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“Capital A” Art

Unlearning the Art World’s Indoctrination

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“I want to believe that, as my sponsor says, you are only a failed artist if you stop making art.”

– Mieke Marple

 

An Article by Guest Writer: Mieke Marple


 
 

My sponsor thinks the SF MOMA is bullshit. Steel cubes or monochrome paintings can’t possibly be art, she thinks. Agnes Martin makes her want to hit her head against a wall. My sponsor shares the kind of opinion that, years earlier, I would have scoffed at. Ha ha ha. How little your lay lil’ pea brain knows, I’d have thought. For nothing emboldened my sense of superiority like knowing the value of something that confused and offended lesser mortals.

Now, however, I see superiority for what it is: inferiority in disguise. It operates in much the same way that an obsession with money equals an obsession with poverty, or a fixation with beauty equals a fixation with ugliness. Relationships that became very clear to me when, as an art dealer, I sold work to people who were both very wealthy and very unhappy. People who owned fashion labels or almond farms or 9-digits’ worth of assets—yet suffered from spiritual inferiority.

What exactly is spiritual inferiority? To answer that, let’s return to a conversation I had with my lovely, outspoken sponsor. It was a Tuesday morning around 9:30 a.m. I was sipping coffee from a Yeti thermos, telling my sponsor over Zoom how I was born with the ability to render things realistically. From a young age, I drew animals with four legs—the back two clearly behind the front two—while other kids were still drawing stick figures. I was born, in other words, with a “hand.” And this “hand,” I knew, was inherited. For there were several women, aunts and great aunts, on my mother’s side who also had it. They were all, I told my sponsor as an aside, “failed artists.”

The irony of this gift—having a “hand”—was that no one in Contemporary Art cared about your rendering abilities. In fact, excessive rendering was often seen as a “naive” or “outsider” gesture. It was a lesson I’d first learned as a freshman at UCLA when some kid had stepped on a piece of paper with his boot and the teacher had praised his work at length, largely ignoring hyper-rendered drawings such as mine. “You must have been so peeved,” my sponsor interjected. No, I insisted, still downplaying a 14-year-old disappointment. I wasn’t upset, merely intrigued to find that art had another dimension to it, a conceptual dimension, I told her. She only shook her head. “That sounds like some heady bullshit.” To which I had to wonder: was it? Was she simply uneducated about art? Or was I uneducated about bullshit? And if she was right, what spiritual connection to art had I forsaken in exchange for “capital A” Art “superiority”? 

 
 
 
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Self-Portrait (2003)
Mieke Marple

My sponsor’s attitude towards art is not informed by art history, art school, or Artforum (obviously), but by her experiences as a counselor in low-income neighborhoods. To her, to be told that the ability to draw the images one sees in one’s head carries no value unless in dialogue with “capital A” Art is a spiritual violation. And nowhere is this violation more evident in me than when I describe my aunts and great aunts—who painted simple portraits and landscapes and sold them in small-time frame shops (if they sold them at all)—as “failed artists.” To her, such disparaging language is a clear sign of how, in order to believe the art world’s hype, I’ve had to devalue the creativity—the life force—of family members who’ve, arguably, had a much larger impact on my artmaking than MOMA ever will. It’s a sign that I’ve lost faith and trust in the people who actually matter in favor of an abstract standard that might lead to a museum show but will never fulfill me like a genuine connection with a loved one. 

Still, it’s hard to shake the art world’s indoctrination around good and bad art. With good art being art that acknowledges art history and modernity (even in its scathing critiques of it) and is shown in the right galleries and museums. And bad art being art that intentionally or unintentionally overlooks modernism and is displayed inside coffee shops or on websites like deviantart.com. I want to be free of this belief. I want to believe that, as my sponsor says, you are only a failed artist if you stop making art. I want to not think yuck when I look at some people’s art on Instagram or on the walls of my local nail salon. I want this more than I want to be the next Jeff Koons. But it’s not easy, because some part of me also really wants to be the next Jeff Koons.