Original article can be viewed here:
http://glasstire.com/2012/07/27/dear-young-dfw-whippersnapper-artists/
"The new normal should be anything but. Time to fuck shit up.
Dear Young DFW Whippersnapper Artists,
Whatever the last “up” economy may have taught you, in your teen
years, about what art is, how it should look in an art fair booth or ad
in
Artforum, how it’s valued, how famous you can get, how
dealers will snap you up, etc.? No. Congrats for paying attention and
for knowing who Martin Creed is, by the way, but that kind of
sophistication can only take you so far.
The new normal is that it’s all in your broke hands now. And there is
no real economy for your art being made here in DFW. Almost none. Not
enough to make a living. And there isn’t a mainstream press, like there
is in NYC and London, to cover your career if you made a commercial leap
anyway. And that’s okay. Because this kind of vacuum is when it’s time
to fuck things up. This is a magic hour, a once-in-a-lifetime chance
when you have nothing to lose, and the place that you’re in—your
neighborhood, your city, your region—if you get busy, can get really
interesting.
I’m picking on you lot because you aren’t painters (another breed
entirely), and you aren’t makers of pretty things and decorative
objects. Your brains are wired the right way to fuck shit up. And I’m
not writing about Houston or Brooklyn or Silver Lake either. I’m writing
about here.
But let’s illustrate this with an example.
Once upon a time, in the 1970s (I know, like, when your parents were
young and skinny and did drugs and shit) in a place called Akron, Ohio,
this thing happened. Just watch the short clip.
https://vimeo.com/43157612
Devo
The new normal should be anything but. Time to fuck shit up.
Dear Young DFW Whippersnapper Artists,
Whatever the last “up” economy may have taught you, in your teen
years, about what art is, how it should look in an art fair booth or ad
in
Artforum, how it’s valued, how famous you can get, how
dealers will snap you up, etc.? No. Congrats for paying attention and
for knowing who Martin Creed is, by the way, but that kind of
sophistication can only take you so far.
The new normal is that it’s all in your broke hands now. And there is
no real economy for your art being made here in DFW. Almost none. Not
enough to make a living. And there isn’t a mainstream press, like there
is in NYC and London, to cover your career if you made a commercial leap
anyway. And that’s okay. Because this kind of vacuum is when it’s time
to fuck things up. This is a magic hour, a once-in-a-lifetime chance
when you have nothing to lose, and the place that you’re in—your
neighborhood, your city, your region—if you get busy, can get really
interesting.
I’m picking on you lot because you aren’t painters (another breed
entirely), and you aren’t makers of pretty things and decorative
objects. Your brains are wired the right way to fuck shit up. And I’m
not writing about Houston or Brooklyn or Silver Lake either. I’m writing
about here.
But let’s illustrate this with an example.
Once upon a time, in the 1970s (I know, like, when your parents were
young and skinny and did drugs and shit) in a place called Akron, Ohio,
this thing happened. Just watch the short clip.
Akron. a college town in the middle of nowhere. These guys were your
age when they started paying attention and got angry and started making
art (that in their case took the form of something like music,
performance and video). Being polite was not on the menu. MTV did not
exist. There was no Internet. And there was no local press to make them
famous.
Yet they are iconic. Akron is famous for one thing, really: Devo.
Luckily, their friends back then did document enough of it, and word
spread, and they kept working on their own very strange vision of the
world, and within a few years they were blowing people’s minds on
national television.
Back to the here and now. Why is DFW so polite? I don’t want to call
this place the Metroplex, but whatever. Golden Triangle. Whatever. Its
politeness is due to what you think it is: religion, screwy politics,
the conservative way money is made and spent. So few artists,
gallerists, curators, collectors and museums here are taking any risk,
whatsoever, that you start to forget what risk looks like. Certainly the
people in charge of this stuff seem to have forgotten what it is, even
if they were young and interesting like you once. (“How soon will you
become the people that you hated?” asks Gerald Casale.)
Why are our youngest, clearest, hormone-and-energy laden
brains—you—not going ballistic? Don’t you feel like caged animals? I’m a
42-year-old writer, and I do. But I don’t make art. I just show it.
It was the ‘70s when Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale started
worrying about Americans getting dumber and uglier and more violent and
lazy: de-evolution. But look at the world today. As Mothersbaugh says in
that clip, from a recent interview: “The last eight years have been a
really swift downhill ride.”
This applies to the art world, too. The museums, the galleries, the
nature of collecting, the nature of philanthropy. It’s all fossilizing
and closing ranks. Pretty soon even LA MoCA, an institution founded by
and protected by artists for decades, will consist only of two powerful
businessmen:
Eli Broad and that megalomaniacal asswipe Jeffrey Deitch.
Downhill ride, indeed, for you artists. Make it fun and honest, at least.
Just get fucking weird. Tap into those things that most turned you on
last year, the year before, when you were fifteen, eighteen. The stuff
you were afraid to bring to light, lest your parents or siblings or
neighbors or professors stomped on it. The more genuine and honest you
are about it, the better shot you have at communicating something real
and identifiable to the world. It’s the secret of great art. Real art,
great art, is the geeks’ paradise.
Look outside the art world if you need more reference. Look at Trey
Parker and Matt Stone. Look at Patton Oswalt, Louis C.K., and Ricky
Gervais and Mike Judge. David Lynch, Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling and freaking
Alan Moore. Robert Crumb. The Flaming Lips, the Butthole Surfers. These
people started with small, smart, impulses—subversive and impolite and
odd as hell (and very, very personal) and ran with it. And wow. It
worked. Subversive is not bad. Stop letting this polite environment keep
you down. Collaborate, for courage, if you must (often helpful), or
not. Up to you.
Sometimes rich people get wind of the good stuff, and want to own it.
That’s what they do. They can’t make, so they buy it or pay to produce
it. That doesn’t mean they get it, but take their money if they offer
it. Plenty of people who can’t afford the work do get it, and will love
you for being the shaman and truth tellers of the world. Just like
everyone who knows anything loves Devo.
Godspeed.
Love,
CR"
_________________
Christina Rees was an editor at The Met
and D Magazine
, a full-time art and music critic at the Dallas Observer
, and has covered art and music for the Village Voice
and other publications. She was the owner and director of Road Agent gallery in Dallas. Rees is now the Curator of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, TCU.
