I Went To Scholarmageddon And All I Got Was This Lousy Back Ache

 The LA Convention Center, Picture Copyright Your Truly

A few years ago I went to the College Art Association Conference in downtown LA and I didn't relish the experience. After being issued a press pass for the latest edition (roughly from Wednesday morning to Saturday evening last week) I went there hoping my opinion would significantly alter, alas, this was not to be.
First, let me get this out of the way: I am not enamored with Academia in any form, and even less in its American incarnation.  So everything I'm writing below is anything but impartial, obviously.
Aside from this, spending several hours locked into a stuffy, dark room watching dull presentation after the other on super uncomfortable seats isn't my idea of fun. But, I do like the spreading and sharing of knowledge, so I was wishing I might learn something or other. What I got from the conference can only be summed up this way: the next generation of art historians is as boring, dull and predictable as the last. And they seem to spend even less time looking at art than wondering if it fits their predetermined categories. There are still too many people trying to RE/something or other (-framing, -locating, -hashing...) rather than, I don't know, JUST DO IT anew or afresh or for the very first time, I don't care, but for the love of the Holy Mother of Belphégor, please, please young scholars and artists, stop RE/ anything. Thank you.



The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

Now, to be fair, it was difficult to pick and choose which sessions to attend, as many were scheduled at exactly the same time  - so, for example,  I spent the entire "bad art" sessions cursing myself I hadn't attended the "Nazi paintings" instead, etc, etc.
From what I heard and have missed, the Rosalind Krauss session was great, and so were the artist-lead ones, especially the Martin Kersels one which I understand was LOUD to the point other sessions panelist came to protest. Way to go, Martin Kersels, I'm sure the Holy Mother of Belphégor will bless your heart!
What else was great at CAA? The book fair was fantastic, and yours truly scored with 4 books including 3 deeply discounted ones at the DAP booth. I highly recommend the Martin Kippenberger biography/portrait by his sister, I've only read about 50 pages so far and it's beautifully written and translated, and super interesting. Also, the guy who sold me the "artists publications" at the MIT Press booth was way cute (hi!) and the kids at Cabinet, my other favorite publication (if you ask, the 2 other ones are Triple Canopy and The Quietus) managed to be even more cranky than I was, a feat on any given day.
I also have to report a big progress from 2 years ago: there are far fewer men with the  "totally shaved head + goatee" look, so hopefully in about half a decade this remnant of last century's men fashion will have disappeared, yay!

Not much rock' n ' roll

I went to a grand total of two sessions. I was planning on four but my goodwill was easily defeated by the general mediocrity of what I've seen. Also, while I'm at it,  whining that is, I want to denounce the extortionist $3 the Groundworks coffee cart sold its very mediocre espresso for. It's not every day I think I'd better have gone to Starbucks, and it was such a day. If you're ever stuck at the LA Convention Center downtown, I highly recommend you take your coffee and pastries business at Hygge bakery instead, get yourself a nice coffee while having a chat with the super friendly Lucas, and stock on their fabulous rye bread.

So, the sessions. As I was saying I went to the "bad art" one, which dismayed me for several reasons. The super adorable girls (they looked like they were 14 to me) who chaired the panels quoted Susan Sontag and her essay on camp, but didn't actually challenge it at all. It would have seemed a basic thing to do to me, but apparently the young generation likes to receive its texts uncritically.
Then the panelists proceeded to read their notes and be incredibly obsessed not with defining what "bad art" was (for whom? who gets to decide what's bad and what's not?) but to wonder how to make some of it "fit the canon" and why some of it didn't.
None of them actually presented and researched their examples of so-called bad art on their own terms (the first panelist did a half-baked attempt at describing his Neil Jenney paintings and that was it), but tried instead to see how they could make them fit their predetermined categories. There was some tired rehash of "the avant-gardes versus postmodernism" and overall lots of beating about the bush and not much treating of the subject (and much "trying to fit my doctoral research into the general subject" feel).
 I was wondering for a while whether someone was going to raise the fact that many defining artists in the established corpus of art history at some point of other produced work that was deemed bad art at the time or even a long time after it was made (from Caravaggio to Duchamp via Courbet, Manet, Picasso to our very own Mike Kelley) and that maybe, maybe there was something interesting in this process...  And nothing came up.
Likewise, one panelist who talked about illustrators-as-artists with, among others, Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade  (no mention of Currier and Ives) was speculating that so-called lesser art was finally deemed worthy of museum interest (his benchmark for acceptation of "bad art" within the corpus) if and only if there was an "original" model/art piece showing good workmanship that could be shown instead of reproductions; and that in the case where only mass-produced objects existed, the originator of the work wouldn't be recognized as an artist, ever. I waited in vain for Walter Benjamin's name to be uttered.
This session was packed, incidentally,  which made me think that the people attending graduate school in art history these days are fed up with the modernist and post-modernist narratives they're being spoon-fed by their faculties, and would like to do something else. They're trying hard, but they only manage to replicate what they've been taught. I can't blame them for this, because they're being part of a system that offers very little in terms of being able to challenge it, and because it's difficult at this stage in one's career to know what one is doing. I certainly didn't when I was a graduate student myself. I just was a truant and left Academia forever.

