David and Goliath, Or Are They?:

An Evaluation of Artist and Market Tendencies in 1960s America

by Chaewon Lee

Introduction

What do you make of a solidly colored canvas hanging grandly at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art? What do you feel when you read a page of vaguely obscure and unrelated sentences, as a security guard quietly watches you from across the hall? How exactly are you supposed to react, and more importantly, how much longer do you have to keep looking without making it painfully obvious that you just don’t care? These classic conundrums faced by museum tourists today were kindly introduced in the late 1960s by artists known as “the conceptualists.” The former half of the twentieth century had brought about new methods of creating art that had already challenged art as it was known: Jackson Pollock splattering paint all over his canvas, Andy Warhol manufacturing hundreds of silkscreen prints using reappropriated images. But the work of conceptualists seemed to defy and escape even these types of revolutionaries. What value was there in work that was cheap, unable to be preserved, and sometimes did not even exist as a physical object for viewers to see? For many critics and occasional gallery-goers, there would be no other reason for collectors to validate these kinds of works except to gain money and notoriety from these artists’ ambitious ideas.

In both casual and critical discussions of modern and contemporary art, the point of conversation ironically seems to focus on the art market, rather than the artists or the works themselves. Since conceptualism’s birth and subsequent legacy, the art market has been

publically abhorred for driving artists into a corner and essentially forcing them to churn out as much financially viable work as possible. “I just don’t understand it.” “Even I could do that.” ​ “How could this ever sell for millions of dollars?” These types of comment have plagued the ​ minds of the general public for decades. They have perpetuated the collective belief that for the past fifty-odd years, art has been nothing but a hoax to inflate the reputations of collectors, a process which harms creative forces and devalues the aesthetic qualities art usually offers.

However, this notion actively refuses to recognize artists and the art market as anything other than radically “good” and “evil.” Denying the frequent instances of collaboration between artists and market forces and instead clinging to easy labels ultimately compounds the public’s already limited knowledge of postmodern and contemporary art history. In a society where art continues to play such an important role in global culture, this is an especially harmful possibility. In reality, the introduction and rise of conceptualism in the late 1960s initiated collaborative partnerships between artists and collectors representing the art market, which embraced new mediums and presentations of art to the wider world.

A Shifting Society: Business and Art Collide

Growing political concerns in America in the 1960s began to facilitate the shift in artistic direction and creation towards more questionable, innovative, almost absurdist works. This was in fact openly embraced by the changing art market. As explained by art critic Roberta Smith in her New York Times article “Conceptual Art: Over and Yet Everywhere,” conceptualism was the ​ ​ direct artistic accompaniment to the “cauldron of political unrest” of the late 1960s, when the heated movements of feminism, anti-war, and civil rights dominated American news and culture.

All these counter-culture sentiments encouraged the public to question and subvert what was

deemed the norm in gender, sexuality, race, and of course in art. The changing morals and ideologies of this era produced a similar shift in artists’ behaviors and how they wanted to present their works. They seemed to possess a “lessened concern for absolutes, an acknowledgment of the exhaustion of modern forms, an awareness of emotional weariness, of global threats,” contends Matthew Baigell, art historian and author of the book Artist and Identity ​ in Twentieth-Century America (155). As such, artistic mastery was no longer attributed to formal ​ characteristics or presentation alone. Composition, line, color, and other elements of technically and aesthetically pleasing art became secondary to what the conceptualists saw as most important: the idea behind the creation. Conceptualism’s questioning of what art was and how it could be showcased fell squarely in line with the changes ringing across the nation and from within the art market.

At the time, the social turbulence in America was almost ironically counterbalanced by an ever-emergent capitalist economy. While the social changes across the nation certainly contributed to the initial rise of conceptualism, acceptance of this art form as a more widely acknowledged movement is credited to the growth of corporations and advertising media. As a result, the art world’s primary authority shifted to that of the business-savvy collector rather than the intellectual art critic. Collectors of this new generation of art believed the works of the conceptualists were reflective of how the country was evolving in such a thunderous yet progressive era. This business-friendly environment effectively nurtured and bolstered the careers of several conceptualists, such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, and

Lawrence Weiner, argues Edward Minniear in his thesis The Anti-Market Myth of Conceptual ​ Art (17). Minniear’s evaluation clearly recognizes that these artists possessed no intention of ​

working completely independently of market forces. In fact, many of their works were often reinforced and directly funded by business-type collectors. Their ability to reach greater audiences in this changing era was in part due to those who pushed to increase the reputability of their creative works. In his book Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Alexander ​ ​ Alberro, a leading art historian on conceptualism, notes that this “infusion of corporate funds” was heavily responsible for the growth of both the market and conceptualism (13).

