the situation of the young artist, between Pop success and lost hopes...
João Fernandes
There have never before been so many artists in the world. Year after year, art schools
educate thousands of artists, whose primary objective seems to be to circulate as much as
possible in their search for recognition and legitimisation for their work. The
opportunitites for this circulation have multiplied on a global scale: museums and art
centres have sprung up everywhere, international events (exhibitions, residency
programmes, workshops and seminars) proliferate, magazines specialising in
contemporary art sell like fashion, music, decoration and lifestyle magazines (from which
they are often indistinguishable...). The art world has expanded, has become
commercialised, and its structure has been influenced by pressure from many different
quarters. On the one hand there is external pressure, political pressure from governments
and public or private institutions which, using culture as a kind of stamp of approval,
exploit its entertainment value to reaffirm the visibility of a power, the crowds that may
attend to museums or exhibitions demagogically presented as proof of its democratic
nature. On the other hand, there is internal pressure, generated by the need for
legitimisation and positioning in a specific domain of artistic creation, which is felt by all
agents involved in the process of creation and presentation of works of art.
In an age in which the 15 minutes of fame advocated by Warhol are being achieved
through the possibility to transform any person’s image into a media asset, ‘to be an
artist’ has become a curious pop perversion of the famous axiom by Beuys and the
Fluxus artists, according to which each person ‘is’ an artist. In this process of pop
emergence of visual artists, in which visibility and recognition may not outlast the
ephemeral circulation of a song in different international charts, we all know how far we
are removed from the generosity and self-discovery of aesthetic creativity as an inherent
factor of the human condition. To be everywhere and at the same time is the aspiration of
any new young artist today. Their expectation has been stimulated by a network of
museums and contemporary art centres, which has extended itself all over the planet,
accompanied by a proliferation of agents of what could be called an art service sector.
This art service sector consists of a variety of services amongst which we may include
curators, exhibition producers, museum staff, art critics, magazine and newspaper writers,
art teachers, education officers, economists, marketing managers, gallery owners and
dealers, and many others.
These days, the situation in which young artists emerge, are trained and circulate
presupposes the dissemination of information about their work, which can provide entry
into an accelerated system of new production, in which everything can be appropriated
and recycled. There is a need to question who produces this information. In an age in
which art has become a form of media entertainment, part of people’s daily life in the
West, knowledge about a work of art also implies knowledge about the circumstances of
its appearence, its circulation and its commercialisation. Contemporary art can still shock,
surprise, amuse. However, we no longer know if it will confront a person with their own
ideologically established expectations and beliefs, since artistic creation itself has become
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part of the leisure industries of our time. To question the artistic creation and circulation
of works, whilst remaining fully aware of these conditions implies the consideration of
the influence ofcontexts or institutions like schools, museums or art centres, markets, and
specialised or general media in a world which we know is increasingly global and that
generates patterns of standardised or standardisable behaviour and attitudes.
The expansion of higher, technical, artistic and scientific education implies a
profound alteration of the position of art schools in the present-day art world. Schools are
now judged not just by the characteristics of the education they provide, but also by the
success of their students in a specialised world of affirmation and legitimisation of the
skills and capacities that they have supposedly developed or helped develop. We live in
an age in which students have very little possibility of transforming the educational
institution they attend according to their own idiosyncratic imagination and creativity.
Often the school defines the standards by which its students will become recognisable.
Art schools today are institutions that have become responsible for some of the situations
of visibility and legitimisation that their students may gain access to. Therefore art
schools now invite critics, curators, and people responsible for museum programmes to
develop contacts with their students as regularly as possible. These contacts can include
the organisation of tutorials, but can also include the production of exhibitions for finalyear
students, alongside which information is produced that is similar to that of any
exhibition in any other art institution. Invitations are sent out, posters are printed, press
packs and advertising strategies are developed. The school has started to become part of a
system of emergence and circulation. It would come as no surprise if one day art school
programmes were to include the preparation of artist’s portfolios, the development of
social skills required to develop contacts at international openings and previews and the
basic knowledge to recognise different institutional and gallery powers... If access to
education today is an important social buffer in contemporary societies, art schools
contribute to the social domestication of their thousands of students, as a first
demonstration of the welfare-state that can trigger possibilities for careers and success.
