GAUGING YOUR SUCCESS AS AN ARTIST Many artists are their own worst enemies and gauge success by how much work they sell. However, the sales of an artist’s work has little to do with success. Many great artists made their work for decades without any sales. Some of these artists are very prominent figures in the art world today like Mike Kelley, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and many others who may not have broken out yet. The most Avant-Garde work is usually rejected. Because it is so unorthodox, it has difficulty being understood by dealers, collectors and patrons alike. Nonetheless, that should not keep one from continuing to work and experiment. It is also unfortunate that many progressive innovators never get discovered because they don’t live and work in Los Angeles or New York. Yet, those are the places in America artists must make a stand for themselves in order to further their careers. Ellsworth Kelly was a mailman who made his paintings based on abstract shapes created from cast shadows he would see while delivering mail. Would you call him unsuccessful? I think not. Artists often continue to beat themselves up and grow bitter and filled with envy as they watch the art world champion other artists over the course of their careers. If they are lucky, many of these artists end up teaching in educational institutions, the rest toil miserably in nine to five jobs making little more than minimum wage. One can understand how they would become cantankerous and disgruntled with this system in place. I empathize with them. But I send a word of caution to my fellow artists in this predicament. Don’t pay attention to others’ successes and don’t give up. The former fuels the fire of disdain and the latter destroys you forever. Even if you don’t produce much work, so long as you are conceiving new works and documenting them in sketchbooks you are making progress. One should also remember how many artists experienced enormous success in the eighties only to be dropped by the art world in favor of the goopy gloppy sloppy art of the early nineties. Think of artists like Jack Goldstein, David Salle and Andres Serrano, to name a few. Their change of fortune in the marketplace didn’t make them failures. Many artists from the eighties have resumes that include some of the most prestigious galleries, museums and private collections in the world. Yet many of them might feel like they have fallen from grace. Goldstein, for one, gave up and committed suicide even after being featured on the cover of Artforum. This is the worst thing that we artists could do to ourselves. I was a student of Jack’s near the end of his life and care for and miss him immensely. We must be kind to ourselves and be grateful for what we have and had and realize that if we keep at it we will have it again, and if we don’t, so what? The important thing is to be true to your vision, to be true to yourself, and most of all be true to the work. If you are only motivated by money, fame and recognition then you probably shouldn’t be an artist. It is only when we take personal inventory of ourselves do we see the truth and from that we can grow. So I implore all the artists who feel overlooked or envy the other guy or gal and say, Focus on your work and everything else will fall into place. As John Baldessari said in Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia (67-68), “Art is often all about who sold what, and how much was sold. New York is the toughest town in the world; everybody is there to make it. You can compete with your students about the work you produce, but to compete about money is a losing proposition. You can’t use money as an index of quality; that is a fallacy. That will drive you crazy.” THE GREAT WHITE SOAP The white cube is one way to refer to a Gallery or Museum space. Four white walls, a ceiling and a floor are all that are required to create one of these places. It’s within these spaces that everything we know for certain becomes uncertain. It is between these walls where the constructs of our society are taken apart and reformed. What is an Art Gallery really? It is a space where all ideology, social structures, cultural norms and values are abandoned for the sake of an artists and their viewers. It is the artist who reconstructs all notions of reality on his or her own terms inside four perpendicular walls. Sure, some spaces are rectangular, triangular, narrow, tall, cramped or huge but their purpose remains the same. That purpose is to challenge our notions of what art is and to express the human condition in new and exciting ways. Truly avant-garde artists know this and utilize it to their advantage. Avid collectors and the wealthy thrive on this sanctuary where the predictable becomes unpredictable, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and where experience can transcend the grueling monotony of everyday living. These sorts of spaces came into their prime during the last century as a response to the cluttered spaces of the French salons of the nineteenth century and to accommodate the scale of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The salon style of hanging is now known as a convention of hanging artworks in such a manner that all the negative space of a wall is utilized. You don’t see it very often anymore, but it is still used — particularly by collectors who have little wall space left and many works they wish to display. How one chooses to display an artwork after it has been purchased is solely at the discretion of the buyer, despite the fact that some artists will insist that their works only be shown in a particular manner publicly. The white cube as I am describing it is not to be confused with those artworks sometimes classified as Post- Minimalist. Nor with Michael Fried’s treatise Art and Objecthood published in Artforum in 1967. Fried’s contention that Minimalism was at odds with Modernism’s emphasis on non-illusion and “flatness” and had more to do with spectacle or “theatricality” was severely flawed. Otherwise Fried, too, would have had to separate the writings of Clement Greenberg on Modernism from the huge canvases of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, which were theatrical by virtue of their scale. Every art historian knows (whether he or she admits it or not) that Art History ended with Minimalism. Art History started with the cave paintings of Lascaux in France that crudely depicted how to hunt. It progressed to portray the illusion of reality in full color on a two-dimensional plane or monochromes in three-dimensional space. Art was romanticized, politicized, elongated until the invention of the Daguerreotype photo print process. It was this invention of chemical magic that unchained Art History to begin its journey backwards till there was nothing left but line, shape, color and form. All of which had no hidden meaning except to aggrandize the fundamental principle that less is more. The “Less is More” aesthetic was already explored by early twentieth century artists like Malevich with his Black Square, 1915 and later by Ad Reinhart with his repetition and colorization of that same form. In the Sixties, artists like Robert Morris, Tony Smith and Donald Judd put the finishing touches on the idea of art history progressing. We had a clear conclusion to Art History, as we know it. More recently artists like Tom Friedman and Jeppe Hein have reinvented it: Friedman with his remote controlled cube Zombie, 1997 and Hein with his Flying Cube, 2004. Both of these works are brilliantly executed and unique in their own way, no matter how derivative the objects themselves. Artists are always rewriting the rules of engagement for the viewer. That is why the Billionaires pay so much for something intangible, forever hoping that it is truly new. They already own ten or more of everything in almost every category. That is why they covet things like Chris Burden’s self-crucifixion on a Volkswagen Beetle or Mike Kelley’s stuffed animals, boom boxes and afghan rugs. They need something to shake them up and confront their perception of what the “real” really is. Like Jean Cocteau, they say to artists: “Astonish me!” The only problem is that for forty-two plus years we have forgotten what we started, mostly because those earlier generations of collectors have passed on and have been replaced by Art Fairs, the Nouveau Riche and Euro-Trash. It is my unabashed opinion that we and all our co-dependents need to be brought back to our senses. It is time to end this schizophrenic-free-for-all-trope- a-dopa, as I like to call it, and get back to the basics. Basics that consist of groups of artists bound together by camaraderie, aesthetics and/or ideologies during specific time frames and re-establish a linear progression of Art History as we used to know it. If not, we will continue to bathe in dirty water, be enslaved by taste, and innovation will be in ever short supply. THICK VS. THIN Throughout my lengthy career as an art student one thing has always fascinated me. When it comes to painting there is or should I say has been an enormous amount of prejudice by art critics at large, for paintings that lack a variety of thicknesses on their surface.