The morning after I was so shot and discouraged I didn't manage to hurry to catch my bus and attend the "punk rock" session, to my deepest regret. I always regret not attending sessions because, you know, the grass is always greener...
So I went to the "rock' n' roll" session  in the afternoon(I think it was called "toward a rock' n' roll history of contemporary art), with the two Chairs doing passable interpretations of a Devo listener and a mumblecore fan, respectively. Just the fact that "rock' n' roll" (as well as "punk") made it into two CAA panels indicate two things to me: a) both musical genres are now totally dead and b) maybe they cannot produce good art history but the young 'uns are sick of the stalemate in their own discipline. Occupy your faculty!

James Chance and The Contortions, I Can't Stand Myself

Where was I? Ah yes, the session. First speaker did a formal comparison between Robert Smithson' Spiral Jetty and the Rolling Stones Altamont disaster, based on superficial resemblances between SJ and the Gimme Shelter movie, on the fact that Howard Junker had written an article about the 2 in a 1971 Rolling Stones magazine issue, and that Robert Fiore, who was Smithson's cinematographer on SJ, also worked on Gimme Shelter. Also that Smithson was a fan of rock music and read lots of rock music magazines (and I hate to break it to that guy, but so did most artists of the time and then some more. Dan Graham was a rock critic, for example). It's one of those paper where you see the starting point but you don't feel like it's going anywhere.
The next speaker is the person who's single-handedly responsible for my flight from CAA. The paper was on the NYC no-wave movement,  a musical instant in the 1970s I'm very fond of. Lydia Lunch, James Chance and the Contortions, etc. At least she was about to talk music, I thought, so maybe I was going to learn something. Alas, this person was so incredibly arrogant, condescending and reeking of self-assured pomposity I couldn't take it anymore: "And I posit and I am going to affirm and I will prove". One bad Springsteen joke was lost on the audience, which was all for the better because the speaker was of the kind you imagine peppering all their Facebook and Twitter conversations with *sarcasm* and *irony* after each post. There was so much intellectual superiority I could take, so I left, and I was suffering from such an allergic reaction I didn't come sneak into the Rosalind Krauss session, which was my initial plan. Instead, I bought a shitload of books and went back home. And nearly had a panic attack, so now you know.







Outside of CAA, one thing that redeemed my scholarly experience last week was going to the Thierry de Duve seminar at the Mackey/Schindler house on Saturday afternoon. I had a raging headache, but de Duve is so clear and concise I managed to follow everything he had to say. I'd gladly come to the rest of the seminar if I could, but I have too many deadlines coming up and I'm broke (I just discovered that street cleaning parking tickets went up to $68, wow!).
 If you have the time, each session is $20, and only $10 if you're a friend of the MAK center, plus if you buy the entire series before 03/12 it is deeply discounted. You're going to learn a lot about Duchamp, and de Duve is a super nice man who's not intimidating at all, so all questions are always welcome (and answered). Just make sure they're not too long-winded.

And lastly, what about this back ache I mentioned in the post title? Well, after 3 car accidents between 2007 and 2009, I have semi-chronic back pain that become worse after a prolonged seating position. So now you know. Can hardly move this week, so my art activities are severely curtailed until I can resume driving. More posting later, hopefully.

