Ugly Blog

“Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a second.”

- Steven Wright

Heroin needle vans are hard to find. I tried once in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was illegal for University Health Services to sell me needles directly, so they suggested the van and made several phone calls on my behalf trying, and failing, to find out on what corner it stopped, when, and for how long. Eventually, I got my free needles-after a week of research-but remember thinking that the HIV-prevention program must be a complete failure. If it was that difficult for a Harvard Law student planning a trip to Africa to find the van, what chance did a junked-up heroin addict who injected six times a day have?

I was reminded of my van hunt recently after reading about these programs in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. The needle-exchange vans work on complicated rotating schedules, but the addicts don’t follow schedules, don’t plan, don’t have the patience to search when jonesing for a fix. The vans and addicts need each other but they live in different worlds, with an information gap between them. The only reason the needle programs work, it turns out, is because of the rise of needle brokers. A few people in each location learned the patterns of their local van, pick up hundreds of needles per visit, then resell them to the addicts at their own shooting galleries at a dollar each.

It’s fun to draw out parallels with the art market here-I know one highly respected Indonesian collector who has Pecandu Seni (“Art Addict”) on his business card, and the safe houses where addicts take their heroin really are called “shooting galleries”-but what’s more interesting is how much both markets depend on word-of-mouth information, with the key players being those who can transmit between worlds.

The van in Cambridge, once I found it, was full of marketing material about itself. Similarly, art galleries spend big on promotions, posters, banners, catalogues, emails, magazines, search-engine optimization, giant sculptures, television specials, free-movie nights, sponsorships and even occasionally being kind to reporters. All to get the good word out. But getting the word out is not the same as getting the word to travel from person to person, especially not across the gap between the world of the artists and that of the collectors.

A successful show, like a successful needle program, needs two things: it needs brokers who are connected to the target population, and it needs the information to travel beyond its own advertising. You can sell cars based just on advertising and a good product, you can sell milk based on price, but you sell art based on buzz. Brokers aside, a successful publicity campaign is a sort of rumor bomb that becomes socially contagious and takes to the air like the flu.

Many of the big names-Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, for example-are brilliant bombers, but fame isn’t necessary to fly. Street artist Joshua Allen Harris used tape and garbage bags fastened to sidewalk grates to create giant animals that inflated whenever a subway passed underneath, pushing hot air through the grate. Subways are such a fundamental part of our urban experience that Harris’ YouTube videos spread like wildfire.

Perhaps the most famous study of how rumors ignite is still the 1947 classic by Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor. They describe three qualities of rumor formation-leveling, sharpening, and assimilation-and illustrate them with the story of a Chinese teacher vacationing in rural America during World War II, looking for a hill with a spectacular view of the countryside. By simply stopping in a small town to ask for directions, the Chinese scholar gave birth to a rumor that a Japanese spy had climbed the hill to take surveillance photos.

The incongruous details of his politeness, real nationality, tourist guidebook and lack of any attempt to hide what he was doing were all leveled, cut away. Elements that made the story sharper were added as his Asian features became specifically Japanese, his sightseeing became spying and his camera a surveillance tool. And the whole story was assimilated to a background Zeitgeist in which a Chinese scholar on vacation was an anomaly, but the Pacific War was a nearly all-consuming context.

Allport and Postman showed that about 70% of details in a message were lost in the first five to six mouth-to-ear transmissions, making the rumor “more concise, more easily grasped and told.” But because the message was also sharpened with details to make it more interesting, fresh, or credible, it didn’t necessarily get shorter, just simpler. The more complex the initial message, the greater the amount of simplification it requires before it is light enough to fly.

Anyone who’s spent time talking to an artist about her work and then read the catalogue text of that work will recognize the process of leveling, sharpening and assimilation. Those of us who write about art are, in many ways, professional rumormongers. We translate visual or performative complexity, often highly individualized, into transitive information that can hop lightly from person to person while assimilating it into a larger cultural context.

But this translation is problematic when discussing visual art. Not only is good art almost by definition-by my definition, at any rate-complex, ambiguous and ineffable, it’s also in a fundamentally different language from the type of narrative that moves easily as a rumor. Add to this the fact that most writers think of themselves as artists who care as much about their own writing as they do about the art they are discussing-we want to appear intelligent, or poetic, or unique in some way; depending on our own aesthetic we might bury the lede under heroin needles or ponderous poststructuralist hammers-and you have a three-fold problem of translation in a market that depends on word-of-mouth information more than almost any other.

The term “word-of-mouth” was first used by William Whyte Jr. in a 1954 Fortune magazine article titled “The Web of Word-of-Mouth.” Leaving aside interesting parallels to the internet and the way artists are creating their own social webs through sites like Facebook or blogs like painternyc.blogspot.com, a key characteristic of all webs is that they are light. In terms of information, light means leveled, sharpened, and assimilated, and naturally the transmission mechanism by which art achieves success has an influence on the art itself. If success is at the end of a bicycle path, people will ride bicycles.

