NOT AN ARTIST

The [not-Art] Decade in Review

ZEELIO: A scan of surveys is possible, now. Did you watch the television over the Holidays.

PJM: We did. It was hella painful, ALMOST TORTURE.

MILO: Didn’t someone interview John Yoo, who was identified as funny?

V: I think I saw that on Salon.

TR: …Which is a laugh a minute.

MILO: Jerry [Artist Lover] Saltz pegged Jeff Koons as his “Artist of the Decade.” He doesn’t even make an effort anymore.

PJM: No pretense of integrity.

V: Saltz’s sellout is complete.

ZEELIO: So, Paul - who’s your artist of the decade?

PJM: Has to be Richard Tuttle. His traveling retrospective was the champ. Collectors of the Decade award goes to the Vogels. It is more than fitting that the decade closed with the release of the documentary about them.

TR: Tim Burton not on anybody’s list?

ALL: [——]

V: Wait - what are the criteria? If it’s “success,” the “winners” would most certainly be  Andy Warhol, followed closely by Damien Hirst.

ZEELIO: “200 One Dollar Bills” [$43.7 million] makes a strong argument for Warhol, not to mention the exploits of the Warhol Foundation and Creative Capitol, its art management apparatus.

MILO: Whatever happened to Hirst’s skull.

TR: Patrick Courrielche not on anybody’s list?

PJM: Yes. Satan’s, right below Glenn Beck.

V: What about Eli Broad?

PJM: Just above Glenn Beck and below Glenn Lowry.

ZEELIO: Remember PASTA? That’s how the decade began, with Lowry union-busting at MoMA. It ended with Broad gaming Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and LACMA/MoCA to cement his gains.

V: The LA art scene is now the barony of Broad. AIG forever!

MILO: On New Year’s Day I found a very relevant short essay by Charlie Finch [Artnet, 12-29-03], entitled “Will MoMA Lose Its Soul?”

PJM: We can surely answer in the affirmative, now.

MILO: Finch, the Scot Hater, closed with a lament or prediction, depending on your POV/timeline.

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And let’s guess what we might see: A room of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills; Koons, the new century’s Pavel Tchelitchew, muscling into the rooms of Pablo and Andy; acres of repetitive Impressionist painting and less Cubism; Pollock bowdlerized with his inferiors and less Mondrian; Brancusi scattered about, among Miró, Leger and Giacometti, in short a disjointed ride through the Postmodern tunnel of horrors, in which every artwork shouts for attention and every dead artist rolls over in his grave.
Every sacred space may become a pleasure chest trying, for a few visual seconds, to amuse.

Such is the triumph of the curator at MoMA, the dealer in Chelsea, the producer in music, the book chain in publishing, the spin and the sound bite in politics.

Is that what MoMA will become? One more American Idol?
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PJM: Again, we can surely answer in the affirmative, now.

ZEELIO: Eerie how that first line came true at Broad’s BCAM.

V: Eerier still, the line about Koons, given Saltz’s “Artist of the Decade” choice. Do Finch and Saltz even talk to each other?

MILO: Every line is prescient. OMG. But none more than the last.

ZEELIO: You’re referring to the upcoming open artist call hosted by Lowry’s PS1 and those wackadoodles at Creative Time.

TR: The artist Death Panel.

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(December 16, 2009; New York, NY) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Creative Time, the New York public art organization, announce Creative Time Open Door at P.S.1, an open call for New York–based artists to propose projects for the public realm, as part of P.S.1’s Free Space program. Artists are invited to submit proposals at http://creativetime.org/programs/opendoor/index.html through January 15, and will be notified if they are scheduled for a review by January 21. After an initial review by the Creative Time curators, 35 artists will be offered 15-20 minute, private portfolio reviews conducted by the curators from both institutions, on January 23 and 24, at P.S.1. The program offers an opportunity for artists to get feedback on specific projects for the public realm.
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MILO: I smell a Reality Show in the making!

V: Isn’t this similar to your New Art in Action framework for selecting NEA individual artist grantees, Paul?

