Sometime during my art school years, an art student presented an installation that caused quite a stir. It was, as I recall, a white wall full of handwritten, scandalous gossip about the school, involving both students and faculty: who was sleeping with who, various other forms of sexual misconduct, revelations and accusations of many sorts, and so forth. The piece caused outrage; at the same time, I am pretty sure no one could take their eyes off it.
Schools are fertile grounds for gossip harvesting: the shared extended periods of time in a group often result in deep intimacy, drama, and conflict (sometimes all at the same time). In Mexico, during those pre-Facebook and pre-snapchat days, a key method to anonymously share comments about others was a “chismógrafo” (“gossipgraph”), which was mainly a notebook with a questionnaire that would be passed around and filled anonymously, usually with salacious questions such as “who do you think is hot?” and “who do you think is not?” Obviously , the anonymity of the comments (as we well know from social media today) gave license to everyone to make outrageous comments about others, sexual remarks, offensive innuendos or outright insults to other classmates that everyone had to read. It was our social media in the 1980s.
Gossip is a communication phenomenon of great interest to Psychology and Anthropology for many years. In his book “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language”, psychologist Robin Dunbar shows how communication amongst primates came to replace the physical grooming that was both a form of tribal support and social bonding. As communities expanded, Dunbar argues, language was developed and used to maintain social bonds, and within language, gossip is something that strengthens bonds and complicity within our tribal groups.
I am generally averse to use the art market to understand the art practice (once I retorted to a conservative critic in Mexico that to attempt to understand art through the art market is like trying to understand marine biology through the Cruise Industry). However, in the particular case of tribalism, business dynamics play a key role, and a subset of tribes, known as Consumer Tribes, happen to offer a compelling definition of the roles that we all play in the art world (with a typology that includes Initiators, Influencers, Deciders, Purchasers, and Users). Business scholars Bernard and Veronique Cova define tribal groups as “a network of heterogeneous persons who are linked by a shared passion or emotion.” Most interesting about Cova and Cova’s description of how consumption offers a sense of identity to the member of a tribe, is that, according to their research, the members of the group “is less interested in the objects of consumption than in the social links and identities that come with them.” While we are too familiar with the fact that art objects are too often treated as investments to attain a certain social status, It might be a step too far to make this a defining trait of the art world; however, if we are to replace the financial market with the market of ideas, a case can be made that the seeking and attaining of status in the art system has less to do with the art objects themselves and the insider information that we have or know about them; which is what elevates the status of a curator, collector, dealer, scholar and/or artist.
The reason why tribal dynamics matter is because in this heavy competition with one another to gain notoriety within the tribe access to privileged information becomes key as it enhances the status of the individual as someone “in the know”. And a lot of that privileged information is gained not only through traditional research, but through socializing and casual conversation (which is where gossip rules). Development officers, of whom I recently wrote an article about, are experts in accumulating the knowledge about the public and personal lives of their funders to strengthen the institutional relationships with them. So when you are setting up the tables for a gala, it becomes crucial to know who is not speaking with whom, who might be compatible with whom at the dinner table, who might have similar affiliations or interests, and so forth. Looking at the table arrangements at a gala one can usually surmise the rationale behind the configurations.
I have two art friends who are naturally gossipy. One of them can seemingly only bond through sharing gossip about others in the art world: who is sleeping with whom, who was fired from a gallery or museum and why, who collected what piece in order to annoy someone else, and so forth. While sometimes informative and entertaining, the stories tend to exhaust me, and especially when I sometimes have a collective project to work on with this person, I feel we seldom make much progress in our work when we meet because so much of my friend’s energy and focus is to tell me the latest gossip. This is a bit different from another friend I have in Mexico City who I used to see practically every time I visited; this person is deeply embedded in the art world there and loves to gossip. So for me those meetings (drinks, dinner) I had with this person were highly useful because my friend was a one-stop shopping for all the latest gossip and information about the Mexico City art world— everything I had missed over the last six months or so. I am not personally interested in repeating those stories to others, and I always take the gossip I receive (as we all should) with a grain of salt; however my friend’s dispatch always gave me a full picture of the alliances, conflicts, dilemmas, and tribalisms that are common in the ever expanding Mexican art scene (and this is why, in a way, I find it beneficial not to live in Mexico City, as I can always return and be in good terms with everybody; otherwise I am afraid I would be forced to join a tribal subset and lose my neutral status).
