Ugly Blog

Paul Renner, Theatrum Anatomicum, KUB Plaza, 2007

Art as a Lifestyle—those four words have such fundamentally opposite possibilities of meaning that it’s like titling an article “Precision and the Soul” and then trying to decide where to start.

The idea of art as a lifestyle requires a definition of art. Artists have asked what is art? for a very long time now; some illustrate the question with every piece they make. And, perhaps, at one end of the spectrum of opposed meanings, art as a lifestyle is the process of artists living out the question of what is art? every day. It’s the vague magic that still dares to believe art is a real thing, interesting because of the impossibility of defining it, gathering people who still quest for it. This is the vaguely utopian, perhaps naïve view of an artful life. In “Precision and the Soul,” this interpretation of art as a lifestyle would be the soul bit. It’s the part not easily amenable to textual interpretation. Writing about it sounds unsophisticated, talking about it best left to freshmen in art school. But it is also the ineffable essence of art, the starting point where art is still art, before it becomes celebrity, marketing, politics, corporations, image or an assimilatory safety valve by which our markets absorb enemies of the state.

Perhaps this should be called art as a mindset, the mental plasticization of a lived reality, where walking through the streets of Delhi can be art, whether you’re from there or not, where every morning you walk out of your house to a new garden because the garden along with all physical reality is determined by subjective layers of shifting meaning.

Some artists have tried to extend and magnify this idea, turning life actions into art, like Hermann Nitsch Dionysian naked baths in the intestines of freshly slaughtered pigs and lambs—as Otto Mühl wrote in the Vienna Actionists manifesto, “Far more important than baking bread is the urge to take dough-beating to the extreme”—or one of Paul Renner’s Hardcore Dinners, in which I was lucky enough to participate once.

At the other end of possible meanings, art as a lifestyle is simply new people learning how to be rich, along with a complex money-image-art machinery that trails behind this process like a murder of crows in the commercial jungle. This meaning of art as a lifestyle is a self-conscious process that travels through fashion and branding, but ends measured in the precision of dollars and cents, or euros, renminbi, rupiah. It’s basically an unstable futures market with highly subjective valuation, no fundamentals, and, for living artists, a replaceable source of material by which supply can always adjust to meet demand. For an economist or historian of financial speculation, the contemporary art market, with its Giffen goods and irrationality, would be fascinating, if frustratingly resistant to modelling. But from a cultural perspective it’s just depressing.

The two opposed meanings do connect, however, and that connection is perhaps the essence of the idea of art as a lifestyle. For the millions of wispy young artists in Berlin or Bandung or Beijing who want to become Jeff Koons, for the collectors who want to buy early into that transformation, and for the art-groupies who need to be “in the know” in order to feed well off the process, that transition across two faith-based value systems, from art as magic to art as money/image, is what defines art as a lifestyle.

In the past, before forty years of the vulgarization of art, before auction houses completely abandoned quality in favour of quantity, and before price crowded out cultural significance as a marker of value, artists climbed out of their unventilated Williamsburg warehouse lofts through an accretion of exhibitions, articles, criticism and acquisitions. It was the process itself that kept prices stable in the long term.

These mechanics have broken down. Art has become a lifestyle in a way that is very different from what it was even ten years ago. It has become a party. For last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), the private jet company NetJets flew in 220 planeloads of the ultra-rich and ultra-hip who “don’t have time to go to all the Chelsea galleries,” according to Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of contemporary art for Christie’s worldwide. “They want things edited for them. They’d prefer to spend $500,000 here or at auction on something they could buy privately for $50,000.”

But it’s not just the convenience of one-stop shopping that makes otherwise savvy traders, hedge fund managers, and businessmen spend ten times the price for a painting. Rather, “It’s the mall experience,” said Nancy Whyte, a private art dealer in Manhattan who went down to ABMB. “It’s fashion, it’s parties, it’s fun all wrapped up in one.”

Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser, concurred: “It’s not just about buying art. It’s about buying a lifestyle.”

But a lifestyle is not bought and hung up on a white wall, no matter how high the ceilings. A lifestyle is lived. It’s defined by going to the fairs, to the parties, by being known and in-the-know. Most art exists in three dimensions, while a lifestyle exists in four. The art can’t keep up, especially if price is all that determines its value. Because then, to paraphrase art critic Dave Hickey, the fairs could just as well be selling collections of Barbie dolls, and the parties could revolve around any icon of personal enthusiasm.

The truth is, I wouldn’t be surprised to walk into a booth at any art fair and see a collection of Barbie dolls, unaltered but resold for several thousand dollars each, justified by the much-abused word “irony.” The whole art world now has a sense of things being thrown at a wall to see what sticks, and, who knows, Barbie might stick; but if she does, I hope the writer of the catalogue gets a percentage.

