In the season of 1970, Information, a timely exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine, opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The works gathered by McShine characterized a new sensibility in art practice; one that emphasized the role that art plays in the formation and circulation of knowledge. Among the most interesting works exhibited was Hans Haacke’s Proposal: Poll of MoMA Visitors.  It consisted of a voting area in the gallery inviting audience participation.  A wall text read:

Question: Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not to vote form him in November?

Answer: If yes, please cast your ballot into the left box; if no, into the right box. 

Beneath this text, two transparent boxes contained the voting ballots.  Their transparency was a peculiarly commanding and telling aspect of the work.  As a formal strategy, it offered a view of the voting rank, of the general public’s standpoint.  This transparency was also a formal device.  Its clarity had the possibility of influencing or persuading a vote.

Thirty-five years after the opening of Information, artist Andreja Kuluncic began a comprehensive polling projecting of a very different New York art world as part of her two-month Artist Residency Program at Art in General.  She had proposed to develop an investigation of how emerging artists could enter the New York art world, which would culminate in the publication of a manual titled The New York Art World for Dummies.  Just before her arrival, New York had recently witnessed The Armory Show, The International Fair of New Art, which generated alongside a breed of younger art fairs, a plethora of social events, and special exhibitions like Greater New York at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate.[1] Conversations about the new collector (the so-called "hedge-hunter"), the characteristic hollowness of art fairs, and the impending crash of the art market remained in the air.

Andreja began her investigation by interviewing individuals involved in various capacities in the art field, and recording their personal anecdotes. I booked her appointments with selected artists, critics, and museum and independent curators, many of them colleagues that Art in General or I had previously collaborated with. Dealers. I called, but had little response. To Andreja’s avail, a supporter of her work—a prominent Croatian art collector based in New York—was able to secure those meetings immediately. To broaden the social network beyond Art in General, we asked some of the interviewees to suggest and help secure other meetings. Dozens of people contributed.

During this period, two articles about quite different aspects of the art world were published in New York periodicals: Considering the Alternative: Are “Artists” Really Necessary? (A Reasonable Proposal), an essay David Levi-Strauss, and Dire Diary, by Jerry Saltz’s.  Levi-Strauss argued, in cynical way, for the primacy of the art market over alternative spaces and for collectors over something like the figure of the cultural broker.[2]  Saltz’s article focused on the insular art world much celebrated by “Scene and Herd,” a relatively new column of the online version of Artforum magazine, suggesting that the characters in it were only actors in a passing infomercial.[3]  In both of these articles there is an underlying preoccupation with the art world.  It is identified here as a major force, dominant and influential in art making and the experience of art.  This is also the general landscape of the art world that is described by the participants of Andreja’s project.  But it is spelled out more clearly: the art market.

The next step in Andreja’s research consisted of a survey.  We culled names of artists and arts professionals in New York from Art in General’s extensive database.  They received by post a multiple-choice questionnaire that asked:

1. What is the most important measure of success for an artist in the New York art world?
2. What is the best way to enter the New York art world?
3. What would you recommend that an artist do to create successful social networks?
4. What factors limit an artist’s ability to succeed in the New York art world? 

More than 30% of the surveys were completed and returned.[4]  The questionnaire was also available in the gallery, and a significant number of audience members completed it there. During the period of Andreja’s residency, and almost two months after, this gallery space was the production site for the project, not precisely used for an exhibition.  There, Andreja and a group of project assistants conducted interviews, edited video and sound footage, and made transcriptions of this material.[5]  Gallery visitors could participate through dialogue or interviews, or could meander alone and listen or look at other information available, like collected sound footage, charts displaying results of the survey, and books on Croatian contemporary art.  As part of the residency project, we organized and hosted there four discussion-based programs that either spawned from or informed the investigation.[6]

In the interviews and surveys, people recommended a variety of ways for artists to enter the art world. Having talent, going to openings, getting reviewed in the New York Times, pursuing an MFA program, and showing in major internationals exhibitions such as Documenta, were some of the most commonly sited example of “success.”  The responses from the survey were rather straightforward: artists getting recommended to a dealer or a curator by someone prominent or artists pursuing an MFA in a big league university were more likely to succeed.  Having solo exhibitions and getting good press reviews were also key measures of success. 

Although one could argue that these findings were predictable, it was fascinating to notice the obliqueness of the personal anecdotes in the interviews in contrast to the bluntness of the survey’s outcome.  Somewhere in the middle of this, the categories and struggles of class, race, and gender were buried—or perhaps simply forgotten.  And there were other assumptions left aside. Discussing the possibilities of entering the art world did not necessarily entail an evaluation of whether it was simple or even viable to access these points or opportunities. And whether entering the art world was something desirable or advantageous was not repeatedly questioned.  It was a given.  Recognition was conflated with success, and both of these were assumed as universal aspirations of a collective unconscious. 

In Haacke’s Proposal: Poll of MoMA Visitors, and similar works of that period, the relationship to raw information is clear. The artist presumably looks at the audience as a cognizant, political self, refusing to draw or figure a cohesive world for them. Instead, it presents a transparently open-ended work, which carries fluctuating relationships, explorations, and experiences about being in this world.  Andreja’s project about the art world follows this tradition. But there is a major difference that is defined by responding to the interdisciplinary nature of her artistic practice. With Hans, polls were used as a scientific and objective tool. With Andreja’s project, and the interviews especially, the answers are very opinionated, and may serve more as an ideological cover than an example of sociological truth. There possibility of self-deception in Andreja’s work—which is by far the most unexpected and interesting aspect of this project—is perhaps intrinsic to the nature of its superfluous and fleeting subject: the art world.

--- END ---

 PROJECT "NEW YORK ART SCENE FOR DUMMIES" >