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Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

Seven Days in the Art World

Sarah Thornton

Book Cover

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights---

Author: Sarah Thornton
URL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001FA0NK6
Category: Books
Genre:

“The art world isn’t about power but control. Power can be vulgar. Control is smarter, more pinpointed. It starts with the artists, because their work determines how things get played out, but they need an honest dialogue with a conspirator. Quiet control—mediated by trust—is what the art world is really about.” (Location 46)

Art is about experimenting and ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it’s an intoxicating combination. (Location 55)

The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a “statusphere.” It’s structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection. As I’ve roamed the art world, I’ve been habitually amused by the status anxieties of all the players. (Location 56)

“The function of museums is to make art worthless again. They take the work out of the market and put it in a place where it becomes part of the common wealth.” (Location 71)

art fosters quick-forming imagined communities.” (Location 84)

“After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there? Art is extremely enriching. Why shouldn’t people want to be exposed to ideas?” (Location 101)

Even the most businesslike dealers will tell you that making money should be a byproduct of art, not an artist’s main goal. (Location 111)

Art needs motives that are more profound than profit if it is to (Location 112)

maintain its difference from—and position above—other cultural forms. (Location 112)

even though many insiders love to loathe the art world, I have to agree with Artforum publisher Charles Guarino: “It’s the place where I found the most kindred spirits—enough oddball, overeducated, anachronistic, anarchic people to make me happy.” (Location 148)

A “good Basquiat,” for example, was made in 1982 or 1983 and contains a head, a crown, and the color red. (Location 216)

Primary concern is not for the meaning of the artwork but its unique selling points, which tend to fetishize the earliest traces of the artist’s brand or signature style. (Location 217)

“Only two professions come to mind where the building in which transactions take place is referred to as a house.” (Location 221)

Many perceive the auctions as the barometer of the art market. Artists may be in high demand when they have a solo show at a major museum, but three years later their work may fail to reach its reserve price and suffer the indignity of being “bought in” (the expression used when a work fails to sell). By publicizing the fact that people were willing to pay half a million dollars one year but not even a quarter of a million for a similar piece by the same artist the next, auctions exacerbate these harsh swings in taste. A record price breathes life into the perception of an artist’s oeuvre, whereas a buy-in is like a visit from the grim reaper. (Location 225)

art consultant called Philippe Ségalot. (Location 230)

First, “people have a litmus test with color. Brown paintings don’t sell as well as blue or red paintings. A glum painting is not going to go as well as a painting that makes people feel happy.” Second, certain subject matters are more commercial than others: “A male nude doesn’t usually go over as well as a buxom female.” Third, painting tends to fare better than other media. “Collectors get confused and concerned about things that plug in. They shy away from art that looks complicated (Location 445)

to install.” Finally, size makes a difference. “Anything larger than the standard dimension of a Park Avenue elevator generally cuts out a certain sector of the market.” Cappellazzo is keen to make clear that “these are just basic commercial benchmarks that have nothing to do with artistic merit.” (Location 449)

“Without auctions, the art world wouldn’t have the financial value it has. They give the illusion of liquidity.” (Location 480)

These top-echelon players are, in the words of one insider, “willing to overbid in order to keep up the overall value of their holdings.” Their opaque activities make a joke of the auction houses’ claims to bring transparency and democracy to the art market. (Location 516)

Most of the primary galleries are in Chelsea between West Nineteenth and West Twenty-ninth, and most of the secondary galleries are on or just off Madison Avenue, between East Fifty-ninth and East Seventy-ninth Streets. Dealers like Gagosian, PaceWildenstein, and David Zwirner have shops in both locations, one for each kind of dealing. (Location 522)

“Unlike gold and diamonds, art has this other value, and that’s what makes it fascinating. Everything else is trying to sell you something else. Art is trying to sell you yourself. That’s what is different about it. Art is what makes life worth living.” (Location 632)

