Equity
Just caught up on reading all the emails I’ve gotten from e-flux over the last several months and, as usual, found a couple of interesting links which, then, led me to other links…and so on and so on and so on. Potentially a very dangerous way to spend the day. One, Hassan Khan’s RANT published in the e-flux online mag, the other a blurb on a group in New York, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).
Before I go any further, it’s probably best to explain that for the most part I have exited from the ‘scene’ criticized in RANT and found my way back to the work and, that on the topic of galleries, get snarky, which is a waste of energy better spent daydreaming, napping or reading a novel.
If you can get beyond the fact that RANT is so obtuse as to fail at actual communication, sounding like Rosalind Krauss on a bad-hair day, there are some valuable nuggets hidden in the artspeak (ironic as it places the rant squarely within the scene it critiques).
My favorite bit is at the beginning:
How do we survive the poisoned glance, the uncomfortable handshakes, the innuendos of undeserved arrogance? We might recognize that introverted scenes produce bile and hysterical defensiveness, yet we remain unable to discover alternatives—this is not that alternative, but only the chance to go into free fall. We begin with a scene at the end of its limits—a scene unable to go beyond the sound of its own insecure high-pitched neurotic voice, a scene on the brink of implosion. The members of this scene are stuck between a craving for validation and approval and the fallout that accompanies unrequited desires.
Every artist knows the worried expression of the curator or director who, on meeting your glance at an art opening, quickly looks away, terrified that you, the artist, are going to hit them up. Also we all know what it is like to be engaged in fitful conversation at these openings with someone whose attention is taken away by scanning the crowd for a more important person they might engage.
The second source that piqued my interest, W.A.G.E., is unfortunately doomed. The Canadian and European models it propounds are unlikely to ever be instituted in the U.S. Still, it’s interesting to read these models (linked to from the W.A.G.E. website) as information you can use to find your own way within the scene while definitely taking a detour around the whining tone of deserving more than you’re getting and the belief that someone else can do for you what you should do yourself.
Why doomed? Well, there’s a link from the W.A.G.E. website to a Code of Ethics by the National Artists Equity Association in 1974. For those of you counting, that’s 35 years ago. And has anything changed? No. Also, if you try to find a website for the National Artists Equity Association you’ll be led to a lame portal site, mostly advertising, and a notice that their domain may be for sale. Sad state of affairs. I won’t even bother providing a link.
On the bright side, I got some affirmation from both sources on my decision to exit myself from the scene for the most part, and find a way that a recluse like myself is happier. That is to do my work when I can and when I’m inspired and to support myself financially doing something else which gives me the freedom to work only with a few galleries where the relationship is a good and pleasurable one and overcome my reservations about providing galleries with free inventory.
