Venice is a classic example of an event that art insiders love to hate. Every two years, a superstar curator is asked to prepare a vast exhibition in a difficult and historically charged venue, with limited resources, a ridiculous timeline, Italian ineptitude, and a spaghetti bowl of national pride, politics, and pavilion positioning thrown into the mix. Then the art crowd descends and, between bouts of champagne drinking and Vaporetto riding, it delivers a categorical judgment—usually negative. The pop psychologist in me believes that some folks have so much fun in Venice that they have to declare the Biennial a failure and a bore. This is partly intended to make their expense-account journey look more like a hard-working professional chore than the sybaritic fun ride it is. (You may discern a note of envy: I wasn’t there.) After this year’s opening, the commentariat appeared to be speaking from the same talking points. The line was that while the last Biennial was awful, this one—organized by art-world wunderkind Daniel Birnbaum, who is undoubtedly one of the smartest young figures on the scene—was banal and flat. Really?

Contrast with Basel. It’s a trite metaphor, but the world’s leading art fair, which occupies the same space as Baselworld, the epic watch fair, really does run like clockwork. (Disclosure: ArtworldSalon co-founder Marc Spiegler and his colleagues deserve much of the credit for this). This year as every other year, Basel was a disembarkation point for collectors and museum honchos arriving from Venice. Profound and justifiable art market anxiety preceded the fair. Even so, nothing hinted at any malaise or uncertainty on the surface. It is a very Swiss thing to never let trouble show, so it didn’t. An astonishing exhibition-cum-performance extravaganza, Il Tempo Del Postino, added a special layer of excitement and significance. But what made Art Basel so different from Venice was the talk surrounding it. The common line here was, “We were hoping for the worst, and we came away happy.” With dealers running out of inventory by the third day, Basel was declared a triumph, a turning point, a milestone to recovery.

In reality, all global events have their strong points and weak points, their relative successes and failures. Their scale and complexity, the sheer quantity of artworks and people involved renders blanket judgments meaningless. Nonetheless, the art world longs for a simple verdict, like a bloodthirsty crowd in a gladiator arena. The best advice for mega-event organizers, it seems, would be to keep expectations on the muted side. Everyone likes a surprise, especially a good one.

A scan of the catalog’s biographies confirms that, almost without exception, the artists in the show are products of art schools, as often as not intensely professionalized, canon-driven environments. This may help explain why so much of the work on view comes with art historical references and borrowings, tweaks on tweaks on tweaks so intricate and numerous as to defy listing.

And Michael Kimmelman can’t resist a similar swipe in his recent and rather sonambulant review of the Venice Biennale:

If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus. It has prompted the predictable cooing from wishful insiders, burbling vaguely about new found introspection and gravity.

What, I have to ask, is wrong with professionalization? What are we really criticizing when we deride the graduates of MFA and PhD programs for nothing more than simply having done what one would expect them to do, which is to go and learn about the enterprise in which they are interested? I suspect that lurking behind such statements lies a romanticized and outmoded notion of the artistic subject—which is to say, of the kind of subjectivity (autodidactic, at odds with decorum and the status quo, sometimes tortured, often difficult, always independent—i.e. an ideal of bourgeois bohemianism) that continues to cling to the definition of the “artist” today like some itchy fungus.

No doubt some answers are to be found in James Elkins’ recent editorial enterprise, Artists With PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (New Academia Press, 2009).  I have not read this collection of essays and examples of artists’ PhD theses, but I imagine it will be necessary if we want to get at the difference (if we allow that there is one) between ‘professionalization’ and ‘academicization’.

To turn back to  charges of ‘professionalism’, what is the merit of it to begin with? Is the ‘amateur’ really, demonstrably, more favorable than the pro? Isn’t the former simply another iteration of our own lurking romanticism? (Or worse, is it of a piece with the rampant and poisonous anti-elitism that we witness nearly everywhere today?)  I hesitate here to make a comparison to the sciences. Professionalization in such fields as biology and physics may have resulted in certain institutional inefficiencies, in misguided research programs and even, in some instances, in a kind of sanctioned alienation from ‘reality’. But no one is calling for a wholesale return to the days of ‘tabletop science’, when experimentation could be characterized as ‘gentleman’s tinkering’. The era of big science, of the Large Hadron Collider and the Hubble Space Telescope, has wrought a reality that the amateur tinkerer could only dream of. Perhaps the rise of the PhD will usher in its own era of ‘big art’ (and I’m not thinking of Jeff Koons here), one of a scale and an ambition of which we can as yet only dream.