Heavy Scholarly Week Is Descending Upon Us

Heya beloved readership,

As some of you know, the College Art Association Conference is descending upon Los Angeles this week, with registration already in full swing earlier today. If you've been following FBC! for a while, you know how deeply ambivalent I am about the thing.
There are two things that give me the willies in general,  art fairs and  the CAA Conference. One, I do badly with crowds - I love everybody equally on this planet, but far, far away from me - and two, I do badly with people taking themselves way too seriously.
Now, I understand the need people have to network, and that it's convenient for institutions planning to hire future tenure-bound faculty to have a general cattle call HQ, but these being precisely what I'm trying not to do, I was to avoid the thing altogether, especially since I'm being too broke to devote money to sessions dealing with the stuff I laugh about usually (see that second link I posted above).

But CAA has elegantly showed they had no hard feelings against me  for making fun of them the last time around and kindly sent me a press pass; so yours truly is going to attend a couple of sessions and then report. I won't tell you beforehand where I'll go, I keep my identity vaguely secret (see "I abhor networking above", or more plainly "FBC! is a sociopath"). Also, I still have more deadlines so the whole thing is way too much, and I just realized today I had to re-read my undergrad nemesis, Stilfragen by Alois Riegl. If you've ever read it, you will understand.

The complete program of the sessions can be found here. Note that to attend, you need to fork over the $$$ to be a CAA member (which entitles you to a subscription to either the Art Journal or the Art Bulletin. I strongly recommend the latter, unless you get the level of membership that entitles you to both journals) plus the cost of attending the conference, or you can get some single-day or even single-time slot tickets. Everything is explained here. There is ONE session that is open to everybody, I understand (please double-check with CAA):

CAA Distinguished Scholar Session Honoring Rosalind Krauss

The Theoretical Turn

Thursday, February 23, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM

West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center

Chair: Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study

Harry Cooper, National Gallery of Art

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Harvard University

Hal Foster, Princeton University

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University

Briony Fer, University College London

  

Indeed, their website is super handy, so if you're interested in attending some of the conference just spend some time on the site, everything is well-explained. Things I recommend skipping altogether: the receptions, unless you have some alumni something or other going on and you're dying to see that asshole you were in graduate school with and who's doing so well at [insert Ivy League fab job here]. Also, do not, under any circumstance, try to eat or drink anything at the Convention Center. Instead, walk over to Hygge Bakery and raid their dark rye bread, hop on a DASH bus and explore the newish downtown eateries, whatever, but don't waste your money at such a ghastly place. Speaking of the DASH, if you live in Los Angeles and can conveniently bus yourself to the Convention Center, do so to avoid the super expensive parking.

Now, glancing at the program, I'm alarmed at two things. One is purely practical: FBC! still isn't ubiquitous, so it's impossible to attend everything I'd like to go to. Sorry, Rosalind Krauss and distinguished speakers mentioned above. The other thing is there seems to be a majority of modern-to-contemporary sessions in contrast to, say, Classical Antiquity, Medieval Art, Renaissance, etc. And many, many of these modern-to-contemporary sessions are dealing with stuff that has too many -Re and -Identity and -Body in their titles. Hey, art historians in the US of A, have you noticed the 1990s ended up with the century? Anything new going on? No? Oh well.
There are a bunch of local people talking at CAA this year, so check the LA Raw session chaired by Michael Duncan on Thursday afternoon, or the Seeing Is Doing on Thursday morning with Simon Leung, Andrea Bowers, etc.


Now, that is A LOT of scholarly things going on in LA. But, it's not all! On Saturday afternoon, and unrelated to CAA, Thierry de Duve will kick off a 10-weeks seminar on Duchamp at the Mackey Apartments/MAK. The whole seminar costs $140, or you can pay $20 per session (there's a deep discount if you are a member), but this Saturday it is FREE. From 3 to 5 PM, after this the sessions will move over to Mondays, 7 to 9 PM. De Duve is one of Duchamp's foremost scholar, so this promises to be interesting.

After all these scholarly things, I feel like everybody will need to look at real art. Let me remind you that on Saturday night, For The Love Of Mike at the Farley Building will be an event showing Mike Kelley's videos for 24 hours.  MOCA has also put together its holdings of Mike Kelley's works (some of them fairly spectacular) while LACMA has done the same with its own super meager collection (3 or 4 works at most.) Please go look at Mike's art and have a thought for him and for all the works he has left us.