PJM: Exactly, except PS1/Creative Time set no standards for “artist” and “art.”

ZEELIO: Hold on. The competition *is* for NYC-based artists.

PJM: Correction noted.

MILO: There’s that “C” Word again: Creative is as “creativity” does. Do any of the curators mention “innovation?”

TR: This is from the Creative Time/PS1 blurb page:

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Creative Time Open Door at P.S.1 is a platform for artists who work in the public sphere to engage in constructive dialogues about their work. Without question, artists working in this vein of aesthetic practice face unique challenges with few forums existing to address them. Open Door was founded in the belief that art production is not simply a final product, but a process dependent on critical input, working through pragmatic constraints, and developing a growing artistic community.
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MILO: What artist doesn’t work “in the public sphere?”

PJM: What does engaging “in constructive dialogues about their work” mean?

V: I think this is a reference to the curator’s mandate, that they be recognized as “collaborators.”

ZEELIO: They must have forgotten what that term meant in the early 40s in Paris.

TR: Maybe that’s why so many curators have shaved heads and are single parents.

PJM: I have a question. What is “this vein of aesthetic practice?”

V: It is the one without paint or stone.

ZEELIO: No heavy metals mingle through that vein’s bloodline. This is thought-blood, which isn’t bloody at all.

MILO: What are those “unique challenges” these bloodless artists face in making not-paintings and not-sculpture, that is - not-art? Is there no not-art forum for such work?

PJM: I believe this is the point, which is confusing, given that the host of this artist Death Panel is one of the premier exhibiting institutions, at least by proxy, in the Hemisphere and the world.

V: I say. That must be the “public sphere” indicated in the text. Don’t they mean “privatized sphere,” as opposed to the “public sphere” you proposed in your NEA/NAIA prospectus, Paul?

PJM: Right. Well, I just thought that the public option might be advanced through the government’s central art agency, as opposed to the DeVos Foundation’s ArtPrize, or one of the other Robber Baron-funded Art Idol award machines emerging over the past decade. After all, America is still a democracy.

V: Not for long, if union-busting Lowry and his “Base” can help it.

ZEELIO: On a side note, what does Lowry’s earn at MoMA?

MILO: Compared to Warhol’s $200, not much:

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Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) — Glenn D. Lowry earned $1.32 million in pay and benefits running New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the year ending in June, down from $1.95 million the year before, as the museum cut costs amid the recession.

Lowry, 54, took a voluntary pay reduction as he pared spending by 10 percent across departments and froze hiring, said Kim Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the museum.

The prior year, Lowry received a 13 percent raise, according to the museum’s tax return. His $1.95 million in salary, bonus and benefits earned him a place as the best-paid director among the half-dozen largest U.S. museums by budget that have filed returns for 2008, according to Bloomberg research.
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PJM: Charlie Finch compared him to Robespierre during the PASTA crackdown, but that’s not correct. Lowry and the Board of MoMA, including Broad, would have had to put their heads on the block for the MoMA scenario to be democratic, French and Robespierrian in its revolutionary dynamism.

V: Too bad, and I mean that literally.

PJM: Back to Creative Time! So, the CT/PS1 “platform” is designed to help not-artists show not-art in a premier art venue. Doesn’t this mandate strike you all as terribly problematic?

ALL: YES!

TR: WHAT OTHER INDUSTRY DOES THIS? What other business devotes so much of its working capital to fabricators who don’t make *products* for presentation and sale?

ALL: THE STOCK MARKET!

TR: Which makes sense.

PJM: How else to explain Saltz’s compulsive obsession with Koons’ monstrosity, the Hedge Hound? This is nothing, if not a disgusting insider joke on the gaming of America and American art by the international moneyed elite. Note how Saltz in his lavish celebration of Koons’ pathetic not-art monument “Puppy” lathers the prose with awed descriptions of cost and manufacture.