Is same generation a useful basis for writing history? Obviously the answer is yes and no. For years now scholars have questioned the validity of viewing the cultural past and the present through the old apparatus of renaissances, dynasties and “periods.” They see these categories for what they are: packaging designed to sell an account of events that will go down smoothly and leave no spaces blank or questions unanswered. Generations could be added to the list.

So much for the “no.”  But what of the “yes”?  Why wouldn’t “same generation” be a “useful basis for writing history?”  Because, one imagines, without the contemporaneity that underpins much historical analysis, the writing of history would make little sense, or it would at least require significant methodological justification just to get itself going.  But this gets beyond my immediate point.  Cotter takes to task The Met and New Museum shows because their “history” is somehow incomplete.  Cotter thinks the Met’s case is myopia, the New Museum’s is inevitability.  Of course some of Cotter’s points—that the Pictures retrospective gives Philip Smith short (actually no) shrift; that the Generational is an exercise in curatorial self-gratification—have some merit.  But here’s the thing: they are shows.  They may even be historically important.  But they are not histories.  Or are they?

This confusion between art exhibition and art history, between curator and historian, is increasingly prevalent.  It has even found a kind of institutional codification in the recent publication of Phaidon’s Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that made Art History, 1863-1959 (2008), the first volume in a two volume set that traces the history of the modern “group exhibition.”  The question here is whether we take these two recent shows that focus on “generations” as Cotter does, which is to say as actual attempts at writing history; or do we see them, and Cotter’s criticism of them, as symptomatic of a condition in which the narratives that we call history are increasingly subject to a kind of lateral spread, in which chains of events, causes and effects, beginnings, middles and ends–that is to say, stories–must give way to the irreducible present?  And what form is more appropriate to the presentation of the present than, of course, the show?

With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?

Coverage of the arts is migrating online but unless someone is prepared to pay for it, the outlook is uncertain

Before we succumb to nostalgia, let’s be clear: arts journalism has never had it easy. Culture, especially in its rarefied incarnations, has never been a high priority for the mainstream press. Criticism is a strange bird in an enterprise devoted to “objectivity” and mass readership. And news bosses rarely care about “soft” arts stories. They are into “hard” reporting on wars and money and sport—boys’ stuff. Instead of a reliable income, arts journalism has paid dividends in the form of access to art and a voice in cultural debates—that, and an occasional VIP pass, dinner invite or goodie bag.

Recently, though, the situation has taken a turn for the worse. The imminent demise of printed newspapers is no longer a panel discussion topic, but a reality. Many US cities including Denver and Seattle are losing their second papers; others (including, possibly, San Francisco, Miami and Philadelphia) are contemplating life without a printed daily. The Detroit Free Press is only printing a paper edition three days a week. Even the New York Times, its stock worth barely more than its Sunday edition, has sold its Renzo Piano tower, imposed steep cost cuts, and is threatening to close its subsidiary, the Boston Globe. The massively overleveraged Tribune Company, owner of dozens of newspapers, is in bankruptcy, leaving the fate of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times in the balance. At the Los Angeles Times, newsroom positions have been cut by half over the past decade, and arts coverage substantially reduced. An aptly named blog, Paper Cuts, counts 24,000 newspaper jobs lost in the US since the start of last year. The outlook for newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic is dim.

Arts journalism as we used to know it is sinking with the ship.

The forces undermining the news business are the same everywhere and have been extensively catalogued by now. Studies show, however, that arts journalism is not being singled out for inequitable rollbacks. The problem is that the cuts are deepening an already miserable shortage of resources, set against a cultural universe that continues to expand. We are past the tipping point: it has become acceptable to run a paper with just a skeletal culture staff. Specialised writers are giving way to generalists. Culture sections are being tossed overboard (standalone book review sections, in particular, are a dying breed). Article lengths and “news holes” (space for editorial content) are shrinking. All this has eviscerated newspapers’ ability to deliver quality arts coverage, which, as a result, must migrate elsewhere.

