https://direct.mit.edu/octo/article/doi/10.1162/OCTO.a.539/135707/New-York-Real-Estate-and-the-Ruin-of-American-Art
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/josh-kline-new-york-art-world-viral-essay-interview-1234780103/
„At White Columns back in 2010, Matthew Higgs championed the community of artists I was a part of when no one else was ready to do so. My point isn’t to drag the nonprofits. It’s about the importance of true artist-run spaces and about restoring agency to artists. It’s about what’s missing. There’s an important distinction between these institutional alternative spaces and real artist-run spaces. {…) In true artist-run spaces, the artists running them don’t check their identity as artists at the door. They don’t have to be professional.“
mich interessiert hauptsächlch der Aspekt: weg von den Institutionen, sich nicht andienen, nicht überlegen, was die wohl wollen und darauf hingerichtete Applications schreiben, um Unterstützung betteln, sondern umgekehrt: selber rausfinden, was man will und dabei die ganze Gegenwart einbeziehen aus eigenem Erleben heraus und daraus was machen. Eigene Räume. Machen, was es nicht gibt. das geht vielleicht nicht mehr in Städten wie New York, aber muß ja auch nicht. Andere Orte.
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„American Artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Huma Bhabha, Black Quantum Futurism, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Jason Fox, Nikita Gale, Georgia Gardner Gray, Josh Kline, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Carolyn Lazard, Guadalupe Maravilla, Paul McCarthy, New Red Order, Monira Al Qadiri, Farah Al Qasimi, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Alicia Riccio, Tschabalala Self, Avery Singer, Tavares Strachan, Sung Tieu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ambera Wellmann, Anicka Yi – Studio Visit: A Curatorial Project by Anicka Yi and Josh Kline for Performance Space New York – Hauser & Wirth – *
This shit sucks, plain and simple. The gallery is a maze of cubicles, the walls printed with dumb AI-generated images of artist’s studios generated from written descriptions of their studios from early in their career, with a work from each artist slapped on top of it. It’s ugly as sin and, like Josh Kline’s crappy essay, clearly driven by a midlife crisis nostalgia for the salad days. You can almost smell the desperation of these artists, many of them trapped in mid-career freefall, begging the art world for a post-internet revival so they can get back to feeling cool and accomplished and financially secure. I guess I’ll use this opportunity to air the few thoughts I had on Josh’s essay, which, if you haven’t read it, is here. Obviously, by and large, everything he’s complaining about is entirely correct, New York is indeed very expensive and the whole art system is antithetical to supporting artists, sustaining artistic communities, etc., and for people who don’t already know these things it’s a good compendium of the facts. For those that already know that and live here, it’s embarrassingly out of touch and even naive. He seems unaware that anyone younger than him has ever started an alternative project space in the city, he feels entitled to an endless upward career trajectory and an infinite fabrication budget (three years out from a Whitney retrospective and having organized this exhibition at a mega gallery), as if it’s simply „not his problem“ that his practice has aged like milk and no one cares about it anymore. Of course the whole situation is terrible, but moving to Philadelphia is not going to bring back your twenties and no one can manifest the return of the early ’00s by force of will. For all his focus on economic structures, he doesn’t go so far as to comprehend that the financialized economy that’s made everything more expensive is the same one that enriched the people who bought his art, which, if he could admit it, might at least suggest the entropic complexity of the problem and curb his self-righteousness about declaring that things should go right back to how they were back in his day. What’s most annoying, though, is that his „political“ outlook appears to be trapped in a literally 20-year-old mode of liberal participatory optimism that actually believes that artists can simply use their agency to make rents cheaper, and then I guess we’ll „make this the funnest summer in world history.“ So his diagnosis is fine, although I thought most of it went without saying, but the prescription is hopelessly undercooked and narcissistic, incapable of conceiving why the world wouldn’t stay the way it was when it worked for him and focused only on getting it back to that, even though his only idea is to gentrify a smaller city. What he can’t face up to is that the world has changed, certainly for the worse, and artists have to come to terms with that as an unfortunate fact of life. Those changes very much don’t work for him, but younger artists have to get by somehow and, in fact, some do. I’m not even saying artists shouldn’t move to Philly if they want to, I don’t want to dictate the correct way for anyone to do anything. The issue is that the article presents itself as a principled insight when it’s really just the author trying to avoid admitting his career has been left behind. Which I understand, the art market has been particularly cruel to artists who were on top of the world 15 years ago, and after you’ve had major museum retrospective it’s fair to expect that you won’t need to give up and go back to school to become an RN or whatever. Still, times change, and if you want to improve anything you have to adapt to those conditions. Josh’s fantasies about a revival of the Providence DIY scene in Pennsylvania (or Indonesia) are like expecting to step in the same river twice or, I dunno, thinking Woodstock ’99 was going to be like Woodstock ’69.“