Invasion Of The Slide-Worshiping Zombies

A strange phenomenon has occurred this week in downtown Los Angeles. Hordes upon hordes of pallid, humorless and bespectacled killjoys, dressed in drab, unseasonal clothing, sporting strange unfashionable facial hair or absence of hair on top, regardless of gender, have assaulted the Convention Center. Not that the LACC itself is a particularly fun place to be in ordinary time, what with its institutional architecture and the occasional Matt Mullican artwork, but this week it has to endure the annual CAA conference. No, not the local CAA (hello tenpercenters! how's business in this economy? ) housed in the Century City Death Star, but the professional entity otherwise known as the College Art Association.
Every year they organize a behemoth nomadic gathering where art historians, artists, curators and critics meet, ostentatiously for scholarly sessions about solemn subjects ranging from the esoteric ( Cultures for Display: Practices of Exhibiting Non-Western and Latin-American Art In Euro-American Institutional Networks) to the generic (What is contemporary art?).

The esoteric example above is pretty typical of the poor vocabulary employed in that type of event: they could have easily shortened their title to: "Exhibiting other cultures in Western institutions", gee, I'm sure it would have lowered their carbon footprint a little bit, by one or two grams at least. In that same session someone uses the term "A Nonpolemicized Concept". Uh, "non polemical" is too plebeian? I understand the verb ending, thank you (can you believe I got a Ph. D. just so to be able to decipher Jargonese???), but, uh, if no one started a polemic about it, maybe it's not worth wasting a scholarly session on it, methinks.
On the other end of the spectrum, the generic one, I'm sure the participants must have had a great time defining : "what is what? What is is? what is contemporary? What is art?"

Usually they (CAA) keep their stuff in frigid cities back East, or even in the Midwest, so no one here really feels like it's a necessity to go there, unless one needs to apply for a teaching job and be interviewed at the cattle call held jointly, for fabulous 1-year non-renewable non-tenure track positions in unknown colleges in no less unknown towns where, no doubt, the food must be unspeakable, or worse, inedible. No wonder academics spend their time writing and reading crime novels! One need an outlet after being made to suffer through such indignities as enduring a CAA session where phrases include: "paradigmatic shift" (used mainly when things are stagnant), titles are made post-Barthesian by an immoderate use of the" / " or "and/or", identities are forever in the need to be reframed and concepts have to be hybridized, or worse, enhanced. "Politics" in your title earns you brownie points, "Questioning" and "Frameworks" within the same sentence can make you win the Monopoly!

All of this normally has to happen within a singular instance, such as: "Re/Framing hybridized identity - the nonpolemicized paradigmatic shift from Western exhibition practice to an enhanced experience of the Bamiliéké sculptural process at the Wetchester Municipal Gallery: whose signification is this? A case study." I think someone should do performance art about it, quick! Michael Smith, where are you?
One understand why academics as a whole body should be taken to drinking, or develop an addiction to Prozac (Cocaine is too expensive for scholars, and meth is reserved for hillbillies, despite being easier to procure in parts where dour scholars are forced to teach).
No wonder why scholars hate curators: not only museum people get to see REAL ART ALL THE TIME and not just slides (or more accurately: jpegs stolen off the internet and pasted onto dumb Ppt. presentations) but they get to hang out with art dealers and collectors at glam events where:
a) the food is much, much better,
b) sometimes the art dealers are generous with the coke picking up the tab (who hoo! conflict of interest!)
and
c) curators don't have to write Jargonese, since they have to make art understandable to everybody, not just to academics.
To balance it out, curators constantly have to legitimize what they do to the public at large, whereas art historians don't have to justify that much what they do, and they don't have to hustle for private money just to be able to do their job.

Besides the sessions and the job fair/cattle call, CAA is also a networking occasion. I always wonder if the scholars hook up (they're all housed in the same hotels), but from the look of them it doesn't seem like many of them are ever getting laid. Even the gay ones look drab! Go figure!
[Incidentally, if some male gay CAA attendees are reading this. For the love of everything that's sacred and holy and precious, please stop shaving your heads. It's soooo last century. Keep whatever you have left short, and invest in good hats, but stop the billiard ball look, OK?]