Beyond the tipping point

But where? Many experts believe that daily newspapers will never find a way back to sustaining solid arts journalism. Magazines are doing marginally better, but they cannot shoulder the burden of timely local arts coverage, especially for non-specialist readers—and some are folding. The news industry, on the whole, was too slow to embrace the internet and deploy its once abundant war chests to find new ways of capturing readers seeking information, services and communities. Myopically obsessed with their traditional product, newspapers failed to acquire, let alone invent, game-changing technologies such as Craigslist, Facebook or the Kindle.

Under relentless shareholder pressure, publishers have tried every game in the book to monetise journalism on the web—from charging for online subscriptions, to fencing off “walled gardens” of premium content, to surrounding journalism with clever advertising. Lately, some executives have been pinning their hopes on an iTunes-style micro-payment scheme. Last month, the Associated Press threatened to make sites that link to its content pay up or face legal action, while Rupert Murdoch warned: “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change.”

But so far nothing has worked. No substitute for newspapers’ monopoly on local and classified advertising has emerged. For Douglas McLennan, publisher of ArtsJournal, a popular arts newsletter and link aggregator (with 50,000 daily users), it is simply too late for papers to innovate their way out of this quandary. “We just need to regretfully bid them adieu and get them out of the room, because they are sucking up oxygen. It is going to make it difficult for the new models to take hold until some of this dead wood is pushed out.”

Now the good news: it is only a matter of time before someone puts the pieces back together again. The search for a hopeful future begins with the insight that although journalists and publications are suffering, readership is up by wide margins. More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.

The problem is not the scarcity or the quality of arts journalism (the latter has always been mixed), but that no one is paying for it—at least not yet. Broadly speaking, there are three ways forward from here.

Recreating economies of scale

Clearly, arts journalists aren’t disappearing. They are just moving online. Technorati lists 185,000 “arts” blogs at present, including 5,396 on “art criticism” and 1,858 on “arts journalism” (disclosure: I am a co-founder of one of them, artworldsalon.com). From a business standpoint, the question is how to generate audiences around these atomised writers to allow them to collect paid advertising. One strategy is for individual blogs to scale up to a size where their writers become popular “personal brands”. This has happened in political punditry and may happen in entertainment writing. But it is unlikely in visual arts journalism, where audiences even for top writers are thin.

A more realistic, already extant scenario links blogs to heavily trafficked journalism, entertainment, or aggregator sites, which attract large numbers of readers by providing access to a wide range of news content. ArtsJournal, for example, currently hosts 42 blogs on a variety of arts topics, including the widely read visual arts blogs Modern Art Notes and CultureGrrl. Under such arrangements, bloggers get a cut of the advertising fees along with greater visibility (which can lead to other paid gigs), while the umbrella site captures readers and turns more “sticky”. Something analogous is happening with some established journalism brands. Innovative newspapers like the Guardian in the UK and VG in Norway are putting together a kind of layer-cake of content that attracts a sizable number of online readers. At the top are editorially supervised staff journalists. Below are blogs, written by staff and freelance writers with latitude to shape their content. The third tier is the vast, unsupervised “commentosphere” of opining readers. The whole machinery works in unison to congregate a wide, lucrative ad base. In view of these developments, today’s do-it-yourself blogs are destined to be a transient phenomenon. Many talented arts journalists will carve out a satellite franchise in the orbit of larger media entities.

How soon such bloggers can tackle the full journalistic workload left unattended by newspapers is another question. In terms of commentary and plain kibitzing, especially about local arts scenes, we may be there already. When it comes to fair and balanced reporting, the record is mixed. On the one hand, bloggers are breaking stories, with arts organisations (or their disgruntled employees) obliging them with excellent scoops. The Getty Center’s leadership crisis, in 2006, when internal memos trickled to the press via blogs, was an early example. Much “insider baseball” that may not get ink in a newspaper is now routinely covered by blogs. Deaccessioning stories alone have become a minor cottage industry.

However, journalism is not just about scoops. It’s about due diligence, evaluating accuracy, giving subjects an opportunity to respond, and providing non-judgmental context. Such protocols are more likely to be followed under the gaze of professional editors. Major investigative stories are clearly out of reach for even the most intrepid bloggers.

