A response to Bobby Conn

So I was hanging out one day at yet another interchangeable coffeehouse, working on my writing a little, smoking and watching the beautiful women across the room, and perusing the July 1998 issue of Lumpen magazine, the monthly Chicago journal of radical politics and absurdist philosophy that is (I usually admit to no one) one of my guilty secret pleasures. In that issue I read an excellent article by local musician Bobby Conn, reporting on the state of contemporary American art as judged by this year's ArtChicago, now the largest annual art exhibition on the planet.

I read through the article and got to thinking about the moment four years ago when I first moved to Chicago, fresh out of college, clutching my fine-art photography degree in one hand and my portfolio in the other. Then I thought about the moment, not even six months later, when I finally got completely disgusted with not only the Chicago art scene but the art scene in America in general, and made the decision to give up my photography and start writing novels. Which is what I'm still doing, four years later.

My friends in this town, the ones who know me only by my 'writer' manifestation, ask sometimes why I gave up on contemporary conceptual visual art and took up writing. It's not something I talk about very often, and I'm not sure exactly how to describe the reasons. It's complicated, and the problems I see in the state of contemporary art in this country tend to run in a vicious circle with no spot that one can point to and say, "Ah hah, here's where the problem is." Mr. Conn made some excellent points in his article, and I wholeheartedly agree with everything said. In my mind however, sitting in that coffeehouse and musing on all this again after a long time of not thinking about it at all, it seems that he missed some crucial explanations on why the art scene is such the fucked-up mess that it is right now. They're not easy points to bring across, because in the process I will implicate myself, Mr. Conn, my friends, virtually everyone in America as contributing to the problem in one way or another. It's also apparent that there are no easy solutions to the dilemma facing us, and the answers to making contemporary visual art once again vital to the general American populace may be so far away from reality to be virtually unworkable. But I thought at least a look at the problems would be interesting, and might possibly lead to some small steps in the right direction.

The gist of Mr. Conn's article lays the blame for our current state directly on the shoulders of rich collectors who buy art strictly based on square footage. This is a valid problem. Anytime a creative market is dominated by the quest for suitable wall coverings, it makes the entire creative community suffer. But the desire for "big art" is definitely not new, nor has it ever been insurmountable. Rich collectors' preference for big pretty paintings can be traced all the way back to the Catholic church half a millennium ago ("Boy, the ceiling of this chapel sure looks bare. Who do we know that can paint something real big and cool? Who? Michaelangelo? Is he available right now?"), and one can point to any time throughout the history of the United States and see that the market side of the fine arts has always been dominated by the buying and selling of larger pieces.

Another small point to remember is that big is not necessarily bad. The work of the Abstract Expressionists for example, such as Jackson Pollack or Helen Frankenthaler, wouldn't nearly resonate or be such profoundly emotional experiences if they had been painted on postcard-sized canvases. Cindy Sherman's point would be totally lost if she printed her photographs as 3 x 5s. Of the long and varied artistic life of Picasso, most point to his humongous Guernica as the pinnacle of his craft, the best painting he ever did. There is a lot of crap being painted these days simply to move canvas, but the simple act of enjoying a large piece does not automatically make you the Antichrist.

The problem with "big art" as it exists today, and why ArtChicago is such a disaster, is that a majority of collectors believe that no other alternative exists for them. Financial consumers of art in this time period--the end of the Postmodern Era--face quite a quandary and as a result have been left flailing their arms and slowly drowning in the kiddie pool. So much of what's being touted and championed by the galleries these days is so post-post-post-post-post-post-everything that many collectors have simply thrown their hands in the air and said, "Fuck it, I'll buy something that looks nice." Even Mr. Conn admits this feeling of helplessness when, attempting to explain why a non-artist has written a critical analysis of the art scene, he says, "I sound pretty dismissive, don't I? I don't have any education, I don't know much art-history." Hell, this is pretty much how everyone in America is feeling these days about modern art besides the artists themselves. It's no coincidence that the most popular style of art in the country right now is so-called "outsider" art, galleries full of work from retarded chicken farmers in Mississippi and psychotic teenagers locked in mental asylums. There is a sense in this country that one must now be "educated" to appreciate contemporary art on any level whatsoever, that one must have studied decades of art history and theory and philosophy before getting the least sense of enjoyment or understanding from this thing hanging on the wall in front of them. "At least this bottle-cap sculpture from the crazy old minister who owns 17 cats is something I can get. He's not any smarter than me, after all."

