William Powhida, Cynical Advice, 2012; graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper; 15 x 20 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How does your work start? Where do you begin?

William Powhida: All the drawings are very specific to a theme, often something that is irking me. The hysterical voice that provides the narrative is a way to amplify things that I’m responding to. A lot of the drawings tie into a bigger narrative, and the smaller “list” drawings are more episodic, they start with some aspect of my own practice or my own engagement with the art world. They are a way to think through all of this, it’s like having a character that speaks through the work.

BG: And how much do you script before you draw the final version? Do you have it totally written out or do you play with it as you go?

WP: I do start with a draft, and I also play as I go. I find there’s an arc to the drawings: the drafts are a basic outline, but then as I’m drawing and spending time with each sentence, it morphs and changes from the original draft.

BG: I’m interested in the play that you have with the voices that come out in the lists, where there’s a lot of sarcasm, on the one hand, and then there’s also optimism. The piece called Less is so negative—not that it’s untrue—but then Hope talks about collaboration and engagement…

WP: It’s been changing over the years. The drawings have started to split, like What’s Right with the Art Worldand What’s Wrong with the Art World. Despite all the ranting and raving, there’s always been this vulnerable part of the voice. I meet people who are terribly optimistic about how the art world works—they’re realistic as well, they don’t deny that a lot of it is crazy—but they still see it as an amazing place to work.

The narrative voice in the list drawings is not objective, because I want the drawings to be the experience of being in somebody’s head and listening to them think about the art world. That also gets articulated in works like the faux magazine covers, as a vehicle to insert myself into this upper echelon of the art world and to critique it. But as the lists have developed, they’ve become a little more rooted in reality. I don’t have to invent as much because it’s actually happening to me. Now it’s a question of trying to find some balance between what I’m actually experiencing in the art world and the things I think are still worth discussing. Whether it’s an effective critique or not I don’t know, but I’m speaking these things out loud so we can talk about them.

Read the full interview here.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

#artmarket #creativeeconomy #collectors #entrepreneur #philanthropy #support

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

I’m an artist with a gallery and I’m stuck in their back room. I’ve been with them a long time. My stuff has a challenging, abstract, unique style, and they pay their rent selling fairly accessible art. I’ve received press and write-ups, but no collectors. How do I motivate them to show and sell my work? I’ve been with them a long time. I’ve tried talking with them about it. They’ve said they’d show my work at fairs and haven’t. I don’t feel they’re really interested in making an effort, as they just push what sells and keep me hanging on… (bad love song here). They do put my work in annual group shows, but that’s about it. How can I get my artwork shown and sold? I’ve been hustling and struggling a long time, and I’m kind of over it. Why shouldn’t I just quit the gallery racket, just make work and not show? It’s not selling anyway.

Jake & Dinos Chapman. Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic De-Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x 1000), 1995; fiberglass; 150 x 180 x 140 cm.

Now before your knickers get twisted, let me say that I think your gallery is equally culpable. This is a two-way problem: They shouldn’t have taken you on if they suspected they couldn’t give you shows or sell your work, and you shouldn’t have agreed to join the gallery if you knew your work didn’t fit with their program. Additionally, they shouldn’t be saying that they’ll take your work to fairs if they won’t—it’s disrespectful and injurious to string someone along. But I’m willing to bet that you don’t have a contract that spells out your mutual obligations, that you’ve never asked them for one, that your conversations with the gallery director about this have been few and far between, and that forthright communication is perhaps not the strong suit of anyone involved.

How do I infer all of this? Because the only strategy you cite as viable is to “just quit the gallery racket” and huff back to your studio for a good sulk. Yet we both know that martyrdom is not going to make you happy; what you really want is to find a gallery that’s right for your work. You say that you’ve been “hustling and struggling” a long time, and I have no doubt that you’ve spent a lot of time and money refining your practice, but remember that it takes the same amount of energy to run a mile in a circle as it does a mile in the direction you want to go. If you’ve put significant time into building your career, the fact that you’re not satisfied may mean that you haven’t acted strategically.

So let’s make a new plan. Start by identifying at least one other gallery in your city that you’d rather work with, and invite the director(s) for a visit. Talk to lots of other professionals—where do they see your work? You might be surprised by the answers, and you also might end up with some excellent recommendations. A crucial part of this plan is to lose your victim mentality, because it’s not serving you well. If you spend all of your time grumbling about how your current gallery has wronged you, then you can’t move forward. And don’t make the same mistakes a second time: Get a contract from the new gallery, be explicit about your expectations, and ask about their limitations. Work with people you trust, but still ask for everything in writing. If that raises eyebrows, just pretend it’s another component of your eccentric-artist personality.

As for being stuck, that’s another cognitive distortion called splitting. This sort of all-or-nothing thinking is not helpful to your brain or your career. You’re not stuck anywhere. Art is about freedom, and you should be represented by people who really believe in your work and want to help you get it out in the world. You may be but one tiny guppy in the art world’s big fish tank, but those folks are out there. Find them. Good luck!