Since the 1960s, MFA degrees have become the first legitimator in an artist’s career, followed by awards and residencies, representation by a primary dealer, reviews and features in art magazines, inclusion in prestigious private collections, museum validation in the form of solo or group shows, international exposure at well-attended biennials, and the appreciation signaled by strong resale interest at auction. (Location 697)

Sam Durant, (Location 720)

Woody Allen’s chameleon Zelig character, who repeatedly pops up in famous documentary footage. (Location 721)

“Art comes out of failure,” and he tells students, “You have to try things out. You can’t sit around, terrified of being incorrect, saying, ‘I won’t do anything until I do a masterpiece.’” (Location 785)

Hickey is not alone in thinking that there is undue pressure on artists to verbalize. Many believe that artists shouldn’t be obliged to explain their work. As Hickey declares, “I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.” (Location 815)

works of art produce arguments, so “when you ask an artist to explain it in words, it is just a parallel discourse.” Moreover, artists often don’t fully understand what they’ve made, so other people’s readings can help them “see at a conscious level” what they have done. (Location 824)

Howard Singerman, the author of a compelling history of art education in America called Art Subjects, (Location 840)

“MFA stands for yet another Mother-Fucking Artist,” (Location 871)

“Criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge,” he said plainly. “Our view is that art should interrogate the social and cultural ideas of its time. Other places might want a work to produce pleasure or feelings.” Of course! Conceptualism arose in the 1960s in part as a reaction to abstract expressionism. Criticality is the code word for a model of art-making that foregrounds research and analysis rather than instincts and intuition. (Location 933)

An artist thinks about culture through visual means. (Location 952)

ideas are a dime a dozen. You’ve got to put it into some sort of form. (Location 954)

Eric Fischl, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and, more recently, Laura Owens, Ingrid Calame, and Monique Prieto. (Location 961)

Artists need “friendships with an inbuilt critique” as a context for the development of their work. “If you look at the history of art,” he maintains, “all the Renais sance artists knew their contemporaries. So did the impressionists. There was a moment in their lives when they were all friends or acquaintances. The cubists were not (Location 1024)

simply individual geniuses. Their greatest works happened in conjunction. Who was van Gogh’s best friend? Gauguin.” (Location 1027)

“Talent is a double-edged sword. What you are given is not really yours. What you work at, what you struggle for, what you have to take command of—that often makes for very good art.” (Location 1060)

“If you go after art and quality, the money will come later…We have to make the same decisions as the artists. Do they create great art or art that sells well? With the galleries, it’s the same. Are they commercial or do they believe in something? We’re in a similar situation.” (Location 1156)

“‘Collector’ should be an earned category,” says Mera. “An artist doesn’t become an artist in a day, so a collector shouldn’t become a collector in a day. It’s a lifetime process.” (Location 1172)

Rubells have a twenty-seven-room museum where they rotate displays of their family collection. They also have a research library containing over 30,000 volumes. (Location 1174)

Richard Prince painting that bears a joke about a man walking out of a brothel. “This is the first work in which Richard took images from 1970s girly magazines and collaged them across the canvas like he did with canceled checks,” (Location 1208)

they wouldn’t dream of surrendering it to the first comer or the highest bidder. They compile a list of interested parties so they can place the work in the most prestigious home. It’s an essential part of managing the perception of their artists. (Location 1238)

“We meet the vast majority of artists, because when you’re acquiring young work, you can’t judge it by the art alone. You have to judge it by the character of the person making it.” (Location 1245)

“A collection is more than the sum of its parts. It creates something unique,” says Logsdail. The worst collections are scrambled, disjointed, and fickle. The best have “a driving force.” (Location 1291)

More and more collectors are opening their own exhibition spaces. Their official reasons are philanthropic, but their covert motives have more to do with marketing. The work of living artists needs to be promoted if it is to generate consensus. (Location 1309)

Baldessari’s photo-based dadaist work (Location 1326)

One of Baldessari’s oft-repeated jokes is that an artist entering an art fair is like a teenager barging into his parents’ bedroom while they’re having sex. (Location 1327)

