ON NOT DOING ANYTHING THAT DESERVES A SNEER

In the following quotation from William B. Irvine’s book on Stoic philosophy A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, substitute the phrase “the art world’s approval” or “art world status” for every instance of the phrase “social status” to understand my purpose in posting this. My emphasis.

“Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status [the art world's approval] we give other people power over us: we have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavour. Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status [the art world's approval], since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.

If we wish to retain our freedom, says Epictetus, we must be careful, while dealing with other people, to be indifferent to what they think of us. Furthermore, we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval. Indeed, Epictetus says that when others praise us, the proper response is to laugh at them…”

“… Marcus [Aurelius] agrees with Epictetus that it is foolish for us to worry about what other people think of us and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. He adds that if we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.

Notice that the advice that we ignore what other people think of us is consistent with the Stoic advice that we not concern ourselves with things we can’t control. I don’t have it in my power to stop other people sneering at me, so it is foolish spending my time trying to stop them. I should instead, says Marcus, spend this time on something I have complete control over, namely, not doing anything that deserves a sneer…“

Any of this ringing any bells, artists?

THE AXIS OF GOOD (STUFF)

The artists’ database Axis is twenty-one years old. One of their chosen top twenty-one Axis things from the past twenty-one years is a brief extract that was published there last year from my book Career Suicide, (you should buy it here) about the hypocrisy and general twattishness of comfortably salaried people at fully funded arts organisations or supposedly “commercial” galleries always expecting artists to work for no pay, with no resources and to no particular benefit for the artist… and worse still, taking it for granted that they will. Worst of all, many artists take it for granted as well and go along with this kind of nonsense. As I put it in the Axis headline: somebody always pays for “free” (and usually that somebody is you). Telltale Career Suicide logo at the bottom left, click there!

Axis (promptly) pays the people who write these things, incidentally, making them one of the few good ones. I haven’t read all twenty of the others yet, but those I have read so far are interesting and informative so I think they’re worth you checking them out.

Hey, I got through this whole thing without making my traditional joke about WWII, setting up puppet states in Italy and Manchuria, having meetings with Mussolini, etc… oh, wait.

http://www.axisweb21.org

A PARABLE ABOUT ORTHODOXY IN ART

Image by Alistair Gentry.

The Song Dynasty artist, writer, polymath and generally intelligent chap Su Shi (蘇軾, also known as 蘇東坡 Su Dongpo, active in China circa 11th century AD) was discovered at his work one day by the same kind of person who nowadays thinks that an artist must play particular types of conceptual games within certain narrow art-historical (usually modernist) parameters if they’re to be taken seriously by the art world. “Why have you painted the bamboo in red ink?” asked this presumptuous visitor, “Surely everybody uses black ink?”

Su replied that he’d never seen black bamboo either.

A thousand years later, Su Dongpo’s red bamboo painting can still be seen in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Nobody remembers the name of the critic who said that bamboo shouldn’t be red.

THE CENTURY

This is the 100th post on my Career Suicide blog. Although I’d like more comments and public interaction, I understand that the divide-and-rule climate of paranoia in contemporary art (and the fact that many important art world figures are extremely nasty, vindictive pieces of work) makes people afraid of even being seen as a fellow traveller of the few who speak out, let alone of speaking up for themselves and putting their name to a criticism. Instead of dealing with the problems, the entrenched elites of the art world make people who talk about the problems into the problems. I’ve heard he’s difficult.

A friend asked me a while ago if it really had been career suicide to publish the book, and then to go further in some ways in the writing of this blog. Other people have asked me the same thing. My answer is always an immediate no. If anything, I’ve had new opportunities, made new friendships and gained unexpected (and in some cases art world influential) supporters.

And obviously I see the site logs, I get the emails, people buy the book, people accost me at events when they find out who I am and they thank me for saying what was on their mind. So I have the powerful comfort of knowing there are thousands of people out there– artists included– who are the silent fellow travellers, the ones who agree with me that contemporary art can be exciting, well-made, intelligent, vital, disturbing, enlightening, beautiful and all manner of other good things that connect with the experiences and the interior lives of a broad spectrum of people… but only when it’s free from the deathly grip of curator egos, vested interests, academic mummery, artists’ vanity, bullshit, and the orthodox art world’s general deference and sycophancy to the rich and immoral, who not only expect this sycophancy but actually require it from their pet artists. I’m not alone, I’m not wrong, and neither are most of the people who follow me… if only some of the snobs who are dug in at the pinnacles would deign to listen.