Going non-commercial

What if audience aggregation won’t make arts journalism into a viable business? Until recently, it was anathema to suggest that newspapers could become not-for-profit organisations. Yet hospitals and museums offer public benefits this way, and so might the press. In fact, a few smaller US papers are already run as non-profits (with mixed results). Specialised art periodicals, such as Cabinet, have for years survived on donations (with excellent results). Going not-for-profit involves some legal and ethical intricacies for the press. Purists worry that journalism could end up in the pockets of foundations with random agendas and short attention spans. Yet, if publishers can keep a “firewall” between their editorial and business operations, they can also do it with donors.

There are applicable precedents. The Kaiser Family Foundation supports coverage of healthcare, for example. “The NewsHour” on PBS, one of the most respected TV news shows in the US, has 22 foundation sponsors and two corporate underwriters (Intel and Chevron). Some pay for specific types of journalism—and no outrage, so far, over conflicts of interest. Public radio (NPR), with 33 million weekly listeners (as against the New York Times’ 1 million daily circulation), is a haven for quality arts journalism that attracts some of the best reporters in the business. It has also perfected the art of raising money for its coverage—from foundations and legions of listeners. Both PBS and NPR receive government support. Only the trained eye can distinguish the “image spots” of foundation and corporate underwriters on public TV from the sort of advertising that populates the commercial airwaves.

Some fascinating new web-based funding models appear less suited to rescuing the mainstream media than to helping smaller for-profit or not-for-profit publications. A Bay Area outfit called spot.us has a method for “community funded reporting”, which pools small donations for specific stories. People interested in a proposed story can make a tax-deductible contribution (typical budgets are below $1,000). The money is held in escrow until the entire sum for the story is collected, at which point the writer gets the green light. My current favourite payment model is Kachingle, which promises to “sprinkle change on the blogs you love”. A Kachingle member sets a monthly budget for donations to favourite media sources—say, $50. Beneficiaries are identified by pressing a Kachingle button already found on many sites. Everything happens automatically. The $50 is distributed in proportion to the amount of time the donor spends on each of the chosen sites. Genius.

There is a growing realisation that without some form of non-commercial support, certain realms of quality journalism may not survive, especially under current market conditions. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian has suggested buying newspaper subscriptions for college students—a bailout that would replenish future readers. The Andy Warhol Foundation supports art critics and reporters by means of grants awarded through Creative Capital. In Europe, where such support falls to the state, Jürgen Habermas, the German sociologist, has urged direct government support for the media. Not to be outdone, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged €600m to aid the press with advertising, tax breaks and student subscriptions.

Philanthropy can help to build a new arts journalism infrastructure to offset the collapse of local coverage. Proposals to harness freelance writers in an organised fashion date back to the late 1990s, when David Resnicow and Frederick Schroeder, of the prominent Resnicow Schroeder arts marketing and PR firm, launched an independent company named MuseNews, a national for-profit art news syndicate that sold stories to old and new media outlets for a small fee. The service, which also sought foundation underwriting, was subsequently merged into Bloomberg, where it evolved into the site’s arts and culture section, known to readers of this newspaper as an excellent source of art business reporting. Current proposals for a new kind of art news service are inspired by the success of online news sites such as ProPublica and GlobalPost, which hired top-notch journalists (some recently laid off) to fill blind spots in public affairs and international news coverage, with foundation support. Politico, which was launched by private investors and will soon turn a profit, operates on a similar model, and it has become influential enough to sponsor presidential debates and be called up for a question at President Obama’s first major press conference. Initiatives are currently underway to develop specialised newsgathering operations for science, healthcare and even religion (the Religion News Network). These organisations are recreating alternatives to professional newsrooms with editorial guidance and supervision. According to some estimates, $2m per year—one-fifth of 1% of US foundation arts support—could ramp up a new arts journalism service. Writers at imperiled publications like the Los Angeles Times are following these developments closely.

The real hurdle for non-profit arts journalism, it should be clear, is not technology, or ethics, or a lack of ideas. It is fundraising. To get behind arts writing, foundations and arts patrons would need to steer funds away from their traditional recipients (artists and organisations) towards journalists (who are often considered as adversaries). In other words, a not-for-profit rethink of arts journalism hinges on a rethink of cultural philanthropy.

