This line of inquiry would extend to anyone working in what sociologist Ashley Mears identifies as a "prestige economy": cultural and historical circuits of value that operate according to a logic that most Classical economists would find deranged. The reason for this is likely due to the "above board" dimensions of commodity production in these categories and the irrelevance of supply and demand when it comes to trying to understand and predict consumer behavior.
"The desire to pursue a life in ‘fine art’ simply means a desire to respond creatively to the present,” writes Kraus. So, not "life drawing", but drawing from life: both the market and the medium of art in the 2010s were enabled by the same tools that made collaborative consumption, gig slinging, peer-to-peer lending, transactional participation and ubiquitous social networking economic drivers everywhere.
> “Whoever showed up and took off their clothes got whatever we could afford to put in the hat.” The figure drawing sessions back in Maine were organized by friends. After three hours of drawing, they would open up beer and pass around their drawings and talk to each other about what they had just drawn. Figure drawing… maybe twenty people went… chipped in ten dollars to pay for a model, sometimes two models at the same time.
Unsure if Minerva Durham, of Spring Studios, (now the Minerva Foundation for Figure Drawing) was one of the women who organized the studio Prince attended in his late 20s after moving to the city. I can tell you that I have been on Durham's mailing list for 13 years, which is probably how old I was when I first saw a penis I was allowed to stare at. and that, regardless of where it is or who is running it, it's the same studio. A quick inbox search pulls up Durham's earthlink email address. As of yesterday, walk-in rates are still the same as they were a decade ago:
> Whatever every other artist was doing outside THE SQUARE had nothing to do with Richard. There was video. There was performance. There was post studio. There was Avalanche. Richard knew about Acconci. He knew about Smithson. He knew about Nauman. He knew about Hesse. He knew about Hannah Wilke. But he also knew about Walt Kuhn and Alice Neel…… the tradition of drawing the figure put him in a place where El Greco, Goya, Cezanne, Picasso, de Kooning, Sigmar Polke, and R. Crumb had already been. There was something safe about the place.
4294967296 MOONS
The qualifications for this bounty were for a whitepaper the expectations of which would have been easy, or at least simple, to meet a year ago. But had I done so, it's unlikely that expectations would have been exceeded:
Richard Prince is one of the most successful contemporary artists alive today. He is not always the most popular. Neither was Duchamp. 1977 was the year the Museum of Modern Art scaled to OVER 1 MILLION SERVED and the "October that Shook the World" was a peer review journal. It was also the year punk died.
In 2014, Prince began printing paintings of women painting. Inkjets:
1974, the things that are contemporary now felt just as contemporary back then: video, performance, new media, even post-studio, even many of the same artists. (Acconci still headlines museums from beyond the grave, and Nauman is 81, making video, but as of last year, in industry standard 3-D.)
In Where Art Belongs (MIT press, 2017), Chris Kraus reflects upon the state-of-the-art (so called) within and against the digitally saturated post-2008, post-studio, post-medium, post-creative, post-contemporary contemporary art world. Following a slew of studio visits at the prestigious UC Davis graduate school of Fine Arts, the artist and critic observed that "70 percent of the work produced by students could not be described as painting or sculpture or video or even...installation."
It's in hindsight that the four reflective and critical essays on contemporary art practices comprise Kraus' lifelong joke on being always already 40 and unsuccessful. Like Kraus, contemporary art stays the same age. Randomly our minds perform relevance filtering, but so do our books: Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) is Kindled to the Semiotext(e) edition in physical space. This would never happen on Amazon.
Kraus reflects upon the "medium of lived time" through New York, Berlin and Mexicali artists working by doing art somewhere other than where art belongs.Algorithmic marketing and the hyper-expansion of art, comparative literature and media theory programs (academia is now a luxury product in the US) have both accelerated and disrupted the high path dependence recent arts graduates face relative to the art market. When Srnicek says that "as workers, we are to be liberated from the constraints of a permanent career, given the opportunity to make our own way…" it's hard to tell if he's joking.
Srnicek, an Accelerationist academic, qualifies the logic of the Platform Firm as not a company but an organizational mode of production. Like the fledgling start-up, the activist projects, research practices, novels, sex work, experimental pedagogy, NGOs, party buses, and cake decorating businesses in Kraus' survey have a pitch. Having spent the past decade and change working between contemporary art and adjacent digital, there is no "break", save for the occasional disaster.
Where Art Belongs and Platform Capitalism are in the Verso section at Barnes and Noble for $14.00, on a syllabus at The New School for Social Research for $60,000x4 and leaked prestigiously into pirate shadow libraries for free. Both were published at the peak of the "on demand" economy. Both attempt to recover something from the post-2008 political moment with some awareness of what it wasn't, even when it comes down to the fact that the only thing worth keeping is the morale.
Describe how this probe works.