The Art World Demystified: How Artists Define and Achieve Their Goals

Introduction

I am not a saint or a sage, or a marketing writer with a recipe for success. I am an artist and I have interviewed hundreds of other artists, curators, critics, and other members of the art world. What I know, they have taught me. As an artist myself, I have also learned a lot by asking for things and failing to get what I want. I have learned that asking is often the hardest part—asking for a show, asking for a grant, asking for support.

Full-Time Artist

I am an optimist, and you will probably find this book motivating because I am genuinely excited about the art world and the opportunities there are for artists and arts administrators. However, I also want to present a sober and serious look at the chances of earning a full-time living off of your art and the choices you will have in the context of the interviews I have done.

In all the interviews I have done (over three hundred as of 2016), there are some common threads as artists explain their failure and success stories and curators explain their methods. Here is a brief overview of what I have heard and what seems to point at the truth.

Luck

To begin with, there are some artists I talked to who succeeded very quickly—who at twenty-four years old won major prizes at shows, and continued to win major awards, getting prestigious teaching positions and gallery and museum exhibitions all over the world. In some cases, luck was involved—but the kind of luck that happens when you visit one hundred galleries asking if they are looking for artists.

There is rarely dumb luck, and most stories about luck and great opportunities are actually about persistence and not giving up—and then suddenly you meet someone by accident, and it is a meeting that changes your life.

This has happened to almost everyone, including the gallery owners and museum directors I have talked to. An example would be the artist who has been asking gallery after gallery for a show, and after months of rejection finds that her roommate is opening a gallery that then shows her work in the first show, launching her career. Those kinds of things happen all the time, but the failures that the artist was having and that her roommate was witnessing were also significant—and something you cannot force by replicating her failures. That is one the most complex aspects of building a career in art—how can you force the hand of luck? You can’t, of course, but you can tilt the odds in your favor so that more possibilities arise. You can see that this might mean you have to keep your day job until something better happens, because this is a process to be dedicated to—for life.

Day Job

Unlike most other careers that I can think of, art making is one that usually requires a second job. One that often relates to the art making, but not always. Traditionally, this is a good thing—have a job that doesn’t demand too much of your time, and spend the rest of your free hours making art. Most of the artists I interviewed, but not all, had day jobs like teaching, painting portraits, being a doctor, or some other kind of work they might also enjoy. Some wanted to quit their day jobs, but most didn’t, feeling it gave them freedom to explore in the studio without the financial pressure of having to sell their art every week or every month.

The wisdom of many artists on the day job is that it should not be viewed as a negative aspect of your life, but one that must be adjusted correctly to support yourself enough so there is still time to make art. It does not mean that you should not aspire to be whatever kind of artist you like, as well as to the large financial gains of which you might dream, but that the day job should not be seen as a measure of your success. Pure success for an artist means making work in the studio on a regular and ongoing basis that is always changing and rewarding to the artist in terms of aesthetics and challenges.

How much you earn does not determine your success as an artist at all. We know this is the case from the hundreds of artists from history who were not financially successful at all in their lifetime, but ended up in the history books because their work is good—or great—and has some real aesthetic value that can still be enjoyed.

So whatever your day job is or is not, be proud that it is the sponsor of your art career and that you are following the path that artists have taken for hundreds of years. Does this mean that if you simply make good work, the world will eventually notice it?

Meritocracy

If you simply strive to make good work, you are doing your job as a professional artist. If, however, you feel that the quality of work alone will rise to the top so to speak, and that by merit alone you will find professional opportunities, you will be disappointed. In this day and age, excellent work is needed and required, but not alone. You will need the support of your peers, a good dose of networking, some charm, and the ability to write.

This is the third book I have written for artists to develop their careers in a professional manner. More resources are online at www.theartworddemystified.com. The difference between this book and the other two, Making It in the Art World and New Markets for Artists, is that this book focuses primarily on demystifying the terms and ideas about what the art world actually is and how it functions. There is also a great deal of practical advice and clear directions in this book to build your professional career as an artist; essentially this book was written to clarify misconceptions that can burden an artist and drag them down by simply being mysterious.

This book also contains interviews with artists and curators that help define how their careers are managed. Their words and advice are valuable in the sense that they give a direct view into the lives of professionals in the art world. In the past two books, I was using my experience in the art world to write from my particular perspective as an artist, and in this book, I am looking at the perspectives of others in the art world. This book features interviews from my Yale radio show, The Lives of the Artists, Architects, Curators and More, and you will hear some of the world greatest curators, writers, and artists talk about the art world from their own perspective. In chapter one we begin with an interview with Robert Storr that dives right into the depths of art criticism and how a Master of Fine Arts degree might influence your career. Then there is an interview with John Currin, who explains his rise to being an art star and a record-breaking-selling painter. Currin explains his early frustrations, the nature of his struggle, and the way he got his first show and pushed himself to network. There are several more interviews throughout the text, and I hope you find them as inspiring and interesting as I do.