Arts groups step up

This brings us to the third, and arguably most controversial, cure for the ills of arts journalism—cultural organisations. Until recently, there was an unambiguous division of labour between arts institutions and the press. One side delivered programming, the other provided exposure, evaluation and public scrutiny. Any suggestion that these roles could blend together would elicit howls of condemnation. But if the marketplace or cultural patrons cannot sustain arts journalism, those with a stake in its survival must come up with alternatives. And it’s already happening.

Arts groups are getting better at telling their own stories and directly engaging their constituents. It may not always look like journalism, but it is filling in some gaps. In the US, regional online art hubs are springing up from Chicago to Kansas City, Miami and Los Angeles, supported by coalitions of local arts organisations and philanthropists, to provide information and discussion about the arts. Museums, in particular, have taken the lead in creating an alternative media infrastructure. MoMA’s recently relaunched website features online groups that allow visitors to explore, create and share information via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and iTunes. London’s Tate (which publishes its own glossy, Tate Etc, billed as “Europe’s largest art magazine”) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis are among the trailblazers pouring resources into deep, polished, personalised online content and public forums. Some museum sites are, in effect, starting to resemble interactive online art magazines.

Their latest features are strikingly similar to the innovations news organisations are deploying to turn their customers into active, participating, loyal partners in the enterprise of journalism.

The next step is pooling resources. “What’s the point of having 1,000 museum websites with separate databases of information?” asks Maxwell Anderson, director and chief executive of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), where he recently launched two innovations that bridge the gulf between the press and the visual arts. One is ArtBabble.org, a kind of YouTube for art, with high definition videos gathered from a consortium of art institutions (IMA, MoMA, SFMOMA, Lacma, the New York Public Library, Art 21 and the Smithsonian, at present). In contrast to YouTube, the videos are carefully selected and screened for quality. The transcripts of many of them are searchable, locally or via Google, so that a casual viewer or a researcher can find the exact spot, for example, where Ed Ruscha reminisces about the Cirrus gallery in a documentary produced by Lacma. Visitors to the site can add their own comments and engage in online discussions, just like at any savvy news site. ArtBabble, and others like it, may well develop into future platforms for art criticism and commentary.

Mr Anderson’s other innovation at IMA is a digital “Dashboard”, located on the museum’s website, providing up-to-date statistics on the museum’s administration and performance. An array of digital “widgets” tally up everything from the number of museum members to the total kilowatt-hours of energy consumed daily. Some of the statistics are not for the faint-hearted museum director. One of the IMA widgets tracks the museum’s endowment in monthly snapshots (down $120m since last October). Another chronicles admissions with data generated every five minutes. A catalogue of objects slated for deaccessioning is next, along with their sale price and where the proceeds end up. For Mr Anderson, the Dashboard, with its objective measurements of administrative goings-on, is an antidote to the “risk of institutional control” that pervades most in-house publications. It is no substitute for hard-nosed reporters, but for transparency, it’s a start.

The hybrid future

Amid the doom and gloom about arts journalism, such innovations offer a glimmer of hope. There is no going back to the cultural and advertising dominance that newspapers once enjoyed. We should be mindful that the emerging landscape offers asymmetrical odds for art criticism (which can survive by the labour of individual writers) and arts reporting (which requires institutional firepower and protections). Writers will struggle to reclaim the access and influence they achieved with the backing of prestigious journalism brands. Even so, the faint outlines of a new system are starting to emerge.

It’s worth noting that journalism schools are seeing a record surge in applications. Many top institutions, including Columbia, Syracuse, the Annenberg School at USC, and the City University of New York, have recently launched graduate programmes in cultural journalism. Despite the current meltdown, these are among the most heavily sought after specialisations. Certification may be even more important for freelance writers than for those in accredited newsrooms. Do-it-yourself journalism is expanding so rapidly that it may be sparking its own demand for journalism training.

Students may be attracted precisely by the lure of the new and unknown. The most exhilarating aspect of tomorrow’s arts journalism will be its unpredictable hybridity, how it feeds on multiple sources of innovation and energy. It will be an undertaking where nimble entrepreneurs sustain criticism and reporting through a mix of advertising, licensing, social networks, donations, digital space rental, and barter arrangements—whatever works. Boundaries between writers and audiences, channels of communication, and professional constituencies will blur in ways that are at once alarming and hopeful. Our notion of what a “news organisation” or an “art magazine” is supposed to do will be upended as new relationships crystallise between the arts, the media and the public.

