Ever wondered what it’s like to be a visual artist in the 21st century? This episodic essay provides an intimate, hilarious, and very painful look at what’s required to create art without dying or (entirely) losing your mind:
Someone tips off Barneys New York about the boho-chic lifestyle I’ve assumed at Grandma’s, and they reach out to interview and photograph me for their fall catalog. I ask a model what they would get paid for a shoot and propose $2,000 to Barney’s. They reject my proposal and offer a $1,000 gift card. I discover a website that will turn the encrypted plastic into $940 cash and accept.
I line all four walls of my studio with pictures of Barney the dinosaur impersonators and tell the interviewer that I’m working on a new project as a follow-up to my 2016 video The Unthinkable Bygone, in which a 3D model of Baby Sinclair from Jim Henson’s animatronic puppet TV series Dinosaurs (1991–1994) is subjected to simulation, dissection, reflection, and endoscopy. I say I’m interested in pop cultural representations of the surfaces of dinosaurs, and how we hollow out the earth to find dinosaur bones, and then use those bones, along with our knowledge of current species, to literally flesh out vivid caricatures about our unthinkable earthly predecessors. That bit doesn’t run in the interview, but every photo he takes is full of bootleg Barneys.
To others my new life seems like it’s all fun and games, but in actuality I’m miserable. The maxim “money doesn’t buy happiness” starts to ring in my head. Not because I actually have money, but because I’m living with the material comforts of someone who does, and it doesn’t seem to make me feel any better. I have the ugly feeling that an Artforum feature, institutional acquisitions, and another lap around the art world circuit would cure this sense of lack.
But Trump is in office, and my work is deemed less “urgent”—“irresponsible,” even. A curator who selected me for an Art Basel commission ghosts me. A gallerist who wants to work with me says she can’t add a white man to her roster. An esteemed curator from the Middle East tells me I should probably get a day job for a while because my career outlook in the art world is bleak. It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle. The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/ENMAhob
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/K0dQ1FI