Chapter 1

Perspectives on the Art World

There are two opposing views on how to navigate the art world. One view, which I have articulated in different forms, is a corporate-type structure where networking, an elevator pitch, and meeting the right people is what it takes to reach success. Depending on your point of view, that is either a good path or a bad one. For many students graduating with a Master in Fine Arts, or another degree, this is precisely the path they want to be on. It is also the path for all the artists who want to earn a full-time living, or something close to it, from their art. The desire to make money is not a bad thing of course, but it gets complicated when applied to the art-making process.

The other view of navigating the art world is one of exploration and investigation into life itself, and money may or may not play a major role in your success—which is defined differently in this case. It is art for art’s sake, for the sake of making it and the pleasure the artist gets from that—supported by a second job or a day job, if you will. Most artists and curators that I have talked to—highly successful ones—say that art making should not be about money first, because that can distract you from making great work that might be disturbing or confounding to the viewer. Can you do both? Yes, there are many examples of that, but you must understand the traps of the market combined with the pursuit of profits.

Making Money

In most cases, the reason artists want shows and success is because they want love and attention. They want good reviews, and they want buyers who admire their genius and talent. That is a very different goal than the businessperson who wants to make millions. You don’t know the names of most hedge-fund managers because they are not interested in fame, they are interested in money and they do not equate it with self-worth.

However, an artist who is looking for attention, love, fame, and ego satisfaction, encounters what appear to be endless cruelties. There is the bad review, the show that doesn’t sell, the collector that returns work, or a negative comment that is obsessed over. All of these elements, familiar to any artist, can send some into a tailspin of sadness and depression, because instead of receiving love and praise for their art, the opposite seems to have happened. The psychological pain from this is acute, because the goal of wanting love and attention has been reversed, and now it is easy to think that in fact your art is not likeable or lovable, and since you made it, it follows that that applies to yourself as well. It becomes a dark day indeed! This is a feeling that you will recognize immediately if you are an artist reading this book. Can you withstand these slings and arrows throughout your career? Have you done so successfully already?

This approach to art making is the first model, and in this book, the explanation of terms and the interviews will help you to navigate those rough waters, but it is essential that you take the larger perspective and recognize the size of your task and the psychology of your need to exhibit.

When taking those things into account, you can seek out support and guidance from books like this and from your peers. It will help you to see a larger view of yourself and your internal struggles so you can better manage them.

The first model is to have a day job, and to make art because you want to and need to, but not to make a pile of money or even exhibit regularly. The second model is about meeting people and making the right connections—in a word, networking. This is the model I use and find success with regularly. I will talk about the second model after the following interview with art critic Robert Storr.

The Art Critic

Of all the figures in the art world, the critic is probably the most controversial. What is a critic for and why do we need them? What is the role of criticism? I have interviewed several critics, some more well known than others, but Robert Storr is one critic that is not only an artist himself, but is also the Dean of the Yale School of Art, was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and has written extensively about artists. In this interview, he tells us two very valuable things: his opinions on current art critics, and his views on art education—in particular the Master of Fine Arts degree and what he feels it takes to survive as an artist. He is actually using both methods—he is an artist that has not sought the market for his own work, yet he has extraordinary connections that have helped his professional career. He is very frank about other critics and is one of the few people who can give a unique perspective on how art is seen and digested by critics and the public.

The Interview

Carey: I think I’d like to talk about the role of the critic. I’ve interviewed the late Arthur Danto, Barry Schwabsky, Dave Hickey—they all have a pretty varying idea of what it is that a critic does. What’s your perspective on the role of the critic?

Storr: I think there are many different genres of criticism for starters, and there are different audiences for criticism. And I think the first choice a writer who wants to write about art has to make is decide for whom or about what they would like to write because there’s no one-size-fits-all definition of what a critic does.

Arthur Danto was basically a philosopher who wandered into criticism because his wife was an artist and he was interested in the visual arts. He was intermittently a very good critic and often really way off base because the undertow of philosophy and the desire to make sweeping statements was just too great to resist.

Dave Hickey is a very able essay writer who is actually not a very good art critic at all and has devolved from being an interesting spoiler in the context of the art world to being a tea partier, basically. He mobilizes resentment against arts and he mobilizes people’s sense that it’s all a rigged game and plays off on that to give himself a reputation as an outsider—but he’s an outsider with a PhD in English literature. He is not a tough Texan—he’s a kid from Fort Worth and he’s created this persona which is actually an artfully constructed persona, but he’s not at all what he pretends to be.

He loves to go after academics and curators and assume that they’re all, you know, sold out and so on but he’s the guy with the PhD, not me. And he’s the guy who has advised Steve Winn and he’s not known as a great Medici. And in the meantime, he’s actually not very good about art. He wrote a whole long essay about Larry Pittman without mentioning Larry is half-Hispanic and gay, which is an awfully big thing to miss when you look at the work. So he’s another type.

Barry Schwabsky is a poet and a successful poet, a good poet. I would say he belongs to a belletristic type of criticism and he’s terrific. At least he’s written nice things about me so what can I say? I mean as a painter, but you know, there are all kinds of critics.