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” media analyst Clay Shirky observed in his blog recently. “No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper,” he added, “but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

I am talking about the ArtPrize [sic.], the “radically open” art competition with the greatest payout in history: $250,000 for the winner ($100,000 for the runner-up) in an American Idol-style contest based on voting by the general public. It’s being funded by a well-meaning young gentleman named Rick DeVos, who won a contest of a different sort — genetic — and leveraged his inherited fortune with entrepreneurial feats of his own. The contestants will register online, ship their work to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the rest will be up to the good folks who happen to be in town during an exhibitionpalooza weekend event where the voting takes place.

So what’s wrong with this picture? I can think of four things.

First, I have nothing against discovering those hidden diamonds in our midst (I, too, watched the Laura Boyle video and got misty-eyed), but public polling is not the best way to reward human accomplishment. The Olympics, the Nobel, or the Pulitzer Prizes are earned in arduous, sometimes lifelong ordeals of jumping over physical and mental hurdles. Judgment by juries and peers has a lot to do with the authority of these awards. It is, I think, a measure of our confused relationship with art if we believe that the general public is better equipped to judge the work of artists than professional juries or peers. Would we pick heart surgeons this way? Architects? Firemen? The ArtPrize reminds me of Komar and Melamid’s spoof surveys of the desirable aesthetic traits of art. Do you like your art fridge-size or TV-size? Check box A or B.

Second, we already have a system for recognizing meritorious artists, and it is frayed and economically challenged. Rather than creating yet another channel of art-world mobility, how about improving what we have? The funds going into this publicity stunt could help many worthy workshops of artistic production and debate, in Michigan or elsewhere. In recent years we have been hearing a lot about the corrupted mechanisms of professional selection in the visual arts. Schools, galleries, museums—all have been accused of being tainted by careerism and greed. Yes, money corrupts. But I see a greater threat in populism than in the lure of fame and riches. And if the lure of fame and riches is was what broke the art world, why would a highly publicized and extremely lucrative award offer an alternative?

Third, it is almost certain that the artist identified through the ArtPrize will never make it into the art-world big leagues. I predict pop and fizzle. There is no vast mass-culture audience waiting for the winner to ascend the ladder of celebrity. This is not going to be the case of the cell phone salesman who sells two million copies of his opera album. I don’t see Larry Gagosian clamoring to sign up the lucky winner. The money is nice, but what will be the ultimate impact on the winner?

Fourth, and last, I detect an odor of desperation emanating from the new prize. It reminds me of those Depression era kissing contests where hopeful couples smooched for days until they collapsed. It relies on the kind of desperation that drives someone to audition for America’s Top Model, or to buy a lottery ticket. None of this augurs well for the winner’s chances of earning lasting artistic recognition, any more than kissing contests predicted long-lasting blissful marriages.

Artists may be blessed with strong survival skills, especially in the putting-a-brave-face-on-misery department. Or is this a form of “false consciousness” (to dust off another half-forgotten thinker who is suddenly back in vogue)? How realistic is this new silver-lining discourse?

The idea that art-market busts are good because artists can “take over the factory, make the art industry their own” and “daydream and concentrate” was given an airing in February by Holland Cotter in New York Times in a manifesto-esque article,“The Boom is Over. Long Live Art.” Lots of people who make their living in the art world took note, and some felt the critic may have missed the point. At this stage in history, must art’s credibility depend on proof of human suffering and absence of commercial success? “Certainly, the excesses of the art world were alienating,” observed Alexandra Peers, an ArtworldSalon friend, in a riposte to Cotter in New York magazine. “But there’s Schadenfreude in the argument that bad times are good for the naughty, naughty art world.”

So which is it: An outbreak of gooey-eyed Romanticism? Or a sober reckoning with tough but healthy new realities?

