www.chrisstiegler.com

An artist named Taylor McKimens, under the influence of abject comic strips, has made a swamp creature and put on view at Deitch Projects.  It is a funny Thing that comes out of the long line of underground comic-book aesthetes made famous by R. Crumb, made high art by Philip Guston.  The imagery is rural by choice, but in an almost ironically condescending manner.  The style seems born out of good fun, but the subject matter seems to be fun at some peoples cost.  It’s worth it though. 

 New York’s Spring art auction season did not echo the performance of the contemporary art market.  Christie’s and Sotheby’s have, again, accrued hundreds of millions of dollars selling some of the finest pictures to be sold.  The names of the big tickets remain the same: Warhol, Freud, Bacon.  The buyers are, by and large, the same.  But so are the sellers.  The undercurrent here is one of inclusion, but not exclusion.  Or, if you have the money at auction, you can get anything.  And business is booming. ¶Looking at the sick half-sibling of the auction house, the contemporary market, things are not doing as well.  The reports from the art fairs are reserved at best.  People, apparently, weren’t buying.  At least not the big ticket pictures.  Smaller art fairs, such as Chicago’s NEXT fair, which focused on less expensive art, seemingly outdid bigger comparators, like ArtChicago, according the Baer Faxt.  The more obvious symptom is the closing of galleries around the country.  The market is recoiling slightly as purse strings drawing shut.  ¶Auction houses are where easily salable picture come up again.  A large element of risk is gone, vanquished by a series of connoisseur checkpoints and market research.  The primary market is the proving ground for art.  There are infinite reasons why art objects don’t sell and so the risk is omnipresent. ¶Tough times are ahead for every industry.  Art, like other luxury goods, was afforded some lag time.   But, as the world’s money weathers the storm, so to will art.  One good thing to note: a flush of any market leaves the strong and talented and so we may well be in for a creative explosion.  Just remember that Weimar Germany was equally as creative.  So that explosion may not be a renaissance.

The fatal car crash that ended Pollock’s life was a stun to the still fledgling American post-war art.  His power and prowess dominated over whole legions of painters who saw him as a beacon of sorts, toward a new and more enlightened American mind.  Pollock, like no other painter before him, was as wide an influence during his life as he was after his death.  Fellow painters would mimic his gestures and methods in hopes of uncovering something for themselves.  Scholars and thinkers would dissect his actions in search of information, clues.  ¶Within a few years of his death, two art historians began to grapple with his legacy.  Enrolled together at Columbia University, under the tutelage of Meier Shapiro, Donald Judd and Alan Kaprow began to unravel the legend behind America’s first Master Painter.  Both scholars understood Pollock’s work as an endgame for art, and in that, saw his legacy as the roots of a coming harvest.  Although these two men approached his concepts with different ends in mind, each revered Pollock.  As such, both were perplexed and excited by the prospects of an American art after its first great hero.  ¶Today, sadly, we will enter a similar cycle of unwinding influence.  On Monday night Robert Rauschenberg died of heart failure.  On Tuesday, newspapers and scholars will eulogize a man responsible for so many changes within American art.  In the months and years to come, a multitude of readings into his legacy will surface, along with exhibitions, magazine articles and web-posting like this.  ¶Simply put, Rauschenberg represents the second benchmark for our American Modernism.  Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s work from the late 1950’s marked a sea change by widening the spectrum of influence to encompass the world at large.  Today, these two artists are refered to as Proto-Pop for this advancement.  It was they who broke apart the hermetic formalism of post-war abstraction to allow for a bit of worldly sentiment.  Johns took the more serious and heady route by catering his art to the introspective game of art-production and its many tricks.  Rauschenberg, on the other hand, was more actively lighthearted while remaining intellectually driven.  Some of his earliest works playfully questioned the difference between painting and sculpture or performance and printmaking.  At his best, he defined a new sense of interdisciplinary art-making by seeking new ways of mingling the media.  At his worst, he reworked and restated the same ideas, as if using himself as a popular culture reference.  At all times he was an exceptional artist.  ¶And so, in the wake of this loss, how will art maneuver?   

A few simple facts pervade the contemporary art scene: there is far too much art to process fully, much of it is poorly thought out or aesthetically clumsy and everyone wants to mention the price of an artwork first.  ¶There is an overwhelming amount of art works to see.  There is too much art for any one person to see, let alone process.  Like any aspect of our contemporary culture whether music or film, the playing field is so vast that one can only hope to keep up with the pace of change and not the lose themselves in the details.  Its less about seeing every object - although you must attempt to see as many as you can.  But more, what art should be asking people to do, is contemplate what they are actually seeing and not wonder what they might be missing.  ¶Cynicism can take hold when someone looks at too much art.  Much of what is created under that banner of art is bad.  Some critics prefer to stop the conversation there; only to continue in the face of a ‘masterpiece.’  The problem with that is missing out on the underlying nuance of cultural change.  Just because a work of art may be visually or conceptually sub-par, does not make it an illegitimate creation of our time.   In turn, even a poorly executed artwork can offer insights into the collective understanding of our historic situation.  My intent is not to be broadly accepting of all artworks in an inclusive way.  There does exist such things as ‘good art,’ although this judgement has more to do with historical perspective than inherent qualities.  Simply, consider it all without being simplistically dismissive.  ¶Money is quantitative and as such is something that is easy for people to discuss.   Some art critics as well as a lot of the viewing public are seemingly preoccupied with the weight of gold above anything else.  Innumerable articles ‘examine’ the present art market and offer ‘insider’s advice.’  As one who was educated at an auction house, let me offer this: the works themselves should never be solely discussed as objects of monetary equivalence.  Not only can this debase the nature of the works, but it undermines any aspect of honest criticism.  It matters not what something is worth in gold if it only seen as an abstraction of the stuff.  Paintings, sculpture and all the rest of it are much more valuable, although the return can be worse.  But if your interest in art is reliant on a currency symbol, take the safer bet and trade futures.  ¶In many ways this is my circuitous effort to define ‘art.’ But more simply, take the art world with a grain of salt.  Its less austere than it can make you believe.