More AI & Art, New Art School Models, the Financial Realities of the Art World, A New Tom Wolfe Doc, and Other Suggested Readings
This week's Art & Artists
Hi Everyone,
Hoping you’re well. I’m happy to be back here after taking a week off.
First off, thanks to those of you who reached out to say how useful my last newsletter (“How Should the Art World Respond to the Climate Crisis?”) was. I look forward to continuing to be involved in this discussion until we solve the crisis. (One can dream.)
Secondly, I have a month’s work of content to curate and now share with you, so here goes…
Will AI threaten art jobs?
A topic I am really focusing on personally is AI and its influence on the art world and increasingly I think it’s something we all need to pay serious attention to.
As such, I wanted to suggest a recent Guardian article that touched on how AI might threaten skilled jobs, such as those in the art world. The article quoted a recent report from The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which said the following: “Occupations in finance, medicine and legal activities which often require many years of education, and whose core functions rely on accumulated experience to reach decisions, may suddenly find themselves at risk of automation from AI.” The report then added that “highly skilled occupations were most exposed to AI-powered automation, such as workers in the fields of law, culture, science, engineering and business.”
The “culture” mention made me take notice. As did the following comment: “The OECD added that while AI had the potential to eliminate boring or dangerous tasks and create interesting ones instead, firms were open about the fact that a main motivation for investing in AI was improving worker performance and reducing staff costs.”
I share this most of all because historically the assumption has been that AI would take low-level tasks and automate them but as the technology exponentially increases in sophistication, we need to start—before it is too late—to better understand and anticipate what it would look like for jobs in the art world to be automated. It’s also crucial for us to think about what we do that could not be automated—or at least that we think could not be automated at this point.
On this note, I also wanted to share this long piece from New Atlantis, “Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal,” by Ari Schulman, which argues why we should take this moment more seriously than other previous moments in the history of AI.
ChatGPT’s reading list
Continuing the discussion of AI, a few months back, I wrote about ChatGPT to evaluate its use for the art world, and in that piece, I raised major concerns about the lack of knowledge around the dataset it was based on, and as a result the truth of the answers it was providing millions of users.
As such, I was excited to read this piece in Insider that shared a recent academic study to define what the AI had actually read, at least in terms of literature. In brief, and scarily, the study found that the reading list mostly consisted of “the self-assigned, late-night, sci-fi reading list of every lonely straight white male Gen X nerd,” and then asked, “What are we in for if GPT-4 has the reading preferences of a 14-year-old dweeb from 1984?” While I truly hope this situation will improve, again we all need to be involved here to educate ourselves and be conscious of the very human basis of all of the AIs that will be flooding our world very soon…
New art school models
Moving on from AI, I was also excited to hear about the New Art School Modality in The New York Times, as I assume others were. If you haven’t heard about it, the Modality is a semester-long program that will start at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and provides about 50 students with a free course in black art history. The Modality is a symptom of a U.S. environment where art school education is prohibitively expensive and where artists are looking for alternative models.
As I wrote about in A Year in the Art World, in my chapter on art schools (and particularly in my conversation with Seth Cameron, a founder of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, such a movement is not new. Art history has featured many of these substitute schools and recent years have seen the founding of new versions, such as the Alternative Art School, among others. While my own research has shown how creating programs offering parallels to traditional university degrees is incredibly difficult—particularly due to the challenges of offering true course diversity and appropriate facilities for making art (not just talking about it)—something is better than nothing and a lot needs to be done in this area to make art education more affordable and accessible. As such, I will be tracking the development of this new program in Chicago, and I hope others will be too.
The plight of the middle-aged artist
I also thought Martin Herbert's recent article, “Contemporary Art’s Midlife Crisis,” in ArtReview was worth sharing.
