Painting or Profession?

The first thing I read this morning was the following message routed to my e-mail via an online dating site. After introducing himself, the stranger asked me: “do you actually sell enough paintings to call it a profession?”

This question is perfect. It exposes everything that has ever bothered me about the art world.

“But there is no monolithic ‘art world,’ Liz!”I can hear my art friends protest. To which I feel compelled to ask this unpopular question: isn’t there? OK, it’s true that in Canada we look as though we have a number of discrete art worlds. Vancouver, for instance, is about big photography, Ken Lum and Jeff Wall. Unless you are a photographer or new media artist, don’t try selling your product in Vancouver. The Maritimes is conceptual art: NSCAD, Kelly Mark and the generation before her, Garry Neill Kennedy. And Toronto? Personally, I think boy art – graphic novel cartoony works. I think: brothers Clint and Griffin I-can’t-remember-their-last-names. Montreal, I think the so-called transgressive “bad-painting” portraits by Eliza Griffiths and Janet Werner, which are badly painted indeed, and contain content too cool for school: chicks from mainstream magazines who are either engaged in some psycho-sexual scenario with an old mustang and a bad boy, or just plain pouty princesses looking defiantly at the camera lens. I say camera because this is not painting, it’s fashion photography gussied up with a little oil paint to raise the profile and price.

I realize that taken together these cities could appear to form a biodiverse collection of media and aesthetics, and, therefore debunk the myth of the monolithic art world. But I would argue that’s not actually the case. Underpinning all these productions is a current of professionalism that transforms idiosyncratic expression – tied to a specific time, place and soul – into a set of standardized visual hooks that signify the presence of art.

Just to change the subject for a moment, I’ve been reading Michael Pollen’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in which he describes the history and impact of industrialization on our food chain. The overproduction of two crops – corn and soy – has created a surplus of biomass that is impoverishing our farmers while creating a dire need for consumption of this excess, so the industrial system re-feeds this biomass to animals not evolved to eat grain, making the animals, and, by extension the people who eat them, sick. To me, Pollan’s report on the disappearance of biodiversity is a not just a lament about the state of our farms and, by extension, our physical health, but it's also a powerful metaphor for describing the state of our cultures and, by extension, our creative, mental and spiritual health.

How is biodiversity connected to the art world? Through the idea of industrialization – aka professionalization in an art-world context. Professionalization ensures artists become efficient producers of creative monocultures (oxymoron?) that adhere to a set of standards guaranteed to produce something everyone recognizes as art and, more importantly, purchases. Were it not such a cliché, I’d be tempted to say the professionalization of art has resulted in McArt. But I’ll restrain myself.

Friends of mine who have made it in the art world have done so because they took a professional, assembly-line approach to their practice, dividing up their time and vision into discrete silos of production guaranteed to yield a better ROI than if they had made something only their friends and family and local community could understand and appreciate. Instead, they have channeled their energies into writing grant apps, artist statements, reviews and catalogue essays about their successful friends’ international exhibits; they regularly send well-heeled portfolio packages to targeted galleries and curators; they slip into their Camper shoes and Comme des Garcons tees before heading out to party at key events in key global cities; they make work about identity politics or cartoon versions of themselves, their friends or people they feel safe enough to judge, expressing naked sexism masked as boys-coming-of-age drawings; and all the while employing social media tools to network with their heroes in the art world, promoting their latest features in New York magazine and the success of their current show in Shanghai through e-mails and FB posts thinly disguised as xmas or valentine’s greetings. These are professional artists. How can you tell? Their process is repeatable, their product palatable, their success more than probable.

In same way industrialization has transformed once biodiverse farms into whole states devoted to growing only corn or soy, professionalization has created entire districts in certain city centres devoted to art galleries that show what amounts to corn or soy (it all looks pretty much the same), outside of which lies an off-the-grid set of alternative spaces that can’t possibly be selling art coz it don't look like what art's supposed to look like. Furthermore, it’s no accident that, by and large, the gallery districts share real estate with fashion districts, convincing art buyers that what they are procuring is not really a rarified object, rather they are buying membership into a coveted world as status-conferring as a pair of Diesel jeans.

Of course I’m exaggerating. And as I write this, I have to ask myself what the hell is the bug in my bonnet? It’s this: in much of the art I see, I feel as if I’m observing someone make clever statements, CNN like, about the world, but I can’t actually locate what the artist really thinks or feels. Sure there’s content but it’s someone else’s response to the world filtered through the artist’s professional hand/computer/video camera/irony. Like news anchors reporting on disasters with the affect of Barbie and Ken, their words sound pretty, but the tone is all wrong. I just don’t believe they are being sincere.
I know I’m being massively reductive here. And I swear to god I’m not bitter. I certainly don’t think my choices are above reproach. My grad show was based on referencing one of the western art world’s bluest chip artists. I wanted to get noticed, too. But I got tired of going to opening after opening, collecting openings like I was collecting chits I could later exchange for points on the cool-o-meter.


After grad school I moved to Montreal to unplug (a strange place to unplug, I know, but it’s easy to ignore art when you don’t live near a gallery district). Instead of attending openings, I made pet portrait commissions in my apartment studio. I called them “dumb paintings” as a kind of pro-active claiming of the critique I was sure my critics would hurl at me. (What critics? You need to be known in order to have critics!) At the risk of sounding naïve, I wanted to make paintings whose content would matter to the purchaser.



While my pet painting business might sound suspiciously like a painting pastoral, I am certainly not harkening back to some golden age when art was made in cold ateliers to be sold at flea markets. Art has always been elitist (by and large; of course, there are always exceptions). Even when painters belonged to artisan guilds, they made work for the church, monarchies and aristocrats (by and large). Generally speaking, the enterprise has historically involved fame, if not fortune. It has always induced delusions of grandeur. And it has always served the elite classes. To be sure, what the elite deems worthy has changed: case in point being the co-optation of outsider art and velvet Elvises which, in the elite’s hands, have been artfully re-deployed with winning results in the manner of fashionistas slumming it in a pair of old Jordache jeans found at a high-end vintage store.

In grad school, we were taught to turn professionalization into a fine art. As part of this training, we had to support our grad exhibitions with an 80-page thesis populated with contemporary cultural theorist’s ideas (all from France, of course) leveraged to defend our studio productions (because god knows our work was not defensible based on our own unpublished opinions. We required a legitimizing apparatus).

My ex once said a brilliant thing: he said it was ridiculous to use Derrida’s theory of painting as a reference point for discussing painting in general because Derrida was not creating a general theory of painting, he was responding to specific works. That has always stuck with me. As I observed my colleagues talk about French theorists like they were best friends, I realized that we no longer have to actually know someone to claim them as intimates, or to claim our own cleverness by proxy. All we have to do is mimic intelligence and intimacy in order to position ourselves as smart, sincere and art-world worthy.

When I was in Mitte, the art district of Berlin, I kept wondering if Canadian artists were behind the art I was seeing. It all looked so familiar. But no. These were Berlin artists. At the gallery that represents Neo Rauch, the front-desk gal informed me that the gallery culls its artists from Neo’s art school in Leipzig, trading on his fame as if it guaranteed similar success from the next generation. Later that day, an artist friend from Montreal doing a residency in Berlin told me he had recently been invited to Neo’s alma mater to give studio visits, but the students refused to meet with him because they consider anyone less than a curator a waste of their time. They know what it takes to make it (produce work like Neo’s), and they expect to make it, specifically at Neo’s gallery. Their professionalism practically guarantees it.