I just finished the first semester of my MFA at [a well-regarded East Coast school]. At the end of last term, I had a disappointing review and my professors said that I wasn’t working hard enough to produce an integrated body of work (I showed them a series of things that were conceptually connected but materially diverse). I get the feeling that what they want me to do is work like most of the other artists in the department, who essentially just make the same painting over and over again. I don’t know what direction to take. Do I stand my ground, or give in?

Andy Warhol. Triple Elvis [Ferus Type], 1963; silkscreen ink and silver paint on linen; 82 x 69 in.

Without knowing the specifics of your situation (such as your current oeuvre, the stated goals of the program, or the methods for assessing first-semester work), I’m going to throw out a few very general statements: In many MFA programs, the expectation for the first year is that students will push their work in new directions. If you came to the program with materially diverse work, it might have been assumed that you’d use your initial months to explore a different kind of production. Additionally, your professors may be hoping to see your ideas brought to conclusions that are thoroughly considered and explored in high definition; cohesion in a body of work can teach you to self-analyze and develop your intentions. Finally, it could be that the conceptual connection between the works is not at clear as you think. But in any case, don’t just make inferences or “get the feeling”—find out! Inquire directly, and talk to more than just a couple of people. Over the next few weeks, schedule a handful of studio visits from different faculty members, fellow students, and curators outside your institution. Prepare questions for them and listen to what they say as they observe your work.

There’s a caveat, of course: If their feedback is not germane to what you’re trying to do, or if it doesn’t provide assistance that furthers your thinking, then it’s probably not very useful and you’re free to let it go. Some professors can only approach the critique process from their own praxis, and their advice may not be beneficial to artists who have divergent practices. Students have to be able to take feedback with a grain of salt.

MFA programs are, to varying degrees, organs of the market; at the very least, the narratives that pervade most contemporary arts programs are market-driven. A quick glance through the portfolio of most “successful” (read: currently making money) artists will show you that if you want to sell your work, you will benefit from having a recognizable product—and that is easily achieved by making things that all look alike. You needn’t adopt that particular strategy, but you should be aware of how it is shaping the world around you. The question is: What kind of artist do you want to be? The direction you take with your work should reflect what you want to achieve—be it development of technique, a conceptual platform, gallery representation, a job, etc.

Because I can’t be there in the studio with you, I’m tempted to play devil’s advocate from afar. If you’re used to making visually and materially diverse works, what would it mean to make similar things? Is there a conceptual space from which you could explore sameness? Since you’re in grad school, surely you are reading something edifying and at least slightly pretentious on the subject (cough Benjamin Buchloh cough cough). Consider this passage from When the Moon Waxes Red, by Trinh T. Minh-Ha:

“When repetition calls attention on itself as repetition, it can no longer be reduced to connote sameness and stagnancy as it usually does in the context of Western progress and accumulation, and its globally imposed emancipatory projects. When repetition reflects on itself as repetition, it constitutes this doubling back movement through which language (verbal, visual, musical) looks at itself exerting power and, therefore, creates for itself possibilities to repeatedly thwart its own power, inflating it only to deflate it better. Repetition outplays itself as repetition, and each repetition is never the same as the former. In it, there is circulation, there is intensity, and there is innovation.”

(Incidentally, I read this in the first semester of my MFA.) Good luck!

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

#artmarket #creativeeconomy #collectors #entrepreneur #philanthropy #support

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

William Powhida. Cynical Advice, 2012; Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper, 15 x 20 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How does your work start? Where do you begin?

William Powhida: All the drawings are very specific to a theme, often something that is irking me. The hysterical voice that provides the narrative is a way to amplify things that I’m responding to. A lot of the drawings tie into a bigger narrative, and the smaller “list” drawings are more episodic, they start with some aspect of my own practice or my own engagement with the art world. They are a way to think through all of this, it’s like having a character that speaks through the work.

BG: And how much do you script before you draw the final version? Do you have it totally written out or do you play with it as you go?

WP: I do start with a draft, and I also play as I go. I find there’s an arc to the drawings: the drafts are a basic outline, but then as I’m drawing and spending time with each sentence, it morphs and changes from the original draft.

BG: I’m interested in the play that you have with the voices that come out in the lists, where there’s a lot of sarcasm, on the one hand, and then there’s also optimism. The piece called Less is so negative—not that it’s untrue—but then Hope talks about collaboration and engagement…

WP: It’s been changing over the years. The drawings have started to split, like What’s Right with the Art World and What’s Wrong with the Art World. Despite all the ranting and raving, there’s always been this vulnerable part of the voice. I meet people who are terribly optimistic about how the art world works—they’re realistic as well, they don’t deny that a lot of it is crazy—but they still see it as an amazing place to work.

The narrative voice in the list drawings is not objective, because I want the drawings to be the experience of being in somebody’s head and listening to them think about the art world. That also gets articulated in works like the faux magazine covers, as a vehicle to insert myself into this upper echelon of the art world and to critique it. But as the lists have developed, they’ve become a little more rooted in reality. I don’t have to invent as much because it’s actually happening to me. Now it’s a question of trying to find some balance between what I’m actually experiencing in the art world and the things I think are still worth discussing. Whether it’s an effective critique or not I don’t know, but I’m speaking these things out loud so we can talk about them.

