Disintermediation Manifesto at 10
Ten years ago I wrote a manifesto. Today I grade my work.
Friend and alert reader Dave Bricker followed my post on the Art Institutes to the School of Shape and Form to my Disintermediation Manifesto. He wrote me the following, which appears here with his permission:
The principal raison d'être of the art degree is to assure the survival of the accredited art school. With schools on a mission to justify the premise that graduates will be able to afford to pay back their government-issued student loans, art is “practical-ized” and “validated” as a career choice. A school cannot teach art unless it has art teachers with degrees, and industries ready to feed on a supply of indentured young artists. And that ecosystem is inherently disconnected from the true reasons anyone makes art.
You make a good case for a long-overdue divorce between art and academia. Only when they separate for a time and get over each other will they have a chance to move on with their original, common mission of encouraging people to observe, think, feel, and express.
Keep up your always-read-worthy work.
Dave, as another independent educator who taught at the Miami campus of the Art Institutes (and taught some of its best classes available, for the record), understands the problems intimately. His note prompted me to notice that said Manifesto was ten years old. I published it in three parts at Artblog.net. Part 1: Disintermediate Education made the following demands:
Art schools should be small, cheap, opinionated, and non-degree-granting. Bring back the apprenticeship. Down with professors, up with mentors. Rebel and train yourself.
Part 2: Disintermediate Sales demanded this:
Artists should sell their work directly to collectors. Collectors should buy work directly from artists. This is the natural state of affairs and should be viewed as such.
And Part 3: Disintermediate Reputation declared:
The correct audience is not the highest-paying, or the one with the loftiest credentials, but the one that loves your work when it is at its best, on its own terms.
One can regard it as a success if one looks upon what one wrote ten years prior and finds it less than mortifying. Some of the trends noted did not pan out. But some of them did. From Part 1:
Here in town, there are hopping programs going at the Boston Figurative Art Center and the Academy of Realist Art. You don't even have to leave home—online, there is the New Masters Academy. Skill, as John Seed put it recently, doesn't deconstruct well. De-skilling isn't going to reconstruct well once economic reality smashes through the academic hothouse from which it has so seldom emerged.
The New Masters Academy is gone, but BFAC and the Academy of Realist Art are still operational. It is astonishing that we have not had a recession in the last ten years, to which “economic reality” refers. Do not assume that it will continue forever thus and never test these predictions.
I adore RISD, my alma mater, and I expect it will hang on like Harvard will. But for the future of art training I'm looking at places like Zea Mays Printmaking in Northampton, the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, the Turps Banana Art School in London, the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Paros. Small, cheap, opinionated, and non-degree-granting.
All of these programs continue as well. I was at Zea Mays this past July to produce the Vegetable Gardener edition. I’m not sure I still adore RISD. I adore what it was. I am not as sanguine that it will hang on.
The logical conclusion of these demands for smaller, cheaper, more opinionated, non-degreed schooling is the apprenticeship. Let's bring it back. I still think there is value in the small school, but for artists with the proper temperament for the master-novice relationship, there is likely nothing better for the passing of skills from the wise to the innocent. Between the small school and the apprenticeship, there is the individual artist/teacher. You can, for instance, take classes directly from Koo Schadler or Frank Santoro.
Koo lives nearby in New Hampshire and continues to teach some of the best instruction in egg tempera that you can find anywhere. Santoro went strong until 2019 and appears to be in the process of coming back from a hiatus. Artists running their own schools is now common and the number seems to be exploding. I know most immediately of
, Clara Lieu, and Kelly Carmody, but Instagram is loaded with others.The full verity of Part 2 has not yet been tested.
If the crash under consideration in these recent pages comes to pass, much like the middle-tier colleges and universities discussed last week, the middle-level galleries are going to get wiped out. Whether the crash comes or not, technology is going to replace more and more of their functionality. The end game here is that the physical display of art outside of non-profits and the blue-chip galleries is going to be divided between short-term pop-up spaces and a sort of high-middle made up of the surviving dealers who have mobilized every possible resource available to them to stay afloat.
I think that we saw some of this probed during the Covid shutdowns. In 2020 I wrote The Virtual Critic: A Thought Experiment:
The longer the shutdown continues the easier it is to imagine a scenario in which virtual viewing becomes the default. In-person viewing would be like going to a live concert, a rarity and a treat for which one might dress up. The rest of the looking would happen through screens. Everyone will know that it’s not as good as real life, but that won’t matter, because real life entails finding a parking spot on Harrison Avenue when it’s seven degrees out, dealing with the L train, battling traffic all the way to Culver City, or nowadays, risking a case of COVID-19. As the shutdown forces more galleries to abandon their physical spaces and more tourists to cancel their plans, the lure of mounting exhibitions in the digital ether grows stronger.