The paradox arises when apparently democratic access to art schools confronts the
constricting network that selects those who will become established and be able to
disseminate their work. Museums and art centres, public and private collections, will then
emerge and guarantee a continuation and legitimisation of this artistic circulation.
Today we know that although artists and their works modified the concept of the
museum in the twentieth century, transforming it into a place of experimentation and
confrontation with their languages, they were, however, never able to alter the conditions
of representation of power that the museum space has always symbolised. With the
princes of the past replaced by ’boards’ representing economic and political power in a
democratic society periodically validated by electoral acts, the social function of the
museum or the contemporary art centre will be invoked to legitimise its existence,
through the definition of strategies to broaden their visitor base. The larger the number of
visitors, the more the funding bodies of museums and art centres will proclaim their
magnanimity in the creation of conditions for access to culture for the citizens of their
communities and the more they will justify the expenses of architectural projects,
operating costs and marketing costs, which grow exponentially because of this demand
for access, to the detriment of budgets for collecting and programming. In other words,
the ‘prince’ will never fail to take care of his own image, continuing to use artistic
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creation as a support to build this same image. It is of little importance that the works
exhibited or selected may even call them into question, or challenge the social
mechanisms of their power. The fact that they are exhibiting and collecting them means
that they are part of this leisure culture, characteristic of a society of the spectacle,
increasing the visibility and prestige of the institution created by that ‘prince’, in an
operation of appropriation that frequently acts as a social anaesthetic. The apparent
increase in democracy in museums, demonstrated by the growth in their public, does not
prevent the appearance of a new type of problem: museums are aimed increasingly at
tourists and not at artists, providing a mass consumption of images, but discouraging
confrontation and individual reflection on the works they present.
Whilst necessarily maintaining selection criteria for their programmes, museums
are faced with a true explosion in numbers of young artists from all latitudes and
longitudes. At the same time they need to multiply the number of temporary exhibitions
in order to attract a permanent flow of public who regularly visit the museum to find out
what is going on, often regardless of who the artists are. The plurality and diversity of
programme possibilities accompany the globalisation of a world of art in which options
and programmes increasingly repeat the ‘usual suspects’, in an iterative standardisation of
exhibition typologies and concepts. The more an artist circulates, the more chances he
has to continue to circulate, often with the presentation of the same project on different
locations. The fact that video is increasingly used as a support by young artists favours
the creation of a particular effect of ubiquity: we need to reflect today on the purpose of
the work of art in the age of exhibition reproducibility...
In this context, group exhibitions prosper as an ideal exhibition format for art
institutions to present themselves as a barometer for young contemporary art production.
However, the group exhibition is precisely one of the occurrences in the art world that
demands urgent review. Commonly curated by one or various authorities, who can
legitimise its pretensions, the group exhibition rarely provides interesting situations from
the point of view of artistic creation. Their budgets increasingly involve more travel and
accommodation expenses, to the detriment of the production of new works. It has become
easy to confront the group exhibition in which one or more curators are invited to travel
and select a series of works and names based on a theme, usually justified by some
fashionable concepts, often taken from hurried and superficial readings of philosophical
texts that reduce Agamben, Augé, Deleuze, Virilio, and others, to mere agglutinative
slogans. Artists frequently find themselves considered interpreters of a questionable play
staged by the curator, the theme or concept of the exhibition justifying the curator’s
authorship instead of clarifying the works presented. The figure of the curator of a group
exhibition for young artists has become established. In their nomadic life, they resemble
the figure of the wanderer and adventurer through European courts in the literature of the
eighteenth century. The results of their work do not consist of the actual creation of
exhibition conditions for artists’ work, but rather in mediating between institutions and
artists, sometimes conditioning the type of work they present in accordance with the rules
and expectations expressed by the institution. Transferring Barthes’ dichotomy regarding
the relationship between the writer and the critic, the curator aspires to authorship in the
process of creating an exhibition, in a relationship in which the curator is ‘primus inter
pares’ amongst the artists he presents. With the difference that he receives a fee, whilst
the artists, if they are lucky, only receive production and travel costs. By increasing
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possibilities of circulation for his work when accepting invitations offered by institutions,
the artist supposedly also increases his possibilities of obtaining an economic income
because of the attention that the market will inevitably, sooner or later, give him.