Eva Diaz writes:

I’ve been getting many emails recently about the Parsons Fine Arts part-timers layoffs situation, and indeed about the New School students’ takeover of the campus last Thursday.  (Full disclosure: I began teaching Art History at Parsons/The New School part-time this semester, and though my students are mostly drawn from the affected Fine Arts MFA program, I am technically in a different department and haven’t been privy to any departmental or administrative conversations.  For more information, see the NY Times  and Artnet  articles from April 3; check out the NY Times  from April 11 for information about police brutality at protests calling for the resignation of New School president Bob Kerrey.)

I, like many people, view the layoffs as a confusing situation.  In many ways the rhetorical positions put forward by both the union and the Kerrey administration are unsatisfactory.  How can curricular excellence and much-needed improvements be instituted while defending some of our most vulnerable art workers: adjunct teachers?

It is important to point out the larger issues of the proletarianization of the academy, the utter lack of job security in a scarcity economy, and the repeal of the notion of tenure in the humanities (and its near impossibility in an art school).   But let’s look at the money situation, always the administrations’ justification for why no-benefits, part-time work has become so pervasive.  Tuition has become outlandishly expensive, but where is the money going?  Here’s some basic back-of-the-napkin math:

Eleven part-timers teaching that many courses in one semester at Parsons amounts to approximately $45,000 to $65,000 (each adjunct makes between $4,000 to $6,000 per course), barely enough to hire two senior faculty teaching perhaps four, maximum six courses per semester.   However, that $45,000 to $65,000 for eleven teachers would be covered by semester tuition paid by only three to four students. (Full yearly tuition at Parsons, according to their website, starts at $33,700 not including room and board and other fees. A little under half of Parsons students receive financial aid; the average award of $10,000 knocks tuition for those students down to $23,700.) If Fine Arts students take about five courses a semester with each student paying an average of $2,900 per course, then the university takes in $40,600 per course, or $446,600 for eleven courses, with an average of 14 students per course (according to collegedata.com, 81% of classes at Parsons have between 10-19 students). That makes the salary for adjuncts between 10% and 14.5% of the gross. Yes, the overhead for running an art school in New York is high, but still, where is the rest of students’ tuition going?

I know that similar situations of mass layoffs occurred at RISD and Columbia in recent years; it’s a pressing issue.   On the one hand, one wants to support the underdog (the unionized, part-time adjuncts making a measly $4-6,000 per semester); on the other hand, at many institutions instructors can hang around doing one mediocre class per year while their work or careers are not developing. If the curriculum is to be made more theoretically and historically informed, more in touch with contemporary forms of practice and current debates, as well as more competitive with respect to other art schools, changes must be implemented. On the whole I would support the direction and goals that Coco Fusco, the chair of the Fine Arts department at Parsons, I imagine is taking. Unfortunately those curricular changes have to take place in an already charged environment of the profit-driven university and a suffering economy that provides little safety net for the unemployed.

I don’t want to concentrate the discussion on Parsons per se because I know very little about who the “non-rehires” were, and whether they in fact were the best people for those jobs.    But I trust there are people here who could provide some more direction in the larger debate about part-time labor in the academy.

The Cuban situation in the art sphere has always been equally perplexing: Cuba doesn’t have private galleries, art magazines or independent art foundations. Internet access is heavily restricted if at all available. Only a handful of artists (who normally live outside of the country) actually get to make a profit of their art. And yet over the years Cuba produced as many or more consequential artists than other countries who may boast of far stronger infrastructure and support system for the arts. Which leads me to ask: amidst all this soul-searching after the fall of the markets, can the Cuban example help the art world re-envision itself?

In Cuba it is really hard to get quick answers to anything, though, as reality is so complex. For starters, the meeting of the art world and the Cuban reality is an awkward one. The Havana Biennial, which just opened its 10th edition last week, is an event that best exemplifies the contrasts and ironies of today’s art world. Officially entitled “Globalization and Resistance,” one could see the event as the ultimate anti-Dubai, anti-Chelsea event. Yet, there was a parallel show precisely entitled “Chelsea,” comprised of New York artists who show at Chelsea galleries. The event seemed to be quite successful, no one seemed to think it was a contradiction to the curatorial premises of the biennial, and everyone seemed happy. The biennial per se, however, as well as the theoretical forum I attended, were much more true to form. Although there were the usual happy exceptions and interesting new artists, the main exhibition included too many predictable works by artists who seem to gloat on the downfall of Wall Street, condemning corporate greed and attacking every angle there is to be attacked, with the usual (and crudest) tools of political art. Meanwhile, the invited (usually old Marxist) theorists, feeling vindicated by the global financial crisis, spent endless hours describing the apocalyptic corrosion of the world’s contemporary culture, and yet, few offered any new proposals for how to fix the situation. Nicolás Bourriaud was there—one of the few regulars at the Havana biennials—explaining his notion of the Altermodern, which could have led to an interesting debate, but unfortunately, and ironically, the eagerness for many to be in a forum to be heard didn’t allow for any sort of orderly debate of any sort. In these cases, theoretical forums devolve into therapy sessions.