Much of “Virtual Critic” concerned itself with the burgeoning phenomenon of modeling 3D environments in simulation of gallery exhibitions and publishing them online. I cited three platforms, Artland, Matterport, and Eazel. Artland is still an art concern but got out of the 3D business. Matterport is still a 3D concern but got out of the art business. Only Eazel is still active as originally conceived. The posting schedule indicates that galleries put up shows there as a splurge. I suspect that the 3D efforts were merely ahead of their time. Once the capture technology cheapens and more art buyers are natively familiar with WASD navigation they’ll become viable.
Nevertheless, the “online viewing room” concept caught on. In “Virtual Critic” I disdained online viewing rooms as DHTML. But clearly the rhetorical framing matters to people. Artlogic installs images at the domain viewingrooms.com for galleries, such as this presentation of Pia Fries for Miles McEnery. Artlogic sells equivalent services to individual artists, so the technological and logistical gaps between gallery representation and self-representation are narrowing.
Nancy Margolis Gallery closed its physical space in 2020 and pivoted to an interesting program of digital exhibitions, Zoom talks, and pop-up IRL events. NMG director Lilian Day Thorpe tells me that her ambition “is to create a unique viewing experience that doesn't replicate or mirror the experience of being in a physical space.” NMG initially mounted some 3D presentations at Eazel, but despite their benefit, Thorpe notes that “they are also reminders that what you're viewing is a virtual replica of something that exists, not the thing itself. This can form an emotional barrier between viewers and artworks and conjure a sense of ‘missing out.’”
Central to Thorpe’s transition to digital was an intention to create a user experience that didn’t resemble a brick-and-mortar space. “I'm interested in using technology and our website to curate exhibitions that offer viewers perspectives they couldn't get elsewhere, including in a physical setting,” she says. “Quotes from an artist's statement, snippets from a catalogue essay, beautiful detail shots, and studio portraits are some of the many components I weave into every show. I hope these elements broaden the context of the exhibitions and allow viewers to gain deeper insights into the works.”
Which is to say that while I’m more sure than ever about the demands of Part 1, I’ve become somewhat agnostic about the demands of Part 2. Hans Herman Hoppe writes somewhere1 that successful societies take division of labor seriously. Given the hypothetical availability of a dealer, selling your art is the opposite, a (hypothetical, again) economically disadvantageous generalization of industry instead of an advantageous specialization.2 While numbers are difficult to obtain, anecdotally it seems obvious that more artists are selling their own work via various online means than ten years ago. But I think that this is a natural state of affairs rather than the natural state of affairs. You should sell your own work if you’d like to or have no option. It’s unlikely that you can think about yourself in the disinterested, yet appreciative way that Thorpe can think about her artists. There are those who can.
, cited in Part 2, is still going strong representing herself and her work. But few are natural-born rock stars like Dooney.Part 3, in hindsight, was the weakest of the series, though it predicted early that the critics were growing irrelevant to the process of building reputation.
I did not expect that ten years after saying so, I would have let my membership lapse in the International Association of Art Critics because there was no point to it. Or that I’d be talking seriously about the last days of the institutions. Or that I was expecting to outlive my 146-year-old alma mater. Or that one of the last full-time newspaper art critics would write that the museums were becoming the subsidiaries of four mega-galleries. That would have struck me as overly pessimistic.
But Part 3 made a claim I still stand by: The correct audience is the one that loves your work when it is at its best, on its own terms. We will simply have to find that audience and keep it in unprecedented ways. See you in ten years, and hopefully many times more before then.
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Ceteris paribus. Obviously if your dealer is swindling you the labor economics don’t apply.
This: The correct audience is not the highest-paying, or the one with the loftiest credentials, but the one that loves your work when it is at its best, on its own terms.
Ideally, work should be purchased directly from the artist, and that way the artist could get more by cutting out the dealer and the buyer could pay less than the dealer would charge. Win-win.
As for your concept of the correct audience, absolutely, but that works better in principle than in practice. The rich idiots will always be welcomed, though they tend to go for what they deserve, and the highly credentialed (who may, in fact, have little or no eye) will be welcomed as "validation" and marketing aids. Still, artists should at least be clear as to precisely who's what.