The Protagonist Vanishes

Why the art world is stating to look like a Juan Rulfo novel.

There are two conversations that my friends often hear me tell. I would like to share them here as part of a reflection about artistic influence, and about how, as Paul Valéry once said, the future is not what it used to be.

The first one is from my years at the Guggenheim Museum. In 1998, when I started my job, my office was adjacent to  the artist Ward Jackson, the longtime museum archivist and perhaps the longest serving staff member ever at the institution; he had worked there since the museums’ opening in 1959. He was a true eccentric: his office was a chaotic pile of objects, including a rotary phone and mountains of papers, some of them there likely since the 1960s and, ironically, not in pristine archival condition. I remember seeing yellowed memos of AAA (American Abstract Artists), a group of which Ward was an active member. Even years after he officially retired, he kept coming back to the museum, for reasons that were unclear to me. I would sometimes see him walking around the offices like a ghost.

 One day we coincided in the elevator, and we exchanged greetings. While exiting the elevator I must have made a cynical remark about my job, likely a side comment that would be made by any overworked staff member.   He did not take my comment well, and he scolded me: “remember, this is a temple of the spirit: it is a really important place” (the phrase “temple of the spirit” was a famous statement used by the first director of the Guggenheim, Hilla Rebay, to describe the museum). I was left confounded and shocked into stillness as the elevator doors slowly shut. Ward passed away shortly after that day, leaving me with this ambiguous last image of him. 

The second exchange happened a few years later, during my first week of work at MoMA. I was helping organize a lecture by Richard Serra who was having his second retrospective at the museum. During the dinner after the lecture, I was officially introduced to Serra, who looked at me suspiciously. I must have looked to him like an inexperienced kid (which I largely was). At the end of the dinner, he pulled me aside and told me the following in the form of advice: “Take a careful look at those walls and at what is hanging there. These walls are sacred. This is the Modern.  Don’t fuck it up.”

Born a decade apart, Ward Jackson and Richard Serra belong roughly to the same generation. More significantly, they are artists who came of age during a golden era in New York City’s art scene. Ward was friends with de Kooning and other AbEx artists, while Serra studied under Albers and Philip Guston. Both were in New York in the early 60s, when New York had already asserted its place as the dominant capital of the art world. MoMA loomed large in the artist’s imagination — so much so that many painters of the Ab-Ex generation would make canvasses measured to a scale that would exactly fit MoMA’s new galleries, with the hopes that the works would be acquired by the museum (and some indeed were).

In this context it is not surprising that the perception of these museums as sacred spaces, and their role at canonizing artists would permeate the culture. In their view, no one can become a real artist unless admitted into those private clubs. To them, and to most of us still,  they are, to a certain extent, places of consecration.

However, in 2021 we would be hard pressed to project the same level of significance that the previous generation had of the great American art institutions. I imagine myself at Richard Serra’s age, thirty or so years from now, talking to a young museum employee at MoMA. What would I say to them? I would feel ridiculous telling them the same thing that Serra said to me.  I can’t imagine myself talking about temples of the spirit now, let alone in 2051.

One could dismiss it at a sign of the times, a moment where the collective distrust of institutions, both political, economic, and cultural, is at an all-time high. But I think there is a more complex and long-term shift at play.

A few years ago, I heard Rachel Harrison say in a conversation that she had many artist friends who just did not care about exhibiting in museums. To them, she argued,  things like sharing images on social media was enough. I thought in all honesty that her comment at the time was disingenuous, especially coming from someone who was such an established artist with works in collections all over the world. But in retrospect I now think she had made an important point.

Let’s start with the topic of scale. Going back to the generation of artists who came of age in the New York City of the 1960s; when you speak to them, a common denominator in those conversations is that their art world was fairly small: they mostly lived in a similar geographical area, there were not so many galleries, and if you were part of that community after a few years you would have likely met most of its key players and connectors. “Everyone knew each other” is a common refrain. Everyone went to Betty Parsons Gallery, everyone knew of the gatherings and performances organized in Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street loft, and so forth. Tony Jones, who used to run the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, told me that, as an art student, on the very day when he got off the boat from the UK to New York City (yes, I believe he came by sea), he walked onto a coffee shop downtown and Andy Warhol was there, so he got to meet him and talk to him. Seems absurd, but it does illustrate how much smaller was the art scene then.

Looking at that world from today’s perspective, it seems impossible to achieve the same in today’s New York art scene, comprised as it is of tens of thousands of individuals and hundreds of relevant art spaces and power centers. Moreover, the art world is (thankfully) not dominated by a single art center, not does Eurocentric art, let alone white and male art, dominate in the same way that it did.

The expansion of the art world fueled by the neoliberal global economy has had at least three effects:  one, the corporatization of museums and biennials, turning non-profit entities into massive, ambitiously competitive enterprises primarily focused on their physical and economic expansion, and arguably seeing their expansion as synonymous for growth. Second is the blurring boundaries between the for-profit and the non-profit art worlds, including academia.

