The Legacy of Thomas Kinkaid, Dead at 54, Lives On

His Impact on Art Economics and Visual Culture Defines a Modern Debate

When the painter Thomas Kinkaid, 54, unexpectedly died in his sleep last week at his home in Los Gatos, California, the devoted fans of his cheerful artworks—and the firm that sells his art prints, the Thomas Kinkade Co.—assured the world that his legacy would live on.

            Millions of copies of his paintings still adorn American living rooms and calendars, and the “Kinkaid” brand name still goes with Bible verses and curios. But the real core of his legacy will be the debate that he stirred in the American art world.

            Neither chic, bohemian, nor avant-garde, Kinkaid claimed to be “the painter of light,” literally and figuratively, as he rose to prominence in the 1980s. He was a somewhat guileless, born-again entrepreneur who made millions upon millions selling his products to fellow Christians, when most artists, curators, and museums were struggling to pay the rent.

            The critics said he had ruined art with his kitschy paintings of garish landscapes, which often went to extremes with bright colors. They said he compromised his integrity by franchising his art on mugs, collector plates, figurines, home furnishings, and even a planned housing community that mimicked his idyllic village scenes.

            One suspects, however, that both the deep loyalty of some Americans to Kinkaid, and the intense criticism he generated from the modernist art camp, was far more about money and culture than the way he handled a paintbrush.

            No one can seriously deny that Kinkaid was a dedicated, skilled artist. He had practiced since his un-privileged youth in rural northern California. He sketched and sketched, went to a Los Angeles art college, published a sketchbook, and painted for an animation studio. As even most painters will concede, he was quite a good plein air—that is, outdoor scenery—painter when he first started replicating his canvases as art prints on a shinny faux canvas material. The offended critics called his art “schlock,” and worse. But by any measure, Kinkaid was a quintessential craftsman who could have taken any artistic direction he chose.

            That was when Kinkaid put his finger in the wind—much as the Pop artists of the 1960s had done—and realized that, commercially, he could do best by selling decorative art to a vast population that liked something between a Disneyland fantasy and a Norman Rockwell small-town scene. Kinkaid had always admired Disney and Rockwell. So he began to produce the Kinkaid hybrid—cozy, bright, soft, and sentimental scenes of village bridges, candle-lit cottages, and pink clouds—without a bit of embarrassment.

            Having returned to the evangelical Christianity of his youth, Kinkaid realized that in the 1980s, a time of religious resurgence, ordinary churchgoers would be a big part of his audience. In effect, it was an early version of the Wal-Mart audience, millions of average-earning, traditional-values Americans. They had no truck with modern art, and they did not mind buying prints in frames to hang on their living room walls.

            For those who were evangelicals (a third of the U.S. population), Kinkaid was “one of us,” and this surely boosted his exploits in retail. In time, his Media Arts Group became the first company owned by an artist to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. In its boom years, the company had thousands of dealers and earned a few hundred million per year.

             Like evangelicals in real estate or Amway, a loyal network of people reached out and sold Kinkaid art prints and items—often in malls—and as business boomed, so did a few ethical and legal problems. The Kinkaid market became inflated. Many of the franchise dealers felt they were duped, by religious sincerity, into a pyramid scheme, and a few proved their case in court, winning million-dollar settlements.

            The rise and fall of Kinkaid, which included public disclosure after 2006 of his battle with alcohol, some lewd behavior, and a recent divorce, was celebrated gleefully by his critics. He was not only an artist who betrayed the true calling, they said, he was also a Christian hypocrite—the one remaining “minority” that can be flogged in public.

            Nevertheless, Kincaid had been an astounding success—the most collected artist in America, his works reputedly in 20 million homes. Not a little art world envy followed his exploits. As analysts have noted, his millions came from the masses, not from a few billionaire collectors, as is the case with the upscale avant-garde. With his financial independence, he could also offer a few zingers, saying that true enough, his “paintings of light” were quite different from the “fecal school” of modern art.

            Many high-tone critics continue the ritual of name calling at Kinkaidian art. They hope against hope to banish its influence and embarrassing success from American culture. That will never happen, however. As CBS News headlined this week: “Thomas Kinkade’s art work gets a boost in sales since his unexpected death.” Not a few art theorists have already announced that mass produced art, and even kitsch, have laid claim to the modern world, so why not enjoy it? Every group in society needs its own art. For the many it will be Kinkaid, for the few, Mapplethorp.

            Money and culture—these hot topics, and not overly-sweet landscapes, will keep the Kinkaid legacy alive. Kinkaid spoke to a social strata, and cultural viewpoint, unreachable to modern art, both visually and religiously. He also ended up with more money than he could responsibly handle. And that perhaps is the best argument for keeping alive our sentimental romance with the struggling, impoverished artist.

The “Art District” Movement Eyes Urban Renewal

A National Symposium Probes How Culture Can Improve City Life

BALTIMORE—Arts and urban renewal, seemingly strange bedfellows, were comparing notes in a big way in Baltimore this week.

            Under the umbrella of the annual Main Street Conference, held for three decades by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, more than 150 art activists and entrepreneurs from nine states gathered to share stories about the newest thing in urban renewal: the state designated “art district.”

            The first National Symposium on Arts/Cultural/Entertainment Districts was also a barometer of how the National Endowment for the Arts is thinking these days. Last year, the NEA issued its first “Our Town” grants to art projects aimed a civic renewal. Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District not only won a grant, but was tapped to host the national symposium as well.

            The “art district” movement is just a decade old. Rhode Island was the first state to create such districts, which are parts of a city or town that receive an “art district” designation, tax breaks, and other financial incentives. Nationwide, art districts are typically found a bit over from downtown. Their key to success is having four “cultural assets.” These are culture-related businesses, practicing artists, non-profit groups, and cultural customers. According to studies, 80 percent of those culture customers come from elsewhere, making an art district a potential economic engine, especially in the usually poorer city sections where the art clusters often grow.

            In 2001, Maryland was the second state to designate art districts, of which there are now 19 (each with a ten-year limit to prove durability). The Station North Arts District, for example, has long had the natural cultural resources of an art college, a city university, train station hub, and symphony hall. But in reality, the district is mostly poor neighborhoods blighted after the 1968 riots. Such an art district has plenty of room for economic, environmental, and cultural development.

            Every once in a while the hands-on art district worker needs a bigger picture of the trend. At the symposium, that was provided by the leading art district researcher, Mark J. Stern of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.

           Stern and his colleagues have been mapping “natural cultural districts” since the 1990s, mainly in Philadelphia, but now Baltimore and Seattle as well. “Natural cultural districts are initiated from the bottom,” Stern said in a keynote address. They emerge from a unique or historic local chemistry, typified by resident artists, mixed incomes, reasonable housing costs, ethnic diversity, and what Stern called a dominance of “non-family households.” Arts and entertainment, however, is what seems to glue these communities together and make them attractive to culture customers.

            Once these art hubs are discovered, cities and real estate developers are often eager to come in and try to “improve” the situation—either as a strictly profit-making proposition, or to alleviate the poverty and social stress of a poorer neighborhood. From a strictly social point of view, these art enclaves are worth preserving because their diversity breeds ethnic tolerance. Also, properties are better cared for. Crime can lessen. Children do better. Rents stay reasonable.