The personal lives of artists have always been part of their appeal—think Paris in the 1920s—but the art usually came first. Now the lifestyle comes first: a process of watching a million things being thrown at the wall with your well-dressed, self-assured and always-fun-to-be-around friends, drinking unusual cocktails, and being the first to notice something that’s sticking. Anyone can throw, but not all wallspace is created equal. The sticky stuff is reserved. The setting for all this is the Neverending Floating Party from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A realignment has taken place by which art now orbits these feverish art-lifestyle parties, which have no direction or grounding of their own other than a high school who’s-in-and-who’s-not sensibility. An ABMB party at Charcoal Studios, for example, billed itself as an “art/retail experience” and included art, artists, collectors, hipsters, models, racks of fashion for sale during the party, plates of sushi with either coffee, tequila or a new antioxidant drink called Purple, and leggy hostesses who walked through the crowd handing out samples of Calvin Klein cologne.

The party has turned artists into self-promotion machines gathering personal networks in order to compete for attention against other artists, against the sushi, against the brand-name underwear being sold in the corner. In the past the consumer state drove a wave of art ahead of itself, assimilating dangerous ideas much as young artists prepare the ground for lawyers and investment bankers in gentrifying poor neighbourhoods; now, through the power of lifestyle, the artist himself has become reactive, a luxury good, a personification of the consumer state.

This process has led to vast quantities of awful art—how does an ugly crocheted pink octopus make it into the top art fair in America?—and infused art valuation with a fashion mentality. The co-owner of Mitchell-Innes and Nash Gallery explained why multiple-edition photographs sold so well at ABMB: “It’s the similarity of images that makes it a plus. People want them because their friends do. If it’s unique and there’s only one, it’s less appealing. For new collectors, it’s all about image recognition.”

As much as collectors hate to hear it, there really are no fundamentals in art. Art is a luxury brand, it has buzz but no theoretical value except pure manipulable desire. Especially in the lower and middle ranges of the success ladder, the only fundamental in art is that the market is, to quote Ben Davis, “fundamentally stupid.” That doesn’t mean that there is no good art. There is. But the connection between what is good and what sells is impressionistic at best.

Art that takes time to think about will not do well, while art with clever one-liner “philosophies” thrives. Paint a pretty face, add a line about reversing the usual process of video representation, and your art dealer will be able to interest Dr. X in the Shanghai suburbs, no matter how derivative the actual work. Without the clever line, the same painting doesn’t make Dr. X look intellectual, so he won’t buy it, and if he doesn’t buy it then none of the other proctologists in the Shanghai suburbs will buy it either. If the inner circles of the art lifestyle are made up of Calvin Klein and Purple, then the outer circle is formed by doctors and lawyers and bankers. Since the two circles are linked but free-floating, ungrounded—an art dealer is just someone who knows fifteen dentists—there is no way to prove that the painting of the face is simple kitsch, that the investment is somehow bad.

Those poor schmucks still asking what is art? look like they’re wearing last year’s shoes, but still the question will never go away. Art is a fundamentally open, plastic paradigm for experiencing the world. In Nietzsche’s view, the artist is the closest to experiencing the world in itself because he is aware of his act of creating the layers of masks every day. Even if, like the rest of us, he can never see what’s underneath them all, at least he is not fooled into believing the illusions.

Nothing seems further from this notion of art than the art-fair parties. Although the participants generally lay claim to a Nietzschean sophistication, much as Damien Hirst’s 50 million pound diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, claimed to ironically mock the art world, these claims have become empty tropes. Meanings exist only in a context, and the context of that skull is a lifestyle of earnest devotion to one’s own image. It’s a lifestyle bereft of true irony. The artists desperately want to be art stars, the collectors want their investments to appreciate and to look smart, and the intermediaries want to imbibe in the prestige. They all wear the vestments, walk the walk, talk the talk, documenting and blogging who came, who wore what, who was seen with whom. It is the contemporary version of bourgeois mediocrity. But then perhaps poets would do the same if there were money in poetry.

For the secular, art is the ultimate religion and the market is Mother Church. Irony is always necessary for questioning structures and authority; but imagine for a second an ironic archbishop—when it’s the authorities themselves who use “irony” as a justification then that irony becomes simply a symptom of corruption.

Dave Hickey once said in an interview, “For many years everyone presumed that Andy Warhol was an ironic artist. We went through this phase, and then we realized that Andy wasn’t being ironic at all. But there is still something to look at in Warhol’s work. Let’s say you buy a butterfly painting or a skull painting by Damien Hirst, and one day you discover it’s not ironic. Suddenly you’ve got a piece of derivative dreck! You’ve got a piece of faculty art. I don’t think Hirst could survive the collapse of our presumption that he is being ironic.”

Or, as The Onion headline put it, capturing the Zen koan, the Derridaesque aporia, that is art as a lifestyle, “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation.”

– by Alexander Boldizar

Art as a Lifestyle was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (November 2008)