The problem with CAA, in all fairness, doesn't reside with the organization itself, but in the fact that art history in America hasn't exactly advanced as a discipline in general for a couple of decades now. IMHO it has remained stagnant for many of the same reasons that make "America The Concept" unpalatable to foreign populations: insularity.
It's all very well to go all anti-Western and to try to advance the cause of minorities within the art discourse, or to brandish political art as the only type worth studying, etc. but the problem it creates is a tiny, micro-sectioned view of art: take a small slice of the sample, hold it under the microscope, and use that tiny sample to draw conclusions. It can be useful, but only up to a point: by now most everybody is pretty well aware of the structure of power at play within the art discourse, so there's no reason to repeat the same conclusion ad nauseam.

Meanwhile, there's a partial loss of general knowledge about art history that make some US scholars (not all of them, mind you, but many who populate CAA sessions) seemingly unaware that there is or was a study of many of the same problems available 80, 100 years ago. It pains me to see people discoursing about Public Art without having any idea of what Alois Riegl has published about monuments. In 1903. Or that art historians would use the word "wunderkammer" without having read Julius von Schlosser (or without knowing the rules of the plural in German, but that's another debate).
I'm happy the Getty (the GRI) went out of its way to publish Aby Warburg's complete writings (the essay on International Astrology is a personal favorite) but I think they should provide the US art historians with a complete series panning the corpus of the discipline, so Pliny the Elder and Philostratus and Vitruvius and Vasari and Winckelmann, etc. would be readily available.
Aside from the discipline ancestors, there are loads of foreign art historians (German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) who are only partially translated or not translated at all in English, and sometimes British historians whose publications are not available here.
It's ridiculous, and it deprives young scholars from a deep well of knowledge that could, I don't know, prove useful, insightful, and may make them study broader problems than the problem of identity politics in the local display of watercolors. I know scholars should read at least 2 other languages, but let's be realistic, very few actually do, and finding foreign publications here when the domestic ones get out of print so fast is an expensive endeavor. In any case I think it would do the US practitioners of art history a lot of good to have this general corpus available, and it would help everybody to get out of the post-Greenberg-post-October-post-Critical-studies miasma we've been collectively immersed in for too long (I also think a hefty dose of sociology and anthropology would do everybody tons of good).

In addition, and this is for all art historians on the planet, not only the CAA attendees: I strongly advise you hang out with real artists, even if your specialty is 17th century Dutch or Precolumbian or whatever. It will give you a better understanding of the challenges of actually making art, which in turn could help you understand the how and why of the way art looks. So you can talk about it without having to resort to the tired clichés and/or the theoretical crutches you've been forced-fed in graduate school.

Of course like all dreary events there are a few highlights at CAA that help save it from total gloom: the Svletana Alpers lovefest yesterday, featuring FBC! favorite North American academic, the adorable Thomas Crow (who doesn't speak or write Jargonese ever! He loves real art! He's the nicest person ever! He knows who are all these people I've just written about, and he has read them!).
Stephen Melville, on the other hand, was totally boring. In attendance was Thierry de Duve, who supervised my master thesis (hi!), but as far as I know didn't present any paper at CAA.
At exactly the same time as the Alpers-session was a session on the Sublime I missed with Ivan Gaskell, whose writings I like. Read Gaskell!
I also got to hang out with Robert Simon of Robert Simon Fine Arts, who kindly gave us a tour of the Getty Baroque Emotions show (awesome show!). Very enjoyable, I learned a lot and he also obligingly confirmed the altarpiece painting here was late 15th/early 16th century Italian (he also told me the name but I didn't write it down, and the 2 pieces on the sides are Rubens). Running into various former colleagues from LACMA was fun.
Lastly, the book section made me stumble upon a new small press, Hol Art Books from Tucson, Arizona. They're reprinting articles about the 1913 Armory Show, for example (For and Against) as well as launching new publications by living authors very soon. They had the most adorable pink booth ever, and were the nicest people around. I hope you stop by and purchase some of their publications!

(pics, in no order: the Svletana Alpers panel, The back of Thierry de Duve's head, empty chairs at a session, part of the Matt Mullican Granite Panel piece at the LACC)

Curators And Scholars Deathmatch!!!

I was going to title this post “Institutional Critique And Its Discontent,” just to prove to the random graduate student who may stumble on this blog that, I, too, master the lingo. Pfew ! Dear readership, you escaped something.
Full disclosure, for those of my inadvertent readers on the scholarly side who may think I don’t know what I’m talking about: I do. I swear, I do!