However, we know that very few will be chosen. Better known galleries develop
relationships with young artists that closely resemble how the fashion industry creates its
advertising images: what they show has little or nothing to do with what they sell...
When the work of a young artist is tested with particular success in a legitimising
context, it has become normal today for that work to circulate rapidly through a
significant number of established museums and art centres. For the artist, who usually has
few resources to survive and work at the beginning of his career, circulating with his
work becomes an attractive form of subsistence. With hotels and travel paid, the artist
eats and drinks with what he receives as a daily allowance, and gets to know countries,
institutions and people which will become part of a CV in which each exhibition prepares
the way for the following exhibition. The names in circulation are numerous: there are
artists who appear and disappear for a while, often known only for one work or for a
small number of works with which they are irredeemably associated. Curators and
institutions frequently prefer to exhibit works that have already been tested and acclaimed
instead of sharing the risk of producing new work.
On the other hand, it has been noted that a significant part of the young art
produced since the early 1990s is distinctly derivative. If artists in the 1960s and 1970s
rediscovered the European avant-garde movements from the early twentieth century,
particularly Constructivism and Dada, as historical contexts to legitimise their work,
young artists today find a specific context for appropriation in the epic examples of works
from those decades. They often quote with an academic flavour, recalling review of the
subject as studied at art school. After the Post-modern debate, to make work ‘in the style
of’ or ‘after’ became a path to follow and not a course of action to be avoided. To this we
can add the mimetic effect that today’s group exhibitions generate. The pop strategies of
the construction of success have led, like in music, to a repetition of models and
structures of already established work. The typology of a new social realism, in which the
artist photographs his family or those he is closest to, the relationship with cinema
displayed by repeated manipulation of well-known films, reduced to a few minutes of
interminable loops, the confrontation with popular urban culture in the architecture of the
suburbs, in club music, in fashion references, in the iconology of gangs, the eruption of
adolescent and autobiographic intimacy, the self-referential discourse on art, the display
of social, cultural and sexual identities, have all become clichés that are endlessly
repeated in group exhibitions. Often we face the same exhibition, regardless of its
geographic location or changing protagonists, and despite the explosion of names and the
diversity of projects that it appears to reveal. To be considered an artistic phenomenon,
the work has to start by being an epi-phenomenon, a recognisable exercise in that ‘clone
art’ in which group exhibitions of young contemporary artists have become.
Globalisation becomes part of contemporary art as soon as the actions of all
agents involved become global. As it is not possible to ignore the shapes and processes of
a global art world, it is important to know it well in order to find precise forms of action
that can make use of its resources without being defined or manipulated by them.
Throughout the history of art, individual and idiosyncratic creativity has always
overcome the limitations of the possibilities that have been on offer. The same dilemma
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continues today for each artist who decides to start to present his work: to try to
participate in the game of success, believing that they are ‘born to be famous’, and their
work only needs to find the right strategies for it to be acclaimed, knowing that the other
side of the coin are the lost hopes that can be recognised in numerous cases around them;
or simply to begin the confrontation with themselves, with the world, the history that has
been presented of this world and all that is part of it, in an uncompromising ecology of
artistic creation that recognises how little it has to do what everyone expects, or what is
already known. As we know, success or failure can occur on either one of these paths. An
age-old problem, in a different world.