And who can blame them for feeling this way? There has been a very shady thing going on in the creative communities in this country for the last thirty years or so, an insidious process taking place so slowly that none of us even noticed it. The thing is: Slowly but surely, the leaders of the art scene in America have changed it so you are no longer considered valid unless you own a college degree in the arts. And this, I'm about to explain, has caused more damage to the state of contemporary art in America than any rich collector or conservative senator could do in 100 years.

At what point was it decided that one couldn't possibly do creative work well unless one was academically trained to do said creative work? It certainly used to not be that way. The annals of American art history are lined with laymen: farmers, sailors, soldiers. Ambulance drivers. Newspaper reporters. These are the people that we now revere and are the staples of any history of modern art--the O'Keefes, the Whistlers, the Pollacks, the Ashcan School and the American Dadaists and on and on and on.

This problem is not limited to the visual arts at all--any hour spent at a bookstore can show you that 95 percent of all novels deemed "worthy" enough to be published these days are by people with MFAs at the right schools and with the right connections, futily trying to conjure up the magic of writers a century ago who never stepped into a classroom in their lives. Why this problem affects the visual arts much more profoundly than any of the other arts is that most other arts still require, by definition, a sense of general understanding by the public to be picked up and displayed by institutions. A novel still has to tell a story; a musician still has to make music; a film still has to have characters and dialogue. The visual arts however, the one section of the arts that is the most directly tied to pure aestheticism, has no such self-regulating measures. A painting doesn't have to "tell a story" to satisfy the basic requirement of being a painting; it simply has to be something physical that can be shown in a room.

This reliance on the academic community to determine our creators wouldn't be nearly as damaging if not for the fact that academians have an agenda. The majority of college art professors (with many notable exceptions, of course) have retreated to the ivory tower because they lack either the skill or the courage to go out and compete in the real world where you must sell your creative work in order to eat. Of course they spend their lives convincing you that you don't "get" contemporary art, that you can't possibly get it unless you come study art for four years. If they didn't convince you of this, they'd be out of a goddamn job! Of course they convince their students that the only valid way to make art is to intensely study the semiotics and philosophy of every single artist that ever lived before them and to somehow incorporate it all into their own work, transforming the canvas into a type of three-dimensional thesis paper. If they didn't, all art students would go to school for one semester, learn how to properly mix paint, how to gesso a canvas, and how to work a kiln, then they'd quit and go out into the real world and actually create.

The process of getting an education in the fine arts in this country has warped itself in modern times into a perverse competition, a pissing match between undergraduates on who can "out-conceptualize" each other, on who can come up with the freakiest, most obtuse, most obscurely-referenced work out there. Artists in this country are increasingly turning their eye inward, creating simply for their peers who are just as obsessed with academia instead of looking out at the world around them and creating for that.

