WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A CULTURAL DISRUPTER? by Thomas Micchelli January 4, 2014 Excerpt from the Times “Disrupters” feature (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) Coverage of the visual arts in the New York Times hit a new low last weekend in its Arts & Leisure feature, “The Disrupters,” a roundup of interviews with “people who broke the rules” during 2013, “a year of cultural upheaval.” The rule breaker chosen by the Times and written up by Carol Vogel was Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, “the 30-year-old chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority.” Dubbed “The Power Broker” in the article’s subtitle, the sheika was responsible for installing “14 monumental new bronze sculptures by the British artist Damien Hirst in front of a women’s and children’s health center on the outskirts of Doha,” a project that “grabbed the world’s attention.” While the other “disrupters” spotlighted by the Times, whether or not you agree with the choices (Miley Cyrus?), can claim a creative role in music, dance, theater, TV, or film, the visual arts selection — reflecting the priorities not of artists but of those who buy and sell art — is solely about wealth, influence, and connections. Vogel — who wrote a fawning piece about the opening of Hirst’s retrospective at the Al Riwaq exhibition space in Qatar’s capital, Doha — tells us that the sheikha is a “sister of the new emir,” though she doesn’t elaborate on the country’s political structure, in which the emir, who took the throne in June at the age of 33 after the abdication of his father, reigns as an absolute monarch. Nor does she mention that the Thani dynasty has been in power since the middle of the 19th century. While it is too early to gauge what kind of ruler the current emir will be, his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani (who had deposed his own father in a bloodless coup), “was considered a progressive leader — vocally supporting children’s charities and encouraging education,” as reported by the British newspaper The Independent on the occasion of his abdication: "Although he had wrestled power from his father, Sheikh Hamad’s autocratic reign was reasonably peaceful, and he even went as far as to vocally support the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011." "With a stable government, Sheikh Hamad was able to focus on turning Qatar from a small desert backwater into a major world power by continuing to exploit the country’s vast oil fields, and discovering and tapping the world’s third largest gas reserves." While The Independent paints the former emir’s opponents as “religious conservative groups in the Arab world, who condemn him for forging links with Western nations, including Israel,” and credits him with developing Al-Jazeera, “the first pan-Arab satellite news channel” into one of “the world’s most respected media organizations,” any criticism of the state — as James Panero points out in an essay titled “The Widening Gulf” in the December 2013 issue of The New Criterion — “remains a high crime”: "In 2011, Mohammed al-Ajami, a Qatari-born literature student, was arrested for allegedly insulting the Emir and, a year later, sentenced to life imprisonment, reduced to fifteen years after appeal." Panero also underscores the plight of guest workers in a country of 2 million where only 250,000 enjoy the full rights of citizenship: "Just last month, Amnesty International issued a 166-page report condemning how migrant workers in Qatar are “treated like cattle.” The country’s acceptance of “sponsorship” employment, a practice used throughout the region, ties laborers to their sponsor employers who have imported them into the country. […] The report detailed dangerous working conditions, squalid living standards, wages reduced or withheld for months, and workers forced to offer bribes in return for their passports. […] At the current rate of worker mortality, one estimate says that 4,000 laborers will die in Qatar as the country makes preparations to host the 2022 World Cup." The cultural pages of the Times, however, have emphasized only Qatar’s high-flying expenditures on art, which include a quarter-billion dollars dropped on an 1892–1893 version of Cézanne’s “The Card Players,” which the newspaper featured in a front-page story by Robin Pogrebin in July. However, as Hyperallergic’s Mostafa Heddaya noted in a post that appeared the same day, “none of this is actually news. The most recent of these buys, the Cézanne, took place two years ago”: "In fact, the article readily admits that comparatively few artworks have even been directly linked to Qatar’s buying spree — most of the transactions, largely made with auction houses, are executed through a complex web of intermediaries to allegedly avoid spooking the market." “The point,” Heddaya concludes, “is that five years of blockbuster art buys and nine-figure total expenditures is the tipping point to get out of The Art Newspaper and onto page A1 of the New York Times.” For the Times to announce “the Qataris have arrived,” as Heddaya suggests, can be taken in itself as an example of the soft power wielded by art and culture. Panero likens the Qataris’ art-buying and museum-building binge to the CIA’s postwar fronting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the United States Information Agency’s promoting of Abstract Expressionism “as an alternative to Soviet Realism”: "Such initiatives, which were considered scandalous when first revealed, now come off as sound (and