In brief, Herbert calls out a reality of today’s art world in which artists in middle age are basically forgotten by the art market. Herbert summarizes it well (and humorously) in the following paragraph:
When you’re young, attractive, frothing with ideas that appear at least somewhat new, and perhaps posting multiple studio selfies daily to Instagram, the artworld is potentially your oyster. When you’re wrinkly and decrepit, haven’t had a show since the early 1980s but have perhaps been a respected teacher whose students now namecheck you, or your old work looks uncannily like other people’s new work and there’s a lot of it mothballed away, galleries are more likely to come knocking in hopes of snagging your estate when you take your soon-to-come dirt nap. Today’s financialised artworld, in this respect, is a cross between Logan’s Run—that 1970s sci-fi flick wherein the hippie edict that you shouldn’t trust anyone over thirty gets allegorised in a society that offs its citizens at that age—and a predatory pseudo-gerontocracy. But in between there’s a big trench with a lot of artists from their late forties up to their sixties lying dazedly in it.
He then adds, “This process is particularly hard on women, as they age, due to residual artworld sexism and because looks have become part of the package of being an artist, an element in the self-marketing that’s come to define twenty-first-century work culture.”
What's to be done? According to Herbert, there are a few options:
Return to how the art world was operating in the 1950s. He mentions de Kooning having his first solo show when he was 44 and Barnett Newman when he was 45. He thinks this could be a healthier model, but doesn’t think that it’s going to come back anytime soon. (Side note here—and obviously a longer discussion, even though artists of that era had their first shows at these moments, it didn’t come with financial success, and artist profits from that time pale in comparison with those made by contemporary artists working today.)
Herbert also (humorously) suggests fast-forwarding the process and exhibiting every single older artist and just being done with them, so the art world would have to show middle-aged artists. He ends the piece, “Bold tastemakers, the trench is this way.”
AWARE
I also wanted to share—and invite you to explore—AWARE, a fascinating project that I sadly was not aware of until recently.
According to their website, AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) is a “non-profit organization, co-founded in 2014 by Camille Morineau, art historian and specialist in the history of women artists. Its goal is the creation, indexation, and distribution of information on women artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Morineau says she “has created AWARE…so that we could rewrite art history from a more gender-equal perspective. It is high time we place women artists at the same level as their male counterparts by bringing their work into the spotlight.”
Hopefully, you’re already exploring the site and won’t need a reminder link here.
Financial realities of the art world
Towards keeping tabs on the financial realities that control the art world and also influence the practices and concerns of artists, I wanted to share a couple of items.
First off, I thought the recent book, Our Lives in Their Portfolios by Brett Christophers, was highly relevant. Christophers’ book highlights the control that asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock, now have over “the roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live.” He says we now live in an “asset manager society” where the “crux of this business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.” As such, since asset managers are often collectors, and because such control privileges profit over people, this should be on the radars of people who are interested in the morality of the art market, as well as on the radars of artists, who have historically called out corporations playing this role. Read more here.
I also wanted to share this recent ProPublica and Artnews article, “How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations, Art, and Other Valuables to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions.” Again towards acknowledging the financial realities behind the art world, this piece lifts the veil to show the not-very-public-service-minded realities behind numerous art foundations.
The article explains:
For the ultrawealthy, donating valuables like artwork, real estate and stocks to their own charitable foundation is an alluring way to cut their tax bills. In exchange for generous tax breaks, they are supposed to use the assets to serve the public: Art might be put on display where people can see it, or stock sold to fund programs to fight child poverty. Across the U.S., such foundations hold over $1 trillion in assets.
But a ProPublica investigation reveals that some foundation donors have obtained millions of dollars in tax deductions without holding up their end of the bargain, and sometimes they personally benefit from donations that are supposed to be a boon to the public. A tech billionaire used his charitable foundation to buy his girlfriend’s house, then stayed there with her while he was going through a divorce. A real estate mogul keeps his nonprofit art museum in his guesthouse and told ProPublica that he hadn’t shown it to a member of the public since before the pandemic. And a venture capitalist couple’s foundation bought the multimillion dollar house next to their own without ever opening the property to the public.
More here.
Radical Wolfe
Finally, check out this trailer for a new documentary on Tom Wolfe, famous for his association with the “New Journalism,” and his many books. which include The Painted Word, his controversial critique of the art world, which should be required reading for anyone working in the art world.
That’s it for this week. As usual, hoping the above is helpful, please find ways to take action against climate change, and see you in a few weeks.
Best,
Matthew
Thanks for letting me know about Tom Wolfe. One of my all time favorite authors.