And this brings us to the next part of the vicious circle, which is that these artists must create in this manner or else will never get accepted into the gallery circuit, which unfortunately has turned into virtually the only place to see contemporary art anymore. Mr. Conn complains about the large public institutions of art in his article-- "Maybe if enough Jerrys collect enough work they can put all their art together in a big concrete bunker and call it the MCA [Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art]. Is that much different than hanging it in his house?...Aren't there any other options?" Unfortunately, there is another option. A lot of people forget that the very concept of a public art museum is a very new one, literally only a few hundred years old. The traditional European view was that art was something for the privileged, for the wealthy educated elite that would (again) "get it." Museums used to be entirely private institutions. They didn't advertise. They didn't open their doors. Appointments would have to be made to see the work inside, and one couldn't make an appointment unless one was in the right social and economic standing. It wasn't until the United States started rising in world power that this scenario was exploded. The efforts of the anti-artists in the first quarter of this century, not only the obvious ones like the Dadaists and Futurists but also groups such as f/64 who believed that public dissemination of their work was a political right, coupled with the rising opinion that culture should be a right for all and not a privilege, is what led not only to the hundreds of public art museums and institutions we now have, but also more fundamental changes such as a national public library system and free schooling for anyone below the age of 18. And whenever that balance between the masses and the elite has been threatened, you've had groups ready to step in and remind us that it's We the People who own culture, from Fluxus and the pop artists in the 60s even into the materialistic times of the 80s, when artists such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer started putting their work on matchbooks and billboards, and Laurie Anderson eschewed the galleries altogether and brought her work to rock clubs.

Sadly our nation exists in an age where the actual physical gap between the work being produced and the means for the public to see it is the largest literally since the Aristocracy. Galleries are run like closed private institutions these days--the only place they advertise new shows is in the very elitist art magazines their "patrons" and not the general populace are reading; it is becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to stop by a random gallery on a Tuesday afternoon to see the work, with more and more galleries reverting to the "by private appointment only" rule of thumb; even at the so-called "public receptions" that dot River North on Friday nights, many galleries have a lock on the door which they must buzz for you to gain entry, and as anyone who's experienced this can tell you, showing up to a gallery on Friday night when the usual crowd doesn't recognize you can lead to icy stares, pointed questions, and a general feeling that you don't belong.

Opportunities to show work outside of the galleries are rapidly disappearing. Community art centers are going bankrupt and closing left and right. Renegade artists are leaving the poster glue at home, fixated as they are on changing their work to fit into the gallery mold. Public art fairs in the last ten years have suffered one of three fates: 1) Simply no longer being profitable enough to continue operation; 2) resorting to decorative art to fill the booths, like Mr. Conn was complaining about; or 3) in the case of a truly successful contemporary show, like Wicker Park's "Around the Coyote," the fair (like the neighborhood itself) becoming co-opted by the soulless and materialistic, who in their attempt to "buy culture" ruin the very culture they were attempting to purchase in the first place. Virtually one of the only aspects left in Chicago of non-gallery-dominated art showings is this city's ongoing commitment to the purchase of outdoor sculpture for public display. But Chicago is one of only a handful of cities left in this country to still think this important--most urban centers (like St. Louis, where I'm originally from) not only have stopped buying public sculpture, but are actually tearing down and dismantling the ones already in place.

Why are so many art fairs and community art centers folding? Simply because the means of their funding--the public grant and award system, including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)--has all but disappeared. Mr. Conn makes an excellent point concerning the modern fate of the NEA and individual artists: "There are no more government handouts (not that there ever was much money, anyway)." This is something almost always overlooked in discussions about the validity of public art grants: in the history of the NEA, only an average of 20 percent of their budget has ever been spent on individual artists. The other 80 percent, and also the vast bulk of the agency's time and focus, has been spent promoting and helping community art centers and special shows for the general public. Do you ever wonder why that cool little center down the block where you took that Beginning Sculpture workshop last summer suddenly closed down? Do you ever wonder why your children are never taken on field trips to the museum at school anymore? Do you ever wonder why that great neighborhood fair that used to go up every summer is no longer being run? It's because all of those things have to paid for somehow, and you--yes, you--took away their budget because some 96-year-old blowhard in Washington convinced you that your tax money was being spent on supplying drugs for some guy who pisses on pictures of Christ and sticks bullwhips up his ass.

