Items by Jonathan T. D. Neil

Artworld Salon

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  Occupy Museums, MoMA and insta-history

  Posted: 20-January-2012, 11:08pm EST by Jonathan T. D. Neil

  One week ago today the Occupy Museums (OM) offshoot of OWS staged a protest inside MoMA during which a banner was unfurled and promptly confiscated by MoMA security.  (Read a decent account here.)  Today, in a cheeky but perhaps brilliant move, OM sent a letter to MoMA’s Acquisitions Committee claiming that the “confiscation” of the banner was in fact a “unilateral acquisition” of a work of art that is by, and so belongs to, OM.  In the letter, the banner, which quoted Camus and called for the end of the Sotheby’s lockout of its art handlers, was designated by OM as both a work of art and ‘historical’ by OM.  Writing that “institutions around the country are negotiating with OWS to acquire archival materials for their collections,” OM designated its banner as one such artifact and then enumerated the three conditions that would have to be met for its return, none of which, in good OWS fashion mind you, were monetary.
  
  The rhetoric of the letter and its demands aside, the OM letter to MoMA raises a host of interesting questions, one of the least salient being, Is the banner a work of art or an artifact, however limitedly ‘historical’?  One could go around and around on that one for a while.  More interesting is the question of how OM is playing the institution’s game against itself.  If MoMA doesn’t take the banner, which it likely won’t, who will pick it up?  The Whitney?  The Met?  Another American, or European, Latin American, or–wouldn’t it be great–Chinese institution?  (I’d like The New York Historical Society to step in personally, but I imagine it won’t get any takers for a while.)  Does the claim of the banner’s immediate historicity, so seemingly easily and retrospectively secured by the letter itself and by the rapidly disseminated documentation of the protest, hold legitimacy? And legitimacy for whom? (Paradoxically, the letter demands recognition from the very institution whose policies it questions.) What’s puzzling, though, is how quickly a protest over the treatment of people–namely the art handlers at Sotheby’s, who are being held up as emblems of labor in general–is being mediated through a conflict over an object?  Is this not the logic of the commodity fetish itself?
  

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  On seeing a performance of exploitation…

  Posted: 12-November-2011, 5:23am EST by Jonathan T. D. Neil

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  Making its way across the web as I write is a story about the exploitation of performers at the hands of Marina Abramovi?.  ARTINFO is running the best recap of the story, and Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic has picked it up and carried it as well, but here’s a brief:

  Abramovi? was tapped by LA MOCA to produce a performance work for the Museum’s annual gala.  The outcome?  Each table at the gala comes with a performer getting paid $150 to sit under it on a slowly-rotating lazy-susan with his or her head protruding up through the table’s center, which carries the promise of intermittent and likely uncomfortable eye contact throughout the evening.  One human-centerpiece-to-be was none too happy about such future prospects and sent a missive to Yvonne Rainer, presumably because Rainer’s position in the artworld is unassailable, her politics predictable, and her network far reaching.  Rainer in turn decried the spectacle in a letter to Jeffrey Deitch, which was published on the web as co-signed by Douglas Crimp, Taisha Paggett and, according to ARTINFO, Tom Knechtel and Monica Majoli.

  In response to Rainer, Abramovi? told ARTINFO, “All these accusations, you can?t have them before you actually experience the situation and see how I can change the atmosphere [of the gala], that’s my main purpose.”  And in a comment to the LA Times, Jeffrey Deitch said, “I would just hope that when people make allegations like this, they would actually come to see the performance and talk to the performers.”  To make good on that, Deitch invited Rainer to a rehearsal of the piece.

  A ticket to see this performance costs at least $2500, so entreaties to see it before judging it are disingenuous. But more importantly, such entreaties are missing the point of the work itself, which is odd, since they are coming from the artist creating it and the institution hosting it.

  After all, to take part in the performance costs the performers their labor for at least the duration of the gala, but it also, as we know, costs the duration of the tryout and of the rehearsals too, and the value of this labor and time, as Abramovi? and the museum have priced it, is $150.  The tenor, if not the point, of Rainer’s letter, was to point out the exploitation of the performer in this situation, because the tenor, if not the point, of the performance itself, the thing that would make it possible for living centerpieces to “change the atmosphere” of the event, turns on the condition of their being exploited.

  Which is to say, it is exactly the stark confrontation between the gala’s (monied) patrons and the (not-so-monied) performers-turned-centerpieces that is meant to be “experienced” and which gives the performance its reason for being?it’s the very thing that would make it possible, in fact, for Abramovi? to conceive of the work as something that might “bring some kind of dignity, serenity, and concentration to the normal situation of a gala.”  Would not the change of atmosphere be entirely different if, for example, Eli Broad and Larry Gagosian and Dasha Zhukova were sitting under those tables?  How would dignity or serenity or concentration ensue from such a reversal??the whole point is that it would be a reversal, that such asymmetry between patron and performer is what the performance is about.

