Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Successful crits can become the basis of lifelong interpretive communities or artist subcultures. Word has it that Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Damien Hirst, and other artists later christened “YBAs” (Young British Artists) forged their alliances in a crit class run by Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths. Arguably the equivalent of CalArts in the U.K., Goldsmiths was for many years the only British art school to amalgamate its painting, sculpture, photography, and other departments into a single fine arts school. Compared to most other British schools, it also placed substantial responsibilities in the hands of the students. A few months before this L.A. trip, I interviewed Craig-Martin, now an avuncular professor emeritus, at his studio in Islington. Craig-Martin believes that “for art students, the people who matter most are the peer group.” Artists need “friendships with an inbuilt critique” as a context for the development of their work. “If you look at the history of art,” he maintains, “all the Renais sance artists knew their contemporaries. So did the impressionists. There was a moment in their lives when they were all friends or acquaintances. The cubists were not simply individual geniuses. Their greatest works happened in conjunction. Who was van Gogh’s best friend? Gauguin.”

  The talk in F200 has moved on to a vivid discussion of artist personas. “The art world is like a western—full of cowboys, whores, and dandies,” asserts Hobbs. “Robert Smithson is the ideal hero. He even died young. Bruce Nauman buys a ranch and ostracizes himself. James Turrell walks around with a ten-gallon hat and ornate cowboy boots.” New World frontiers are integral to the mindset of many artists in L.A. When I interviewed Chris Burden, I drove through the dry hills, past the scrub oaks, to his studio in the wilds of Topanga Canyon. He bought the land from the granddaughter of the original owner. “It had only changed hands twice,” explained Burden. “Coming out here, you have a feeling of space and potential. The physical situation becomes a spiritual thing. Artists need to be pioneering.”

  It’s 9:15 on a Friday night and Asher is probably the only faculty member left in the building. “I don’t have a theory of time,” he explained to me in an interview. “It is a very simple, practical matter. For clear investigations, you need time. That is the only rule of thumb. If you don’t have it, you run the risk of being superficial.” Asher doesn’t remember when or exactly how the class got so long. “People had more to say,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t go on for as long as we would like.”

  Many artist-teachers think that Asher’s epic crits are a sign of madness, but Hirsch Perlman admires the commitment: “I love the idea. It’s one thing to put in the unpaid hours, it’s another to get the students to do that.” Indeed, Asher personally underwrites the hours after 5 P.M., and the students line up to spend them here. CalArts takes pride in the fact that it is a twenty-four-hour campus, yet Post-Studio is an institution within an institution.

  Fiona has fallen asleep on the beanbag. She is out cold, with her mouth slightly ajar. Someone’s mobile phone meows. The group giggles. A student is holding forth. “This is going to end up a question eventually…,” he says.

  At 10:05 P.M., one of the dogs groans in the midst of a dream. Another is curled up like a doughnut. Virgil, the crit’s smartest dog, ever alert to the goings-on in the room, sleeps but perks up one ear whenever his master speaks. A woman is lying under a table, and it occurs to me that the couple suppressing giggles to my left must be stoned. Asher’s distinct style of pedagogy is revealing itself. This is not a class but a culture. But when is it going to end? For a fleeting moment, the crit appears to be a weird rite engineered to socialize artists into suffering. But I come to my senses, and after twelve hours of sitting, I lie down on the hard floor. Bliss.

  As we move further away from the regular workday—the rational, business hour—the class takes on a life of its own. The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it’s allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.

  When I was on the freeway this morning, it struck me as significant that to get to CalArts, one drives against the traffic. There is a huge pleasure in the sense of independence and the unimpeded flow, particularly when the cars going in the other direction inch mindlessly forward in a molten bumper-to-bumper mass. Los Angeles isn’t a city so much as a solar system where different neighborhoods might as well be different planets. The real distance from CalArts to the Valley or Beverly Hills is not that great, but the psychological rift is huge.

