"
PL: In the realm I work in, when the smoke cleared, it turned out you’d fallen behind if you hadn’t “gotten” Masaccio. You’d fallen behind if you hadn’t gotten Manet and Cezanne. You’d fallen behind if you hadn’t gotten Picasso and Braque, Pollock and Newman, Stella and Smithson. You were wrong, they were right. Now I don’t get anyone from Julian Schnabel to Matthew Barney and realize that it’s much more likely that I’ve fallen behind than that what I thought was real art simply ended, like at a certain point mosaics or stained glass simply ended.
…
AN: Why don’t you just take the position that it’s a bad time for art, a bad period?
PL: That’s what you say before you take the pledge and confess you’ve Fallen Behind. First you say it’s bad, then you say you’re “out of sympathy,” and then you say you’re out of it, period.
AN: Can you identify what happened to get you here?
PL: I think the most important thing that happened was the death of Smithson in 1973. It’s possible he was the one carrying the ball at that moment, the way Pollock was around 1946, or Goya was in 1800. If Pollock had died in 1946 or Goya in 1800 … well, you’d just see a void. And around the same time, all the good people just walked away: the better critics, the better artists. The void got filled with Warholism.
"Amy Newman & Philip Leider, “An Art World Figure Re-emerges, Unrepentant” in The New York Times, September 3, 2000. Source.
"
AN: And where are you at?
PL: Two places, actually, both pretty interesting. The first place is the Chestnut Tree Cafe, with the rest of the ghosts, drinking Victory Gin and trying to make out what’s passing the darkening window.
…
AN: Explain.
PL: Well, in the Chestnut Tree Cafe we spend most of our time pondering what it’s like to have fallen behind: you get in free when you’ve arrived at the certain conclusion that you have fallen behind. Then the waiters keep filling your glass without your asking. The TV is on but without sound, and you usually sit with your back to it. There’s no fax, no e-mail. The waiters pat you on the back and say, “You guys don’t need that stuff.”
Falling Behind turns out to be a stage in one’s career as real as the stages of Paying Your Dues, Getting In, Being on Top of Things, the nice period of Instant Comprehension when you don’t need anyone to tell you what’s going on, then a kind of Unconscious Withdrawal, then a kind of Conscious Withdrawing, with snarling and anger and the certainty that everything has turned to nonsense. And then, if you’re still alive, there’s Falling Behind.
"Amy Newman & Philip Leider, “An Art World Figure Re-emerges, Unrepentant” in The New York Times, September 3, 2000. Source.
Hokusai Katsushika, Blind Monks Examining an Elephant, impressions from 1878. Source.
"More than once over the years I had told Sandy that if worse came to worst, that if we lost everything and found ourselves without a roof over our heads sitting on the curbstone at Franklin and Vista, we would not be without resources. From a car passing to the east, I would borrow a pad of paper; from a car passing west, I would borrow a pencil. By evening I would have written a story and we would be back in business. I always believed this."
Preston Sturges, in Sandy Sturges’ Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words.
from Anthology Folkatone Music, 2001. Link.
"The secret as essence has never been the predicate to knowledge; it is an essence that has never been in general a predicate. The transcendental essence of the secret prevents it from being a part of either ignorance or empirical knowledge that one might then banish to the transcendence of silence or of darkness. Rather, it is this silence or this darkness—when they are absolutely deprived of transcendence, but not of positivity. The secret contains in it no fragment of the World, of History, of Meaning, etc.: it is radically finite and for this reason inalienable."
François Laruelle, “The truth according to Hermes: Theorems on the secret and communication” in Parrhesia 9, 2010. Source.
John Chamberlain, Ultima Thule, 1967. Source.
John Chamberlain, Shortstop, 1958. Source.
"Finally, a couple of years ago, a group of economists began to look at these comparative indexes not simply for evidence of art’s investment value, but for an explanation of its price structure. William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and Christophe Spaenjers suspected that equity market returns actually have a direct impact on art prices by increasing the buying power of the wealthy. So they compared art prices to income measures. As they report in their paper “Art and Money”, their analysis did not find a relationship between art returns and “overall income variables (such as GDP or total personal income)” but only with income inequality: art prices do not go up as a society as a whole becomes wealthier, but only when income inequality increases."
Andrea Fraser, “L’1% C’est Moi” in Texte zur Kunst 83, September 2011. Source.
"Until about ten years ago, one of the most widely cited texts by an economist about the art market was a paper called “Unnatural Value: or Art Investment as a Floating Crap Game”, written in 1986 by William J. Baumol. Baumol analyzed “several centuries of price data” and came to the conclusion that the real rate of return on art investments was basically zero – hardly an encouragement for art collectors. In 2002, two New York University-based economists, Jiangping Mei and Michael Moses, claimed to prove him wrong and began publishing an analysis of art auction results that showed art outperforming many other investments. This was the beginning of the Mei Moses Art Index (as well as their art consulting business, Beautiful Asset Advisors, … ), which quickly began to appear on art investment websites and in publications like Forbes, playing a significant role in the development of the art investment industry."
Andrea Fraser, “L’1% C’est Moi” in Texte zur Kunst 83, September 2011. Source.
"Without wanting to stretch the comparison too far, we can perhaps agree that when producers intervene in their own mediation, or take up communication as pure means by interrupting its normal function and efficiency, the subject’s relation to itself (and to its own social reproduction) is held in a momentary state of suspension. And then the script is somehow back in our hands. And perhaps other inter-subjective syntaxes can now be experimented."
John Kelsey, “The Self-Employment Rate” in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art.
"While established critical forms work on abstraction without actually transforming anything, fictional strategies always expose the discursive subject to the possibility of modification (sometimes even extinction). The subject in question is no longer an individual producer, but “a latent social subject for whom the individual artist acts as agent.” In other words, the one who goes to work is not exactly the same one who authors the situation: the distance between them is, in fact, the place where the work of fiction happens."
John Kelsey, “The Self-Employment Rate” in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art.
Stan Douglas, Coat Check, 1974, 2012. Source.
"Doing several things at once has been a way of remaining unemployed even in the midst of constant, inescapable employment. Writing, too, can be a form of unemployment within employment, and so is closer than ever to art."
John Kelsey, “Preface” in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art. (via butterflyhunt)