“At fairs, gallerists are reduced to merchants,” explains Baldessari, “a role in which they’d rather not be seen by their artists. The alarmed expressions on the parents’ faces say, ‘What are you doing here!’” (Location 1328)

Artists tend to view art fairs with a mixture of horror, alienation, and amusement. They feel uneasy when all the hard work of the studio is reduced to supplying the voracious demand, and they wince at the sight of so much art accompanied by so little substantive conversation. (Location 1330)

discrepancy between the real price and the PR price is a respectful embellishment compared to the shameless whoppers told by other dealers. (Location 1364)

deep-seated anxiety shared by many collectors. More people than ever are buying contemporary art, and chances are that most of it is (Location 1404)

historically insignificant. It may be personally meaningful, intelligent, even edifying, but in the long term many of these collections will end up looking like the tattered silks of an age gone by or the archeological remains of an ancient garbage heap. They won’t be definitive or influential. They will not have changed the way we look at art. (Location 1405)

Turner Prize (Location 1505)

Selling for high prices and winning prizes are two of the most newsworthy things an artist can do—hard facts in a life of relatively unquantifiable achievements. (Location 1521)

what makes a good art magazine, he was adamant: “The one essential thing—it cannot follow the market. Nor should it try actively to influence the market. It has to have its own point of view. It has to be honest. After that, clarity of writing, purity of design.” (Location 2023)

“If you’re resting on your laurels, you’re wearing them in the wrong place.” (Location 2031)

The Maltese Falcon, (Location 2097)

Marian Goodman is across from the table of contents; Larry Gagosian is adjacent to the contributors’ page; and Bruno Bischofberger, whose distinctive ads consist exclusively of photographs of Switzerland, has had the back cover of every issue since the 1980s. But many other spots vary from month to month. (Location 2176)

Christopher Williams. (Location 2212)

Lieberman suggested that the loftier the writing is, the more effectively it legitimates. “We are supposed to commune with their self-contained emporium of fine ideas,” she concluded. “And transcend the fact that certain things are supervaluable to shopping fetishists. It’s repression by omission, and it’s mind-boggling!” (Location 2237)

moment—Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin—exploit constructed personae,” (Location 2278)

“Cults of personality are realities, people are attracted to that, (Location 2279)

Saltz’s wife, New York Times critic Roberta Smith. (Location 2309)

most influential critics in America, Jerry and Roberta, as everyone calls them, are married to each other. (Location 2311)

what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive. (Location 2358)

“My weak point—I cannot focus on just one thing. I have to set up many things. If just looking at one project, then immediately get the feeling it boring.” (Location 2614)

“I am jealous of Warhol. I’m always asking my design team, ‘Warhol was able to create such an easy painting life, why our work so complicated?’ But the history knows! My weak point is my oriental background. Eastern flavor is too much presentation. I think it is unfair for me in the contemporary art battlefield, but I have no choice because I am Japanese.” (Location 2651)

“I was taught that one of the defining premises of modern art was its antagonism to mass culture,” said Rothkopf. “If I wanted to be accepted more readily by the academic establishment, I could argue that Takashi is working within the system only to subvert it. But this idea of subversive complicity is growing stale, and more importantly, I just don’t believe it’s a viable strategy.” Rothkopf concluded, “What makes Takashi’s art great—and also potentially scary—is his honest and completely canny relationship to commercial culture industries.” (Location 2829)

“A classic is news that stays news.” (Location 3015)

“Great art is essentially work that has proven inexhaustible in terms of the value it gives to those who pay attention to it. It says, ‘I am in the present tense despite the fact that I was made five or fifty years ago.’” (Location 3016)

“British art is amazingly diverse, but I guess British artists often deal with the dominance of the literary in our culture. Tracey is a wonderful storyteller. In her own words, she is a ‘raving expressionist.’” He paused. “I suppose there is also a wry humor in a lot of British art—Damien, Tracey, Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos [aka the Chapman brothers]. It contrasts with the dry quality of a lot of German and American conceptual art.” (Location 3141)