  Several people are sleeping. Apparently it is normal for people to drop off for forty-five minutes, then rejoin the conversation. I become aware that there is no clock in this room, then notice that above each blue door is an EXIT sign, on which someone has written IRAQ. The space is no longer a banal box but a war-torn landscape.

  After an hour or two on the floor, I remember why I am here. I’m trying to gain some site-specific answers to some big questions: What do artists learn at art school? What is an artist? How do you become one? What makes a good one? Responses to the first three questions are wide-ranging, but people’s answers to the final question are all about hard work. Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), put it most eloquently: “Talent is a double-edged sword. What you are given is not really yours. What you work at, what you struggle for, what you have to take command of—that often makes for very good art.”

  If effort and persistence are essential to becoming a good artist, the work ethic of this marathon crit is bound to be good training. One of Asher’s favorite expressions is workable. When asked about the importance of his class, the artist suggested modestly that it might have something to do with its “spirit of production.” Exhaustiveness is necessary. Key. Endurance is also essential. As a student told me during one of the breaks, “When there is nothing to say, that becomes the question, in which case that’s a really interesting conversation.”

  A good art school provides a sense of being somewhere that matters with an audience that matters. “Every artist thinks they’re going to be the one, that success is around the corner,” says Hirsch Perlman. “It doesn’t matter what stage they’re at, either. That’s what’s funny about it.” In L.A., many invoke the once-neglected video artist and sculptor Paul McCarthy and imagine that eventually they too will be discovered and upheld.

  Footsteps echo out in the hall. It’s a security guard with a burbling walkie-talkie. Time to get up. I pick a new chair. It’s 12:12. Midnight is a magical hour. Asher continues to take his slow notes. The crowd is getting giddy; we’re all a bit punch-drunk. A new round of food-sharing ensues—bags of Hershey’s Kisses and other chocolate goodies. The conversation is often vague and people get confused, but it still feels open and earnest. The discussion segues to a video that Hobbs made of a monkey on a bike and everyone falls apart laughing.

  Five minutes to one, and no one is sleeping. No one is even lying down. The whole day has been a game of musical chairs—of alignments and confrontations, flirtations and resentments played out in space as well as words. The gaps between comments are getting longer. After a long silence, Asher says, “Is there a bar here?” The comment is absurd. It’s a gesture of camaraderie. No goodbye could do justice to the end of this semester-long rite of passage. Asher takes his leave. As the students filter out, many feel bereft and one says, “It’s so sad to see Michael go.”

  The students leave, but I stay to take one last look at the abandoned room. Huge piles of trash-filled grocery bags, orange peels, and snack wrappers litter the floor. The space no longer feels dry and institutional but complicated and inspired. Whether it’s deemed art or not, the Post-Studio crit is Asher’s greatest and most influential work. It’s a thirty-year institutional critique that reveals the limits of the rest of the curriculum. It’s also a sound piece where Asher has been at the quiet eye of a multivocal storm. It’s a minimalist performance where the artis
t has sat, listened with care, and occasionally cleared his throat.

  3

  The Fair

  It’s the second Tuesday in June, so I must be in Switzerland. Ten forty-five A.M. The world’s most important contemporary art fair opens in just fifteen minutes. In the lobby of this black glass trade-show building, there isn’t an artist or student in sight. Collectors—some worth billions, others just millions—stand in a tight throng, clutching their credit-card VIP passes. Many are studying their floor plans, mapping the fastest routes through the maze of gallery stands. In the old days, when art sales were slow, a few collectors would wait until the fair was closing before sauntering in to strike bargains. Nobody would think of doing that now. By noon today, there may be nothing left to buy.

  The relentless boom in the art market is a topic of conversation. “When is the bubble going to burst?” wonders an older gent in a Savile Row suit and black Nikes. “We can’t answer that question here,” replies an acquaintance. “We have entered a macroevent that is uncharted, a scale of expansion unseen since the Renaissance!” The older collector frowns. “Nothing goes on and on,” he counters. “I’m feeling bearish. I’ve only spent, I don’t know, two million dollars since January.” For the most part, those heavily invested in art prefer to talk expansion. “A bubble misunderstands the economic realities,” says an American. “Only a century ago, no one had a car. Now people have two or three. That’s the way it’s going with art.” A hundred private jets have touched down in Basel during the past twenty-four hours. Rifling through her crocodile handbag, a woman expresses her qualms to a friend: “I feel decadent if I am on the plane all by myself, so I was relieved when a couple of curators agreed to a lift.”

