Artist as Muse
Shifting the Structure
Untitled (Who owns what?), 1991/2012
Barbara Kruger
“Let’s do ourselves a favor, artists, and stop smoking the collective pipe that tells us we’re magical beings above the tedium of contracts and bookkeeping.”
– Mieke Marple
An Article by Guest Writer: Mieke Marple
Artists are the center of the art world. They are who get featured on the covers of W and Vanity Fair and who celebrities like Kanye West want to collaborate with. Never will you see photos of their studio managers or gallery liaisons except in some obscure corner of Getty Images. Never will there be an Art21 on art dealers. Artists alone are the ones with the aura, the magic—the ones who inspire us simply by existing.
And yet, if being an artist is so great, then why don’t more dealers become artists? As far as I know, it’s much more common for an artist to become a dealer than vice versa. And there are reasonable reasons for this. Making art is a more well-known and less specialized occupation (there are many schools offering fine art degrees, very few offering art-dealing degrees). It, thus, makes sense that a love of art starts with art making and becomes art dealing or advising as a person comes to know the intricacies of the business—as well as of their personality and bank account. However, there is another reason why artists are more likely to become dealers than the other way around—which is that being an artist is not so great. And no one knows this more than the people who’ve seen the art world sausage get made.
A few reasons why being an artist is not so great… When I was an art dealer, very few artists asked me to schedule shows or for sales updates. If they did, they were usually scared off from asking again by my response: a terse “I’ll let you know.” As a dealer, I loved this. But now, as an artist, I find this—along with the unspoken rule that artists shouldn’t ask galleries to show them or collectors to buy their work—unbearable. Never have I felt so much like a middle school girl hoping to get asked to dance. That artists are supposed to hang around at openings, on Instagram, or (at great expense to their bank accounts) at MFA programs—hoping for someone to notice their genius feels, to me, hopelessly outdated, hopelessly gendered. Never would we expect an entrepreneur (a role we still gender as masculine because it has to do with business, as opposed to that of the artist, which we still gender as feminine because it has to do with creativity—never mind that artists are entrepreneurs) to sit around waiting for investors to invest money in their start-up.
Protect Me From What I Want
Jenny Holzer
Of course, the most successful artists are by no means ineffectual. Yet, even they accept a certain amount of glamour and fawning attention in exchange for power. When I was a 21-year-old gallery intern at a prestigious New York gallery, one of my jobs was to buy potato vodka for an 80-year-old artist and pick up another artist’s hotel room after she’d had a weeklong bender. And I felt lucky. Lucky to be so close to these titans of creativity, these living embodiments of art history, even if it meant picking up their dirty underwear and stepping over condom wrappers. Only now that I am in a 12-step program and am an artist myself, do I view these errands with sadness—both for the artists, whose actions were clearly self-destructive, and for myself as a young intern, who accepted proximity to bad behavior in lieu of learning anything truly helpful. Only now do I see the gallery as a kind of enabler, romanticizing their artists’ addictions under the mistaken belief that addictions must be indulged, or even cultivated, for artists to make their most uninhibited art. Looking back, I doubt most of these artists, successful as they were, were any more able to exert real pressure on their mega dealers than emerging artists are able to exert on their less-than-mega dealers. And it wouldn’t surprise me that, if they had a picture of their financials (who owned what, how much it sold or resold for, etc.), it was a vague one, at best. Not because they weren’t interested, but because artists are not expected, nor given the tools, to be financial equals.
I was once asked, while on a panel, about the role of “the muse” in art. It was a concept I rarely thought about—one that, I felt, belonged to a prior time when women were still diagnosed with “nerves” and people didn’t know about things like bacteria. “It’s just a way of dressing up plain ol’ boring exploitation,” I said, “of making it look fancier and more meaningful than it is.” It then dawned on me that, in the art world, artists play the role of “the muse.” The magical aura we attribute to artists—which makes their dealers tend to their every irrational whim and say ‘don’t you worry about the financial side of things, just let Daddy Gallery take care of it’—does not honor artists, but infantilizes and disempowers them. Artists are the ones whose exploitation we romanticize.
Of course, ever since Andy Warhol, the notion of artist-as-entrepreneur has gained such traction that we no longer balk at artists who wear business suits. Nevertheless, there remains a great divide in financial savviness among artists—with shark-like men like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and now Beeple on one end, and most every other artist on the other. Even as a dealer this had bothered me. In response, I helped start a lecture series to financially empower artists, called Money Talks, along with the gallery’s accountant. Unfortunately, this series was infinitely less popular than the stand-up comedy series my gallery partner had started. And I get it, it’s much more fun to laugh at the way things are than to do the boring work of changing it. Fortunately, it is changing. The rise of NFTs, love ’em or hate 'em, is putting pressure on the art world to be more transparent and give more financial authority to artists, just as the BLM movement is forcing us to examine structural inequality. Nevertheless, let’s do ourselves a favor, artists, and stop smoking the collective pipe that tells us we’re magical beings above the tedium of contracts and bookkeeping, and get to work making mature, financially-informed demands—as opposed to carte blanches to behave like child savants.