            For most art districts, Stern said, the diversity and stability is more important to the local economics than the “selling of tickets” to big art events. But when one of these vital art districts is suddenly “discovered,” somebody will inevitably start thinking about how to draw large crowds to sell loads of tickets (or drinks, or artworks, or boutique items). It is at that point that art district policy becomes complex and demands wisdom. Once an art district becomes a commercial success, the economic and racial diversity may decline. This is typically known as gentrification. The rents in such a “cool” artsy neighborhood rise. Only the prosperous can live there.

            For most of the art district advocates who came to Baltimore, the idea of a generous financial “intervention” is hard to turn down. What art district would not want better transportation to bring cultural customers, or the opening of an impressive new art or entertainment facility? But many of the local art workers would probably agree with Stern—an urban theoretician only—that the wisest way to develop an art district is gradually. “It’s a very complex urban ecology, and we need to be careful,” Stern said. “Successful cultural districts tend to destroy [ethnic and economic] diversity.”

            He sees two solutions. Both of them have benefits and down-sides. The first is to welcome the infusion of “cataclysmic money.” This can upgrade an art district overnight. It also tends to produce a “winner-take-all” art neighborhood. A few artists and establishments get rich. The majority get stuck. Stern prefers the second solution, which is the gradual building up of networks of support and business. This approach also loves to receive money from the city, philanthropists, and businesses, but only to “compensate” for economic rough spots, not as cash to accelerate a sudden boom.

            The data that Stern and his team are generating is perhaps the best in the field. Not only are local art district workers interested in the findings, but the NEA is designing grant programs—such as Our Town—around the data. Urban renewal remains a challenge. The arts are only one weapon. So Stern left his audience with more of a dilemma than a solution, but as laborers in the arts vineyard, they clearly understand that. “How do we build those districts without undermining their diversity?” he asked in closing.

College Art Students Face a Challenging Future

Studies Show that Arts and Humanities Jobs are Harder to Find

Twenty million U.S. undergraduate students have recently returned to their college classes from spring break. Right about now, most of them are thinking short-term. They are thinking about reaching the end of the school year. They are thinking about summer.

            For seniors, however, graduation day means going into the workplace. American schools have about 70,000 undergraduate students in the visual arts, so about a quarter of them are in those graduation shoes. Although the statistics for art jobs are not optimistic, if anyone can outsmart the trends, it might be the art students. They are to be the future members of the “creative class” in society.

            They begin their careers with some glum data, however. One recent study found that recent undergraduate degrees in architecture and art rank highest for the unemployed: 13.9 percent for architecture (because of the housing industry collapse) and 11.1 percent for the arts. Every “soft” field of study (that is, everything in college that is not science, technology, engineering, or math) shows a tougher job market. Recent graduates with any kind of humanities degree show a 9.4 percent unemployment rate, according to Census data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

            Clearly, college graduates with science degrees or who entered fields of growth—such as healthcare, business, education, or engineering—are most likely to find a career-related job right out of college. Unemployment for students with recent degrees in health or education, for example, is just 5.4 percent.

            These employment numbers can be looked at in many different ways, of course. For example, about 89 percent of college art students have found a job—not too bad, though the employment obviously mixes good and bad pay and jobs unrelated to art. Art students are not too much worse off than all recent college graduates, who report an average unemployment of 8.9 (a bit worse than the national average). What is more, college graduates still have a great advantage over the rest of the population. Americans with a recent high school diploma are 22.9 unemployed; high school dropouts are at 31.5 percent.

            The dour employment news is not hurting art’s popularity, it seems. College study of the various visual arts is among the more popular of 173 majors, according to Census surveys. Commercial art and graphic design rank 21 of the 173. Other art majors rank this way: fine arts (22); architecture (33); art and music education (48); film video and photographic arts (54); art history and criticism (81). Enrollment in the most popular fields of college study vastly outnumbers the others, since they offer guaranteed job tracks, such as the degree in accounting (4 of 173 in popularity).

            Art popularity does circumvent the problem of studying science, which by consensus continues to be the hardest of college studies. Some students simply have the science-and-math gift, or they have early school training that makes college science easier. The vast majority of college students find science to be very challenging. At the same time, many in the arts clearly feel they have a gift, too, but it’s in artistic ability. So why study science when the instinct flows elsewhere?

            Perhaps the only reason not to follow the art instinct is the cost of college. Every one must now think of college as an investment. Students need a job quick to pay off student debt, which today averages from $20,000 to $40,000.

            At this point, even the art student needs to remember that education is also about human development—that is, life skills. True enough, surveys of students show that the highest motivation for college (77 percent) is to make good money. There once was a time when students believed that paying for college was like a guaranteed ticket to a job. Students are more skeptical now, but college enrollment continues to rise. Meanwhile, student surveys also show that the second highest priority for college students (47 percent) is “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”

            Among art school educators, human development usually has been as important as the skills. Robert Milnes, an art professor at the University of North Texas and president of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), recently told fellow art college teachers that the “whole person” is what they are trying to address. “Our job, like that of a coach, is to train young students to be professionals on one hand and to help them become better people on the other,” he said, using a sports analogy in his fall NASAD address for this school year.

            The rate of college art grads who give up art and design within five to fifteen years is very high, Milnes said. But as in sports, the picture is mixed: “Some [grads] will become quite wealthy, maybe right out of school even, but the great majority of our art and design students will, like college athletes, go on to fulfilling lives in which their major art or design activity during school may or may not be the most significant issue or their primary source of income, though they may always value their experience.”

            The odds of making it big as an artists are tough, though there is nothing that blocks college art grads from having a productive life. “The time we have with the students is about their development as well as expertise at a particular practice,” said Milnes, emphasizing that brighter side of what every art student can achieve. “Life values and decision-making skills have to be a good part of what we teach.”

Drilling for a “Lost da Vinci” Mural

Florence, Italy, Troubled by Researchers Tampering with Ancient Art

When Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes were cleaned in the 1980s and ‘90s, the restoration project received praise and criticism. Of the latter, critics said the massive touch-up ruined the antique authenticity of the Michelangelo paintings, making them look too pretty.

            This month, a similar debate took off in Florence, Italy, where a swashbuckling researcher has drilled small holes into a massive fresco by one Renaissance master to see if another fresco—done by Leonardo da Vinci—is hidden underneath. The project has evoked all the hoopla of a “Lost da Vinci.” It has also forced Da Vinci mystery hunters, art historians, and Florentine politicians into a debate on how far to go in tampering with works done 500 years ago.

            The missing Da Vinci mural is a mainstream topic in art history.

            Around 1505, Florence had commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural in its city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, portraying the Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo got most of it done, but then abandoned the work. Later artists, such as Rubens, saw enough of Leonardo’s composition of furious combat between men and horse to make full sketches. Leonardo also left behind his own small drawings.

            Then in the 1550s, another formidable mural artist, Giorgio Vasari, was ordered by the duke of Florence to remodel the entire civic hall and paint new murals of a more recent Florentine victory, the Battle of Marciano. The mystery is this: What did Vasari do with Leonardo’s old battle mural? Did he whitewash over it? Or did he build a secret double wall to hide and preserve the laborious work done by Leonardo for future generations?

