Wow, talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

I should not be allowed to read crap until I have my force field fully activated. I'm turning into a crusader, I can feel it. I am trying to save painting from some whacked out misconception that painting (a) holds less less meaning than weaving ponchos on the street outside a gallery or making dinner for poor friends  (b) that painters only make paintings in order to make money and (c) in the process I am also trying to save people from having to wear crappy ponchos while thinking they are culturally enlightened.

It's one thing to choose a conceptual project without an end product as your chosen medium, but to suddenly jump on the bandwagon and declare that the economy has forced everyone to give up traditional mediums and to inanely assume that do-good art is "unsellable" and loaded with meaning, WTF???

I mean, we're at viral status right now. Code Orange, people. I went to grad school in the 90's. I quit painting because I didn't want to be weighted down with "The Object" etc blah blah blah. I came back. I saw the light, whatever. I'm not dissing Social Art, I'm just in awe that suddenly there's this wave of people who think thought they were going to "cash in on the hot art market" and when it didn't happen, they jump ship. I'm also in awe these stories are permeating the media.

Mat Gleason has also written about this much more eloquently and rationally in the current issue of Artscene.

I was going to just link to the NPR report, but what fun would that be. No, you must read it here. I gave up on trying to clean up the spacing issues from my slipshod cut and paste job. Link to story with pictures here.

5/26/09 10:33 AM
In Tough Times, Artists Find Inspiration, Invention : NPR
May 26, 2009
by Laura Sydell

Over the past decade, the notion of the "starving" young artist became a bit of a misnomer, as artists right out of school were snapped up by galleries, sometimes selling their work for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But times are changing; after a decade of record-setting prices, the price of art at auction was down 35 percent in the first quarter of 2009, and art galleries are cutting back and shutting their doors.

Last year, 27-year-old painter Michelle Blade finished her MFA at California College of the Arts. She was looking forward to cashing in on the hot art market — until she discovered that the market wasn't as good as she expected. "People are just not buying work anymore," Blade says. But, Blade adds, being an artist is about more than just money. She says the realization that it was going to be harder to sell her paintings freed her up to think more about meaning. Her latest art project is a series of one-on-one sunset conversations documented with photographs.

"This isn't sellable," she admits. But, she says, "this project is opening up a huge community to me, and this is a new way of having an art practice." Triple Base, Blade's gallery in San Francisco's Mission District, is a for-profit gallery that has a not-for-profit arm meant to support experimental work. For the past few years, gallery co-director Dina Pugh says, it was hard to get artists to use the nonprofit.

"There was a sense that art was becoming a little bit staid, a little bit safe," Pugh says. "I think we're all involved in art because we want to see it challenge the status quo. … But I think it's hard when people are making a lot of money, [because] they just want to keep doing what works."

Pugh is now seeing a change. Artists in San Francisco have been experimenting with social practice art — a movement that questions virtually all of the conventional notions about art, from the need for galleries to the very definition of an artist. Pugh had one artist weave ponchos in the street in front of her gallery and gave them away to people in need. Another gathered unsold vegetables from farmers and cooked dinners for, well, starving artists.

"I feel a sense of optimism," Pugh says. "People are kind of excited that the options are more open to them now to experiment in a way that they didn't before. ... Maybe they would have been considered kind of hippie-dippy or Utopian."

This wouldn't be the first time that a major crisis has sparked a new art movement. The Dada movement was born out of the tragedy of World War I, says art historian Mary Anne Staniszewski, as a reaction to the ugliness of the war. "They started to make works in a radically different way, and it is really the most influential break in terms of the 20th-century art movements," Staniszewski says. "They really started making performances, collages, happenings."

Staniszewski notes that the Depression sparked a social-realist movement that gave us photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and that the upheaval of the 1960s brought more attention to the work of women and minorities. She adds that in times of crisis, institutions are sometimes more open to different kinds of art.

"Another really key point is that artists have been taking on all of the great and important questions of our time this whole period," Staniszewski says. "It's just that the very, very mainstream art world has not paid attention to it." Instead, the focus has been on extravagance — as with Damien Hirst's piece, "For the Love of God," which featured a human skull made of platinum and decorated with more than 8,000 diamonds.

Painter Chuck Close hopes that era has come to an end: "It'll be a time of major purging of a certain kind of wretched excess, I think."

Close, who is in his 70s, has had a long and successful career painting photorealistic portraits. He says he worries about the struggles ahead for many of his less financially successful colleagues. But, he says, artists are a different breed from investment bankers.

"An artist will lose everything and still go right back into the studio and get to work," Close says. "I didn't notice anybody at Bear Stearns offering to go in and work for a year for free to try and keep their company going." Even if artists are now going into the studio with less certainty, Blade says, maybe that's not such a bad thing for art.

"With the economy going in this huge downward spiral, we need a moment of reflection," she says. "I want to take the idea of the sun setting and kind of just look inward, because there is no West; we can't go to a new frontier. There is nowhere else for us to go. Everything has been established."

As for anyone who might be discouraged rather than inspired by these tough times, Close likes to remember the words of his mentor, painter Philip Guston, who advised that someone who could be talked out of being an artist shouldn't be one in the first place.

Follow up comment included:
Cynthia Tyler (JudithAbraham) wrote:
May 22, 2009 6:00:15 PM PDT

If you are going to write a story about contemporary art - more
research into the history of the critical discourse is advisable. If
you had investigated artists at the top commercial galleries in
New York (for example) you would have found many mid-career
practitioners for whom non-painting and/or "relational art" is
the basis of commercially successful careers. Relational Aesthetics
is a significant movement that emerged in the 1990s and rapidly
became part of mainstream art practice. (See the work of Rirkrit
Tiravanija, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan etc). The work of
artists like these coexists at galleries with the work of painters
and sculptors in a cozy manner. Yes, the economic downturn
may cull out people who are not seriously committed to what
they make, but in general the art world has been pluralistic for a
long time and remains that way. This is hardly a revelation.
Artists have to make art. There is no question about it. Money is
good. But art happens, whether there is income from it, or not. I
cannot be talked out of being a woman, being 58 years old,
loving dogs and cats, longing for Venice, or making art. Thank
goodness, it actually does support me, most of the time. I am
blessed.