What prompted this post was an encounter with a former colleague at a very cool party, a few weeks ago.
My friend had left the museum world almost 3 years ago to attend a Ph. D. program in art history in one of LA’s region local universities. No, I’m not going to tell you which one. The best one of them, yes. She’s terrifically smart.
During the course of our conversation, after I asked her if she was happy with her program, she turned to me and said: “You know what? These art historians, they are not like us”. What??? Did she mean they ate little children for breakfast? Or ignored the use of deodorant? (I'm afraid some of them do).
So I pressed her on, and she continued by saying how academics didn’t care for the art and its interpretation the way curators (and generally speaking, museum people) do.
I was a bit startled, not by her reflection but by the fact that I felt something similar too. I had dismissed my feelings as essentially another proof of my inherent restlessness and my ever-present ability to get bored very, very quickly.

I was fascinated by this conversation because the dichotomy between Academia and museum people here seems so acute I had trouble to believe it when I came back to continue my career in sunny California. I couldn’t understand how people kept on asking me what I was.
Was I a critic? A curator? An art historian? A teacher? A writer?
I still don’t understand why I would have to choose and why I couldn’t be all of the above? I mean, in Europe it’s routine to wear many hats in the art world, if only because art jobs pay so little it is impossible to survive without having several activities. No one can pay the rent by being an art critic alone, freelance curating certainly doesn’t bring as much money as the amount of work that goes into mounting an exhibition should be worth, and all teaching jobs tend to be part-time. None of these separately can cover the insane rents charged in Paris or London, for instance. So everyone does everything and the quality of the work doesn’t seem to otherwise suffer. Actually, Euro art critics (they all teach and some of them curate) tend to be more educated, well-rounded and interesting than their US counterparts. Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw or Jan Verwoert come to mind.

So I never, for the life of me, even thought I had to make a decision and stick to just ONE of these activities. Also, I am used to the ongoing dialogue in Europe between academics and art people. In Paris I routinely saw Sorbonne instructors and professors alike at openings or simply gallery-hopping. Many museum people attend public lectures by renowned academics. In fact most museums in France routinely schedule conferences, symposia and lectures in the “expanded field” (to borrow a term from Rosalind Krauss). These tend to be free, but most importantly they are part of the regular programming at museums, where it is believed the general public can round up its intellectual education, in addition to aesthetic pleasure provided by the art. Indeed, both are inseparable in everybody’s mind.
There isn’t that much of a distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture either and many academics don’t feel threatened by popular culture the way they are in the US.
It is true Euro-Academia tends to be conservative, but there is a little bit more openness and leeway in Europe I believe. For example my friend Jessie Bi wrote his Ph D. dissertation on “Silent Comics” and he didn’t have to flee the Art History Department for some improbable Cultural Studies or Linguistics one.
In addition, at my second (don’t ask) Alma Mater the Ecole du Louvre, roughly 90% of the faculty is composed of curators and/or museum people. It is in fact a school requirement that the teaching body as a whole should have a real art world credential/job/work experience. And everyone publishes, whether it is art criticism or scholarly articles. In fact the Pompidou publishes one very distinguished learned journal, Les Cahiers Du MNAM (a cross between October and Art Journal, but less dogmatic than October), and the Louvre publishes La Revue Du Louvre (sorry, no direct link). So all in all I never really felt there was that much of a gap between the two worlds, with the exception that academics are generally not that much up to date on contemporary art, but they should be given credit for trying.


I had a first inkling of how different things were in the US when SoCCAs organized an event at LACMA called “Institutional Critique And After”. For my 2 non-art readers, Institutional Critique (IC)* is some highfalutin name given to a branch of conceptual/post-conceptual art that finds nothing better to do than interrogate art institutions practices embodied by The Museum In General (not the art schools and the art history programs, incidentally). It’s been developed by artists, most famously Daniel Buren in France. In Southern California the best-known artist is Michael Asher, and in NYC that would be Andrea Fraser, though some think only Hans Haacke is the real deal. IC started as a reflection on the “White Cube” (the always white physical space of the contemporary art galleries) but soon enough branched into a critique of the art institutions themselves, collectively dumped into the The Museum category .
Why The Museum, dear non-art reader? Well, because all artists want to show there and become part of the collections. They don’t critique commercial galleries that much because they know no art dealer would ever be coerced in feeling guilty about not showing them (ha!), nor do they blame Academia because in many cases, they are part of it, and if not they know that even though Academia is where art history is written, it is not where their potential audience lies.