            In 1975, the famous art sleuth Maurizio Seracini, who investigates the authenticity of artworks, noticed that a green battle flag in one of the Vasari murals bore the words, “Seek and you will find.” Knowing his art history, Seracini theorized that in that area, Vasari must have built a double wall over Leonardo’s Anghiari mural to save it from destruction.

            Last week, on March 12, Seracini and his sponsor, the National Geographic Society, announced that by drilling 14 tiny holes in the Vasari mural and inserting medical optical probes, they found an air space and what looked like paint, brush strokes, and bits of material that could be the black pigment and reddish varnish of Leonardo.

            To get to that drilling stage, Seracini had to persuade Florence and the art history establishment that his theory was sound enough to risk damaging the Vasari murals. Seracini requested permission to drill in 2006. Last year a restricted drilling was performed (only in cracks and restored surfaces, and thus not marring anything original). Last week’s press conference in Florence declared that the minimal drilling produced “encouraging” evidence of a long-lost Leonardo.

            To fuel the excitement, National Geographic aired a documentary on Sunday, “Finding the Lost da Vinci,” which sets the tone for the publicity that will now surround future decisions on what to do next.

            “You can’t break the Vasari,” one citizen says in the documentary.

            “No, we’re not going to break the Vasari,” a Seracini team researcher replies.

            Fortunately for this drama, Seracini is at the top of his field. He runs research laboratories at the University of California, San Diego, and in Florence. They are equipped with the newest scientific tools to x-ray walls and analyze tiny particles.

            As an art world celebrity, Seracini has his supporters and his foes. In the latter category, a group of art historians has circulated a petition to stop further work. They say the risk of harming the Vasari is not justified by a mere hunch—the cryptic words “seek and you will find.” Some see Seracini styling himself as an art world Indiana Jones. This can make art conservation workers in Florence worry that his exploits will distract money and attention from the city’s many antiquities that need repair.

            Nevertheless, a lost Leonardo does trump about everything else in the art world.

            Italian officials, balancing the politics, must decide whether Seracini can drill further for definitive evidence. The mayor of Florence supports moving ahead. He has said that if a Leonardo is found, he would prefer that over a Vasari (who is better known as the first art historian, not a painter ranking with Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Raphael). In fact, the story of the mural began as a competition between two great artists of the day, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

            Both were asked to designs battle murals for opposite walls. Michelangelo got only as far as a “cartoon”—a large drawing on paper with charcoal—before the pope summoned him to Rome to begin painting the the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo, meanwhile, put up his Battle of Anghiari, experimenting with oil paints, but ruining some of it by using burners to promote fast drying. Leonardo probably got the full imagery on the wall before he quit and left for Milan.

            Oxford art historian Martin Kemp said that there is no guarantee that the discovered residue comes from Leonardo, since city halls had many wall murals. Still, “I think this needs to be resolved,” he told National Geographic News. “We can’t just leave it hanging in the air. . . . If it’s discovered, it would be one of the most famous discoveries of a century.”

            Then comes the obvious question, posed by writer Noah Charney, head of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art: “If Seracini succeeds, then we are faced with one more puzzle: How do we reveal the entire Leonardo without destroying the Vasari that lies above it?”

Surrealism in the Americas: Putting Painting Before Poetry

A Major Exhibit of Female Surrealists Revels in Visual Fantasy

LOS ANGELES—For the longest time, Americans have viewed Surrealism as a form of dream-like painting. The exhibit here of female Surrealists, “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” confirms that common impression.

            It also updates the public to the fact that while the 1920s founders of Surrealism were European men, there is a line of illustrious female Surrealists as well—and a good many in the Americas. Some had been U.S. painters and art students who caught the 1930s European trend, while others had been Europeans who, at the onset of war in France in 1940, began migrating here and to Mexico.

            For Latin America, the most famous Surrealist painter was Frida Kahlo, a native of Mexico. Two of her paintings, one a self portrait with her former husband Diego Rivera (1931), and the other, Two Fridas (1939), are large and striking features of the exhibit. Other icons of female Surrealism—from Louise Bourgeois (sculptor) and Leonora Carrington (collagist and painter) to Lee Miller (photographer), Dorothea Tanning (painter), and Maya Deren (filmmaker)—are arrayed by themes across this expansive display at the Los Angeles County Museum.

            The exhibit, put together in cooperation with Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, shows 175 work about 47 artists. It continues in Los Angeles until May 6, when it travels to Quebec. The exhibit’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland is quite apropos, since the very nature of Surrealist art is to represent images of fantastical worlds, dream states or nightmares, and a reality that can be very psychiatric in mood.

            To evoke all of this, Surrealist visual arts had to use fairly traditional approaches to painting. Surprisingly, perhaps, the so-called movement began among poets. The term was coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He was writing a pamphlet for an avant-garde play in Paris, titled Parade, and came up with the neologism “sur-realism” (beyond realism). He later produced his own “surrealist drama.”

            As it turned out, a young poet follower of Apollinaire was Andre Breton, who later claimed to have co-invented the term. Either way, Breton founded the Surrealist movement as a literary event in 1924, drawing especially on his medical work in psychiatric wards and Freud’s new theories about dreams, sex, and the repressed unconscious. The visual side to this new interest in odd associations buried in the unconscious—and screaming to get out—came from outside France.

            In Germany, the “Dada” painter Max Ernst was doing works that tended to mix human parts with machine parts (a kind of Dada specialty). Also, from Italy came Gorgio de Chirico, who brought to Paris his paintings of haunting public plazas of Milan with long shadows, lone figures, classical statues, and faceless mannequins (to become a kind of icon for Surrealism). As these visual influences converged, Breton held his first art show in Paris in 1921. It was actually Dada art, convened at Galerie Montaigne and debuting Ernst, who soon eclipsed Dada painter Francis Picabia as the Surrealist favorite.

            In 1924, Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto. He also founded his publication, Surrealist Revolution, which connected art and Surrealism in a famous article, “Surrealism and Painting.” He knew that modern art was more influential than poetry, so he wanted to bring the visual arts under his Surrealism banner. The first official Surrealist art exhibit came in Paris in November 1925 at the Galerie Pierre Loeb. Breton even persuaded Picasso to submit a work or two.

            Meanwhile, Surrealism developed a kind of subculture in Paris, dedicated to encounter groups discussing poetry, sex, and the unconscious. One day, the classically-trained Spanish painter Salvador Dalí arrived in Paris, too. Welcomed into the Breton circle, he began to out-paint and out-antic even Ernst, and eventually Breton banned him. Still, in December 1936, Dalí appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the superlative Surrealist. This coincided with the first big art show on the topic in the United States, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” at the Museum of Modern Art. (Ever since, ordinary Americans have associated "Surrealism" with  Dalí's hyper-realistic style).

            In Paris, Breton and friends matched the New York event with the even larger “International Surrealist Exhibition,” which gathered a Who’s Who of the “usual suspects.” This was 1937, the year of Surrealism’s highpoint in Paris before the war, which shifted the story to the Americas. Over here, Dali became popular. So did Ernst and other Surreal-like painters such as the Spaniard Joan Miro. In fact, many of the American painters working on Depression-era federal art projects tried out Surrealism before moving on to pure abstraction, which led to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

            In the wake of this, the female Surrealists kept intact much of the literal, or figurative, painting style of early Surrealism. They created new images, drew on folk stories—as Kahlo did in her Mexican Surrealism—and retained the movement's interest in meticulously painted tableaus, picture-stories that were mysterious, moody, symbolic, and iconic. They also were filled with themes important to women.

