Trading in Vulgarity: On Work of Art

I spend much of my time these days trying to approach what constitutes pop culture with the cold aloofness that pop culture enthusiasts apply in approaching famine and genocide. Though I am but a puny human and there are times in which it simply can't be avoided, not because something is genuinely cool or because it tests the limits of the absurd, but because certain exports of pop culture think they can be one or the other, which results in a very different aim altogether.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist is one of the newest urbane reality shows on Bravo which I heard about a few times but wrote it off with the greatest indifference. As far as I can remember though it was talked about negatively. Sure, Bravo can penetrate the cooking profession, everyone can understand food and being that the chef must feed the people, it's audience-friendly. Art on the other hand is more ethereal, it is best kept as far away from the eyes of the rabble and guarded in the hands of one creator who, whether possessed by incredible insanity or incredible stupidity, will choose when to unleash his work to a viewership, albeit a rather limited, sycophantic viewership. In a word, it's vulgar. It's vulgarity practically eclipses the vulgarity of all the Real Housewives shows put together. Why in the name of all that is sacred would Bravo cheapen the very medium that produced Guernica? But in spite of all this during some downtime in my rather busy month of not receiving emails from editors and generally being a failure at life I decided to take the opportunity to see the first episode.

In general Work of Art is as I assumed it would be: identical to Top Chef and Project Runway in structure and tone, only it's about visual art. Take a handful of “upcoming” artists in or around my age – sometimes older or younger – and subject them to various challenges that are guaranteed to strain the idiosyncrasies and work patterns of the artists that made them artists in the first place and offer the person who fails the least at these challenges with an award that no other artist could ever respect or take seriously. But also like Top Chef there is a bit of redeeming quality, in that it has actual quality. There is no lack of basic talent among the group even if their art is somewhat derivative (I see hints of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Brandon Bird) or somewhat predictably provocative. Hell, there are even artists in whom I've taken a keen interest. One of them is the token autodidact named Erik. His work bares the marks of the self-taught, but I imagine that once he gets out of his skull phase – or at least does something more interesting with it – he could excel in his own right. There is already a dislike for him however seemingly because he has no training, and is kind of a loser. (Though these people seem to forget that Francis Bacon, Ryan McGinley and one of their admitted heroes Jean-Michel Basquiat were untrained.) One who I'd rather not see excel however is someone named Jaclyn. Her hypersexualized paintings show no small amount of technique and at least some cleverness, but much of what I can see of her work is a kind of interior exhibitionism. She's the visual equivalent of a girl with whom I took a creative nonfiction class who wrote a rather blasé essay* on her vagina and later submitted an essay about her sex life alongside her final essay. It was wrapped in yellow police tape.

Just going off the first episode there is little more to say. Though as to whether or not it's vulgar and does more harm to art than good, well, no on both counts. The fact that some call it an art industry should indicate to anyone how corrupted the art world is, at least as far as New York goes. Rather the show is an extension of that corruption. Many of these artists would not be where they are had Basquiat not been discovered and subsequently exploited as he was in his very brief career. If one wants to look at a truly vulgar show, try Top Chef instead. Think about it. Visual art, like any art, is essentially pointless. As Brian Eno has said, “Culture is everything we don't have to do.” Unlike culture, we have to eat. Top Chef seems to have a secret motivation to torture the hungry with its elaborate presentations and tendency to waste food in order to get minor details just right. It gives a kind of elitist impression that the poor will eat when the creative class are done creating. Perhaps that's too deep a reading of the show, but when set up against Work of Art, there is a whiff of the offensive about it.

None of this is to be seen as an attack on art itself. Indeed, I love visual art. Last year's Bacon exhibit at the Met was one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. Almost every work there had something to say that was worth saying, they moved me emotionally and creatively. Even the work of the late Dash Snow, while not terribly nuanced in any way, is aggressive and challenging to everyone's sensibility and taste. But what happens in New York and London, worlds these contestants want to be a part of or are already a part of, is but a small portion of human creative life. I'm of the belief that the next great artist is probably some schlub in Minnesota who paints exacting, insightful portraits in his or her basement and leaves them there until he or she dies. For now, Work of Art will be but an amusement of ego and pretension and will likely end the same way shows like that always end. Someone gets a prize for learning absolutely nothing.


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*I'll admit that overall my writing was putrid in that class, but it's the principle of the thing.

