This letter grew a bit long — the best thing is to put Ralph’s question first:

> On Jun 10, 2016, at 2:13 PM, Ralph Kerle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

—snip— 

> Practising artists don't consider the work this group does as art. 
> 
> So what is it?

—snip— 

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Dear Ralph,

This is an interesting question, as well.

If you take the position that the purpose of art is to “erase the boundary between art and life,” as Dick Higgins often said, or “the purpose of art is to make life more interesting than art,” or perhaps that “there is no boundary between art and life,” as some Fluxus artists would say, myself among them, why wouldn’t it be art? 

In fact, I would ask the interesting question in three, perhaps four ways. If I look at this as a question from the viewpoint of the sociology of art or the sociology or knowledge, it probably isn’t art. If I look at the question from the viewpoint of an artist as I have sometimes been, I would agree that most professional artists wouldn’t call this art, though I would not necessarily be among them. If I look at the question from a Fluxus perspective, I would say, “Who cares?” And if I look at it from the perspective of a management scholar, I’d say that I am not sure — are we looking at this in an instrumental perspective for helping people to be better managers, or are we looking at this from a humanistic perspective, to invite people to grow as people.

It always used to interest me in driving around the Western United States in the Fluxmobile to stop in towns that had a few art galleries. I would often find galleries with seascapes on the coast or Western art in the tradition of Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, or the much younger Harry Jackson.

Remington and Russell lived in the last years of the “old West”, and they eulogized the dying breed of cattlemen, cowboys, and the era of the open range. Remington died in 1909 and Russell in 1926. Harry Jackson began as combat artist in the Marine Corps during the Second World War. He shifted to abstract expressionism under the influence of his fellow westerner and once-close friend, Jackson Pollock. Then, hailed as a promising younger member of abstract expressionist group, he turned to Western paintings and sculpture in the 1960s. (You can find good articles on these three in Wikipedia, and a range of reproductions around the net, including some of the major museums with collections focusing on Western art.) 

The galleries I’d see rarely had work by these acknowledged and significant artists. Rather, they’d be people whose work you rarely found in museums, but they often had collector lists that showed the names of movie stars, senators, or well known businessmen. 

What astonished me was the range and depth of the market for these people — they were unknown and nearly unrecognized by the art world, but their prices showed that after the dealer’s commission, selling two or three paintings would provide a good living. And given the fact that the collector lists ran forty or fifty names deep, these people would have been living off their work consistently. 

In the 1980s, I did a great deal of work on the economics of art. I became a friend of the man who managed Harry Jackson’s business. I was astonished at the amount of money Harry earned. Here is Harry’s 2006 obituary in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/arts/design/harry-jackson-artist-who-captured-the-west-dies-at-87.html

There were many distinguished practicing artists whom I knew who simply didn’t see what these folks did as art. But many of the artists whose work interested me enough to follow their work didn’t make any kind of comparable living. They earned a living as teachers at an art school, or plumbers, or occasionally as the inheritors of enough money not to worry whatever they did.

If they taught at a university art department, they were required to exhibit their work regularly in the same way that our universities expect us to publish, but it wasn’t directly for money. If one of you publishes a monograph in the series I edit for The MIT Press, your royalties might treat you to a dinner with your partner at a good restaurant, but if the restaurant is too good, it won’t cover the tip or the taxi fare home. Same thing for most living artists who are paid as professors at a university art school or an independent academy. They show as part of their obligation to demonstrably practice as professional practitioners in their field. If they sell something every few years, it’s a nice thing … but they don’t dare to give up their day jobs. Then, too, many apparently successful artists who don’t teach have one kind of fiddle or another to play. One very famous conceptual artist made his living buying and selling New York real estate. A distinguished media artist I know made his living the same way. Another was a skilled investor. Yet another made a living by taking over bankrupt companies and managing the firm finances until they came out of debt. Very few artists — and that means professional artists — make a living on art. 

When I “made a living” at art — if you could call it a living — I usually spent three or four years in massive poverty, traveling around the country doing different kinds of things. When I lived in New York, I'd eat on the tab at McGoo’s in Tribeca where the owner Tommy Chaipis let artists run a tab. Every now and then, I sold something and I managed to pay off my debt for the past four or five years. When I did, I’d walk into McGoo’s and write Tommy a check for $12,000 or $15,000 to clear the bill. Then I’d start again.

My “day job” as a management professor and later as dean of a design faculty, now as a part-time professor allowed me to store up nuts and acorns for retirement. I’m occasionally making art again — the Pompidou recently exhibited some of my work, as did the Modern in New York, but I’m not getting rich.   

The interesting added fact is this: even when I made a living as a practicing professional artist, I didn’t make a living. And most of the time, it seemed to me that half of the commissions I got were given with the expectation that I would be irritating to the local art professionals. More than once, I gave a lecture at some university or museum where a local art professor from an artistic viewpoint different to that of Fluxus made it clear that he thought that I was a charlatan and an utter fraud. It’s been my privilege to be excoriated by imitators of every artistic episode from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, when I moved to Scandinavia. 

None of these folks ever imitated artists from Europe. They only spoke English and therefore limited their reading to Artforum, Art in America, or Art News, and somewhat later the regional art magazines the flowered in America from the middle of the 1970s to the late 1980s when the NEA was still generous.

But it was very clear that the vast majority of practicing artists in North America did not think of what I did as art. Neither, for that matter, did the gallerists or collectors.

That being the case, I’m wondering whether it makes any difference that folks think of what AACORNERS do as something other than art. Johnny Depp is unloading his Basquiats at auction soon. No one has unloaded many Friedmans, though I did see a couple pieces bought in last year.

To quote the critic Peter Frank in an article about my work, “It’s not art. It’s better!”

Yours,

Ken

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