bloodless) Cold War policy. It would be nice to see Qatar’s cultural deployment as a similar force for liberalization, but the country’s track record on human rights complicates this interpretation." The Times casts the sheikha’s activities in terms of aesthetic intervention — the shakeup of a conservative society through art, both Western and Islamic — but the very act of reporting them, and their implied approval by the West, proves their efficacy as statecraft, whether that was the prime motivator or not. The soft power of culture, in the short and long term, depends on political myopia and historical amnesia as much as it does on public relations and message control. We see it at work in New York today, where the venerable New York City Ballet is now linked to the name of David H. Koch thanks to his gift of $100 million over ten years to renovate the former New York State Theater. How long will it take before Koch’s anti-labor, anti-environmental and anti-health care efforts are overshadowed by his philanthropy? When we enter Carnegie Hall, the Frick Collection or the Morgan Library & Museum, do we think about the workers at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills, who endured 12-hour shifts seven days a week for subsistence wages, with only one holiday, the Fourth of July, per year? Or the role of Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s virulently anti-union partner, in the breaking of the Homestead Strike of 1892, which left nine strikers dead? Or J.P. Morgan’s arms dealing during the Civil War, which counted among his earliest windfalls? As Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States (2003), Morgan “bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them.” In 1889, Carnegie wrote an article for the North American Review called “Wealth” (later republished as Part 1 of “The Gospel of Wealth”), in which he called upon his fellow “rich men” to bequeath their fortunes to public institutions “by which men are helped in body and mind,” thereby “returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.” He built his first Carnegie Library in Braddock, Pennsylvania, one of his steel mill towns, where the photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier, a relentless critic of the ravages of capitalism, was born and is now in residence at the library. Koch, according to his Wikipedia entry, supports gay marriage and stem cell research. He opposed the war in Iraq and the war on drugs. These views, you could say, are of a piece with his free-market, libertarian mindset, but, like Carnegie’s philanthropy, they also reflect the complexities of means and motivations that, since the time of the Medicis, have manipulated society and culture for better or worse. While it shouldn’t be assumed that the Times’s coverage of Qatar — which has focused solely on the amount of money spent on blue-chip artists, galleries and auction houses — has been going out of its way to skirt these complexities, it is grotesque to suggest that a scion of the kingdom’s ruling family, born into incalculable wealth and privilege, can be considered a cultural disrupter. If, as Vogel tells us, the Hirst sculptures at the women’s and children’s health center, depicting “the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus and ending with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy,” were never intended “to shock nor offend residents of this conservative Middle Eastern city,” she never follows through on whether or not the residents were offended — a necessary detail in gauging how well Sheikha al-Mayassa’s campaign to “transform this oil-rich capital city into an international cultural destination” is working. Instead, Vogel blithely transitions to the sheikha’s activities in art acquisition, museum building and introducing art to schoolchildren — “highly educated about art, [she] has deep pockets and has emerged as a power player.” And that, it seems, is what it takes to be a disrupter. A more credible idea of cultural disruption, however, was put forward by Holland Cotter in his contribution to the paper’s New Year’s Day feature, “Great Expectations for 2014: New York Times Critics on What They Want to See,” in which he writes: "Finally, I’m hoping against hope that the New York art establishment will wake up to the fact that by continuing to pile all its money on a minute handful of artists in a minute handful of galleries, it’s killing this city as a home to experimental new art. Spring’s the time for a palace revolution." Thanks to Mostafa Heddaya for his help with this article. Hyperallegic >>> LOST IN THE GALLERY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Holland Cotter Looks at Money in Art By Holland Cotter Jan. 17, 2014 “Pastoral (Den’en),” by Ay-O, in “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured non-Western works that are too rarely seen. Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo A new year. A new New York mayor. Old problems with art in New York. I have a collection of complaints and a few (very few) ideas for change. Money — the grotesque amounts spent, the inequitable distribution — has dominated talk about art in the 21st century so far. It’s a basic fact of art history. Emperors, popes and robber barons set the model for the billionaire buyers of today. Of course, it is today that matters to the thousands of artists who live and work in this punitively expensive city, where the art industry is often confused with the art world. The distinction between the two, though porous, is real. The art industry is the nexus of high-price galleries, auction houses and collectors who control an art market renowned for its funny-money practices. In numbers of personnel, the industry is a mere subset of the circle of artists, teachers, students, writers, curators and middle-range dealers spread out over five boroughs. But in terms of power, the proportions are reversed, to the degree that the art world basically functions as a labor source, supplying the industry with product, services and exotic color but, with the age of apprenticeships long gone, only uncertainly sharing in its wealth. The scene at Christie’s during the sale of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud.” Christie's Images, via Associated Press Do I exaggerate? A bit. The argument can be made that labor is benefiting from its ties to management, in a high-tide-floats-all-boats way. Visit art schools or galleries, and you get the impression that a substantial portion of the art world is content to serve as support staff to a global ruling class. The reality is that, directly or indirectly, in large ways and small, the current market system is shaping every aspect of art in the city: not just how artists live, but also what kind of art is made, and how art is presented in the media and in museums. I got tired of money talk a while back. Rather than just sputter with indignation, I figured it would be more useful to turn in another direction, toward art that the industry wasn’t looking at, which is a whole lot of art. But reminders keep pulling you back to the bottom line. With every visit to the gallery-packed Lower East Side, I see fewer of the working-class Latinos who once called the neighborhood home. In what feels like overnight, I’ve watched Dumbo in Brooklyn go from an artist’s refuge to an economically gated community. Recently, my attention was drawn to a controversy surrounding a large and much praised group exhibition installed at a complex of converted warehouses called Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The show, “Come Together: Surviving Sandy,” was conceived as a benefit for artists who had suffered losses in the 2012 hurricane and was promoted as evidence of art-world solidarity. Yet a widely read blog, Art F City, reported that the owners of the complex, which had for some years provided low-rent studios for artists, were now raising rents dramatically, forcing many artists to vacate. (Landlords say 25 percent of Industry City tenants are artists). The new residents seem to be an upscale clientele drawn by the artsy atmosphere. Whatever the full facts, money is the winner, and with that comes caution and conservatism. This is almost absurdly obvious on the high-end of the market. Sales of retrograde “masterworks” can be relied on to jack up the auction charts at regular intervals; the most recent record was set last fall by a $142.4 million Francis Bacon painting of Lucian Freud, a monument to two overpraised painters for the price of one. Meanwhile, big, hugely pricey tchotchkes — new whatevers by Jeff Koons, say — roll out of fabrication shops and into personal museums being assembled by members of the international power elite. Outside auctions, the marketing mechanics buzz on. Roughly since the end of the multicultural, postmodern 1990s, we’ve watched new art being re-Modernized and domesticated, with painting the medium of choice, abstraction the mode of preference. Together they offer significant advantages. Paintings can be assembly-line produced but still carry the aura of being hand-touched. They can be tailored to small spaces, such as fair booths. Abstraction, especially if color is involved, can establish instant eye contact from afar. If, in addition, the work’s graphic impact translates well online, where stock can be moved eBay style, so much the better. Other traditional forms — drawing, photography, some sculpture — similarly work well in this marketing context. But an enormous range of art does not, beginning with film, performance and installation, and extending into rich realms of creative activity that defy classification as art at all. To note this dynamic is not to dismiss painting or object making, but to point to the restrictive range of art that the market supports, that dealers are encouraged to sell, and that artists are encouraged to make. The narrowing of the market has been successful in attracting a wave of neophyte buyers who have made art shopping chic. It has also produced an epidemic of copycat collecting. To judge by the amounts of money piled up on a tiny handful of reputations, few of these collectors have the guts, or the eye or the interest, to venture far from blue-chip boilerplate. They let galleries, art advisers and the media do the choosing, and the media doesn’t particularly include art critics. What, after all, does thumbs up, thumbs down matter when winners are preselected before the critical votes are in? In this economy, it can appear that the critic’s job is to broadcast names and contribute to fame. Conservative art can encourage conservative criticism. We’re seeing a revival — some would say a disinterment — of a describe-the-strokes style of writing popular in the formalist 1950s and again in the 1970s: basically, glorified advertising copy. Evaluative approaches that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the assumption that art inevitably comments on the social and political realities that produce it, tend to be met with disparagement now, in part because they’re often couched in academic jargon, which has become yet