In obedience to ancient traditions designed to reassure the wealthy, art is, unlike porn, not evaluated solely according to whether you’d want to look at it or not. Critics judge the work according to the messages it communicates to the culture at large and the intelligence of the artist doing the communicating. This involves the critics in two hilarious fictions: that maintaining some arrangement of objects in a remote white room in an upscale neighborhood for a month is a way to communicate a message to the culture at large, and that someone who thinks it is could possibly be intelligent.
The job requires rare powers of cause-and-effect denial. Give four art people a banana and they will say: It’s wonderfully yellow, it’s too yellow, it’s not yellow enough, I’m so glad it isn’t yellow, and then say it’s wonderfully squishy, it’s too squishy, it’s not squishy . . . And on and on until the banana gets so famous that they start getting paid to agree that the banana is yellow and good.
My work, they say, is sexy, and not sexy, and too sexy, and fringy and edgy, and neither fringy nor edgy, and too fringy and edgy to be relevant, and colorful and not colorful enough, and on and on.
So it’s very hard to care or think any of it matters. Every artist’s press release says the artist’s work “raises issues of . . .” as if a visual artist’s work in the zeros ever raised any issue. What people say is not as important for business as the fact that they say things and get paid to say them and the things they say them about get paid for. It is not an environment that incentivizes people to say or make things that make any sense. It is a living though, and one of the better ones.
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