For this new generation of collectors, conceptualism represented “a means to differentiate themselves from their past, and a way of distinguishing themselves from their more established, and aesthetically conservative, peers” (Alberro, Conceptual Art 8). In effect, this allowed ​ ​ collectors the opportunity to show a public sign of commitment to fresh and innovative ideas. On the flip side, conceptual artists themselves also discovered allies in these collectors. By garnering financial support from collectors and businessmen of the art scene, conceptual artists were able to find legitimacy in an institution that had been less than eager to represent them in the past. The idea that artists had to possess connections to powerful families or feed into a hierarchical system in order to be represented in the art world was becoming a thing of the past; instead, their work could simply be discovered by collectors who intentionally searched for stranger pieces in smaller galleries and exhibitions.

Despite all this, it is almost common belief in the public conscience that collectors sought out these ambitious works solely for their investment potential and global marketability. This notion is almost universal in large part due to the current inflated state of the art market, where a small, privately gifted self-portrait by Andy Warhol to his secretary Cathy Naso, can be sold at a

Sotheby’s auction for over $6 million (Panero 26). In his article “The Art Market Explained”

cultural critic James Panero quotes Naso’s realization of the unbelievable publicity that the market can bring about in the blink of an eye: “Andy has made me famous for fifteen minutes… and I’ve come to realize that fifteen minutes of fame is more than enough” (26). French art historian and economist Sophie Cras supports these arguments, defending that when an excessive amount of money became involved to “turn quality into quantity,” this inherently devalued the creative process of artists and instead prioritized a “homogenizing means for dehumanized exchange” (20). Critics of the art market’s supposed greed find that coercing art into the realm of economics and investments fundamentally opposed what art and artists stood for within society.

It cannot be denied that associating price predictions and bell curves with art was and still is unsettling, especially because art is always seen as something that is supposed to be uncompromisingly free-spirited and creative. And of course, collectors were still concerned with an artist’s marketability and certainly did comprehend how they might profit, which was particularly valuable in a society that pushed for achieving success and being self-made. Even favorable changes in tax laws and the proliferation of New York publications advertising the profitability of art investments continued to move the art market into the direction we are so familiar with today (Cras 19).

Despite all this, increased marketability did not deny opportunities for conceptualists, nor did it indicate that market forces infringed upon artists’ individual processes. Because conceptualists created art which defied the classic sculptures and paintings of Western art history, it is easy to label them as a group of artists who rejected “art-objects” and strove to escape the art market’s attempts to commodify and stifle their work. But this categorization boils down to stereotypes which perpetuate the notion that the artist is the starving, humble hero and

that the market is the money-hungry antagonist. In looking more closely, it is clear that these exaggerations are more harmful than helpful in understanding market and artist dynamics that began in the 1960s. This marrying of economic, social, and artistic functions, which all initially seemed so incompatible, is appropriately defined as “symbiotic” by Mark Westgarth in his article

“The Art Market and its Histories” (32). Possessing the means to create art did not change the type of work conceptualists created nor the messages they hoped to relay. As explained by famed conceptualist Douglas Huebler in Edward Minniear’s previously mentioned thesis: “conceptual art had never been really bent on collapsing the very institutions - the art galleries, museums, collectors - through which their nature must be communicated” (qtd. in Minniear 14).

The Promise of Publicity

Evidence of the mutual relationship between artists and the market is especially clear in the projection of the artist’s public persona. Conceptualists concerned with their image often worked together with collectors, who almost acted as their informal publicists, to increase their public profiles and to illuminate their methods of working. While artists engaged in carefully articulating their words and beliefs, collectors provided them suitable platforms to address exactly what artists hoped to relay, whether this was through private interviews, televised programs, or art journal publications.

Christopher Howard, a New York-based museum curator, addresses this issue of image in his review of Patricia Norvell’s transcribed book of interview recordings, Recording Conceptual ​ Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub,

Smithson, and Weiner. Howard takes duly note of minute details, mentioning more than once ​ that “unintelligible passages appear in the raw. Because of this format, Carl Andre and Joseph ​

Kosuth refused permission to include their talks” (40). Although Andre and Kosuth fully participated in Norvell’s interview series, Howard’s observation tells us that the artists’ inability to control and monitor their words was, to them, clearly detrimental to their reputations and simply not worth the risk. Moreover, these unedited interviews were potentially harmful to the work they had so thoughtfully created and attempted to describe.

