Damien Hirst Trades Formaldehyde for Linseed Oil

The resurgence of figurative realism as an emerging trend may have reached its tipping point with Damien Hirst's recent decision to re-invent himself as a representational oil painter and exhibit the "No Love Lost" show at the Wallace Collection:

http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/exhibition/77

Although the paintings are closer to the illicit chalk-on-blackboard doodles of a girlfriend-less teenage heavy metal fan being held in after-school detention than to the Titian masterpieces in the adjacent room, Hirst's conversion to painting is enthusiastic and unequivocal. In his own words:

"Conceptual or minimal art seems a bit dead."

- Damien Hirst, Time Out, 10/13/2009

Seismic tremors and rumblings indicating that realism could be the "value stock" in an uncertain market have even reached Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, which asks "Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?"

The Gauntlet is Tossed

At Art Basel Miami I debated Hirst's legacy as a conceptual artist with a curator, making the case that his previous work was entertaining gimmickry. By "gimmickry" I mean that the artistic merit of the piece is a function of the production budget, which fuels the marketing buzz in a self-reinforcing loop. I claimed that any clever gent could easily come up with a brilliant concept if given a $20 million budget for its execution (this figure was the cost of Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull).

I was challenged to step up to the plate by producing just such an idea, assuming I had the budget, with the stipulation that I had to come up with it over the next round of cocktails in order to support my claim that it was "easy." So here goes. I hope Damien is listening and ready to write me a check, because this one is a winner.

Swinging for the Fences with $20 Million

My concept is entitled "Canned Almanac 2010." My budget: $20 million. The work will hold a mirror up to the face of the current global economic and cultural order.

A beef cow will be selected from a random midwestern American slaughterhouse. The bovine carcass will be launched into near-earth orbit on a commercial rocket. The capsule will circle the earth three times where it will be visible in the night sky to the world's population. The heat of re-entry cooks the carcass leaving a charred cinder. After dramatically impacting the earth, the cow's remains will be packaged into ordinary unlabeled aluminum soup cans.

All of the of the cans except one will be made available to members of the general public through an online lottery. The lottery winner's identities will be kept anonymous. The lottery entry web site will be publicized after the capsule landing by random distribution over internet social networking sites. The remaining can of meat will be retained by the artist and sold at an amount exactly equal the cost of the project.

I hereby submit the "importance" and "relevance" of this piece:

• The work is historically important, as it sits at the intersection of Pop and Post-Modern conceptual art, seamlessly referencing Damien Hirst's animal carcasses, Warhol's soup cans, Piero Manzoni's cans of feces, and Christo's oil barrels.
• The work is relevant because it informs the current ecological crisis debate by using a staggering quantity of fossil fuels to generate a nutritionally worthless food item that is distributed to an anonymous public via internet marketing channels. In this way it exposes the absurdity of the post-industrial global consumer product system.
• The work deconstructs notions of the value of cultural productions, as it simultaneously rejects and embraces the art market's valuation process by giving away cultural production to random recipients who may be art world outsiders, while at the same time exploiting an insider art transaction and netting out at zero "profit".
• The work explores the relationship between physical mortality and cultural permanence, as the dead cow is resurrected as a permanent art icon which invests the meat with cultural value while maintaining its essential meaninglessness.
• The work redefines the commoditization of art by turning the pop art notion of commodity art on its head. Rather than re-contextualizing a cheap mass-produced product, it creates an undifferentiated and useless end product at a massive expense and then cheapens it by giving it away to anonymous "owners".
• By using an internet lottery to distribute the artworks irrespective of insider status, the work subverts the structure of institutionally sanctioned access channels to cultural information.
• The work subverts the art market's cultural product distribution norms, because the distribution of the artworks are a function of random digital interconnectivity over social networks.
• The work challenges bourgeois notions of provenance and ownership in that the initial owners will be anonymous, and the cans of meat will be indistinguishable from a normal supermarket product.

I welcome feedback on the validity of this piece from conceptual artists. Does it meet up to the standards of a Hirst? I would ask him to finance this project, but I expect he will be busy in his garden shed painting another floral still life.

The Arrière-Garde?