Conceptual artists have used gossip as a medium— aware of the fact that their storytelling currency make others disseminate it for free. Maurizio Cattelan is a specialist in making projects that primarily exist as a “did you hear what he did?” story, such as his 6th Caribbean Biennial, where he invited ten artists to the island of St. Kitts to do nothing other than relaxing by the beach. The piece, like the banana taped to the wall, becomes a bid to make it the talk of the town.
Gossip is, of course, a primary source for art journalism— and by that I do not really mean tabloid journalism, or the kind of celebrity news and rumors one reads about on page six of the New York Post: in our largely secretive art system, most important players do not have social media nor communicate through it as key information is word of mouth; so the gleaning of vital information has to be conducted that way. I often think about an art journalist friend who used to write for a major contemporary art magazine; whenever we met at an opening or reception she would quiz me about a lot of subjects connected to the museum I worked for, to see if she could get some kind of insider scoop about something; unfortunately for her I was never of much use both because I didn’t that much of a valuable insider knowledge nor did participate in the secret conversations that she deemed so valuable.
At times, private tensions that are open secrets of sorts fully break into the open. Such was the case of the enmity between Roger Brown, a leading Chicago artist of the 1980s and 1990s, and Alan Artner, the chief art critic of the Chicago Tribune. Their dislike was mutual, public and vicious: for years, Artner would write scathing critiques of Brown, and Brown often struck back, at one culminating time making a freak show-style banner painting ridiculing Artner titled Alan Artner, Ironic Contortionist of Irony (1993), showing the art critic sticking his head (there’s no subtle way to put it) up his ass.
Looking back at episodes like that, and aside from understanding the full context of the painting that Brown made, I see its value not in how it connects with the anecdotal or biographical, but as part of a lineage of works by artists who hated art critics (in the genealogy of Daumier). In those cases, the false currency and the pettiness of gossip becomes clearer than ever. Gossip might provide a colorful footnote to different episodes in art, but indiscretion is not useful (and sometimes not even credible) knowledge, and its wielding in an artwork, more often than not, is less grand conceptual strategy and more petty vindictiveness. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
History has a way to wean out small-mindedness and meanness, and rumors created from resentment, conspiracy theories, or wishful thinking often recede into the ether.
In the end, ars longa, confabulatio brevis. Which is why works like that art student installation are forgettable: I can’t even remember the artist’s name, nor the details of the gossip shared in it, surely because they were not important. But this offers little relief from the damage that rumors (false, true, or half-true) and the invasion of privacy can cause.
An artist who has reflected on the sacred nature of the personal secret is Sophie Calle. For her 2014 work Secrets, she created this instruction: “Find a couple. Have each other of them tell me a secret. Install two safes if their home. Lock each secret up in its own safe. Keep the codes to myself. The lovers will have to live with the other's secret. Close to hand but out of reach This work consists of two safes, an accompanying plaque installed in the home of a natural couple and a signed Letter of Agreement. Each safe must contain a secret in an envelope or other container given to Sophie Calle by each person representing one-half of the Couple. Neither half of the Couple has or shall have access to the secret of the other.” A few years later, as a commission by Creative Time, Calle produced a project titled “Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery”, described thus: “During the two-day opening, in a setting nestled among the mausoleums and monuments of Green-Wood’s verdant rolling hills, visitors transcribed their secrets onto paper, and deposited them into the earth below, through a slot on a marble obelisk of Calle’s design. The artist was on hand during the two-day event to receive some visitors’ secrets.”
Those works make me think about the reasons by the artists who defend their privacy at all costs, up to the handful of those who refused to share any biographical information about themselves or who keep their lives completely private, out of reach from every chismógrafo, every tabloid and intrusive commentary. Biographical anonymity is understandable for artists who want their works to be scrutinized on their own without an accompanying gossip track, who chose to have their works exist without their personal narratives attached to them, and who instead chose to take, like Calle’s participants, all their secrets to their grave.
The Mexican artist Ulises Carrión (1941-89) explored the contours of gossip in the 80s:
https://www.deappel.nl/nl/archive/events/304-ulises-carrin-roddel-laster-en-goede-manieren-een-kunst-een-kunde-een-techniek-lezing