            All of this comes through at the “In Wonderland” exhibit. And that’s a good thing. Literary Surrealism and its subculture imploded, suffering from many of its worst features, such as narcissism, obfuscation, and even misogyny. What survives is the splendid visual products of an age and outlook. The Lady Surrealists—often working on their own, unrewarded and in obscurity—have helped preserve some of that important art legacy in the Americas.

“American Artist” Celebrates the Realism Movement in Painting

The Magazine Marks 75 Years of Keeping Classical Skills Relevant to Art

At American Artist, which is a lavishly illustrated monthly art magazine, the phrase “Sunday painter” is not a dirty word.

            For that matter, neither are the words “old master,” “self-taught,” or atelier, the French term for a small workshop composed of a teacher and students, typically learning classical art techniques.

            Celebrating its 75th year, the magazine continues to be a flagship for what it calls a continuing American “movement” for realism and representational work in drawing, painting, and pastels. It honors the European old masters and the great American realists. It also encourages everybody to learn to paint, an egalitarian approach that nevertheless argues that it is best to learn by imitating the genius of the past.

            To mark its 75th, the magazine has produced a March/April “special issue” that charts the history of representational painting in the United States. It ends with a look at “the state of representational art in the new millennium.” This panorama also tells the publication’s history. It was founded in 1937 as Art & Instruction, changing it name to American Artist three years later. The publication weathered the 1950s to 1970s, when abstraction and then anti-traditionalism became cutting edge in the United States. Having endured, American Artist has caught the 1980s wave that revived “classical realism” in painting.

            Even so, every art publication today faces challenges to keep readership and underwrite the staff and printing.

            In 2008, the Colorado investment firm Aspire Media acquired the American Artist Group (which has several “how-to” magazines on painting and drawing skill), and placed it under Aspire’s other unit (acquired in 2005), Interweave, one of the nation’s largest publishers of craft and skill magazines. In recent years, American Artist has gone beyond just magazines, expanding its “do-it-yourself” (DIY) movement of people who are eager to learn from the old masters. The magazine now holds weekend workshops with traditional instructors. It also launched the Artist Daily Web site and a video channel.

            In a competitive environment for art publications, American Artist is hoping to building on its “great brand,” said editorial director, Michael Gormley, the former dean of the New York Academy of Art, which was founded in 1979 as a graduate studio school for figurative art and art history. To claim some of its past glory, the magazine has revived its headline logo from the 1970s, a kind of compliment, Gormley said, “to our history and our readers who have stuck with this through the ages.”

            With its brand status, American Artist continues to be a clearing house for the nation’s many ateliers with traditional art teaching programs. This month’s special issue, for example, offers the annual Workshop & Art School Directory, a road map to outlets for training in classical arts—oil painting, sculpture, watercolor, pastel, colored pencil, graphite, printmaking, or charcoal. Typically, these media are applied to a list of classic subject matter: portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and outdoor painting.

            For all art such ventures, the market is still a bit ambiguous. Only a few of the independent art colleges in the United States still emphasize classical painting skills. The same is true for many more art departments at U.S. colleges and universities. Students, laymen, or retirees who want to learn the skills of the old masters must typically search hard, or be ready to pay for specialized training. That support system largely exists in the surviving ateliers—the constituents of American Artist—that continue to unashamedly trace their heritage to the Renaissance, trying to plug the dike against “contemporary art,” a tide that excludes “Sunday painters” to emphasize ironic attitudes, shock-value, and conceptualism over skill.

            In some ways, on the other hand, the return to realistic painting is an embarrassment of riches these days. There is a great deal of it, in fact. In the large Chelsea Art Galleries district of west Manhattan, it is told, the dominant kind of art is representational, and the artists—many coming from top graduate schools, others self-taught over the years—are very good and are looking for sales.

            Though not having a monopoly on the realism spirit, American Artist does hope to throw a spotlight on the plenitude and quality of the new classical realism. In April 2013, it will hold a large “commemorative exhibition” of “a core group of artists we have identified as long-time leaders of our movement.” In conjunction, it will also hold a juried competition for new blood in the realist approach (with submission guidelines coming in May). The 2013 exhibit will be held at the historic Salmagundi Club (taking its name from a Washington Irving satire), a midtown Manhattan art club founded in 1871, and then travel to the West Coast.

            As an art education movement, magazines such as American Artist speak of “timeless instruction,” in other words, techniques and disciplines that have proven to work in the hands of any diligent artist. After those skills are mastered, the artist is free to be creative. After all, Leonard da Vinci said, “The greatest misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.” Picasso, too, justified his Cubist revolution on his mastery of classical skills. Since he had mastered them, he said, did he not “have the right” to experiment with a few rebellions? It’s still a good argument.

Killing Goldfish and the Peculiar Ethics of Contemporary Art

A Panel of Scholars Raises Concerns on What to do About “Hurtful” Art

LOS ANGELES—More than a decade ago, the artist Marco Evaristti explored the “killing aesthetic” by letting art gallery visitors in Amsterdam pulverize a goldfish swimming in a blender. Legal protest ensued, and the Dutch courts ruled that the means of killing the fish was instant and humane, while the efforts of animal rights groups to steal (or "rescue") the fish were a violation of property law.

            This is just one of the ethical dilemmas explored at a recent College Art Association (CAA) panel, where art leaders stated their concern about artists using “degradation” of human beings and “physical hurt” to animals as part of their art.

            The dilemma has got even the CAA's head office over a barrel. Its semi-official statement on animal abuse in art said that the CAA opposes animal cruelty, but also opposes all forms of censorship. As an unofficial CAA panel of scholars here in L.A. suggested, artists have a hard time policing each other when controversies arise. Meanwhile, the public has grown increasingly contemptuous of artists who use fish, sharks, pigs, horses, dogs, and birds—or fake bloody corpses at gala fund-raising parties—as fodder for seemingly hurtful artworks.

            Gerald Silk, chair of art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, convened the “Beyond Censorship” panel at the annual CAA convention, which brought 4,000 art educators to the Los Angeles Convention Center.  The panel seemed to suggest that many artists today are going too far. The dilemma is what to do about it, since all professions try to keep standards. Do artists claim to have special “privileges” that society does not give to other people? Silk asked. “Some of the material today may be disquieting,” he said, opening the panel session.

            The well-known story of Evaristti’s goldfish art, titled Helena, was among the most complex case studies. “Helena is far more complex than deciding to push a [blender] button,” said Jonathan Wallis of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, who analyzed differences between "moral" law and legal statutes.

            Other animal-related works of art were no less difficult. One Latin American artist made videos of horses being slaughtered. Two other Latino artists employed a seemingly starving dog tied to a gallery wall or a hawk meeting its apparent demise in large conceptual art cage. Later, the artists explained that the dog was actually fed, and likewise for the bird. Nevertheless, in both cases, protest arose. Police closed the hawk exhibit and a global Internet “rumor” spread that the dog starved in the gallery.