  The crowd is held back from entering the fair by a barrier of chrome turnstiles patrolled by an officious troop of female security guards dressed in navy uniforms with matching navy berets. It feels like a border crossing. In fact, Swiss security at Basel airport was more relaxed. I hear from more than one source that even dogs are issued photo ID exhibitors’ passes, but when I check this with a fair official, he dismisses it as absurd. Absolutely no dogs allowed.

  The Swiss enjoy observing the rules as much as those of other nationalities like to break them. It is a cultural difference that has plagued the fair for many years, as collectors and consultants attempt to sneak in early to scour the stands for trophies and negotiate deals before anyone else has had a chance to see the work. The Parisian dealer Emmanuel Perrotin was thrown out of the fair because he gave exhibitors’ passes to art consultant Philippe Ségalot and Christie’s owner François Pinault. As a compensatory gesture toward Perrotin’s loss of face and income, Ségalot admitted to paying him $300,000.

  This year Art Basel security is extra-tight, and I’ve heard of only one surreptitious entrant—Ségalot. The unmistakable Frenchman with the extravagant helmet of hair transformed himself, with the help of a Hollywood makeup artist, into a bald man and entered the fair on a shipper’s pass. Or at least that is the talk. Ségalot is nowhere to be seen in the scrum, so I call his mobile. “Allo. Hmmm. Yes, I have heard the rumeur,” he admits. “Some people think they saw me…I like people with a lot of imaginayyy-tion!”

  It is a joy to snoop around an art fair before the feeding frenzy begins. Yesterday I slipped in during installation. The stands of old-time Swiss dealers were still stacked high with crates, not a staff member in sight. Other gallerists were fine-tuning the positions of their art objects and hanging lights, while those who’d had trouble gaining access to this elite club of international dealers were wiping their fingers along the tops of picture frames, checking for dust. “I’m ready for Armageddon!” said Jeff Poe, whose Los Angeles gallery, Blum & Poe, was back in the fair after a forced one-year hiatus. “They never properly explained why,” Poe said with a groan. “It’s water under the bridge.”

  Art Basel claims to host la crème de la crème, but the all-determining six-dealer admission committee is not without its biases and idiosyncrasies. It tends to favor Swiss galleries and those showing the kind of European contemporary art that some jokingly refer to as “dry Kunst.” As a member of the admission committee explained, “The fair is significant from a prestige point of view. If a gallery is not admitted, people might think that it is not as important as another gallery that is. If a gallery is refused next year, it could destroy their business.”

  Poe and his partner, Tim Blum, are known for discovering artists and launching their careers. Blum is high-strung and edgy, whereas Poe is laid-back, with a slow swagger. Despite their differences, many confuse their monosyllabic names; they forget that Blum is the brown-haired middleweight while Poe is the blue-eyed, dirty-blond cruiserweight. One of their artists used to call them “Double or Nothing,” referring to their symbiotic relationship and the confused setup of the gallery’s early days. When I told Blum, a Catholic boy from Orange County, that a rival dealer had complained that there was “way too much dude” in their gallery, he shrugged and said, “I guess they mean we’re macho, testosterone-driven, hard drinkin’. Yeah, well, we’re raw. We’re very West Coast. So our success freaks some people out. We’ve played it the way we wanted. That’s why we are doing well for our artists. We believe in them and we work like motherfuckers.”