Randall Lane and the Pathological Autobiography: A Defense ... kind of

From July 2007 to around November of 2008 I put in some time at Doubledown Media, a small publishing company that put out magazines catering towards the financial set and the otherwise affluent. A few months following what was, in truth, my third departure from the company, it had officially announced it was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. At present I am a creditor in that case, owed a meager couple hundred dollars that I knew I was never going to get even before I filed the claim. But whereas I have been mucking about in a quagmire of failure and frustration (as is my MO), the company's figurehead (and to many ex-coworkers the chief antagonist of the films taking place in their minds) Randall Lane has kept relatively busy. Not only is he on the editorial staff of The Daily Beast, he also has a memoir coming out this summer that has everything to do with the job that brought the two of us into contact with each other. In order to build anticipation for this release, Randall has arranged for a particularly juicy excerpt to be printed in the July issue of Vanity Fair. As I had anticipated it is already receiving stern criticism from former employees over its factual inaccuracies, fuzzy memories and profound distortions. Fair enough, but at the same time, so what?

The annoyance, perhaps even rage, from my former colleagues is not entirely without justification. As an editorial assistant for Doubledown, my primary task was fact-checking … lots and lots of fact-checking. For someone who is more of a stylist than a researcher this is the most loathsome of jobs, but I'd like to think that I did it with some seriousness and competence. We all did so much of it that we may well have known the contents of every issue inside and out. Naturally this is a job that comes with its own brand of stress. It wasn't terribly calming when my former boss and mentor, the company's managing editor, told me that I was the “last line of defense” against what may very well be a huge libel lawsuit. Fortunately it never came to that, but Randall was a stickler for factual accuracy of course, and to see him turn his back on accuracy in his own work is tantamount to being spat in the face. While part of this rage is based on much understood bitterness, it is mostly based on a linguistic misinterpretation.

The writing of a memoir is not an act of journalism, and while memoirs tend to be autobiographical they are by no means autobiographies. (And if they are they're autobiographies of the pathologies of their authors. Like A Million Little Pieces for instance.) Rather, memoirs are self-serving and one-sided by their very nature. No one in their right mind believes any of what happened in, say, Going Rogue and most certainly in Rousseau's Confessions were described truthfully, all that we can possibly demand of these authors is that the names and locations mentioned exist and are spelled correctly. Memoirs exist either to perpetuate a personal myth (Sarah Palin) or in Lane's case, as a defense against accusations of facilitating the collapse of an entire media company and the jobs therewith.

The content of the excerpt has little to do with the company itself, but with an incident it had every bit to do with. It details his dealings with artist Peter Max who he'd brought on board to “paint” portraits of those most worthy of making it to the annual Trader 100 list. I remember the portraits and what a big deal the arrangement was. I had not heard of Peter Max before that point, but when I did I knew not only his name and occupation, but that he wasn't very good at his occupation. Randall confirmed for mw in the piece what I had always suspected when I saw the paintings in layout: that Max was just painting bright colors around silk-screened photos. While that much is true, people have been taken aback by Lane's view of the situation, namely his dealing with money amounts which some say are conflicting, and his portrayal of Peter Max as a greedy “businessman” whose studio is more of a factory than Andy Warhol's Factory. Damning accusations indeed and ones that tend to bloat into the ridiculous when written out in Lane's irony-free prose seemingly scrapped up from the Entourage writing room floor, but not necessarily interesting or scandalous. Almost every artist in the post-Francis Bacon world has been accused of putting commerce before aesthetics, chief among them Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. That this route is taken in describing Max's supposed sleaze tactics of “selling rich people their photographs back to them in quadruplicate” is not as offensive as Lane's omission that the artist plainly sucks.

But what I feel should make people upset is not the lies of Randall Lane, but the truth. I found it only a tad amusing that Lane is now ready to admit that at the time he was dealing with Max – in February of 2008 – Doubledown was “struggling.” It's funny that, as I remember it at least, for much of that time, even after the crash later that year, we were told the opposite. Sure the company was not doing well in the sense that we might perceive it, but it would be fine, just fine, and everyone's job was safe. This, of course, was before salary cuts and layoffs. In any case, Randall seems more honest with the reader than he was with his employees, and with his prose style able to render everything intangible, those events come off as amusing anecdotes or bits of predictable narrative, the real life effects of which were conveniently glossed over. If there is to be any qualm with the excerpt, it's that.

This of course is only in a context that does not extend beyond the excerpt. At present I cannot talk about the rest of the book's contents and how they deflate or propel my comments here. Nor should this be construed as any kind of personal attack. Randall's not a bad guy in the grand scheme of things, he was actually quite helpful in offering me guidance in not being an idiot, though neither he nor I could have seen my abject indifference to grand scale ambition on the horizon. And there is more than enough room for fondness in regards to the memories I've collected while at Doubledown. This, however, does not change the fact that his writing style is not doing literature any favors. Of course if he's unhappy with my opinions regarding the excerpt he's more than happy to provide a free copy of his book so as to better educate me on the things I didn't know was going on at Doubledown while I worked there. As a creditor in the bankruptcy case, I believe he should have my address handy.