            The distorting effect of Internet information, or that of “social media,” has become a serious new issue for artists today, said Donna Moran of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. With the Internet, a global protest about a “starving” dog can develop overnight. Also, the uncouth work of young artists may haunt them forever, even after they repent. The case in point is Tom Otterness, a successful sculptor, who is now being haunted by his 1977 Shot Dog Film, in which as an “angry” young artists he indeed shot his dog on video. Last year, the Internet revival of his past deeds led to the cancellation of a major art commission, and his future looks bleak.

            Moran of Pratt also said that young artists have quickly learned to manipulate the Internet to gain attention. They might introduce offensive art in order to raise protest, after which they claim censorship, sending that message around the Internet to rally news coverage and an unimaginably large mass of Internet supporters. This puts significant pressure on art institutions, far more than a single artist can do.

            Another panelist, Joe Zammit-Lucia, said the problem goes beyond the Internet to the corruption of contemporary art culture itself. The art culture seems to reward deviant behavior, said Zammit-Lucia, an artist, businessman, and advocate for animal humaneness. He cited a typical trick of the artist: do something offensive, provoke protest, and then call protestors hypocrites because society itself is worse than the art. This has led to two rigid sides. One side says anything goes in art, the other says that society puts limits on everyone, and that should include artists.

            Zammit-Lucia traced that new egregious art to modernism’s avowed anti-humanism, and also to postmodern “conceptual art,” which privileges extreme ideas over normal human feelings. As a result, today there is a breed of artists who specialize in “dehumanized” art, knowing that sensation sells, he said. These artists also know they can gain “moral cover” from the art world when society protests. Added to this, Zammit-Lucia said, is a distorted reward system: art education is ambivalent about dehumanized art, critics write cheerful reviews about it, and savvy curators show it to publicize their galleries and sell it to collectors. This is a “self-feeding cycle of morally questionable behavior,” Zammit-Lucia said. “We need a way to break the cycle.”

            He suggests that the art world, while not endorsing censorship, revive an age-old form of self-regulation, which is to ostracize offending artists. This would involve stating moral objection to artists who abuse their “privileges.” This is the old fashioned shaming of bad behavior. The public is already doing this.

            Here’s the rub, though. It will be much harder to ask millionaire collectors and wealthy art foundations to stop funding or buying such art, since they are guided by publicity-driven curators who endorse it. And it will only grow on the Internet, giving fame to some, while destroying the reputation of others.

Reckoning with “Black Identity” over 4 Decades of Art

The Chrysler Museum is Next to Stir the Art-and-Race Discussion

Not for the first time, the black painter Robert Colescott will have an honorary room of his own.

            In three weeks, when the “30 Americans” traveling exhibit of black artists reaches the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., it will dedicate one of its largest spaces solely to the colorful work by Colescott, a dean of African-American artists, who died three years ago at age 83.

            The Chrysler already owns two “monumental” Colescott canvases, always colorful, satirical, and done in acrylics. These will be teamed up with three more canvases in the visiting exhibit, which just wrapped up a four-month show in Washington D.C.  As the Norfolk museum says, Colescott’s “work was an enormous influence on the generations that followed,” mainly through his treatment of delicate racial issues in diverse and humorous ways. His influence was evident back in 1977. In that year, Colescott was the first black artist to represent the United States at its pavilion at the Venice Biennale—a room of his own on the world stage.

            As the senior painter in the "30 Americans” exhibit (with actually 31 artists), Colescott anchors its central theme—how younger black artists deal with the topic of race today. Some of the artist “grew up amidst the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, others continue to live within its aftermath,” says the exhibit, which “explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity.”

            The selection in the show could not be a more diverse patchwork of responses to the race topic. They range from the outsized Renaissance-type paintings of heroic black males by Kehinde Wiley, to Kara Walker’s popular cut-paper silhouette murals (this one of Camptown Ladies, 1998). There is also the found object conceptual work by Rodney McMillian: a room-sized dirty white carpet hung on the wall.

            As art critics have noted, the grouping of 31 black artists would seem to promise a consistency in their collective show, at least if taken to be organized under a racial theme. The works—76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos—could not be more different, however. None of the artist statements say the same thing.

            “My work has to do with the tension between masculinity and beauty,” writes Wiley. “It’s all about convincing the world about your position in society.” When artist Leonardo Drew stacked a wall of cotton bales as his artwork, he said, “The work becomes the emotion.” In Renée Green’s five sets of photo collages from old movies, the work “highlights the power of exclusion and the arbitrariness of seemingly objective systems.”

            The well-known Carrie Mae Weems, who does photos and text on slavery, notes that the works hark back to the “anthropological debate” on people from Africa. Rashid Johnson says of black art today: “It’s not a weapon for me. It’s an interest.”

            Generally, the works of the 1960s and 1970s had been about protest and racial pride, whereas today they seem far more ambivalent and ironic. They can cleverly use stereotypes to not only lampoon white attitudes, but to comment on black pop culture as well, with all of its foibles.

            For general visitors—which included President Obama’s family at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington on January 29—the cumulative impact of so many black artists has been exciting. A sampling of the leave-a-note wall at the Corcoran is typical: “It’s Incredible,” “Finally,” “Bold, brash, profound,” “Majestic,” “Amazing,” and “It’s a Lively Exhibit.” Behind the enthusiasm lies a deeper discussion on how African American artists—and a young generation of American blacks—want race to be discussed today. If the artists do it in images, their peers are looking at the terminology itself: black, African-American, or simply American.

            An Internet movement has arisen to call for an end to the late-1980s term African American, for example. It favors simply black or American. “We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us,” Gibré George told the Associated Press after he started a popular Facebook site, “Don't Call Me African-American.” In a story on the trend, the AP also quotes Shawn Smith of Houston, who prefers black: “How I really feel is, I'm American,” said Smith, who comes from North Carolina. According to many other comments, the reference to Africa wrongly eclipses the more recent roots of American blacks, either in the states, the Caribbean, or elsewhere.

            Ever since the Rev. Jessie Jackson made the campaign for the African-American term his chief legacy, the change of generations was bound to raise a debate on who decides the proper labels for individuals or groups. Obviously, black artists will have a role in how this plays out. Not for nothing, this notable exhibit is titled 31 “Americans.” The University of Chicago art historian Darby English said that the 31 artists, despite their diverse approaches, present a profound question for the future: “What becomes of black art when black artists stop making it?”

“30 Americans” Black Art Exhibit a Tale of D.C., Miami, and the Rubells

Two Enterprising Collectors Make a Bid to Mix Art and Urban Renewal

WASHINGTON D.C.—Behind every great art exhibition is a larger story, and for a drama that involves celebrity collectors, the Miami art scene, top black artists, and Washington D.C.’s top art school, the “30 Americans” exhibition is tale worth telling.

            This week the Corcoran Gallery of Art, just a block from the White House, began packing up the 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos that made up a rare and stunning show. It was titled simply “30 Americans” to say something new about African American artists, who usually organize under a “black" American art banner.

            The traveling exhibition, which began at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh last year, has just finished its four month run in D.C. Now it heads for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., opening March 16.

            Significantly, the show was designed by the collector couple Donald and Mera Rubell of Miami. They drew upon their own private collection to gather the works by, actually, 31 black artists. Since the Rubells settled in Miami 20 years ago, their family fortune—derived from New York clubs and Florida real estate—has allowed them to become hotel developers and avid collectors of contemporary art.

