Art World as High School Cafeteria

Fine art is rarely the democratic product its creators often claim it is. Especially contemporary art. No matter how big an art "star" of the 1980s got, his or her name recognition among the people at large is probably negligible. With the exception of Andy Warhol, is there an artist active in the last 25 years that even a quarter of Americans would recognize?

Much of this is because contemporary art is very rarely mass cultural product. It only becomes that decades afterwards, or as a result of extensive media exposure.

Some of this is because there doesn't really exist an audience willing to consume a cultural product as complex as contemporary art. Culturally, we're living at a time when the lowest common denominator sets the tone. How do you compete with the sensationalism of reality TV and the rampant sentimentalism and/or deathporn of the multiplex?

And then there's the art world itself. It's a pretentious poor man's mirror of the other institutional cultural structures of the US. Like Hollywood, it only pays attention to something if it's bound to make money, if it. Unlike Hollywood, its voice is often a tree falling in an unpopulated forest, and it's actually quite small. In many ways, too small. Even internationally, the Art World is, in many ways, actually that: an insular universe with its unique unquestioned assumptions.

I can't speak to the art world as a whole, although I have in fact just done so. But I know from that which I have seen that an atmosphere of exclusivity and even incestuousness is not inimical to the Art World. And this exclusivity, this thing called elitism often enough, is often in the service of no more than maintaining a cred of coolness.

I don't support coolness as a valid criterion, for many reasons. For one thing, although coolness is often meant to represent authenticity, coolness is often achieved, in the art world and beyond, through artifice. Coolness is often synonymous with popularity in the public high school sense, and I say this not merely because they are both nebulous words. Both words are often coded language for social power, the type of Machiavellian power most succinctly if cartoonishly charcterized in the film Heathers. What creates the social fact of coolness, popularity, or hipness is, then, often not those values that a given society will claim as its authentic values, but rather the naked or covert expression of a type of power that could be characterized as political.

For example, a trend in an artist's credibility or the perceived value of his or her work is often dependent upon its critical reception. And this critical attention is often proportional to the artist's presence within a social sphere that includes said critics. Although the specific evaluation of an art review has a bearing on that trend in coolness etc., a lack of attention is certainly capable of stalling a career, and a critical notice in one publication or another can signal that one's stock has gone up.

As a result, many contemporary artists' careers owe more to their degree of exposure than any evaluation of the quality of their work. In this respect, the art world resembles strongly the other major cultural institutional spheres of America. I mean, is Britney Spears on the radio or television because she is beloved, or is it the inverse? While, obviously the two feed on eachother, It seems that a real grassroots cultural response is far less likely than one fed from the outset with carefully tailored and overwhelming cultural "machine."

So it doesn't pay as well, it's cut-throat, and it rewards loud a**holes more frequently than real talents. So why be an artist?

Duty.