  During installation, in front of an exquisitely crafted three-panel painting called 727-727, Blum was speaking quick-fire Japanese with their star artist, Takashi Murakami. The two men were laughing and arguing about the price of the work. English numbers erupted out of the Japanese flow—“eight hundred thousand,” “one million,” “one point five,” “two million.” The canvas depicts DOB, Murakami’s cartoon alter ego, riding on a cloud-wave in a colorful world of virtuoso painting styles. The original painting with the 727 title is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The new 727 is more complicated, more accomplished; it’s “a culmination and a departure.” Several collectors are already vying to acquire it sight unseen, but what is it worth?

  “Takashi worked so hard on this painting that several staff quit,” said Poe, who grew up in West Los Angeles and was the lead singer in an art rock band called Blissed Out Fatalists before starting a gallery. I mentioned that I had heard that Murakami was going to show with the omnipotent Gagosian Gallery in New York. Poe sat down, gestured me to the empty chair beside him, and asked, “Where did you hear that?” In the art world, gossip is never idle. It is a vital form of market intelligence.

  After visiting Blum and Poe, I explored the stands with Samuel Keller, the director of Art Basel since 2000. Keller is a handsome forty-year-old whose smoothness is aptly signified by his close-shaven head and shiny shoes. As he did his rounds, he praised dealers in French, cracked jokes in gesticulating Italian, and maintained an even, warm tone in German with an irate dealer who didn’t like the location of her stand. I believe I even heard him say “Shalom.” Keller seems to possess all the best qualities of the multilingual Swiss—modesty, neutrality, internationalism, and an instinct for quality. The impresario also has a knack for appearing not to hold the reins of power. He recruits consultants to help choose which artists get the few coveted “Art Statements” spots (where young dealers put on solo shows of young artists) and enlists curators to help select and install “Art Unlimited” (a cavernous showroom of large-scale museum pieces). Keller even has twenty-two “ambassadors,” who act as channels of communication for different territories. If you took all this at face value, he would seem to run the fair like an international summit or United Nations (to use his term) rather than a profit-making enterprise. It’s a strategy that has no doubt contributed to Art Basel’s ascendancy over older fairs like Art Cologne, the Chicago Art Fair, and New York’s Armory Show, which have slipped into being local or regional events.

  Art Basel takes place in a purpose-built exhibition hall that the Germans call a Messe, or mass, as in “the masses” or worshippers “going to mass.” Since the Middle Ages the word has also referred to markets h
eld on holy days, and today, by extension, to any trade fair. The main building is a black glass box on the outside, with a clear-glass circular courtyard on the inside.

  Three hundred gallery stands are split between two floors, each arranged in two easy-to-navigate concentric squares. The art is so demanding that the architecture needs to be nearly invisible. The ceilings are high enough to go unnoticed, and dealers praise the quality of the walls, which support even the heaviest works. Most importantly, the expensive, artificial lighting is clean and white. It blends with the natural midsummer sun filtered through the windows of the atrium.

  When Art Basel first opened, in 1970, it looked like a flea market, with pictures stacked up against walls and dealers coming in with canvases rolled up under their arms. Nowadays the fair provides a respectable environment. In his light Swiss German accent, Keller explains this approach: “If you go after art and quality, the money will come later…We have to make the same decisions as the artists. Do they create great art or art that sells well? With the galleries, it’s the same. Are they commercial or do they believe in something? We’re in a similar situation.”

  10:55 A.M. Five minutes until the fair opens to the VIPs. Don and Mera Rubell, a zealous pair of Miami-based collectors, stroll into the expensive mob with their adult son, Jason. They’re wearing running shoes and baggy trousers with pockets and toggles in unlikely places, like funky grandparents setting out on a long hike. They are so unostentatious, so inconspicuously wealthy, that I’ve heard them referred to as “the Rubbles.” The three look amused by the spectacle of anxious shoppers. Having collected art since the 1960s but with particular vigor since 1989, when they inherited money from Don’s brother, Studio 54 co-creator and hotel owner Steve Rubell, they are familiar with the prefair jitters. “When you first start collecting, you’re intensely competitive, but eventually you learn two things,” explains Don. “First, if an artist is only going to make one good work, then there is no sense in fighting over it. Second, a collection is a personal vision. No one can steal your vision.”