April 15, 2006
This seems like a good idea
From Carol Vogel's "Warhols of Tomorrow are Dealers' Quarry Today" in today's Times:
Beginning this year, first-year graduate students were not included in Columbia's open-studios event, held each December, when the school community and the public are invited to see students' work. The intent was to give these students more time to develop without the anxiety of showing what they can do just three months after they've arrived.
On a somewhat related note, see my December 2004 diary entry on Artforum.com:
In an ideal world, all of these students would take what they've learned off to tiny studios in the outer boroughs, where they'd hone their ideas and edit their bodies of work before beginning to look around for a gallery. But we're in the midst of a strong market and live in a terribly expensive city—not at all an ideal world for young artists—and it's becoming more and more common for students to have gallery shows. Kevin Zucker, who had two Chelsea solos before he graduated (Columbia '02) and is now with Mary Boone, is the poster boy of the phenomenon. Obviously this kind of early success can create hype, dauntingly high expectations, and a context in which every failure is a spectacular one—to say nothing of an art world in which youth itself is a selling point. (This may partly explain then-21-year-old Rosson Crow's sold-out SVA BFA thesis show last spring.) Most dangerous, it can lead artists into a catch-22 wherein they find commercial favor before critics and curators even know who they are. As word spreads through the collector grapevine, what the artist hears is: "Collector X wants a painting like the one Y has." Satisfying demand becomes priority number one, and critics and curators write the work off instead of trying to contextualize it. I saw promising artists at all three schools; here's hoping they don't meet such a limited, if profitable, fate.
Rereading the end of the quote above, I can't help but wonder if I wasn't (subconsciously, perversely) making the same kind of speculative grasp as dealers and collectors in an attmept to consolidate some power over the direction of these young artists' careers. I'd like to think that critical interpretation bears some influence on the course of art history in the long run, but of course cannot know so empirically. But the careers of painters like Zucker and Brian Alfred—himself recently picked up by Boone after four fiscally successful, critically ignored exhibitions at Max Protetch—do not evince staying power. I can think of few group shows with notable contributions by either artist (and a host of others, lest you think I'm picking on anyone in particular). I wonder how many museums have acquired—and therefore committed to preserve—works by either artist. Perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned, because maybe they're worrying about the same things . . . all the way to the bank.