            Now they are buying real estate in Washington D.C., hoping to shape its art scene, and this is why, in the view of some, the Corcoran show was more that a splendid art event. It was part of the Rubell family’s bid to become players in the local arts of the nation’s capitol.

            “We decided to call [the exhibition] ‘30 Americans,’” the Rubells said of their traveling exhibit, launched in March 2011. “‘Americans,’ rather than ‘African Americans’ or ‘Black Americans’ because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.” The works by the 31 artists bear this out. Each artist has reflected differently on the American black experience from the 1970s onward (see next week’s column for this topic).

            In this sense, the Rubells are shaping the art discourse in America. Their generosity also has bolstered a good number of young artists, whose work they buy, store in their large warehouse galleries in Miami, or loan for exhibitions. As real estate developers, they are also thinking about urban art scenes. That is how they made their mark in Miami, and it seems to be their ambition in Washington D.C. as well.

            In Miami, besides owning a few luxury beach hotels, they bought large warehouses in the downtrodden east Miami art district, the Wynwood neighborhood. By dint of their local collection, they have become, over the years, unofficial hosts of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach festivities, boosting their global celebrity. The Rubells’ first venture in Washington D.C. was to buy a dilapidated Best Western hotel, now called the “Capitol Skyline Hotel,” in the city’s declining southwest, a section currently being gentrified by developers. Thanks to the Rubells, the three-star Capitol Skyline has become a modest art scene, a place of artist gatherings and displays of contemporary artworks.

            Eventually in D.C., the venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art and its Corcoran College of Art + Design crossed paths with the Rubells, now doing business in the capital city. The Corcoran complex is a classic museum-art school arrangement. While the school is financially stable, the museum—housed in a massive but old beaux arts building—struggles to keep up repairs and raise millions for operation costs each year.

            Everything at the historic Corcoran art complex was looking pretty good in the first decade of the 2000s. The college enrollment, ranging between 500 and 1,000, was doing well enough. The Corcoran had land next door to lease and it ran a satellite campus in prestigious Georgetown. In 2006, it also bought from the D.C. government, for $6.2 million, the defunct Randall Junior High School in southwest D.C. as an ideal setting in which to create a new and larger Corcoran College of Art campus.

            Then came the stock market crash in 2008.

            Today, the Corcoran has an annual deficit of a few million, is trying to sell its Georgetown campus, and was lucky to find at least one source of financial relief—the Rubell family. The Corcoran could no longer finance the Randall school campus. So last year, the savvy Rebells bought the boarded-up property for about the same price.

            The Rubells are in partnership with a local developer, Telesis, to turn the school and its playing fields into a cultural hub, much as they had done in Miami’s warehouse district. According to the plan, which may be completed in 2014, the vintage school building will become a Rubell Art Museum and a restaurant. Mixed-price apartments and perhaps a hotel will be built on the school yards.

            The Rubell story adds credence to the recent Wall Street Journal headline that private collectors are now eclipsing galleries and museums, using their independent wealth and considerable art holdings to set up new art scenes at will. Logically, the Rubells see it as urban renewal, an idea that city planners everywhere can agree with.

            “We want to create a lot of life here,” Mera Rubell told the Washington Post last year. “We want to make an important place. This city does a crappy job of selling itself. It’s amazing that people come here because the promotion is so awful. They just show men in suits in front of marble buildings. This could be the social hearth of the country. It’s enticing to come to a desert and do something big.”

            Such big moves always raise eyebrows and question motives. Some have said the Corcoran Gallery hosted the Rubells’ “30 Americans” show because it came to the financial rescue, a quid pro quo that the Corcoran denied. Some locals also believe the Rubells muscled in on the school as if at a fire sale, getting the real estate at a price four times lower than its true worth, since it is in a gentrifying area.

            Either way, the collectors and the galleries make their moves and the art world charts its future. Meanwhile, the splendid “30 Americans” exhibit heads to Virginia, a topic worth looking at in the next column.

            Next week: the “30 Americans” exhibit.

Telling Tales of Rags to Riches in the Art World

1 Percent of Artists Have Luck but 99 Percent Must be Determined

The late 19th-century American author Horatio Alger never devoted one of his “rags to riches” books to the story of a young artist. But these days, not a few entrepreneurs in the arts would want to hear that story.

            How does an artist succeed financially against the odds?

            The odds look daunting in the current economic climate. While the mathematics of the “1 percent wealthy versus the 99 percent of the rest of us” may be exaggerated and skewed, life at the top of the economic pyramid does seem like a different planet.

            Take Facebook. When it filed as a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, it reported $1 billion in pure annual profits even before it starts selling shares. Next, look at Art Basel Miami, the annual art fair. Last December, the moneyed class showed up as usual, plunking down $1.5 million for a blue-and-white Ellsworth Kelly art object no bigger than a bread box. “Despite the flatlined economy, the art market has been roaring,” reported the Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik. “In the first half of this year, total worldwide art sales hit a record of . . . $5.8 billion.”

            The ordinary artist is not entirely cut out of these developments. Facebook reports that users swap 250 million photos per day, which could be called a type of art marketing or art appreciation. One graffiti artist, David Choe, 36, accepted private employee shares from cash-poor Facebook in 2005 in lieu of a fee when he painted murals in the company’s office in Palo Alto, California. Now, Choe’s stock is estimated to be worth $200 million. What is more, the Zynga computer game company, whose founders included art students, has also shot up on the stock market, since it provides most of the games Facebook users play.

            Such rags-to-riches sagas in the art world are mostly a recent phenomenon. It began with the Pop art of the “Warhol economy” and now is driven by the high-end market of contemporary art. Along the way, stock market and Internet bubbles sometimes do not burst, and in those time, some visual artists are carried rapidly upward on the rising tide of wealth.

            On his blog, Choe presented the life of artists as both a lottery and a kind of divine providence. “Have you had the dream where you ARE this guy?!?” Choe wrote. “And then some kind of happy accident happens, and as you’re in the middle of this glorious car crash, you stop to realize, that there is actually no such thing as an accident, and no chance encounters, and that everything has a direct purpose?”

            Which brings us back to those “Horatio Alger stories.”

            None of the Horatio Alger characters won the lottery, but there is a connection. In the stories, characters such as Mark the Matchboy or Ragged Dick typically meet a wealthy patron. The patron is impressed by their efforts at self-improvement. Then the patron gives them seed money. After that, the characters make the money work by way of persistence, inventiveness, frugality, and virtue.

            The stories are considered hokey today. But two of their principles still are alive and well: seed money and virtue. To get the seed money, artists need to go out and put a best foot forward. They may find a wealthy patron, or simply land a day job that can accrue savings. Then, once some money is coming in, the artist must make the most of it by being productive and frugal. Virtue, plus creativity, may drive successful art.

            Forbes magazine’s personal finance writer Kym McNicholas jumped on the David Choe story as a parable for freelancers and entrepreneurs, of which artists are typical. While most artists need cash, not stock, Choe had the luxury of obtaining some stock and holding on to it. Even in this, Choe was lucky. At first he said Facebook was a “ridiculous and pointless” company, but didn’t know any better. Facebook, too, was lucky. Many Internet and finance companies have paid employees in stock. Then everything went into bankruptcy.