Some would charge that the public grant system in this country never had much money to begin with, and they would be right. But that would be missing a crucial point to why it's necessary. Having public money towards the visual arts says in both a physical and metaphorical way that art is important to us, the general populace. The NEA was started in an optimistic time in this country. More and more people across the nation were beginning to say, "Wait. If this government is for the people, by the people and of the people, shouldn't my taxes be going for something more than the police and the army? Is it enough that my government provide highways to drive on?" People began to believe that a society that takes care of only its most fundamental needs is ultimately a barbaristic society, a Spartan one. And are we barbarians? Of course not. Once a society gets to a certain point of maturity and stability, it becomes necessary not only to provide basic services but also to take on the task of making its members better people--or at least to provide ways for its members to become better people if they choose. It's the same argument being debated right now over the government's role in providing internet access to the poor--if our country wishes to be the best it can be, isn't it in all of our interests to make our citizens as intelligent, sensitive, cultured and enlightened as possible? Isn't it our job as a society to provide some sort of means of experiencing music, dance, writing, visual art, academic research, to those very citizens whose finances exclude them from these very things, simply to keep our country from being run by a handful of the wealthy elite? If our country as a whole is more intelligent and cultured than that other country over there, doesn't that inherently protect us from hostile mental takeover just as an army protects us from hostile physical takeover?

So. The NEA is cut back, forcing artists to rely on the gallery system more and more for public exposure. Which makes artists shape their work into the more esoteric and conceptual to get in the galleries. Which makes them go to college more to get this training. Which cuts them off more and more from the general public. Who, by this act, believes more and more that contemporary art is not for them. Which makes them support public subsidy of art less and less. Which gets the NEA cut back. A vicious cycle, like I said. Is there a solution? Yes and no, I suppose. I have my own "dream team" in my head, a series of actions that could only happen in a hypothetical world that could quickly overcome these problems. Although not comprehensive, my list would have to include the following actions:

Reinstate and fully fund the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as all the various state and local arts agencies.

Eliminate entrance fees to all public art museums.

Make teaching one of the highest-paid professions in this country, thereby setting up intense competition for the jobs which lead to the best and brightest artists in the nation being our professors.

Have galleries advertise in popular culture magazines.

Have popular culture magazines take more of an interest in artists.

Begin art history classes in grade schools as an integrated part of the social studies and history curricula, showing how the creative work of this country is as important to our development as the famous wars we've fought.

Have parents take their children to the art museum at least twice a year, and teach them from a very young age that art can be something important.

Have galleries and museums take a pointed interest in non-academically trained artists.

Teach people that you don't have to spend money to become cultured.

Have more individual artists volunteer their time teaching workshops at community art centers.

Encourage artists to form alliances and "schools of thought," promoting the group's work as a whole instead of eternally struggling as an lonely individual.

Like I said, this is a hypothetical list and doesn't sound too encouraging at first. But all is not lost, I suppose. Like I said, I write novels now, and in these last four years I've found that I can do just about all the things in this genre that I always wanted to do as an artist. I can publish a book that can be read for its complex metaphorical and allegorical messages if that reader wishes, while another person can read the same book and just enjoy a fun, engaging story, if that's what they wish. The majority of my publishing efforts are DIY, allowing me to directly communicate to my public without the interference of a strict hierarchy forcing me to shape my work in a certain way. About once a year or so I'll publish something with a mainstream publisher, allowing me to financially survive without having to depend on grants or wallow in the academic community. I get attention from the mainstream media in a way that my artwork never would.

The world of words is something considered vital by the American populace right now. More novels were sold last year than in any other time in the history of the human race. And it's not just John Grisham and Stephen King, either--serious writers of literature such as Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabakov, Jim Carroll and Hunter S. Thompson all had breakthrough sales in 1997 because of newfound attention from the mainstream media. This year, for the first time in history, a book of poetry has sold over half a million copies (and is still selling steadily). And it's not even from a rock star--it's the poet laureate of England!

I see these things and am encouraged. The arts in general are thriving right now, and visual art is certainly not dead. Yes, several profound changes need to take place for this to happen. But this is a strange country--the mood of our citizens is constantly changing, and what can be seen as a death knoll one year can turn out to be a catalyst for a new golden age ten years from now. Maybe, with help from all of us, visual art can be transformed in the coming years to something of vital importance to the American public.

Maybe. Just maybe.

Copyright 1998, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.