Kosuth in particular is also famous for having hosted his own gallery exhibitions, parties, and publishing editorials explaining his thoughts on the processes of his contemporaries, many of whom were interviewed in Norvell’s aforementioned book. In one specific instance, the artist provided his opinion on the work of Sol LeWitt, saying “‘The kind of formalist art where the artist decides and makes decisions all the way down the line, that’s a very rational way of thinking about art...What I’m doing is much more complex. And it’s much more irrational’”

(Kosuth qtd. in Alberro, Conceptual Art 39). Although this comment was quite scathing, it was ​ ​ more importantly a way for Kosuth to explain the difference between LeWitt’s way of working and his own. The purpose behind these projects was to help educate the public about the varying methods of all of New York’s up-and-coming artists in easily understandable terms.

While it is certain that prominent conceptualists agreed in prioritizing the idea over the final product, the ways they went about presenting their work varied greatly. Some were concerned primarily with photo documentation while others emphasized the physicality of their art, even if the materials used to create this art were ephemeral; some criticized the manufactured and seemingly impersonal processes of artists like Kosuth, while others lauded his innovative methods and established them in their own practice (Norvell 33). Closer analysis of artists involved in the movement “reveals at least as many stylistic and ideological differences as it

reveals similarities,” says film and art critic Ginette Vincendeau (60). Recognizing what these artists had to say about their creative decisions in comparison to another’s is something that would not be possible if artists did not care about how they were perceived by the public.

What comes as less of a surprise, of course, is that market forces were also equally concerned with how artists were viewed. Alberro notes that “advance information, like publicity, supplants information that…had previously been conferred through criticism” (Conceptual Art ​ 41). Collectors working in the market believed it was better for them to help explain the artists’ ​ ​ work on their own terms, rather than relegate that responsibility to critics and their interpretations, which often boiled down to indiscreet hostility and bitterness towards conceptualism as a whole. Establishing the right time, place, and circumstance to promote these artists’ creations required frequent communication between the artists and the collectors, a nuance which is not easily recognized.

As such, it is often argued that collectors manipulated false images of conceptualists in ways that would attract the most attention to their galleries and bring them the most acclaim, thereby turning these artists into the victims of a cruel and unethical practice. Such an idea is not difficult to believe when considering the eccentric personalities and controversial comments of artists like Kosuth. However, as important as the creative side of art was to these conceptualists, this did not mean they did not care about how they appeared to the public, especially at a time when many hoped that this rebellious kind of art would fade into obscurity.

Neither the market nor the conceptualists would have benefited from the misconstruction of these artists’ personalities or creative processes, and artists perhaps had far more to lose than their collectors. As part of an institution with a business foundation, collectors could recover

from negative press of an artist they represented, simply by refusing to represent them any longer or prioritizing the work of others who were more publicly favored. But, for artists, a tarnished reputation would almost instantly result in a decreased ability to create work and thus to survive in the ever-changing and turbulent landscape of the art world. Though people are inclined to believe that the inflation and profit-driven tendencies of the art market destroyed artists’ spirit and creativity, art critic and gallerist Jerry Saltz suggests in his article “How Does the Art World

Live With Itself?” that in another sense, the art market is precisely what allowed artists to “assert themselves, step outside themselves, act, and maybe do something meaningful.” As radically different as their work was from modern tradition and representational art, so too were the conceptualists’ inclinations towards the market and a more public lifestyle. Despite the fact that not many in the 1960s believed in the art that the conceptualists were creating, the artists and collectors both understood that people would believe the publicity surrounding it, and were unashamed of that fact (Alberro, Deprivileging Art 392). ​ ​ A New Frontier: Documentation as Collaborative and Public Art

Increasing focus on the publicity of conceptualists naturally meant that more streamlined methods of disseminating their art needed to be developed, and this question provided another imperative instance of the joint efforts of artists and the market. The turn towards advancing technology in the late 1960s meant that photography and videography were becoming more and more viable in the art world, both as a means for documentation of art and as art themselves.

Art historian and university librarian Jim Berryman explores this idea thoroughly through his analysis of Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub was one of the most well-known collectors of early conceptual art who was particularly concerned with methods of documentation, especially

because these works were relatively cheaply-made and deteriorated quickly as a result

(Berryman 1155). Today, we are accustomed to going to museums of all kinds and picking up the small catalogues that summarize and explain the content of specific exhibitions. However, this was all news when Siegelaub helped to introduce this method of information into the art world in the 1960s. Through catalogues, collectors increased the public’s knowledge of conceptualism and its artists on both a national and global scale, while the artists were able to include personal statements and explanations of their works to a much wider audience.