            “The Facebook story is making us collectively giddy and euphoric,” McNicholas wrote. “That could make us more susceptible than usual to scams and get-rich-quick plans.” The key to Choe’s success, Forbes suggested, was that he was doing what he loved. Meanwhile, he stumbled upon the stocks as barter for spray painting graffiti art across interior walls. How he uses his new-found fortune is the next question.

            Today there are ample how-to books on artists developing a plan, a brand, a portfolio, and pursuing prizes, grants, exhibits, and galleries. As most artists will concede, however, success does seem to be a matter of luck—or of having the right connections. In the end, therefore, the one thing that remains in the artist’s control is what’s found in those un-cool, old-fashioned Alger books: determination, self-regulation, and enthusiasm.

            Even in physics, the “rich get richer”—the particles and energies that have a leg up over other particles tend to increase in size without effort, creating giant galaxies and stars. In the art world, too, the rich get richer. The one resort for the other 99 percent of artists is to rely on skill, character, and enterprise. It seems very un-bohemian. But just ask Mark the Matchboy, who in fiction rose up by the boot-straps to financial security. That’s often how it works in non-fiction life as well.

Two Images in Japanese Art Reveal the Flow of Visual Culture

Large Cartoon Eyes and a Big Wave in Prints Started Powerful Art Trends

Before the Big Eyes, there was the Great Wave.

            When people in the West turn their attention to Japanese art, these are the two archetypes that come to mind. In recent decades, the big-eyed cartoon character of Japanese comic books, animation, and contemporary art, has influenced even Western culture. A century before that, Japanese art prints had invented the giant wave, and that too has endured as an icon of Japanese art well known around the world.

            Most recently, the cartoon-like characters with the large, glinting child’s eyes have even become part of cutting-edge Pop art, showing up in the works of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. He’s put the big eyes on smiling flowers, mushrooms, and a large sculpture, Oval Buddha. A far older work, the Great Wave woodblock print, while having some modern imitation, continues to appear as a benchmark in art history. It was prominently featured in two recent BBC programs, the latest being “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”

            The big eyes and the great wave also have lessons about the interchange of Asian and Western culture in the development of art, or what the expert’s today call the development of “visual culture.”

            The more ancient of the two stories (about the wave) begins in the early 1800s, when the more traditional treatment of waves in Japanese design suddenly gave rise to a single giant wave, thanks to the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

            Known as Kokusai (first name), he departed from flat Chinese style painting and a design tradition of “rough sea screens” by adopting Western-style perspective. Western art was reaching Japan by way of Dutch and French books and drawings. As he mulled these changes, he formed a new portrayal of the cresting surf at Enoshima beach in Kanagawa, near ancient Edo (now Tokyo). The beach still today is the best for surfing in Japan. He designed one large, stand-out lacy wave, put a boat in the torrent, and placed Mount Fuji in the far distance, smaller and dimmer, as a matter of visual perspective.

            As a woodblock printer, and sometime illustrator-cartoonist, Kokusai was commercially minded, and that led to his new approach in the now-famous “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” Of these, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) turned out to be the favorite, especially outside of Japan. The single wave—a giant breaker—stood out like a main character, a role typically played in Japanese block prints by a prince, warrior, or courtesan.

            After this, the single wave became a symbol for many concerns in Japanese culture. The wave came to stand for foreign invasion, whether Mongol or Western, and also natural disaster and the warrior gods. “The wave’s authority depends not simply on its scale but also its singularity,” art historian Christine Guth writes in the current Art Bulletin. “It is, in the eyes of Euro-Americans, Japan’s most representative artwork.”

            In Hokusai’s day, thousands of inexpensive woodblock prints of his various scenes and stories were sold, but the single wave motif was a favorite, leading Hokusai “to use it again and again in various combinations,” Guth says. “Commercial opportunism led other print artists to draw on the cultural capital encoded in the market-tested Hokusai ‘brand’ and in so doing opened the waves to interpretations that kept them fresh.”

            In short, the Great Wave became a permanent visual image for Japan, much as the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night come to mind when the world thinks of European art and culture.

            After World War II, however, a new image rivaled the Great Wave. With the rise of modern Japanese comics (called Manga) that rival was the Big Eyes, now a dominant image in cartooning and Pop art.

            That story begins with Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), a serious medical student who turned out to be the founder of modern Japanese comics. For Japanese culture, he invented the big-eyed, cute characters (though he proudly said he borrowed the big-eye concept from the American cartoon, “Betty Boop”). His most famous early character was a bionic boy, “Astro Boy,” who rocketed around by nuclear power. Other big-eyed characters were “Kimba the Lion” and “Black Jack,” among a growing number of other child-like heroes and creatures.

            As a result, the feature of large child-like eyes came to dominate many artists in the Japanese cartoon industry. They soon exported such branded characters as “Sailor Moon” and “Pokeman,” and Western artists picked up its variations. Eventually, even sophisticated Pop artists such as Murakami adopted the big eyes because of their strong cultural reference—that is, their dominant place in visual culture.

            So today, the Great Wave and the Big Eyes may be the most salient aspects of Japanese visual culture, at least to the West. Both of them came by way of cultural exchanges, adaptation, and successful commercialization. Nevertheless, both were developed by profoundly great artists—Kokusai and Tezuka—both of whom did a vast number of works in a great variety. They just happened, meanwhile, to hit upon two icons that stood the test of time: the Great Wave and the Big Eyes.

Seeing Damien Hirst’s Spots Before Their Eyes

Hundreds Travel the World on a “Challenge” to Visit 11 Gargosian Galleries

When the science fiction author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, he could not have imagined its current version in the art world. This month, the international art dealer Larry Gargosian has persuaded people to journey the globe to gaze upon “Spot Paintings” by British super-artist Damien Hirst at all 11 Gargosian galleries.

            In the Jules Verne novel, the 80-day adventure began as a bet in a British club. Similarly, the “Spot Challenge” offers a prize—a spot print signed by Hirst—to anyone who visits every gallery on a self-funded world trip. The spot artworks are all composed of multicolored dots in grid-like formations on white fields.

            The betting began this month, and reportedly several hundreds of people—leaning toward young travelmeisters, art journalists, and wealthy hipsters—are taking planes, trains, and buses in an itinerary that stretches from New York to Hong Kong and London (a loop of about 20,000 miles). Some participants seek the Hirst print as a personal treasure. Others will try to cash it in on the art market.

            The hanging of spot paintings in all 11 Gargosian galleries is “structured as a global exhibition,” a spokeswoman said. “Damien and the gallery thought it would be extraordinary if someone made it to every location. He felt that whoever did should be rewarded with some artwork.” One wonders why anyone would want to go to every location to see similar spot paintings. But then, recall, in olden times, people walked hundreds of miles to see a boring shrine.

            As Britain’s wealthiest living artist, Hirst is a kind of rock star. Rock stars all have groupies, so the fact that people are taking the “challenge” seems harmless enough. As a conceptual artist, Hirst has big ideas, but then he pays workers and craftsmen to carry them out. The current exhibition, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011,” has been painted by hired help. The galleries are showing 331 spot paintings out of some 1,400 that Hirst staffers have produced.

