01 Graze.mp3
15-Dèwèl.mp3
Im-Waiting-for-my-Banshee.mp3

 

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If you follow art-world gossip, you’re probably aware that their is an ethical conversation happening in regards to the insularity and small-town-mindedness of the global art world. The drama is being played out by various agents of the press, and stars the New Museum and billionaire art-aggregator Dakis Joannou. The drama is rather complicated and unfolds in many directions, such as e-flux’s brilliantly immediate response announcement:
“In response to a series of articles concerning museum ethics that appeared last week in the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Time, New York Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and blogs such as Art Fag City, Modern Art Notes, and JamesWagner.com, we would like to bring to your attention several helpful resources on this subject and let you know about a conference taking place at the Seton Hall University today.”

New Directions in Museum Ethics: A Conference of Graduate Student Research
November 14, 2009, 8:30 am-4:30pm
Seton Hall University
Science and Technology Building
Science Center Atrium & Room 101
South Orange, New Jersey

http://www.museumethics.org/

The International Council of Museums: Code of Ethics for Museums

American Association of Museums: Code of Ethics for Museums

The most acutely emotional, synoptic version of this currency is by Mr. Jerry Saltz’ article, Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum, in New York Magazine, where he outlines said dynamics as follows:
“In this case, the circle looks something like this: Joannou, a New Museum trustee, is friendly with Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director. Her curator, Massimiliano Gioni, has worked previously with Joannou, and he oversaw the current three-floor Urs Fischer show. Urs Fischer has curated shows for Joannou; Joannou also owns a good deal of Fischer’s work. Fischer’s art dealer is Gavin Brown, who also represents Elizabeth Peyton, Jeremy Deller, and Steven Shearer, all four of whom have had solo shows at the New Museum since it re-opened less than two years ago. I like that the art world isn’t regulated. I have seen Joannou’s collection and it is incredible. Still, when you add in Koons as the curator here the whole thing just breaks down. If only the museum would have either curated the collection itself or gotten someone else to do it …”

[The amazingness of New York Magazine's web intelligence is on display below (i.e. link appeared magically during copy/paste).]
Read more: Saltz: Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum — Vulture http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/11/saltz_money_insularity_and_a_h.html#ixzz0WqtM08Pt

However, my personal favorite relational-appendage to the situation is the following drawing, made by William Powhida, for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail [click image for link to hi-res version]:

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[Video: SUPERFLEX trailer]
Danish collective Superflex has created a series of films about the financial meltdown in which the artists treat the crisis as a form of psychosis to be treated by a hypnotist. The offering is a sort of therapeutic device that has a correspondence with the theatrical devices of art that have been employed in recession’s past.

This is no longer a seller’s market.
There have been claims that the art market will remain immune to the global financial crisis. However, a recent report by the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, for example, finds that artist unemployment peaked two years after the last US recession had ended.

The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies put out a report that found respondents expect that the downturn will induce changes in consumer behaviour that will be both positive and negative for the arts.
• Less travel/cultural tourism, particularly international tourism (with an additional effect
in the USA where travel tax revenues, such as motel taxes, are often put toward the
arts).
• A shift to less expensive arts experiences.
• A shift to the arts away from more expensive leisure pursuits.
• Reduction in spending on theatre tickets, particularly single ticket purchases rather
than subscriptions (‘loyal supporters via subscription tickets likely to remain’).
• Fewer art purchases by both individuals and institutions.
• Consumption of quality and major arts experiences will be stable, but smaller local arts
may experience a decline in consumption (‘Consumers will cut back on discretionary
spending in anticipation of economic difficulties, which will skew arts attendances
towards bigger, more mainstream and crowd-pleasing fare as smaller personal budgets
make audiences more discriminating and risk-averse in their arts spending).
• Sales and private sponsorships declining in value

Positive outcomes from the downturn:
The majority of respondents expect some positive or ameliorating factors to arise from the
downturn. Three possible factors were provided in the questionnaire to stimulate thought:
• Local cultural tourism may increase, offsetting an expected decline in international
tourism.
• People will turn to the arts in times of turmoil for the arts’ ‘feel good’ factor, so demand
for the arts may not drop as much as in other sectors.
• Innovation, creativity and flexibility in the arts sector will allow it to respond better to the
downturn than other economic sectors.

Synoptic Version: The total results of the report were “mildly negative” regarding the effect the global economic downturn will have on the arts sector.

Yet, an alternative perspective is that some are considering this crisis a time for rebirth, or a pruning of unessential and/or reckless tactics of the art world’s inflation. Some critics are admittedly supporting the optimistic attributes of the crisis by referring to the problematic situation as a sort of cleansing of their excessively prompted critical capacities and bankrupt attentions. “Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art,” writes Saltz. “The ’40s, ’70s and the ’90s, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted, but it was also reborn.”

Additionally, since the 90′s, there has been a massive collective push in art that celebrates interpersonal exchange and monetary-free [via representation] models for the collective trafficking of ideas. Personally, I’m unable to reason whether or not this concern was caused by the pattern-recognition of artists, as early-adapters, or if this focus was caused by [the somewhat] newly developed exchange principles of the internet. In the past, I’ve mentioned that I was glad such times had descended upon us, as the rate in which we find creative and more self-sustaining practices of production increasing as a matter of survival. The test of this perception [one that I find myself now thoroughly engaged with] is the elasticity of hypothesis and the level of passion that the holder of such perceptions is willing to invest. I find the most important aspect of the test, to be that the understanding of such an investment must remain within the abstract terms in which the investment’s resources are culled. The difficulty of such pursuits then becomes a matter of faith, regarding the collective’s abstract equity and that equity’s relationship with an individual’s personal value system. Meaning: is it possible to really even claim self-sustainability, on the front of any ideological crisis? Or, is such a claim imaginary, and therefore empty of material resource beyond the ability to simply bring things together [conceptually]?

