by Jerome du Bois
I wasted my day writing about the art world when I should have been working on our novel. I told myself I wasn't going to do this anymore. Too much pain. What a chump. I was going on in this vein--
The art world is a moral swamp. I want to reach for a long set of tongs when I sort through what's bought and sold under the rubric of art: sordid confessions, misogynistic self-humiliation, all bodily excretions, dead animals, dismemberment, pimping out one's own mother, and worse. The most famous artist in the world is the lord of the flies. It's 20,000 Leagues Under The Manure Pile, artist. What are you doing there?
--and so on for a couple of pages. I ended up like this--
Most artists in the art world today would never stand up to declare, "I won't participate in a system that rewards Damien Hirst, Paul McCarthy, and Tracy Emin." And then step outside, as Marcel Duchamp did, to guard the integrity of his life.
Won't happen. They just don't have the moral backbone. They suffer from deconstructive osteoperosis. Remember how the Drawing Center booked from Ground Zero like a stripe-assed ape when their agenda was challenged? Cowards.
And I want to leave it there. It's foolish to angrily point at these jerks. They just laugh at you because they cannot be shamed, they cannot be reached by decency, because they really want to go as low as humans can go. They don't object to Hirst as Hirst; they just want to replace him. And they have no problem with the moral bankruptcy of Jeffrey Dietch and Larry Gagosian, since they share it. So to hell with you whores. Drown in your degradation for all I care. But I spent forty years looking for inspiration and hope and beauty in art, and the last twenty has broken my heart. So allow me to give you bastards a couple swift kicks before I head out.
First, for all the self-important hoopla about the crucial social role of art, the art world doesn't influence the world much, does it? In the last year, what art work has had the most impact upon the world? Picasso's $100M painting? Please. The US economy creates that much money in a few hours. The answer is the Mohammed cartoons. Nothing that the top one hundred living artists in the world has ever done, including all their political whiny crap, has had the worldwide influence of these low-rent illustrations. People everywhere are debating the role of images in the world, but not because of any artist or art writer. Think about that for a second, Richard Serra, Paul McCarthy, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, all you bozos.
Second, the art world really isn't that significant economically, is it? Sotheby's 2005 revenues were around $520M. By contrast, Big Lots, for example, is #465 on the Fortune 500 list, with revenues in excess of $4B. Eight times the value. Do you think if we rolled up Sotheby's worth with Christie's and all the big dealers, that we could reach four billion dollars? I haven't done the math, but I don't think so. If Big Lots dropped off the map for some reason, the US economy would roll on without hardly noticing it. So what kind of perturbations could the art world possibly summon? In the great and glorious vehicle of the US economy, the art world is a cup holder, a hood ornament, a decal.
So for all the posturing and gesturing and puffery, today's artists are pretty much ignored by most people; and the whole worth of the art world (separate from private collectors' holdings) could probably fit inside a broom closet at Wal-Mart.
A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
Maybe that applies to this posting as well. But at least I can look at myself in the mirror.
Posted by Jerome at June 2, 2006 11:45 PM | TrackBack