For example, in December of 1968, Siegelaub and seven conceptualists--Robert Barry,

Robert Morris, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Douglas

Huebler--created a project called Xerox Book. The artists each created printable works that were ​ ​ less than 25 pages, which were then combined, photocopied, and widely distributed to create something mimicking a group exhibition, only in book form (Berryman 1157). In effect and quite intentionally, the book challenged the idea that an exhibition space was needed at all in order to showcase art. When asked in an interview about his experience working with collectors like Siegelaub on Xerox Book, Robert Morris found the artistic and collaborative aspects to be ​ ​ particularly noteworthy, saying: “‘I could use their imagination, and their knowledge...I was pretty much involved every step of the way but I didn’t have to preconceive the whole thing’”

(qtd. in Norvell 45). This way of working was less physically taxing for conceptualists while also being responsible for instigating more discussion and development of inquisitive works. The idea that artists did not have to work in isolation was almost unprecedented, giving them all the more freedom to experiment in various ways with their creations.

Exploring methods of documentation and distribution sometimes even served as the basis for conceptual work itself. A perfect and equally perplexing example of this is Robert Barry’s enigmatic works from 1969 titled Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From ​ a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion. Barry released each of these gasses from ​ pressurized cannisters, but of course, because of their nature they could not be physically seen or detected by a camera. For the project, Barry and Siegelaub printed a poster which contained the name of the work and a phone number. The number was connected to an answering device and a prerecorded message, which went on to describe the work in detail, much like a physical catalogue would (Berryman 1151). With these kinds of ambiguous experiments, artists and collectors like Barry and Siegelaub were pushing the definitions of both modern art and documentation, even when documentation as an artistic practice was still in its infancy. The direct intermingling of concept, execution, and public exposure was an important development in conceptualism that continues to bleed into contemporary art today. It effectively invited people to realize how the many different aspects of art could be elevated by utilizing the strengths of not only the artists, but those around them as well.

Undoubtedly, outright criticisms of the documentation phenomenon that began in the late

1960s focus on the market’s perceived exploitation of conceptualists and their works. When speaking about the increased distribution of exhibition catalogues in his article “Conceptual Art of the Press Release, or Art History Without Art,” museum curator and art history professor

David Joselit laments that the wonder and sensibility of conceptual art was reduced to the “much more mobile medium of text, which, like currency, was easily circulated and consumed” (168).

Others like Edward Henning, who was chief curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art, found that

these catalogues attempted “to function like a nursery school for precocious children,” a way to simplify these works so that they could be easily evaluated and consumed (21). Joselit and

Henning clearly find the idea that one collector would so grossly condense these works of art into a few words to be an insult to the creative methods of the artists and other intellectuals who dedicated effort into analysis of their form and content. In addition, making these pieces of art so readily available for the public to consume seemed to transform art into an advertisement, a spectacle for display rather than a piece of culture that should be appropriately valued.

However, this line of thinking does not acknowledge the innovative and inquisitive artworks like Xerox Book or Inert Gas Series that were created as a result of conceptualists and ​ ​ ​ ​ collectors working through varying methods of documentation. Moreover, in the 1960s, when the public’s access to art was far more limited than in our contemporary era, the documentation and distribution practices pioneered by these artists and collectors were the surest way to disassociate art from elitism and to escape the “exclusionary technology” of the gallery space

(Berryman 1158). In this way, the oft-recalled criticism of mass consumption that the market is always blamed for was perhaps the only way to help the public comprehend the puzzling ideas of conceptualism. It was the only way to help individuals realize that creators and collectors no longer wanted to exclude them from the conversation and language of art.

Conclusion

Since the catapulting rise of conceptual and contemporary art, people have always been concerned with the meanings behind these movements. But in a world where hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into investing and conserving artwork that looks cheap and childish, there are perhaps more who question whether there is anything to take away from these

types of work at all, and it is less and less surprising that the art market is constantly labelled as ​ ​ an institution that manipulates creatives for profit and reputability. However, perpetuating such misleading stereotypes refuses to acknowledge the many instances of partnership between artists and collectors in efforts to challenge art, who it was for, and how it would be distributed. Seeing market forces as the calculating and cold enemy to free-thinking artists severely impacts how willing we are to learn more about artists and the work they create, as well as how we position ourselves in the world of art, in something that is so significant and present in our lives. Through closer investigation, it is clear that the introduction and proliferation of conceptualism and market forces in the 1960s was perhaps one of the first instances of business-oriented professionals and artists expressing their desire to work with one another, as opposed to the ​ ​ former simply choosing to employ the latter. In effect, the system was no longer merely an impersonal exchange of goods and services; it was an ongoing process of cooperation and mutual respect which changed the art world for good, and arguably, for the better.

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Author bio:

Chaewon Lee is currently a third-year student at VCU, majoring in Communication Arts. She composed "David and Goliath, Or Are They?: An Evaluation of Artist and Market Tendencies in 1960s America" for Professor Christopher Jackson’s UNIV 200 last spring (2019). She enjoys singing, learning about film, and exploring all types of art museums.