I was also asked recently what I thought the solution was to these gatekeepers getting in our way, these people who think they can still decide everything about who is an approved and adopted artist, and what kinds of work these artists get to show. I said fuck the gatekeepers, and the gates. Go around the back and climb the walls. Better still, bulldoze straight through those walls and make sure they can never be repaired. Let other people pour through the breach behind you.

We’re tired of celebrity artists whose artistic expression and product– because that’s what they’re making, product– has no more depth, value or meaning than their counterparts’ appearances on a reality TV show. We’ve had enough of the same tired little roster of Frieze-endorsed charlatans running through their limited repertoire of modernist gestures that owe everything to the narrow canon of what a few dozen people have decided Fine Art was from the 1930s to the 1970s, and having very little contact with real contemporary life or thought. We’re sick of artists being the least important, worst paid and most abused workers in the art world. For as long as we’ve been truly human, artists have been with us and they’ve been seeing the things that other people don’t, expressing their insights in ways that other people can’t. Art wasn’t invented to go on a Saudi princeling’s wall, to whitewash the brand of car manufacturers or petrochemical companies, or to be collected like knick knacks at the whim of idle trophy wives who are mainly laundering their oligarch husband’s blood money anyway. Art is not frivolous or a consumer commodity; it’s one of the parts of human nature that at its best truly takes us beyond the animal and makes us both human and humane, and helps us to understand all our sisters and brothers in the human race.

Death to the white cube. Long live the new art.

“WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A PROFESSIONAL ARTIST?”

It’s an understatement so massive as to defy analogy when I say that I’m not a fan of Frieze’s corporate brand and their self-appointed role as corrupt policeman of “proper” contemporary art’s boundaries. I deal in my book with the magazine’s generally quite vile ethos, which I experienced first hand at Venice Biennale. I also discuss in the book my feelings about Frieze Art Fair; these feelings are not particularly warm and fuzzy either. I won’t repeat them here. Read the book. I’m reliably informed that Frieze’s senior bigwigs take violent exception to being criticised as well, one of the true hallmarks of a whacked-out despot. Naturally this makes any criticism one engages in much more enjoyable: Matthew Slotover as Kim Jong-Il via Team America, so ronery and ranting impotently about which uncooperative artists or gallerists he’s going to have “disappeared” from critical discourse…

However, a somewhat old (early 2009) but very interesting article by Dan Fox was dug up from Frieze’s archives by somebody on Metafilter yesterday. It’s a relatively long read, but it still manages to cover quite efficiently the art world’s various overt and covert interfaces with money and prestige, and to do some serious analysis of the art world’s and many artists’ enduring, perverse love affair with obfuscatory, artbollocks language.

Other highlights include:

Fox using Sally O’Reilly as a human shield to put a round in the forehead of Sarah Thornton’s glossy, Grazia-esque, drooling, “… and of course Damien was attracted to me…” starfucker book about contemporary artists, Seven Days in the Art World. O’Reilly: “To take [Takashi] Murakami as the subject of the studio visit chapter is rather like offering Turkish Delight as a typical foodstuff.” Nice one.

Some good advice to artists from Gilbert and George, of all people.

Reference to philosopher Nina Power’s view of what she calls “Nu-Language” to create illusory gravitas, complexity and engagement with ideas where none of these things truly exist; very much along the lines of my own views on that subject, and of George Orwell’s (discussed on this blog a while ago.)

Fox’s discussion of the art world’s uncanny ability to assimilate, neutralise and monetise resistance… and the romanticism of some artists themselves in imagining how effective their resistance is, or not as is more usually the case.

… and so on. No comments or discussion are allowed on the article itself of course: THIS! IS! FRIEEEEEEZE! <Kicks unimportant civilian art lover and their worthless pauper opinions into the pit.>

Intelligent comments and discussion beyond the clutch of Frieze’s cold, dead hand at Metafilter, though.

A Serious Business by Dan Fox, at Frieze:

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/a_serious_business/