Just as it is far easier to write a compelling narrative about a Japanese spy during WWII than about a Chinese scholar on vacation in Maine, it is simpler to wax poetic about conceptual art than about a piece that is primarily formal. The translation gap for conceptual art is much narrower, which means less relevant detail has to be leveled, there’s usually a clever hook already present that makes the resulting narrative stick, and the work more easily assimilates into our shared understanding of what contemporary art is. Ironically, work that is profound or subtle has a much harder time turning into a light rumor-and falls flat when talked about rather than experienced.

Ceteris paribus, the more profound the art and the more it depends on its own direct contact with the audience, the less it can be helped by the “buzz” machinery of the art world. How do you rumorize a Rembrandt or a Rothko? Truly great artists rarely skyrocket in fame. Rather, they leak.

That’s not to say great artists are ignored by the critics. Gladwell categorizes the individuals who are key to transmitting product information into connectors, mavens and salesmen. In his role as an expert, a maven, as someone exposed to a lot of art, the critic tends to seek out complexity. But in his writing, in his role as a connector spreading that information to others, the critic simplifies. This tension can be resolved in several ways. The best critics follow Donald Judd’s advice to Roberta Smith-”describe and judge”-in a way that captures the essence of the art they are discussing, leveling only those elements that truly are secondary. That sort of critic is to be prized. Others resolve their cognitive dissonance by focusing on art that is amenable to their writing, or, just as frequently, they do damage to the art.

I am always struck when I see great art shoehorned into “discourse” that sounds like a poor man’s Derrida. In last month’s issue of C-Arts, Michelle Swayne recounted asking the Chinese artist Xiang Jing at the Asian Contemporary Arts Fair in New York about her strangely gravity-filled giant sculptures. Xiang Jing’s two-word answer, “My body,” is an artist’s answer, ambiguous and complex, filled with empathy for all the women she’s sculpted, emotional connections, and existential undertones of the larger-than-life. But the curatorial for Soliloquy at the Indonesian National Gallery translated her work into “the impacts of urbanization” and “values rooting in traditional culture.”

Similarly, Ashok Sukumaran’s energy-and-exuberance-filled Glow Positioning System at ACAW last spring was benumbed in the catalogue into work “sensitizing us to our own vicinity.” And the curator’s text for Heri Dono’s most recent magical example of mutant-wayang postmodernism-updated mythology, Post-Ethnology Museum at Gaya Art Space in Bali, skipped the humor that ranged from Dono’s riff on the Pieta to the pinky-sized penises on the giant wayang-gorilla paintings, and talked instead about colonialism, imperialism and “The Other,” even writing those words on the six-meter-high gallery walls. And then underlining them in a desperate curatorial struggle to prop up their vitality.

These rumors will never fly. It’s hard to elaborate critically on empathy or humor or playfulness, so these are often leveled even when they’re essential to the art. But words like colonialism and imperialism-though they allow the writer to show off that he’s read, say, Lyotard-no longer have the sharpening quality they had in 1970s academia or 1990s art world. The Other is tired and the audience immune.

Translating art into rumor is difficult, because it cuts against the nonverbal nature of visual art, which is why so much of art discourse reverts to things that are far easier to discuss in textual form: money and biography. Of the two, biography is far more effective. Although a ballooning sale price may be interesting in collector circles, among artists judging another based on sales is still considered crass. But framing an artist as one of the “thirty under thirty,” for example, is sharp in every circle and is pregnant with other potential meanings-youth, hipness, and energy, which in turn signal a potentially good investment without having to talk about money directly. Artists understand this slip into biography and many use charm, attitude and so on to create a rumor-ready persona, a Warhol-like self-marketing publicity package, blending identity with art in less literal versions of Orlan.

I recently mentioned the artist Baker Overstreet to a friend whose response, though he’d never heard of Overstreet, was “Great name. Saatchi artist?” My friend guessed (correctly) from just the name that the artist was someone Saatchi would like. Someone ready to go.

As a writer, money and biography seem like cop-outs. But if a gallery can frame an artist in a rumor-worthy way-whether through the art, the artist, or even just the artist’s name-and get that information to fly through the web of word-of-mouth, then it has done fifty percent of its job. The other fifty percent is putting that rumor in the hands of people who know dentists, hedge fund managers and CEOs the way the needle broker knows addicts.

Rumors beg for belief, and they follow Darwinian rules of survival: simple, sharp, contextually assimilated rumors take flight, lifting all ships that conform to their rules. Which is fine, so long as we rumor-drafters carve carefully. Perhaps, like doctors, we should take an oath: first, do no harm (to the truth).

The World Wide Web of Word of Mouth was originally published in C-Arts Magazine, March 2009.