Most important is the third phenomenon:  that, precisely because of that proliferation of venues and platforms, both nonprofit and for-profit, both virtual and real, we are now in an era where not one single entity can have absolute dominance of the art narrative. This, in a way, has also resulted in a fragmentation of canons, and it is impossible even for large museums to insist that there can be a single canonical narrative to art, and they now must admit to it. What they don’t usually add (because it is not convenient) is that there can’t be a single institutional/canonical/dominant arbiter anymore either.

Certainly, and I am sure many of will immediately object, things have not changed enough. But the fact of the matter is that even artists who receive some of the highest distinctions in the art world (say, a retrospective at a major museum) are not guaranteed the same transformation and propulsion toward the influence of a new generation than the artists of the avant-garde once had.

What has become clear already for several decades is that art does not have a unified narrative, and that the way that narrative has been constructed in the past, as a series of dominating chapters and movements, fails to acknowledge too many practices that have not conformed with those theories or rhythms. So, I am not arguing that there will never be another artist with the same talent or genius as, say a Picasso or a Duchamp, but rather that there may well be many artists working with that same or greater genius and abilities working today, but given the fragmentary world we all live in today they are unlikely to receive the same art historical levels of recognition or have the same level of influence onto others. Even historically, when we find major artists who should be given a deserved place in the historical canon, like Hilma af Klint, they seem to permanently be at a disadvantage because the gospel of modernism has already been etched in stone and it is difficult to erase it.

The problem is partially connected to how we psychologically and emotionally give so much importance to names and ideas that even if we see new and revolutionary ideas that in some respects could be considered better,  we might be unable to recognize it. To illustrate this, I would like to share an interesting fact, not from the world of art, but of instrument-making.

Antonio Stradivari is probably the most famous luthier who ever lived. In his remarkably long and productive life (he lived and worked up to his 90s) he crafted more than 1000 instruments, about 650 of which survive to this day. The beauty and richness of the sound of the Stradivari violins is the stuff of legend: several reasons are given for it, including the elegant design, the type of varnish, and even the type of wood employed for the instrument (legend has it that the luthier himself would travel to Val di Fiemme, a valley in the Trentino province, to personally pick the spruce trees from which he would take his material). So revered are these instruments that many receive individual names, like artworks, and they go for 16 million dollars each on average.

Museo del Violino, Cremona

The question is whether the sound of a Stradivarius can be paralleled or surpassed. So in 2017 there was a study conducted at the Institut Jean-Le-Rond-d'Alembert in Paris — a research institute affiliated to the Sorbonne. The study explored whether the sound of the Stradivarius violin is truly superior to any other instrument.  A total of 137 listeners —some in Paris and others in New York— were asked to listen to several Stradivari and non-Stradivari violins to determine which one had the superior sound. The experiment was conducted on a double-blind basis, meaning that the violinists also did not know which instrument they were playing was a real Strad.

The results showed that most listeners preferred the newer violins to the Strads, and neither the violinists nor the listeners were able to meaningfully distinguish the difference between one and the other. You might wonder: did this influence how we feel about Stradivari violins, or did this increase the value of the other 21st century instruments, made with likely superior technology and equal or perhaps even greater craftsmanship? I believe you can guess the answer.

There is a question about context of course— specifically the context within which the earlier instrument existed which cannot be recreated. But in objective, practical terms, the study showed that nowadays there are equal if not superior violins to the ones made by Stradivari. Only that they are not Stradivariuses. But is the value then the romanticism of the story, the fact that Stradivari traveled to Val di Fiemme to pick the tree and make this delicate object that matters? Or is it about the ultimate sound the instrument makes? The question really is on what our objective parameter is to measure great art, and the extent to which we are being influenced by our religious devotion to the canon.

The morale of the story, if one is willing to draw a parallel between the world of luthiers and the process of value construction in the visual arts, is mostly a positive one. In this post-dominant center aesthetic future, no one will be famous for more than 15 minutes. This presents a problem for those who try to construct definitive histories of art making today, but what it only means is that the art discourse will no longer be primarily dominated by individual names, be it of artists, curators, funders, or institutions. And that is largely a good thing. We might be entering a very interesting moment, like a novel a without protagonists. Or perhaps something like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, where the protagonist is elusive and sometimes fades away like a ghost, where there is no set plot line.

All that is left is the music that comes out behind the curtain. The musician and the listener might not know who made that instrument, but they are still unified in producing and processing its message. A double-blind exercise that results in seeing anew. Or, as Octavio Paz who was once laboriously editing proofs with a young assistant and he nervously pointed out a mistake Paz had made in the copy, afraid he would get annoyed, Paz told him: “aquí no importamos ni usted ni yo: aquí lo que importa es la poesía” (“this is not about you or me: what matters here is the poetry”).