A new generation gap is emerging in the art world. In an interview with Charlie Rose on February 9, 2008, Julian Schnabel states:

"Most older artists are going to give you advice, and you can't listen to them because what they don't understand is that the basis of your work is to destroy the standards that they set out in the first place."

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8931

The current generation of young painters seems to be taking this to heart in an unexpected way, by questioning the painting standards of elder artists like Julian Schnabel himself, starting with these:

• Preference for concept over execution
• Crude execution passed off as expressiveness
• Self-referentiality as a primary source of inspiration
• Incoherence presented as intellectual sophistication

An even more fundamental rejection of Schnabel's artistic generation would be to re-think its destructive notion of the avant-garde itself. Artists are choosing to advance the development of painting constructively, by "standing on the shoulders of giants". This approach attempts to build on the accumulated knowledge of the past rather than obliterating it.

This is exactly what today's young figurative realists members of "The Upset" and "Classical Realist" movements are doing. Hopefully Schnabel will pass the baton to this emerging generation and stick to filmmaking where his talents seem to be better suited.

In this "arrière-garde" action of standing on the shoulders of giants, let's not discriminate too much: in this recent painting I'm hoping to stand on the shoulders of a troublesome Modernist as well as my 17th century heroes:

"Green Palimpsest", 2009. Oil on board by Thomas Shelford.

A Flight to Quality, and a Flight from NYC

Recommended reading: a very timely article by the New York Times about the boom-bust cycle in the art market and the impact of the recent correction:

"The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!"

I share the author's relief that the over-hyped art market is experiencing a correction, and that this is resulting in a "flight to quality," defined as skill-based figurative art. However, I don't share the author's view that the resurgence in realistic painting is due to the fact that paintings are easy to sell: the New York Times is betraying its conceptual bias here. The resurgence of painting in the past 15 years was driven by underground reactionaries who were bucking dominant tastes, and the movement to re-connect with traditional painting practices was discouraged by both critics (with cries of "kitsch") and galleries that prefer to sell "factory" conceptual art which is easier to produce quickly in large format. It is far more cost effective for a gallery to exhibit a "found art" plastic bag installation stapled to the wall alongside a pretentious essay (I'm not making this up, by the way) than it is to invest 150 hours over 2 months on the "slow art" process of making an 18x24 inch oil painting.

NYC Studios: Casualties of the Downturn

That being said, artists are really suffering right now and leaving the city in droves as studio rents and maintenance costs have remained high while art sales vaporize. The anecdotal evidence is accelerating: next Saturday I'm invited to attend the going-away party for a hyper-talented New York Academy of Art Postgraduate Fellow who is moving to Maryland on a permanent "sabbatical."

For those who care about the grass roots of NYC's cultural ecosystem, it's time to think globally and act locally: I'm organizing a regular salon event with the legendary celebrity fine art photographer Gilles Larrain to raise consciousness about this issue and engage people in the studio community. Here's the press release and web site, spread the word!

http://www.artsalonparty.org/pressrelease.php

The Upset: Young Contemporary Art

Gestalten has just published a survey of the resurgence of figurative realism that is now overturning the art world, spotlighting the torrent of young contemporary artists who view late 20th century Modernism as a dead-end movement that has reached its logical conclusion and exhausted itself. This new avant-garde is pulling off a come-from-behind "upset" as they turn their backs on the conceptual conceits of the art establishment by adopting the skillful execution last seen in 17th and 19th century painting.

In the late 1990s, Classical Realist ateliers perfected their archaeological recovery effort, and now young artists are reaping the rewards by pointing their bazooka-sized skill sets at contemporary subject matter inspired by science fiction, comic book illustration, street art, and other sources. The Upset offers a who's-who of this broad movement with interviews, biographies and beautifully photographed artwork.

Taking the art world by storm, artists of The Upset like David Kassan and Mark Ryden (who draws inspiration from post-modernism's whipping boys Bruegel, Ingres and Bouguereau) are running circles around the current generation of institutional elites who took great pleasure in declaring the death of painting in the 1960s and '70s.

It seems that the dustbin of history has been flipped over unexpectedly, and if the trends documented in The Upset continue on their current trajectory, in twenty years we may find ourselves looking back on late Modernism as an odd interruption in the continuing two-thousand-year historical narrative of Western painting.