In Praise of Predictability

When we need a break from the extraordinary.

We are amidst the dog days of summer— the period where the Sirius (Canis Major) becomes visible over the eastern horizon at dawn. This is a sultry and lethargic period, this year being one where drought and fires are menacing vast parts of the world, where regions that never see high temperatures are currently baking in heat— the scary consequences of global warming.

In our everyday life, the late summer is a period where we all try to find a few days to rest before the return to heavy activity in the fall. As I have been examining the common desires and needs that we all often have for even a semblance of a vacation during these days I have turned to think a bit about what those needs say about us— and by extension, ourselves, and perhaps what these feelings might reveal relationship with the old and the new, in life and in art.

First, I need to confess something unpopular, surprising and which may perhaps sound unsophisticated to some of my friends: I like nondescript, corporate hotels. The reason is primarily my desire for anonymity while traveling. I have a deep-seated aversion toward Bed and Breakfasts — places where one usually has no privacy, where you have to go downstairs in the morning to have breakfast with a group of strangers and are required to socialize before even having a first cup of coffee. The nondescript corporate hotel, in contrast, is a place where no one will ask you where you are from, where the basic aspects of a person’s stay are taken care or with minimal social interaction.

My need for sameness and anonymity in hotels is not, of course, something that I want from life in general, and most definitely not from art. My work as artist is socially engaged— meaning, I do work that involves talking to and working with people, which I deeply enjoy— and I strongly believe that anyone who wants to break new ground in art has by definition to be adventurous and not mired in monotonous rituals. My aforementioned need, instead, arises from something akin to a need for complementarity and balance to that constant experimentation.

This yearning for predictability is in fact, I will argue, something that we need in order to structure our lives meaningfully. Brands are built on predictability in the form of quality control: what makes a product appealing is not just the fact that one might consider it good, but the fact that whenever one buys it, it is always, consistently the same product one expected to get.

This basic principle applies in a very interesting way to the world of art.  A few years ago, at a meeting at MoMA where we were discussing visitor trends, my then colleague Alex Roediger (who works there as Senior Information Coordinator, which includes conducting visitor data analysis) revealed to us that a comparison of TripAdvisor reviews of all New York art museums, the one museum that ranked highest of all in terms of meeting visitor expectations was no other than The Frick Collection. “The Frick?” we asked. The Frick, I thought to myself, the stodgy institution frozen in the Gilded Age that does not admit children? “Yes”, Alex said, The Frick. It turned out, he observed, that the general public wants predictability. As I recently asked him to elaborate on that comment years ago, he recalled: “The Frick gave people exactly what they wanted and more. So it was a home run exercise for their visitors.” The fact that some of the works are still hanging where Henry Clay Frick himself originally put them is likely appealing to many, and even their special exhibitions are not significant departures from the old master program that the museum has on offer. “People would say things like “Even better than I imagined!”” It is like the restaurant to which one is a regular and satisfaction resides in getting the exact same dish over and over again. Once one thinks about it, the high marks then make perfect sense.

This of course presents a challenge to those museums that engage with contemporary art and need to balance the desire of visitors to see familiar pieces with encountering new ones.  As it turns out, finding art that is challenging in a museum can make a visitor feel cheated, and even develop a sense of distrust in the institution.  Mainly, however, what happens is that, as Roediger adds, “their expectations were misaligned with their experience.”

This seemingly small observation is, however, of great importance as we try to understand the aspirations and cultural demands that we make of new art.  The basic expectation around emerging artistic practice is that it needs to question the status quo, create new paradigms, and invent new models. This intellectual demand is, of course, at odds, for the commercial demand of homogeneity of experience by large audiences. This is the reason for blockbuster exhibitions at large museums, and the strategy of balancing an exhibition program with crowd-pleaser artist (Monet, Matisse, etc.) with more experimental art.

But this balance is nothing new or surprising and anyone who is involved in the art world knows about it. What is less scrutinized, I would argue, is our implicit desire of homogeneity and predictability in experimental, even radical art.

As Erving Goffman once argued, we all operate under a range of assigned social scripts— and the art world is no exception. With his further creation of frame theory, Goffman tried to explain how the social roles that we play are circumscribed to a particular set of parameters. Interestingly in art,  (as I tried to discuss in a 2012 book titled Art Scenes) the social role of the artist is one where there is an expectation that the parameters will be broken; as the character of “the trickster” (using Lewis Hyde’s terminology) the artist is a disruptive force that nonetheless is expected to be disruptive, thus honoring the pre-established script. The curator, in contrast, is scripted as a moderating force that helps frame the disruptive behavior of the artist to others, thus forming a complementary ecosystem.

There are two points that can be made from this seemingly disconnected set of thoughts.  First, in order for art to retain some of its frame of reference, it can’t be completely unpredictable— that is, it can’t dispense of every single discursive framework we use to refer to it as art. It is another way of saying that all experimental art needs to retain a dose of conventionality. If it exists outside of the museum and/or if it is outside of the art market it still needs to be written about and discussed (i.e. framed conceptually) as art in order to be valued as such. And second, —which is in fact a necessary follow-up to the first point— is that instability and stability are symbiotic. Just as anthropologists have often shown how  nomadic and sedentary forms of life complement each other, in art we need both order and chaos to make sense of it.

Instinctively or not, artists often recognize this tension, and through their work they appeal to our sense (and desire) for normalcy to give us something that upends that very normalcy. An interesting example was DIS Images, a 2013 project by the DIS collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, David Toro, and others. DIS Images functioned as an alternative stock photo agency, selling images for the purpose or advertising but at the same time making twists and variations on the traditional, commercial stock photo catalogue with homogeneous images that follow “neoliberal corporate aesthetics.” DIS I mages might have been in some ways a utopian project — or dystopian, depending on how one looks at it—, but the questions the collective pursued in this and other projects are fascinating, among others: can the uncanny be sneaked into the ordinary?   

DIS Images- landing page

These sometimes feel nearly existential questions to me as I continue to examine the relaxation that I derive from so-called “neoliberal corporate aesthetics”. The critique that projects like DIS Images mount have the effect of producing guilt in me, fears of abject vulgarity in my taste. 

But in my defense (and I believe, in defense of us all), in periods like the dog days of summer, we need that frivolity every now and then: we need the dumb beach  in order to prepare us later for the intellectual stimulation and challenge of new ideas and art forms. The tragedy would be to live forever, unaware, inside that unexamined sameness. Hell would be living inside a stock photo for all eternity — but not if it is only for a long weekend.

There is a memorable moment in GK Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, where two characters debate order versus anarchy:

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamppost, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold."

"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

So is the light that the predictable can shed onto the unpredictable. It is those conventional places— like the cliché images of the beachside hotels I have used to illustrate this column— that I find relaxing, perhaps because they are meant to be temporary and I can ultimately step away from them, and because I can see my real (and imperfect but beautiful) life against the light of that unreal (perfect but mendacious) world.