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There were 70,000 separate decisions involved in Puppy. Every flower had to be placed exactly right. It was mad! (Puppy remains a demanding pet: Its owner, the megacollector Peter Brant, spends upwards of $75,000 per year maintaining it.)
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It couldn’t be any clearer, but an insider like Saltz could never get away with full disclosure and keep his sham “artist friend” reputation and professional status quo defender position within the elite. Koons dog was placed at GE HQ, at the Rockefeller Plaza, and the Guggenheim, Bilbao - did this not provide any clue to the “ditzy” Saltz?

TR: Not apparently - Saltz described Koons as not going “in for the savvy art-about-art gestures,” which technically is true. Koons goes in for the savvy art-about-art-business and -megacollectors gestures. Here, Saltz, who is a genius at contriving critical sins of omission in service to the Super Class art world, fails as usual to clarify the distinction, or to explain that it is just that distinction that drives Saltz’s fascination with Koons as an anti-art star phenom.

V: So, the Creativity Time people at Lowry/PS1 are in fact implementing the tactical abolition of art.

ZEELIO: Of course. And they are doing so through a very effective marketing campaign designed to garner maximum buy-in from the affected constituency.

MILO: The hungry and suffering artist!

ZEELIO: It is the basic premise of Reality TV/American Idol-style exploitation.

PJM: Did you see the ads running on cable listing the achievements of American Idol contestants? What impact! Grammies, Academy Awards, etc.: - the consolidation of the talent machine in a FOX-owned corpratized vehicle!

V: Was it Idol or America’s Got Talent?

ZEELIO: What’s the difference? All of the Death Panels operate the same, more or less. A few talentless clowns, snobs and prima donnas make snarky remarks about a parade of willing-to-do-anything people trying desperately to “live the dream.” In other words, a made-for-TV model of the Super Class vision of a New World Order.

TR: Same as it ever was.

PJM: But how about that last line at Creativity Time Death Panel 2010:

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Open Door was founded in the belief that art production is not simply a final product, but a process dependent on critical input, working through pragmatic constraints, and developing a growing artistic community.
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MILO: Code words include “art production.” Also, “not simply a final product.”

V: “Creative production” is a euphemism for artist management, the antithesis of the lead artist in the dimensional art production, or the studio artist in the traditional model. In the Creative framework, curators, bureaucrats, dealers, collectors - everyone but the artist - is essential in producing a good “outcome,” which isn’t the same as a “final product,” which is code for “artwork,” as in a painting or sculpture.

TR: Curators can’t paint. That’s why they become curators. They can’t write. That’s why they aren’t critics. They are managers, solvers of artistic problems by the lowest common denominator.

ZEELIO: Tim Burton is the lowest common denominator.

PJM: Which is why we musn’t be too harsh on curators. It is the Lowries of the market who sign off on these abominations. Even the Lowries, can’t be completely singled out, since they are serving at the behest of the Trustees, and the Boards, whose agendas are really what drives the nefarious global art machine.  

TR: Do you think Koons chose a Scotty as his puppy to reference the Masons?

MILO: I, for one, wouldn’t be shocked, if he had. That would make the insider joke a bit more daring, wouldn’t you say?

PJM: What is Creative Time/PS1’s “process dependent on critical input?”

ZEELIO: It is the epitaph of both artist and art.

PJM: And “pragmatic constraints?”

ZEELIO: Otherwise known as the cost/benefit analysis, the hammer and sickle of the arts administrator. Again - it is the death knell for art and artist.

PJM: Finally, what is Creativity Time/PS1’s mandate for “developing a growing artistic community?”

ZEELIO: I would venture this to be a heavily encrypted message about expanding local attendance, by transforming the museum into a media entertainment center focused on consumer portable “art,” with an eye toward globalist “inclusivity.”

TR: Tim Burton.

ALL: TIM BURTON!

TR: Any Artist of the Decade votes for Ran Orter?

ALL: Who?

TR: What about Ryan Trecartin?

ALL: WHO?

TR: Last chance - Mark Bradford?

ZEELIO: Only in this decade could an “artist” be identified, lauded and defined as a GENIUS for swishing gaily through Compton.