William Powhida. Oligopoly (Revised), 2011; Watercolor, acrylic ink, and colored pencil on panel

BG: Do you ever second-guess yourself? Do you ever think, “Oh, I shouldn’t write that?” Have you ever censored yourself?

WP: I haven’t censored myself in terms of any particular drawings but I feel, now, much more sensitive to thinking about the political impact of calling somebody out, and in particular, anybody who is just trying to come up in the art world, even though it’s the same process that I’ve been commenting on the whole time. Because I don’t want it to appear like sour grapes, that’s why it’s aimed at the upper echelon of the art world. I don’t think it’s fair to satirize somebody’s career ascent…I guess that’s a form of censorship. But I do wonder about all the people that I have called out, [laughing] if I’m not on the list for some shows because I’ve offended somebody…

BG: Do you meet the people that you’ve drawn?

WP: On occasion. Jules de Balincourt lives in Bushwick, and we’ve had a number of conversations.  I’ve never met anyone who is straight up hostile. It’s sort of like everyone’s on the clock in their professional roles, and when we’re done, we can hang out…

BG: Like politicians.

WP: Yeah, and when we’re off the clock, there’s a different kind of dialog, usually they understand that it’s framed as art, it’s a kind of fiction or satire, and it’s not a personal thing. It’s rooted in the perception of power structures and the roles that people play. Christian Viveros-Faune is someone that I’ve poked fun at but he completely understands where it comes from and he’s still a supporter of the work. He’s like, I get it.

William Powhida. Less, 2011; Graphite and watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 in.

BG: And, to a certain extent, isn’t it still flattering in a way?—in an “any press is good press” kind of way? People who are in power get a lot of attention, and any attention that they do get reinforces that power structure.

WP: Yes, it can, that’s the downside of it, just saying or evoking the name. That’s why I did the Ars Magica suite, the art world through the lens of ritual or black magic, just naming the name is giving it power. But I’ve always hoped that it wasn’t only a reaffirmation of their power, that there was some sort of critique in it that might be useful. The thing about recognition is that it’s necessary for an artist, too. You’ll see thirty or forty shows in Williamsburg but only a handful will get reviewed, so there’s this process of omission as a critical model. Recognition is a big, needy area that can occupy an artist’s life. I thought there might be something interesting in naming things instead of omitting them, but I’m not trying to reify anyone’s position.

BG: You’re talking about the social, emotional, and economic structures of the art world, and those are complicated, so to have that kind of complexity and clash in the work just mirrors what’s already there.

WP: And also you can hold up a mirror to art world, you can show people this perfect mirror, and they don’t necessarily care. That world has so much power, you know? People can know the things that are wrong in the art world, or that could be changed in a way that it would make it a more interesting place, and it doesn’t matter. There’s a line in one of the drawings, I think it’s, “There’s a difference between knowing shit and making people care about it.” That’s one of the important things about the drawings, they can capture some part of the emotional experience of being an artist.

William Powhida. Hope, 2011; Graphite and watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 in.

BG: But you’ve also worked with groups who do care.

WP: Yes, after the show last October I spent a couple of months going to Arts & Labor meetings through Occupy Wall Street and it was just an incredibly different experience of a kind of critique that’s beginning at the base, that has nothing to do with the existing art world. It’s super challenging, because most of the artists that I know are like, “I don’t know how to engage with that. I’ve done a lot of work to get to this place and although I’m not making any real money, I’m in this system and I can’t just step outside of it and completely demolish it and not consider that I work with an art dealer who’s trying to make a living.”

And we’re not talking about the star system, we’re talking about the middle class of the art world. And now I’m in this place where there is something to lose—a position of recognition, or at least an audience—and it’s hard to step completely outside of that, but there’s still a lot to critique. It’s easy to make a very principled critique when you’re on the outside, but it’s more difficult to do within it. That’s where I have to deal with and embrace all of the contradictions, and talk about them so they’re out there for people to consider.

BG: I once read a great line: “The way to deal with a troublesome outsider is to bring him into the fold.”

WP: Well, that’s also part of the critique of my practice, is that if it’s absorbed into the system or made safe then it loses all power. There’s the assertion that if you’re inside the system then the critique has no power, you’re just a pressure-release valve that lets the steam out. But that’s as dismissive as saying, we’ve bought your work, it’s safe, we’ve allowed you in. I’ve been very conscious about trying to resist certain opportunities that are presented and doing things that subvert those expectations…

BG: And what happens when you do get invited to the Miami Basel VIP parties?

WP: I’m sure I would find the experience kind of deflating. Part of the attraction of that kind of thing is in maintaining the illusion that it’s fun, like, “Look at this fabulous universe that we exist in!” And you get there and it’s just a bunch of boring financial people there who don’t know that much about art, and really well educated people who don’t have as much power as the people who have the cash. I’m hopeful that if I’m invited to do something like a survey show that I would still be able to reflect on the process of it, and the institutional apparatus, and how it feels, and layer that into the narrative so that the work responds to its environment.

*Note: larger images of the works that appear in this interview are available at http://powhida.tumblr.com/