For Art’s Sake - Art on the catwalk
Is fashion artsy? Or are artists selling out?
I still suffer from the misguided, vaguely hippie-ish delusion that artists are somehow linked to the counterculture — that their values from Van Gogh to Pollock to Adrian Piper are defined in opposition to the world of base, material things that regular people clock their pitiful lives around.
Not so, the art and fashion magazines nuzzle affectionately. The avant-garde is a distant memory in the new media-constructed Art Chic, where all it takes to make it is style, good looks, marketing ability... oh, and a backlog of paintings or sculpture doesn’t hurt.
Fashion designer Marc Jacobs has in recent years made hipster luminaries Sofia Coppola and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon his art babes du jour. But now sculptor Rachel Feinstein is Jacobs’ bellwether, adding the luster of high art to his fashion spreads. Fashion rags used to lard their pages with snapshots of the well-dressed patrons and society types who showed up dressed to the nines at gallery openings. Now it’s the artists wearing the Prada and Chloe. Because of their circulation in media culture, from fashion to shelter magazines, I now feel as if I know Damian Loeb, John Currin (Mr. Rachel Feinstein), Vanessa Beecroft, Cecily Brown and Sam Taylor-Wood’s faces, apartments and style better than I do their art.
Female artists are apparently no longer interested in that whole deep ’60s look. You know, yanking scrolls from their vaginas in edgy performance pieces, looking like half-crazed she-creatures sprung from Greek myth, failing to dress up for gallery openings or hell, skipping them all together. Now they are supposed to be chic, well-turned out and aspire to the same world of materialism and cocktail parties their dealers and collectors occupy.
Maybe I suffer from that damnable post-Gen X condition of nostalgia for a time I never lived in when artists could be surly and unwashed instead of market savvy and design handbags on the side. Now the road to art world success seems paved with sex and salesmanship like everything else.
As fashion magazines fill up with chic artists, art magazines have become infused with fashion.
Atlanta’s own homegrown photographer Roe Ethridge has lately gotten in on the act, creating an ad for Jack “Honey, I’m a designer, too” Spade, husband of handbag queen Kate. The recent Spade ad shot by Ethridge features a moody shot of an artsy boy type gazing out of a WASPishly appointed room. The Spades have tapped into the art world before to sell their wares: Photographer Larry Sultan shot Kate Spade’s 2002 Wes Anderson-style preppy print ads.
Real art has been contaminated by proximity to commerce which has been stealing its look for so long the original now looks like an ad. As a result, Tiny Barney photographs now look like ads for Lilly Pulitzer. When I look at a Nan Goldin now, I can’t tell if it’s the cigarettes or the liquor that are being sold. If you didn’t know better, you might want to rush to the new Prada gallery heavily advertised in Artforum to check out the slamming airbrushed androids in its latest photography show. The art world has sold off so much of its attitude, the fashion world now looks cutting edge and shopping seems like some kind of rebellion.
I used to think the infusion of the style and design crowd was a great thing for the arts. Bring on the Jezebel folk — have them twist an ankle navigating those deadly Castleberry Hill sidewalks in their bling-bling. More likely it just reduces art to a fad, sucking all of the allure and integrity off with it. Restaurants, bars and retail furniture stores are starting to highlight art now, which also seemed like a good idea, until you think about how horrific it could be for the artist. Artists now don’t need to dread the horrible reduction of their work to “sofa art” chosen to complement interior design. Worse, they may find more trend-conscious customers choosing the sofa instead of the art, as in, “At least you can sit on the sofa.”
When did cultural commentators become so singularly sour and bitchy, as if trying to echo pop culture’s pubescent too-cool-for-school attitude? First there was the snarky, dismissive NPR report that Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher) had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. On “Morning Edition,” commentator Neda Ulaby said of Jelinek’s books, which have dealt with sadomasochism and rape, that it didn’t “make me want to run out and read them.” How, Ulaby complained, could a writer whose literature was “mired in the ’80s,” and the unfashionable content of gender war get selected when everyone knows global views are where it’s at in the contemporary literary scene? Then there was Jonathan Kandell’s New York Times obituary for French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, which many have rightly pointed out was snidely irreverent on the occasion of this important writer and philosopher’s death. At various turns in the obit, Kandell took great pains to emphasize Derrida’s difficulty and abstruseness — like signaling the end of Albert Einstein’s life by noting how “hard” it was to understand his work.