  From one perspective, then, the thing that makes such a performance what it is is exactly the fact that most people?people who cannot afford to support LA MOCA by buying a gala ticket for $2500?won’t see it.  And what makes such a performance from another perspective is that the people who are “performing” in it are exactly those same people.  And it’s the confrontation between these two classes of people, the possibility of their mutual recognition, that makes the performance what it is?a performance of, if not about, exploitation. Seeing such a performance, and so “experiencing” it, if it is indeed to take place as described, wouldn’t change a thing.

  [9/12 update: the LA Times runs a full story here.]

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  Maastricht: a different model for collecting?

  Posted: 21-March-2011, 4:10pm EDT by Jonathan T. D. Neil

  BY JONATHAN T.D. NEIL AND ANDRAS SZANTO, JUST RETURNED FROM THE NETHERLANDS

  Why don?t we see more cross-period and cross-category collecting? We found ourselves asking this question repeatedly while wandering the halls of The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) this past weekend. And it appeared to be the question dealers were asking, too. One London-based gallerist we spoke with lamented the decline of the collector dedicated to his or her individual wants. Such connoisseurship simply comes down to wanting the ?best? of what one likes, regardless of whether that is a Richter abstraction from 1984 or a Brueghel wedding dance scene from 1614.

  The Maastricht fair is tailored to this kind of collector. It is really five fairs in one, with large sections dedicated to old masters, modern and contemporary works, antiques, works on paper, and design. Within these larger sections one can discover highly specialized booths offering jewelry from antiquity, illuminated manuscripts, Chinese relics, guns and armor, nineteenth-century Japanese prints, or 1930s photographs. Even the length of the fair (ten days) and the habits of its collectors (most transactions happen toward its end or after the close) speaks to an entirely different sensibility than what reigns at Art Basel Miami or Armory or Frieze. It is not uncommon to see collectors lost in conversation in front of works?and not about prices.

  In short, at Maastricht, discernment reigns. But why is discernment in decline elsewhere?

  For two reasons. The first is education: Maastricht demands a high base-line level of knowledge on the part of collectors. Only a solid grasp of world history, the classics, and religion will unlock the meaning and relevance of the work on offer. Barring that, one must have total faith and trust in the dealers dedicated to this work. Time and again, we witnessed impromptu master classes being conducted in the booths, with dealers delivering learned excurses on the form, content, material, and history of a given piece. Questions of provenance are left to the wall labels. Some press releases stretch on for five pages, replete with footnotes.

  Second, market and institutional pressure: Collectors are increasingly encouraged to pick one medium or category ? say photography or west-coast video ? and stick to it. Others feel compelled to reproduce institutional habits in miniature, which is where the language of ?filling gaps? comes into play. These approaches explain why so many strictly contemporary art collectors have the exact same stuff hanging on their walls. Only through one or the other of these strategies, it is commonly thought, can a serious collector hope to have museums, or maybe taste-maker magazines, come knocking.

  Yet Maastricht seems to counter this particularist/generalist dichotomy. Its historical and material scope alone stands as a lesson in the necessity of discernment as a skill for today?s collector.

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  Zuckerberg to VIP Art Fair: “Users are fickle…”

  Posted: 26-January-2011, 4:00pm EST by Jonathan T. D. Neil

  There is a scene in The Social Network when Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is laying into his then CFO, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), for freezing the company account of the then-neo-natal Facebook. It’s the best 30 seconds on the fragility of a company’s online profile that one can possibly find, and it goes something like this:

  Do you realize that you jeopardized the entire company?…If the servers are down for even a day our reputation is damaged irreversibly.  Users are fickle…Even a small exodus, even a few people leaving would reverberate through the whole user base. The users are interconnected, that’s the whole fucking point!

  The VIP Art Fair is not Facebook.  It’s not a social media platform and was never billed as one. Rather, it is the first successful attempt at bringing something like an Art Basel or Armory Show to your browser. But here’s the thing: “Users are fickle.” And VIP learned that lesson the hard way.

  The scrutiny and criticism have been relentless: my colleagues at ArtReview questioned VIP’s default email sharing/privacy settings (another Facebook lesson), about which collectors were pissed; bloggers, as they do, have offered comment and cattiness, on everything from the experience to the idea; everyone I’ve spoken to trashes the interface, or has said the art looks “flat” (you are looking at it on a screen, I remind them); and rumors abound that exhibitors have been asking for refunds.

  Barring those rumors, all of this confirms that VIP is indeed a success, a qualified one, but a success nevertheless.  People logged on, looked, commented, contacted (too many it seems). This is what happens at an art fair. If the chat function didn’t work, or no one was manning the booth?well guess what? This happens at art fairs too.  And if there was no “buy now” button on the screen, if you couldn’t give your credit card number and get an email confirmation of your purchase, then again?that doesn’t happen at an art fair either. Those transactions have always been “offline” so to speak, just as they were here.

  The issue is that we expect more from the online environment, or rather we expect different. It simply isn’t enough to replicate the experience, it has to be remediated and enhanced. One thing that it absolutely must be, however, is seamless. VIP is a success, but its reputation is damaged. Irreversibly?