I didn’t participate much in the organization of the symposium itself for family reasons, but Rita G., Da Best Curator In This Town, did work on it quite a bit, but I watched from afar, mostly. I must say I found it funny how an academic organization approached the museum when looking for a host, as they pretty well knew the museum wouldn’t have said no or we would have passed for a bunch of conservatives nitwits unwilling to review our own institutional flailing. Thus being cornered into graciously blocking an auditorium, getting the cost of the symposium organization shouldered more than partially by our institution, the thing had to pursue it course. Didn’t they need us, these Institutional critics!

[In all fairness I'm speaking more generally about the documents I read prior to the symposium than about what went on there, as I have almost no recollection of what was said then and since I don't have the book handy, I'm drawing big generalizations about IC, rather than reporting anything specific debated about at the symposium]

In any case I was a bit taken aback at some of the swipes against The Museum As A General Category Representing The Institution At Large, when really the collective enemy, if there really has to be one, should have been either The Unbridled Market (usually defended by Dave Hickey, absent there) or maybe The Absence of Political Consensus To Support The Arts.
Uh?
Don’t most artists want to be represented in museums collections or have exhibitions there? Yes, I thought so too. Selling is good for the wallet, but it doesn’t bring in any prestige, let alone historical status. As far as being only recognized in the pages of October or Critical Inquiry, well , that’s pretty much the only place where someone like, say, Silvia Kolbowski has some recognized existence. Not sure she has something going on elsewhere, no?.


Another encounter with a large congregation of academics drove the point home when I attended the CAA annual meat market fest in Boston** in 2006. (Note to Mike and Annie: no, not that CAA. This one. As dreary as the Century City Death Star-looking building, but far less moneyed). Granted, I was still in a catatonic state of shock, owing to a very spectacular car crash on the day where I had to fly in, but even if I make abstraction of it, I still made this astonishing discovery: US academics are NOT funny. But really, really not.

It was winter,snowing and cold, OK but :

a) no one had any fashion sense, regardless of gender and/or sexual orientation (FYI male art historians have an overwhelming tendency to be gay, with maybe the exception of photo people when they specialize in photojournalism).
b) everyone took themselves soooooooo seriously.
c) most people seemed to walk as if they had a broomstick stuck up their a…..
d) no one seemed to care about art itself. Just the discourse about it.
e) conversations were dreadful, boring and generally tense.
f) the gala party was one of the gloomiest, bleakest, dreariest, ghastliest affair I have ever attended, and God knows how many social functions I have been to in my professional art life.

I did stick to my fellow museum colleagues and friends because they seemed so much more real than all these newly minted Ph.D. hunting for tenure track positions. There were a few exceptions, like people from Williams who seemed normal and nice and to enjoy food and partying. Like us art people.
But I never really felt at home until I met with MIT curator Bill Arning who kindly told me about the Giant Art Party there, and when we got there Austen and I ran into Michael Smith! Aaahhh, relief. Smith had just made a new video, where he was taking this MIT online course to become an air traffic controller. Hilarious, as usual. Hurry, someone to give him a well-deserved retrospective! I hadn’t seen Smith in about 8 years and it was nice to see what he was doing. Plus, he is in person a very agreeable fellow. And he has the BEST eyebrows in the entire artworld, and probably the rest of the universe too.

