CAREER SUICIDE: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Why do some artists spend their whole careers doing stupid stuff like mutilating mannequins or painting old bits of wood with baffling phrases? Why does everyone in the art world get paid, apart from the artists? Why do most students spend years doing their MA, closely followed by them doing sweet FA? Who are the HoWiAs, and what the hell do they think they’re doing? How and why did a bunch of paintings that looked like vandalised portraits of SpongeBob Squarepants get taken so seriously as an international art fair?

‘Career Suicide: Ten Years as a Free Range Artist’ was and indeed still is my book about the realities of working in the art world for most professional artists, the thousands of unfashionable, underpaid and little-known ones who have to do all manner of unfashionable, underpaid and little-known things to survive. You should buy it, it’s really great because I’m a really excellent writer and I’m much more interesting than most of the boring old tools who write books about art.

ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES: PS

I know many of you have been reading and sharing Artist Opportunities May 2013, and hopefully you’ve been reflecting upon the tragic fact that I hardly needed to exaggerate in order to make my satirical point. I’m sure many of you encounter their real world counterparts very frequently. However, Gallerina Butthurt* writes to say: “It’s easy to mock, but I don’t think anything is achieved by attacking places that are under pressure already and try to help artists.”

Firstly, au contraire ma petite pomme de terre. It is easy to mock (and fun), but I hit close enough to the nerve that it gave you a guilty sad, didn’t it? Secondly, many of the outfits I have in my sights are doing anything but helping artists. They’re helping themselves to artists’ money. Many of them are just plain old nasty con artists and psychos.

But to help Ms. Butthurt out, I shall take the liberty of offering my positive advice about how not to be one of those places.

* Not her real name, nor even the pseudonym she’s hiding behind, but apposite.

1. Nobody needs another new art magazine full of impenetrable artspeak gobbledygook or another pseudo-professional online aggregator of shallow, glib reviews, reposts from better blogs, and listicles or slideshows about your favourite art. There are already numerous people doing that very well (or at least extensively). What are you adding, except your snout to the trough?
2. If you want professional work for a professional situation, pay me. This is also applicable to exhibitions, festivals and the like. I have done and will do things at reduced cost or no fee, but this is pro bono work. Pro bono has nothing to do with U2, luckily. It means “for the good”. In other words, there may be (and in fact I know there are) situations in which myself and/or other people can benefit from being involved in a project in ways that don’t involve money. Sometimes I do favours for people because I like them, or I believe in what they’re doing, or just because it’s absolutely no loss or bother to me if I help them out. This doesn’t give anybody license to take the piss by assuming I’ll always work for free and that providing content for them never costs me anything. I can’t pay my bills with kudos, good company or “great exposure”. Or, as it’s summarised brilliantly in this article: “We don’t do it for the money. But we won’t do it without the money” See also: Should I work for free? A Note to You, Should You Be Thinking of Asking Me to Write For You For Free

WHAT THE DUCK?

‘Rubber Duck’, like its maker Florentjin Hofman’s other work, is daft, kitsch, intellectually undemanding and entirely uncool. Yet its value, I think, lies in precisely these attributes. When was the last time the work of any artist celebrated on the front cover of Art Review or Frieze aroused general excitement, civic pride, despair at the prospect of it going away, or “limitless amounts of joy”? This last comment is from a discussion at the governmental level about the widespread positive fallout from Hofman’s avowed attempt to spread this joy. I certainly don’t think art can be or should be uniformly subjected to tests of popularity or popularism, but I also think that somebody except the artist and their friends should care about and connect with an art work.

Until recently the 16m tall duck was floating between Hong Kong island and Kowloon. Although described by the artist as a contemporary art work, which it is, the duck was brought to Hong Kong by a shopping mall as a promotional stunt. It’s very healthy that absolutely nobody seems at all interested in the sponsors and that the artist and his duck have gained far more publicity and kudos than the mall.

I say “until recently” because the joy came to an abrupt end when this happened:

And it happened amid accusations of cigarette attacks by mainland China’s notoriously uncouth, vulgar tourists, the enmity of “duck haters” (yes, really) and various other conspiracy theories of the kind that run wild on Sina Weibo and its ilk whenever they get going on any subject even tangentially involving relations between Hong Kong and China. The most likely genuine explanation is environmental stress from the wind and waves, although the eventual face-saving Chinese style explanation was planned maintenance, i.e. “no, no, it’s not a PR disaster, we meant to do it.”

People had been coming from hundreds of miles away to see it, with a collateral commercial impact on everyone from street hawkers with yellow bath ducks (almost certainly made in neighbouring Shenzhen, the world’s factory) to hotels offering “duck view” hotel rooms. Rubber Duck’s untimely demise left many locals as jocularly or genuinely distraught as the Weibo user who wrote ”Don’t die! I still haven’t had the chance to make a pilgrimage and come worship you, big yellow duck.”

Now let’s try to imagine anybody apart from their friends who work as curators or at art magazines giving a single, tiny fuck about the joyous arrival or the sad premature departure of absolutely any of the formulaic work done recently by critical young darlings like Haroon Mirza, Karla Black or Elizabeth Price who can apparently do no wrong…

…

…

OK, put down your pens, time is up. Anything? No, me neither.

ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES MAY 2013

NEW ART MAGAZINE

Unpaid, submission is FREE!!!

Irrelevant, ugly new art magazine/art and lifestyle blog seeking submissions of 3,000-5,000 word articles for its next issue. Please submit your text, plus a CV and two examples of your previous professional writing from a major publisher or magazine we’d really prefer to be working for. All entries must be sent in a format that suits us because we’re really lazy but is incredibly inconvenient and aggravating to you, such as a single PDF compiled from various documents of different sizes, shapes and file types. Please also fill in our application form (download hidden in a cryptic sidebar somewhere on our site) even though it has numerous inexcusable spelling mistakes and totally screwed up formatting so you have to basically type the whole thing out from scratch just so anybody stands a chance of being able to read or understand it.

Your published work will be read by literally ten people, only one of whom even slightly cares about it, and we won’t think to give you a free copy of the magazine or invite you to the party we’re having to launch it. Deadline: tomorrow, 8.30 am.

UPDATE: due to absolutely no interest, deadline extended to the day after tomorrow, 7.30am!

DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, LONDON, 18TH APRIL-30TH JUNE 2013

The first thing I noticed, and the reason I went back to The Photographers’ Gallery after boycotting it in disgust last year, is that they seem to have quietly reverted to not charging entry fees for their exhibitions. Victory is mine. When they’re publicly funded and sponsored for exhibitions by the Deutsche Börse and The Telegraph, then it bloody well should be free. They knew I was right, obviously. It’s good to be the king. I wonder what Mr and Mrs Telegraph (retired) think of Mishka Henner scouring Google Street View for itinerant rural prostitutes, though? I suspect they would take a dim view of the whole venture, even if the prostitutes are primly referred to as “sex workers” at the gallery, and described in an even more absurdly PC and “let’s not judge, mmkay?” manner on the web site as “isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments.” Or maybe Mr Telegraph would be well into it and he might even like to get URLs and grid refs so the dirty Tory pig can check out some of the “isolated women” first hand.

It’s not nice to think that women have to sit in plastic garden chairs by a motorway so some nasty scumbag can come along and buy blow jobs, but get real… it isn’t in any way inaccurate or out of line to call them prostitutes.

Mishka Henner, SS98, Cerignola Foggia, Italy, 2012.

I’d seen Henner’s work before, and I really like the eerie, desolate, and profoundly un-erotic world he’s created with this series of pictures. It reminded me somewhat of David Lynch’s mild obsession with uncanny hookers in odd places, as seen in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Inland Empire, etc.

It’s also very interesting that half the nominees (Henner and Christina De Middel) are showing work that’s completely outside the tiny comfort zone of anybody who still worries that photography is not quite art. Henner’s obviously working with a database of found material in a way that definitely stands on its own feet as art, and De Middel’s work is from a self-published book. It’s a huge step forward to see self-publishing and digital practice acknowledged in this way, even though I also love veteran old school photographer Chris Killip’s monochrome, classically photographer-y, authoritative and didactic pictures of decaying communities in the north of England in the 70s and 80s, as Thatcherism set about destroying what was left of them.

Although– or possibly because– they’re beautifully staged, shot and finished, I have some reservations about De Middel’s work. I doubt she’s being deliberately colonial, but her African astronauts (or “Afronauts“: see what she did there?) look a bit too much like they could be some kind of wilfully quirky and borderline racist fashion shoot for a stupid magazine like Wallpaper*. Quirky and racist. “Quiracist”. To get a bit pompous and sociologist-like in the mode that I mocked in the first paragraph, there’s something a bit othering and hegemonic about the way this body of work seems to be suggesting that the idea of Africans in space is inherently odd, funny or inconceivable, even if The Afronauts is partially based on Zambia’s real and fairly inept attempts at space flight.

In the real world I passed on quickly from Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2, and I’ll do the same here. Brecht, war is hell, pasting over somebody else’s work, incredibly ugly artist’s book, Google, something, something. Basic art school stuff: very dated, very dull (or “dullted”). What’s it doing here?

“CUSTOM-MADE FOR MONEY LAUNDERING”

If businesses like casinos and gem dealers must report suspicious financial activity to regulators, so should art dealers and auction houses. But to dealers and their clients, secrecy is a crucial element of the art market’s mystique and practice.

Have you ever accidentally told the customs authorities that a painting you own is worth $100 when it’s really worth $8,000,000? It’s an experience we can all relate to, I’m sure. It’s such an easy mistake to make, isn’t it? The quotes here are from a relatively shallow but interesting article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, on money laundering through art, which is the evil (or more evil) twin of high level art dealing as investment:

As other traditional money-laundering techniques have come under closer scrutiny, smugglers, drug traffickers, arms dealers and the like have increasingly turned to the famously opaque art market, officials say.

It is hard to imagine a business more custom-made for money laundering, with million-dollar sales conducted in secrecy and with virtually no oversight. What this means in practical terms is that “you can have a transaction where the seller is listed as ‘private collection’ and the buyer is listed as ‘private collection,’ ” said Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the asset forfeiture unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. “In any other business, no one would be able to get away with this.”

Though there are no hard statistics on the amount of laundered money invested in art, law enforcements officials and scholars agree they are seeing more of it.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html

Previously on this blog:

Money laundering, arms dealers.