Art Wunderkids and the Art World System

Sorry about the absence of posts. Busy, busy week in Lo-Land-- work is hectic right now and I've been helping out with a gallery catalogue in my off-hours.

But, sparked by the ever-brilliant Julie Sara Wecsler, I've also been thinking a lot about art wunderkids and their position in the gallery world. I've been trying to figure out how to describe this phenomenon -- as exemplified by "School Days", whose opening was described bouyantly by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pages. We have a group of incredibly motivated, ambitious, young artists who have equal hands in their own practices, art history, the market, and saavy connection-building. They end up wow-ing the art world heavies and rocketing to stardom. (Dana Schutz, Elliott Hundley, and Iris Nemecek are recent examples, and Nemecek, though an international example, is still a student in Vienna.) Is this lightning-quick success similar to the motivation that drives the SAT-tutored (elite) youth of America into the right colleges? Are these artists more ambitious than those of the past? Is it that art schools have professionalized so much and so quickly that they can pump out artists and just plop them into galleries? Or, is it just that the market has driven youthful artists into factory-like making -- i.e. producing for collectors, but not pushing the boundaries?

There are also broader issues of which one must take note. In assessing the art world and its hunger for youth, we have to acknowledge that we are only talking about a handful of artists, coming from a handful of schools (Yale, Columbia, UCLA, Art Center, sometimes the Art Institute, etc.), for a very select audience of movers, shakers and observers. But, that being said, there are other factors involved too; like how art schools have changed in the past twenty years. Chuck Close had some things to say in Tompkin's piece:

A lot of artists in the tottering stages of forty-and-over might be horrified by the show. Chuck Close, who graduated from Yale’s School of Art in 1964, said the other day that none of his classmates would have dreamed of showing the work they did in art school; the freedom to experiment, to try new approaches without fear of failing, was essential to finding their own way, he felt. But Deborah Kass, a visiting artist-teacher at Yale, did not seem concerned. “A lot of these people are really good artists, and you just get out of their way,” she said.

And perhaps one gets out of the way because of the speediness of information--the quick exchange of email, and the ease with which one can use the Internet to distribute images and CVs to a broad network of people--that has contributed to this culture of fast success in the art world. Not only galleries have this access, but the artists themselves have access to a bevy of information instantaneously.

The art world that gets talked about, and that thrives because of collectors, is the result of a network of select people. While I imagine that there are some MFA students who don't get snatched up as quickly at Yale or UCLA, Art Center or Columbia -- whether by choice or by ill-fated chance or pre-maturity in their careers-- there are a ton of MFA students out there who don't even get acknowledged as cutting edge because they're not enrolled in the right schools in the right major metropolitan areas. And, the questions linger: What are they making? And who will go out there and get them? (At the very least, we have New American Paintings, which can bring some of them to us in glossy form.)

Another factor to take note of: trends, in general, can be accessed, taken in, and distributed more quickly now. And it makes sense that the art world--charging ahead of that curve as far as aesthetics--would be subject to the same pace. But, here's the kicker that applies to trends: in the recent Los Angeles Times article, "Fads Are So Yesterday," it almost seems that evidence from (and analysts of) contemporary culture debunks the notion of fads in general, predicting that individuals will find what they like and wear or acquire it, instead of looking to contemporary currents to tell them what to do. However, the art world and the gallery system is a world based on trends, albeit of high quality. Newness and surprise is valued almost as much as astoundingly groundbreaking work, and the current explosion of MFA success is particularly suited to these obsessions.

But the real question, I think, tends beyond biography and pedigree: it is whether the work itself is sustainabile; whether it's universal; whether it has the ability to stupify and invent, and challenge traditions and norms of already-formulated ideas about art. And the answer to that, of course, is no a measure of youth. Those questions take time to answer.

** An interesting and connected piece of news is that Rob Storr has been named Dean at Yale School of Art. Not only does Yale already have an arsenal of super-fine professors and a reputation mythical enough to send gallerists swooning, Storr has an acknowledgedly critical and fascinated eye. It will be interesting to see how -- or if -- he will address the meteoric rise of MFA students and shake things up.