Something Clever

Nothing is worth 17.7 million dollars. Absolutely nothing.

We have lost the concept of value.

We live in a world where spending 160 million dollars can't even buy you the governorship of California. Meg Whitman just found that out the hard way.

We piss money away on the most foolish things. Athletes. Celebrities. Politicians. Artists.


I liked the fact that the Guerrilla Girls were maintaining a healthy separation of art and politics. Still, I would rather they not want to bring womankind down to the level of the bourgeois white, male, New York artist of the 1990's (or the 1890's for that matter). I am appalled at not only the disparity between the value assigned to the work of men versus women, but that any such a value is assigned to anything. "Romaine Brooks" says right out loud that the system is "pretty fucked." I was not surprised to read the statistic that more than 50% of art school students are female, but later women only make up a tiny fraction of artists in galleries. I personally believe that it is because women tend to lack the ego necessary to make it in the gallery scene. One of the side effects of motherhood is learning you are not the most important person in the world. An artist that doesn't believe that of themselves will never "make it". While I don't condone the system as it stands, nor have any desire to participate in that type of capitalism, I respect what the Guerrilla Girls are doing. It is much more effective to change parts of the system than it is to undermine the whole. I wish that weren't always the case. I wish that, in general, society was more compassionate, an ideal that directly threatens the gallery/artist/critic relationship as it stands.


I really liked Mary Jane Jacobs approach. It takes a lot to walk out on a few of the world's most important museums and decide to become an independent art advocate. She talks about the futility of fixing one problem at a time; a women's show, an African American show, a Latino show, etc. I don't think that there is necessarily a solution to the problem of tokenism, as Suzi Gablik puts it, but I think it is important to make sure the progressive efforts we make are not purely reactionary, obligatory. I think that Jacobs touches upon the issue when discussing the relevance of works presented in Charleston, SC. I think the most important fact is that the artists geared their work to be contextually relevant to Charleston. I think the best way out of the big business popularity contest that art has become is a certain level of local relevance. I think the idea that access to art should be free is also crucial.

I think that some of my own background is relevant to this argument. I grew up in Chicago, a city so segregated that the term "hyper-segregated" had to be coined to describe it. Chicago had a lot of ups and downs- the Art Institute Museum technically only charged a donation to get in. I spent a lot of my childhood exploiting that rule. This gave me access to some of the most famous artists in history, but it also taught me they weren't worth paying for. Also, my mom and I moved around a lot, and very rarely lived in dominantly white, English speaking neighborhoods. This meant that I got to see something that seems a little overlooked in Gablik's interviews: just because it isn't in a museum, doesn't mean that it's not art. In a lot of the neighborhoods, small cultural centers and even nominal museums celebrated the work of the residents and the micro local cultural heritage. This was true in almost all the neighborhoods: Puerto Rican, Mexican, West African, Polish, Korean, Thai, Pakistani, etc. All the neighborhoods were vibrant and valued creativity in their own way. They just didn't pay millions for it. Art was just a part of life, and that's the way I like it.

***Above, a friend's piece, a mural on the side of a shoe store near the El in Chi,  that fucking Jasper John that sold for 17.7 million and a painting by Jenny Seville, who is one of my favorite lady painters.