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Why are the places we view art so alarmingly homogenous?
It’s most likely due to the authority of institutions, namely the corporate-minded board members at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, during the era of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. We are still behaviorally re-enacting cultural strategies of this era, so the politics of exhibiting would certainly fit this behavioral bill. However, MOMA’s corporation clearly wasn’t capable enough of inventing these strategies on their own, but rather perverted many of the strategies and beliefs developed by people like El Lissitzky, and members of the Bauhasian entourage. [Lissitzky should be a beat after every teacher's own heart, with conceptions of art such as "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation).]

If the history of such relationships is of interest to you, a recommended read would be that of Charlotte Klonk’s Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, which traces the history of “experience spaces.” The historical narrative follows the methods of display influenced by scientific theories, in the 19th century, and the German influence of the 20th century, which found gallery directors who were inspired by collectors’ homes, and who hung canvases extremely low down and in single file.

So, if you’re an art enthusiast who is concerned, in a ‘deep’ way, about the sustainability of visual art in the 21st century, this book will serve as an important foreword to your personal performative essay. Additionally, here is a link to an unofficially related blog on the same subject: spaces of experience.

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[Sam Taylor Wood's Still Life]

Time is where it’s at, within the current field of well funded art talk. Thanks to “exhibitions” such as Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Il Tempo del Postino, an event that took place and currently only exists within the second-hand conversations of what happened, or interviews, or a very expensive catalog, the talk of time is an ironically “hot” topic. “The world’s first visual arts opera” would and could clearly only be realized within the current climate of the 21st Century’s economics of attention. The stage has certainly been set for art’s privileged spectacle to be fully taken advantage of as visual art on the ‘couture’ institutional level has become a finely and well funded system for the advertisement of situational importance and historical validation. Time as a medium has been the hidden forefront of art discussion since the legal battle between Ruskin and Whistler solidified the troubled relationship of art and the public, via Whistler’s defense of ‘Art for Art’s Sake.’ However, [re]focusing the direction of a viewer to be as hyper-sensitive as possible in order to realize the importance of time-mediums may prove to be fertile ground for the extended application of art as a perceptual exercise or the implicit relationship art has with advertising. Either application should prove fruitful for those willing to engage, as we haphazardly wander into an era of what may be considered “Real Abstract Art.”

Face it, if I told you that the performances of Il Tempo del Postino were the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen in my life, you’d start looking for the exhibition.

The expensive catalog by M/M Paris can be found here:

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Hidden within the body of this information, about an organization, lies an artist and new ideas about art.

I apologize for neglecting to mention this before, but e-flux is one of the largest resources for contemporary art on the internet. So, if you like to feel as though you are taking part in the world by knowing what is going on with your favorite human activity, subscribe to their email alerts here.

About e-flux [straight from their 'About' page on their site]

Established in January 1999 in New York, e-flux is an international network which reaches more than 50,000 visual art professionals on a daily basis through its website, e-mail list and special projects. Its news digest – e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia.

The daily digest is put together in cooperation with nearly a thousand leading international museums, art centers, foundations, galleries, biennials and art journals. Our focused and selective approach to the information we choose to distribute has been rewarded by an exceptionally high degree of attention and responsiveness from our readers.

Additionally e-flux is read by 45,000+ visual arts professionals: 47% in Europe, 42% in North America, and 11% Other (South America, Australia, Japan, etc.) 18% writers/critics, 16% galleries, 16% curators, 15% museum affiliated, 12% artists, 10% consultants, 8% collectors, 5% general.

And if these statistics aren’t convincing enough, download the following pdf essay, Daniel Birnbaum’s Temporal Spasms.

What becomes beautifully poetic about this network is the realization that e-flux is the collaborative instigation of this man: Anton Vidokle [pictured on the far right, in the image below].

Vidokle’s resume is quite staggering, if you take the time to find the pieces and place them together [and this doesn't even account for the work that I'm sure he produces, or contributes to, without taking credit]. The most admirable aspect of Vidolke’s ‘art work’ is his relative freedom from the network of institutions that is generally believed to legitimize the individual artistic practices. Vidokle, through e-flux, produces, disseminates, and critically interrogates the ideas that animate his practice and simultaneously involve everyone else’s. He can also display the evidence of this process publicly and bring together friends and collaborators to discuss and refine them. And you must also take note that Vidokle doesn’t deny the institutional systems that authorize our artistic ideas, but instead engages with them selectively, in order to confront their roles as producers in the 21st Century.

He also, charmingly enough, contributed to the inertia of education as exhibition [or art], with the project UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA in Berlin [2006-7]. Clearly, the man holds a special spot in my heart and is a valuable resource [whom will be referenced again] in the ongoing post +ART SCHOOL [CONTD.]. I look forward to meeting him, one day, and asking him to discuss the importance of [character] distinction within the field of production… namely that of art.

So, please go to their site and invest more of the collective attention that makes e-flux a behemoth of influence. Click on the following image to be carried there…

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