another form of sales-speak. There’s no question that we need — art needs — an influx of new commentators who don’t mistake attitude for ideas, who move easily between cultures and geographies. Regular gigs in mainstream print journalism have all but dried up, but the Internet offers ambitious options in a growing number of blogazines including Art F City (edited by Paddy Johnson) and Hyperallergic (edited by Hrag Vartanian), which combine criticism, reporting, political activism and gossip on an almost-24-hour news cycle. And although both are based in New York, they include national coverage and in a feisty mix of voices, a welcome alternative to the one-personality blog of yore. That mix would probably be even more varied, and transcultural, if a few forward-thinking, art-minded investors would infuse some serious capital into such enterprises so they could pay writers a living wage and make online freelance writing a viable way of life. I don’t know what it would take to get a global mix of voices into some of New York’s big, rich art museums. If archaeologists of the future unearthed the Museum of Modern Art as it exists today, they would have to assume that Modernism was a purely European and North American invention. They would be wrong. Modernism was, and is, an international phenomenon, happening in different ways, on different timetables, for different reasons in Africa, Asia, Australia and South America. Why aren’t museums telling that story? Because it doesn’t sell. Why doesn’t it sell? Because it’s unfamiliar. Why is it unfamiliar? Because museums, with their eyes glued to box office, aren’t telling the story. Yes, MoMA and the Guggenheim have recently organized a few “non-Western” shows. MoMA’s 2012 “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” packed to the ceiling with art we’ve rarely if ever seen, was a revelation. But they need to take actions far more fundamental and committed. International Modernism should be fully integrated into the permanent collection, regularly, consistently. Their job as public institutions is to change our habits of thinking and seeing. One way to do this is by bringing disparate cultures together in the same room, on the same wall, side by side. This sends two vital, accurate messages: that all these cultures are different but equally valuable; and all these cultures are also alike in essential ways, as becomes clear with exposure. With its recently announced plans for an expansion, MoMA has an ideal chance to expand its horizons organically. The new spaces, which should certainly be devoted to the permanent collection, won’t be ready for several years, but the museum has no excuse for waiting for its long-overdue integration process to begin. And on the subject of integration, why, in one of the most ethnically diverse cities, does the art world continue to be a bastion of whiteness? Why are African-American curators and administrators, and especially directors, all but absent from our big museums? Why are there still so few black — and Latino, and Asian-American — critics and editors? Not long ago, these questions — of policy but also political and ethical questions — seemed to be out there on institutional tables, demanding discussion. Technically, they may be there still, but museums seem to be most interested in talking about real estate, assiduously courting oligarchs for collections, and anxiously scouting for the next “Rain Room.” Political questions, about which cultures get represented in museums and who gets to make the decisions, and how, are buried. Political art brings me back to where I started, with artists, and one final, baffled complaint, this one about art schools, which seem, in their present form, designed to accommodate the general art economy and its competitive, caste-system values. Programs are increasingly specialized, jamming students into ever narrower and flakier disciplinary tracks. Tuitions are prodigious, leaving artists indentured to creditors for years. How experimental can artists be under such circumstances? How confidently can they take risks in an environment that acknowledges only dollar-value success? How can they contemplate sustaining — to me this is crucial to New York’s future as an art center — long and evolving creative careers? The temptation for many artists, after a postgraduate spurt of confidence, is to look around, see what’s selling, and consider riffing on that. We’re seeing a depressing number of such riffs these days. Again, do I exaggerate? And, again, sure, to some degree. By no means is all the news bad. Start-up galleries are opening; middle-tier galleries are holding their own, or doing better than that. Artist-intensive neighborhoods like Bushwick and Ridgewood are still affordable, companionable and fun. But when the rents get too high, or the economy fails, or art buying falls out of fashion, and the art industry decides to liquidate its overvalued assets and leave? Artists, the first and last stakeholders, will have themselves to fall back on. They’ll learn to organize and agitate for what they need, to let City Hall know, in no uncertain terms, that they’re there. They’ll learn to share, not just on special occasions, but all the time. They’ll learn that art and politics are inseparable, and both can be anything and everything. They’ll learn to bring art back from the brink of inconsequence. As someone long on questions and short on answers, let me ask: Why not start now? © 2014 The New York Times Company __,_._,___
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