Anyway, what I gathered from these encounters, lectures and discussions at CAA, and at the IC symposium, and from this discussion with my former colleague, was that US academics despise museum people, and more generally tend to consider us as a bunch of largely under-educated retarded trust-fund babies who can’t distinguish between Identity Politics and Post-Structuralism. Not that it is very useful when fundraising to mount a Tacida Dean retrospective, mind you.
My former colleague told me they went as far as telling her how surprised they were at the quality of her work, “given where she was coming from”. Never mind she had an MA, spoke several languages fluently, and hey, she’s smart too! Like, they got her into their program to rescue her from a miserable life of obscurantism in the museum world?
Not only this, but museum staff must be amongst the most over-educated, underpaid demographic on the planet. You would never believe the number of people who routinely hold MA.s at every level: secretaries, registrars, technicians, etc.
The fact that to be a curator in most museums nowadays you have to be at least an ABD, and many, many of us hold Ph.D. doesn’t seem to have registered in Academia. And, oh, you know, these language exams you have to take when doing your coursework? You know what, in museums we have to use foreign languages ALL THE TIME. Most of us are fluent in 2 or 3 languages. We SPEAK them when we go abroad. No, we don’t get our graduate students or TA.s to translate essays and articles for us, we’re grown-ups. In clear, we come from the same world as you, you boring nitwits. We even read your obscure and often poorly written publications, in case we’d like to give you asylum in our catalogues. Yes, that catalogue essay paid for your nice mid-century Danish dining table and chairs. If we were not so busy doing fundraising, maintaining our collection, deaccessing, we would write the essays ourselves.

What strikes me the most with his huge gap is the way US art historians tend to forget that art is object-oriented, even when it’s conceptual (see the upcoming Lawrence Weiner show at MOCA). Duh. It’s very nice to publish stuff about the theory of the gaze or the scopic impulse, but if there wasn’t an art object in the first place, what would be the subject of your savant musings? Art as idea as idea, maybe so, but even Kosuth’s thoughts are embodied in a physical dimension.
Not only this is an evidence (or it should be), but another one is museums are the places where art is physically cared for.
Art doesn’t exist only in the virtual world of slides or jpegs, no matter what Walter Benjamin wrote about mechanical reproduction. Maybe the aura was destroyed in your scholarly minds (and only there, mind you)***, but if you were doing your art historian job correctly, you would bother to check some inessential things such as: size, color, scale, volume, small details, etc. So you wouldn't state gross mistakes because the color on your reproduction is off.For example.

But really, aside from the fact that many, many museum curators are scholars in their own right and often curate groundbreaking exhibitions, what I find compelling is the absence of academics roaming around town to look at the art (with the huge exception of Thomas Crow, who has now departed the Getty for NYU. Tom, we miss you). You almost never see any of the art history various local faculties at openings or even contacting museums to bring their classes and look at the art in person. It seems they all believe art is better viewed in dark classes, watching slides or PowerPoint presentations. I almost never run into scholars when gallery hopping or visiting various museums, with the exception once again of the Getty people, who operate in a research center linked to a museum and not in a degree-granting university.
Lastly, most exhibitions curated by scholars suck. I can name two on the top of my head: L’Informe, in 1996 at the Pompidou, curated by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, which as a totally rigid, formalist, dogmatic installation, totally betrayed the Bataille “concept” (of formlessness/shapelessness) they were trying to demonstrate. And Voici, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (in 2001 I think) curated by someone I like very much and under whom I have done research, Thierry de Duve. It was so poorly installed despite great artworks I felt really terrible for de Duve, who is such a kind and nice man in addition to a first-rate Duchamp scholar (and wrote great things about Jeff Wall too!).
Sadly, art historians tend to be text-oriented as opposed to visually bent. If art history was solely left to them without us**** museum people, it is likely very little art would ever appeal to the public in general. Because you cannot hang art works with ideas and chronology alone: it looks terrible.

Anyway, I’m past 2,500 words and counting, so the result is: academics, you bunch of hypocrites, be more respectful of us or else we’ll boycott your essays in our catalogues. You will have to find something else to pay for your next vacation in Tuscany. And please try to take yourselves less seriously, you're not really fun to hang out with. Maybe that's why you despise us in fact: you are secretly envious of our parties!



*In passing, I find it funny how IC was meant as a critique of The Institution, but its name could as well mean the critique has become an institution itself, as in the Mexican PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party.
** Dear DLC, if I ever have to go back to Boston, please let me know where I can get great espresso. I was miserable the whole time there and I’m sure it’s because I didn’t know where to look. Thanks in advance!
*** a real ambitious scholar should revisit this essay in the light of the 70 years of history that have passed and see how it has stood the test of time. It’s pretty obvious to me that despite some marginal cases of sellout (Magritte, Dali, Impressionists) the iconic quality of the artwork remains.
****I’m including myself even though I’m not working in a museum at present, but I’ll get back home as soon as there’s some room for me.