The theoreticians Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh, and so on—I think they have a lot of problems, as does Dave Hickey with actual art history. They know almost none. They’re technically art historians academically but they know very little art history. They’ve done very little primary research. They don’t know history very well because they read theory about history but they don’t read history.

So they will write articles predicated on certain sweeping generalizations about the 1930s in Europe and then apply them without any adjustments to circumstances which are not those. I admire all of the Frankfurt people but I don’t think the American version of French theory or a Frankfurt school in contemporary art criticism is of much use to anybody. [Laughs] That’s being a critic of critics!

Carey: Understanding the different roles is helpful to a lot of people. And then there’s someone like Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith who write for New York magazine and the New York Times, respectively.

Storr: Jerry is appalling. He’s the class clown. He is somebody I’ve known a long time, since Chicago days, and he’s turned into a travesty. And the idea that he should be running around being the conscience of the art world and at the same time playing the game of the art TV show that he did—and that he should be championing women and then dissing the first African American woman curator to do SITE Santa Fe. All these things are about Jerry, long and short. And about Roberta, it’s all about Roberta, long and short—and it’s too bad because they are punchy writers and again, they draw interest because of the contrariness, but there are no principles, and they’re not fighting long term battles for anything and never have.

Carey: And how does that figure in with these other schools of criticism? I mean, Jerry, he’s also achieved this popularity that’s …

Storr: He’s playing to the peanut gallery. He’s playing to an audience that actually doesn’t know about art, that doesn’t really like art. Roberta’s the same way. I mean, she’s writing for the New York Times and she’s writing insider writing for outsiders. If you read her criticism carefully, and I have for very a long time, she’s constantly playing into myriad battles about the art world—who’s in, who’s out, and who she has a grudge against—but she’s publishing it as if it was information that everybody needed to know, does know, etc., which it’s not.

If she would write about the art right in front of her, if she would suspend her own sense of self-importance long enough to really give more attention to the complexities of being an artist, she’d write better, and Jerry the same.

Carey: But that’s not going happen because that’s part of how they …

Storr: Because they get paid for it.

Carey: I suppose that has something to do with where journalism about art is today.

Storr: Journalism now is at the lowest it has ever been. There was a time in the fifties when you had [Clement] Greenberg who was an empire builder but a very gifted one, and Fairfield Porter, Donald Judd. Bob Morris. A lot of people were writing a lot of stuff that is still worth reading, you know, and I can’t imagine how much of this stuff anybody will read ten years now. Mostly, you can’t read it a week after it’s published.

Carey: And why is that? What’s happening? Is it kind of the dumbing-down of journalism? I was talking to a reporter not long ago who was saying everything is about comments now. It’s about how many comments you can get in an article, and the way that you get comments is by saying something inflammatory, and has this affected the art world and critics, too.

Storr: Totally, it is like critics have gotten confused about the issue of what their role is. I mean, they’re there not just to admire or just to observe but they’re there to weigh and think and look better than the average person in order that the average person can be tested and [then] do better themselves, right?

So if you set a model of what it means to look hard at something, think a while about it before you open your mouth, and then articulate it carefully—you will have done your job as a critic and then you can write about anything you want.

There are many critics I read with whom I fundamentally disagree, but I always learn from them. But today it’s about instant response. It’s about the number of likes you get on your Facebook page. It’s all about the ego popularity presence of the critic. And frankly, none of these people are interesting enough to really merit being a presence overall.

Carey: So is there a way out of that? What is the future of writing? It seems that we’re devolving into this kind of popularity contest. What’s the hope for that?

Storr: Charlie Finch was the pioneer of this kind of vanity criticism and spoiling criticism. And, you know, does anybody read Charlie Finch? Now? No. Does he even write? No. What’s the future for it? Not much.

I’m a craftsman; I may have many faults and I’m sure I do, but I’m a craftsman, and I work very hard at writing well and I work very hard at looking before I write. And I do homework and I listen to artists and I do everything I think I need to do before I sit down and deliver an opinion that I hope would be thought about, not agreed with.

One of the people I greatly admire, Virgil Thomson, was a composer and critic and he wrote for the old Herald Tribune, and he wrote something I think is my motto. He said, Never overestimate the information base of your reader and never underestimate their intelligence, and most of the people we’re talking about do both—but backwards.

Carey: Are there other critics that you admire who are walking that road?

Storr: There are a lot of people that I read. I used to read Peter Schjeldahl with much more interest than I do now because I think he’s burned out. I like Christian Viveros-Fauné, who, I think, is actually trying hard to write a principled criticism. Martha Schwendener I like reading. I really admire Holland Cotter, he’s doing a very good job. Mike Brenson tried to do the same thing at the Times but he was basically driven out. Chris Knight in Los Angeles.

Carey: Let’s talk about the academic environment, why does an artist need to go to school? What is the importance of that? And I know that some of these are obvious questions, and you can take this anywhere, but a school like Yale, the MFA program in particular, in one sense carries this kind of mythic weight in the art world—and then there’s plenty of artists that come from Yale that don’t move on to mythic careers.

Storr: Most artist don’t move on to mythic careers and the importance of