            At first, Hirst was a rather humble art worker, studying art at Goldsmiths College in London, and helping fellow artists show their rather in-your-face art work at warehouse shows. By helping the others, Hirst rose as ringleader of “the Young British Artists,” a name given to them after the multimillionaire advertising executive, Charles Saatchi, promoted them like a new punk rock band. They held several controversial shows—titled “Sensation”—designed to offend and stir publicity.

            After that, anything that Hirst made was blue chip material for the art market. In the mid-1990s he was one of the fastest rising contemporary artists, sought by the Turner Prize in England and Venice Biennale in Italy.

            As a working class Brit, beloved for his foul mouth and carefree (former) doping and drinking, Hirst became famous for putting dissected animals in formaldehyde. His shark in a tank became a symbol of the new British art. When millions in sales rolled in, he poured millions into each new art project, always being newsworthy for the price tag, if not the artistic merit. Oligarch collectors, from Russia to China, lined up to obtain Hirst “originals.” To meet the demand, Hirst defaulted to production-line art, and thus his proliferation of spot paintings.

            Now that the “Spot Challenge” is on, it almost seems that the participants—who reportedly can make the world trip on a $2,500 economy air fare—are giving Gargosian and Hirst free publicity (as is this column). From the participant point of view, however, it must surely be a personal thrill ride, with a record to set, and not a few hardships to overcome.

            The first winner was 27-year-old Valentine Uhovski, who handily completed the 11-stop trip, passing through New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Athens, Rome, Geneva, Paris, and London. It took him eight-days (not 80 days). From Russia, Uhovski moved to America and founded the Artruby website, which no doubt praises Hirst. The second to complete the trip was Jeff Chu, a journalist for Fast Company magazine.

            A young writer for Britian’s Art Newspaper, Cristina Ruiz, chronicled her low-budget progress across Europe in a blog, for which other young bloggers have cheered her on. Each participant must prove their 11 visits by a document stamped at each Gargosian Gallery, so Ruiz gingerly ticked off the first two in London.

            “Two stamps down, nine more to go!” she wrote January 12.

            Then she began her travails of travel on a shoe string. “I am boarding a train to Paris from St Pancras station,” she wrote later. “It’s not fun getting up at this ungodly hour but at €39 ($51), the 5:40 am train to Paris was the best deal I could find, so here I am.”

            And of course, Ruiz’s writer’s dilemma in dealing with the Hirst dots, like spots before her eyes, suddenly dawns upon her, sooner rather than later: “There’s no depth to the brushstrokes, no variation to the composition, just painting after painting of incessant glossy dots. . . . Which begs the question: what on earth am I going to blog about as I make my way around another TEN galleries full of spots?”

            As a talented young writer, and a dedicated pilgrim, Ruiz will have surely found something original to say. Almost certainly, it will be more original and interesting than the spot paintings themselves.

Serial Printmaking Show Matches the World Series, Kind Of

A Museum with 60,000 Historic Prints Puts Some of its Best into Daylight

BALTIMORE—In the sports world we have the World Series, and in the visual arts we have the print series.

            The excitement of these two kinds of series may not compare exactly, of course. But the skill of the printmaker—the producer of etchings, engravings, lithographs, and screen prints—can often be more impressive than that of a pitcher, fielder, or batter at the plate.

            That skill is currently being demonstrated in the “Print by Print” exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which is a national treasure trove of “works on paper.” With 60,000 prints in its archives, the museum rightly calls itself a “comprehensive resource for the study of Western printmaking.” Through March, the BMA has pulled out a diverse sampling of its collection to exhibit 29 series of prints, totaling more than 350 items in black or colored ink. They are done by a coterie of top names in art over the past 500 years. The display ranges from Albrecht Dürer and William Hogarth, for example, to Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Roy Lichtenstein, and a sampling of contemporary artists.

            The key theme here is "series": not just one print, but a group of different prints by an artist that go together as a single theme or technique. At this BMA world series, there is no grandstand cheering, no screaming at the umpire. The gallery lights are dimmed, since inks on papers can rapidly deteriorate under strong lighting. To protect the more antique works, the exhibit will run for an optimum of five months, then reach a safety limit, after which the prints will go back into dark, dry, and cool storage.

            While print exhibits are not unusual, they typically are smallish, specialized in appeal, or put up as side attractions to block-buster shows. By contrast, “Print by Print” shows what can be done to immerse visitors in an entire world of prints.

            The serial print (usually meaning a story-like series) developed along with the printing press (1450). They first illustrated religious books and then secular tales. As illustrated by the BMA exhibit, not only professional printer-publishers turned to this technology, but so did painters, who as draftsmen wanted to explore one idea, or technique, in a series of different prints that all went together.

            The number in a series can vary dramatically. At the BMA, the Picasso example is a two-part comic-strip-like etching, “The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937),” a protest against the Spanish general. In the same decade, the Cubist designer Sonia Delaunay produced 40 color prints by stencil, producing a volume of examples for fabric or wallpaper design.

            Some of the series are by now well known, while others will always seem like precious re-discoveries. Who has not seen Albrecht Dürer’s 16 woodcuts (1490s) on “The Apocalypse,” which depicts events from the Book of Revelation?

            “He was an enormous influence on printmaking,” a BMA docent told one tour group.

            Still, even Dürer has been matched or outstripped. One example is the 31 refined etchings by the Italian artist Canaletto, “Views, Some Based on Real Places, Some Imagined.” For atmosphere, another Italian feat is the 16-etching series of “Imaginary Prisons” by Battista Piranesi (1761). These large prints offer a journey through fantastical and gothic architectural interiors, vast stone labyrinths.

            One wonders how these skilled craftsmen kept a steady hand, let alone the patience—a question that arises often when looking at engravings and mezzotints that seem to have the resolution of a photograph. Such is the case with Englishman John Martin’s 24 mezzotints of “Milton’s Paradise Lost” (1820s) and the Flemish artist Hans Collaert’s 10 engravings of “Design for Pendants” (1581). Not that past engravers have anything on the present, as illustrated by the unfailingly steady hand of Andrew Raftery in “Open House: Five Engraved Scenes” (2008).

           Three things seem to happen when in the presence of such a rich variety of serial prints. You first must decide whether to spend your time up close marveling at the detail, or standing back to obtain a broader effect. While many print series work both ways, others seem to demand one or the other, as in the case of needing to stand back to enjoy the large screen prints of American artists Ed Ruscha, Sherrie Levine, and Lichtenstein.

            Second, looking at prints is a search for clues and hints besides the main story, for often the artist has put in accessory details designed to delight, humor, or surprise. The classic William Hogarth print series in this exhibit, “A Harlot’s Progress” (1733), is a morality tale filled with quips and innuendo in nearly every sundry item included in a scene.

           Finally, prints offer a chance to marvel at the craftsman’s skill, whether it is the tightest, finest line, or the just-so smudging of crayon and ink in a lithograph.

            Dürer knew what skill was about: training and practice made perfect. Still today, as in Dürer’s, the printmaker is often consigned to being the blue-collar artist, not exactly the sports star of the art set. One time Dürer tried to compensate for this copper plate ceiling. In a self portrait, he showed himself wearing gloves, the sign in his day of being a gentleman (in addition to a mere printmaker).