This is why the real show-stealer of the biennial was the side project by the now eminent Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. On one night, Bruguera had a podium with an open mic, offering everyone to step to the podium and say anything they wanted. This simple action has enormous significance in Cuba, where no one dares to speak up for fear of government repression. Valiant Cubans stepped up and spoke for freedom of expression and a myriad of other freedoms-actions that a few days later were rejected by the organizational committee of the biennial.

Bruguera took the opportunity of the biennial to do daily showcases of the work of her students, under the title of Cátedra Arte Conducta. (Art/Behaviour seminar). A project that is described as a seminar of activist art, it blends somewhere between Bruguera’s personal art project and the educational process of a new generation of 19 and 20 year old Cuban students. The works, albeit predictably rough, had a wonderful raw energy and imagination that made the entire biennial pale in comparison. On one night, there was an actual wedding at the gallery: a young Spanish artist, Nuria Guell, held a competition where she would marry the Cuban national who wrote the best love letter in order for him to obtain the EU citizenship. After a jury selected the best letter, the wedding took place at the gallery.

The Havana biennial has always stood in a category of its own, and as such a cultural anomaly it is always valuable to see what it has to tell us. It is produced with a minuscule budget, and anything done there is done against a powerful background of symbolism and—it feels to me—historical resonance. While other biennials feel like spectacles, Havana feels like a cause. But every time I visit I am left both with contradictory hopefulness, dismay, and disillusionment. Hopefulness because art really feels to have a mission and a purpose there; dismay because what flourishes there does so at the expense of repressive state policies and a yearning of freedom of expression. And disillusionment because Cuban artists, while the appreciate the attention, ultimately their aspirations are be in Chelsea, while we outsiders crave for the sense of historical mission hat they have. So, again, is there something to be learned from the remnants of this revolution?

From Eva Diaz in New York City:

Speaking of the appropriation of empty real estate for art venues in Dubai and elsewhere, a fascinating mise en abyme is taking place at the former Dia space in Chelsea. Dia pioneered the Chelsea art frontier, then sold the building four years ago to a developer who, due to the bummer economy, failed to find tenants for a proposed “apartment gallery hybrid” (this according to the  NY Observer). The space has now been donated to the rechristened “X” non-profit contemporary art center for one year.

In a self-reflexive panel touching on new, non-market/real estate-driven hybridities in such improvised sites, Hal Foster and David Joselit last Thursday conversed about the current and possible future effects of the economic downturn on the wider field of art: its production, reception, distribution, and consumption; its educational institutions and institutions of display. Unfortunately it was an abbreviated session—someone in the audience fell into swoon half way through (an event later judged unrelated to the fraught topic at hand).

The evening was structured around as a series of insightful, speculative questions that posed tentative propositions about how to combat the privatization of cultural institutions and the financialization of art. Here’s quick telegraph of the five questions Foster and Joselit were able to cover, which involved some apposite participation from the large audience:

Will the social role of the artist change in the new “undercapitalist” economy?   Is the neoliberal art museum sustainable?   Will art biennials wither away?   What will be the effect of the economic crisis on art schools?   Will art criticism regain its place in the art world after being marginalized in the market boom?

The last question raised the very pertinent issue of what constitutes expertise in the field of criticism, latterly turned into generalized judgment or appreciation on the part of dealers, collectors, etc. Is there a place left for the common set of terms that a critic provides?Or has the globalization of the art world meant that a form of market-driven relativism supplanted criticism—disguised in the pluralism of purchasable media, the near ceaseless ahistorical plundering/pastiche of prior practices as fodder for new work, and the surfeit of MFA-equiped contemporary artists and surplus of biennials and art fairs?