Donald-Kuspit-Diane-Thodos

Donald Kuspit is one of America’s most important art critics. He is a Distinguished Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation among others. He is a contributing editor to Artforum, Sculpture, the New Art Examiner, and Tema Celeste Magazines as well as editor of Art Criticism. He is author and editor of hundreds of articles and books including The End of Art published in 2004. He frequently writes for Artnet.com

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic and was a student of Donald Kuspit at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1987 to 1992. She is also a former student of Stanley William Hayter and Sam Gilliam and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002. She has exhibited most recently at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago and is represent by the Paule Friedland/Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, The Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago. She will be exhibiting at the Kouros gallery in New York City in 2010.

Diane Thodos: I believe, as you do, that postmodernism represents an inextricable cultural crisis: a collapse that cannot repair or heal itself. I wouldn’t want to be an artist if I had to be, ideologically speaking, a postmodern artist.

Donald Kuspit: There is no direction. They don’t know what art is. We’re in a nihilistic endgame. I was reading a review about Bruce Nauman, a piece in Newsweek by Peter Plagens. It begins by saying that he’s perhaps the most influential American artist since Warhol, and I thought now what does this mean? Everyday he was trying to redefine the art “ex-nihilo” – out of nothing – and my thought is even God started with something. But also that means that he does not know what art is. He believes you have to redefine it, reconceptualize it. So what is it? Does it exist? It is annihilative: perpetual redefinition, unstable, etc.

DT: It isn’t ex-nihilo, it’s ex-nihilism. It is consciously nihilistic in its intent.

DK: I think it’s over for a lot of those people and one of the things I see happening is a return to tradition in a variety of ways (without mimicking it).

DT: Regarding the postmodern problem I remember you once raised the question in class about why is it artists don’t allow themselves to go back to being influenced by a tradition. I really have to pose the question why have we come to the point that an artist doesn’t even think about being influenced by some of the artists we have seen exhibited today – like the German Expressionists at the Neue Gallery or Francis Bacon here at the Met.

DK: Well they are. Lucian Freud was influenced by Bacon. The change in his art was due to his friendship with Bacon. There are a lot of repetitions, quotations, and appropriations. There is a sort of Duchampian mode/conceptual mode that’s still operational. I think of the art of the spectacle – the British sensationalism is related to that.

DT: It’s gotten very academic and old by this point. It’s a very narrow road extremely well traveled.

DT: And at this point when you think of the incredible diversity that occurred (I remember you talking about the “Big Bang” of Modernist creativity at the beginning of the last century around 1905 – 24) we still have these rich aesthetic Modernist traditions that have barely scratched the surface of their possibilities in a sense.

DK: Well, part of the whole idea of Modern is “make it new” so there’s this momentum of novelty until then this becomes a cliché itself. But I think there’s a deeper reason. We look at this Expressionism show [Brucke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin 1905 - 13 at the Neue Gallery, Feb. 26 – June 29 2009]. What we see is artists who are people who have certain life experiences. It comes through certain attitudes and ideas. They are responding toward objects: Kirchner toward women, or landscapes, or African art. They are engaged in life enhancing experiences and then they are making the art as part of it. It’s not exactly reifying it but the art becomes part of that life experience. So they go to the coast and are excited by the waves. They’re taking it in, they are receiving it, they are very open to all this that is happening.

DK: They are open to life, and the art becomes part of this openness. Now art is self-ghettoized. Think for a moment there has been no adequate response to 9-11. Compare that to other responses from the World Wars, or even Rosenquist’s painting F-111 responding to American power. But a lot of this has been taken over by photography – documentary photography. These guys who are right up there with the troops and quite a number of the images are just stunning. So it is a kind of “artistry”, not what we call high art. That’s part of it. The events are outside the art world and may be too overwhelming and they just don’t know how to deal with it, or they don’t want to partly because they are “in on themselves.”

DT: Why is there a tremendous fear of emotion when it should be part of life?

DK: They probably do have emotions in their lives – I don’t see how they couldn’t – but they split it off and deal with “official “ issues of art.

DK: It’s a split state. It’s pseudo-rational art. To me it goes back to something that T.S. Eliot wrote about – what he called the disassociation of sensibility. This is a famous distinction – set in art of the Modern period – between the separation of cognition and feeling. The issue is to get them together. So these guys are on the side of cognition – Nauman turning to instrumental reason, technology, theory machines, neon – rather primitive technology though some of it is sophisticated. The emotions have been flattened.

DT: You have often written about the exclusion of experiential depth in the great morass of conceptual art that dominates today’s art world. To use a strong term, do you see the art world projecting a kind of “indoctrination” as a means of control and as a means of destroying humanist and expressionist tendencies in art, or is it something else?

DK: Well, as you know certain groups – for example October most notoriously – have attacked humanism quite explicitly. I think they have a naive idea of the human. But the larger issue is – I think it’s something Greenberg once said – that in the Modern period there’s no clear idea of what it is to be human. We are not sure anymore so you have all this talk about cyborgs – semi-robots, semi-humans. The other day I had a computer repaired and I went to a tech serve which has a place on 23rd Street. While I was waiting they were showing videos. These were videos made by “avant garde” artists and there was one that was quite fantastic. It showed a robot female with a kind of pretty face but with a body made of pipes. She’s underground with all these other big pipes surrounding her and she’s plucking some sort of artificial flower and very tenderly looking at this flower. I thought – now look, there’s this image in front of me, she’s a robot with this mask on her and she has simulated feelings – it’s all simulation. Or it’s like in Japan where now they have made robot pet dogs which are very useful for people who are terminally ill. They feel companionated by them. To buy them actually it’s about $4,000. So you have this world of this technological society.

DT: Yes – referring to the title of the book written by Jacques Ellul “The Technological Society”.

DK: Yes – that’s very important. So in such a society the question is what is the fate of feeling – that’s one way to put it – and what is the fate of the human? Now certain analysts who I admire argue that the problem of being human is to create a “margin of freedom” within determinism. There are all these determinisms – biological, social – so how do you create this margin of freedom in which you can be human and have feelings? And I would say now we have technological determinisms. For example let’s take this little machine you have here [digital camera/tape recorder] – a brilliant incredible invention. In five years it will be half the size and do twice the work. The question is what is it for? I have seen some people get hung up on gadgets – they have got to have them.

DT: Yes – they are playing video games all the time, they are on the cell phone all the time, or constantly texting.

DK: But what do they think? These are just transmission machines – like television, a terrific invention, or the telephone – another terrific invention. But content is not there – the human content. It’s like the technology is slowly overwhelming, even replacing the content. There is a fascination with the technology for the sake of the technology.

DT: It is replacing the emotive affect and communicative element of the human being.

DK: That’s right – and people think Aha! If we follow the mechanical model then we are emulating the “zeitgeist.” There is this old debate which comes back in various forms – including in existentialism and psychoanalysis and in the 19th century – between the robot model of man and man as an organism. So the Modern period pushes us to more and more robot models.

DT: Like what Picabia was talking about when he had his Orphic ideas in painting and then transformed them into the Dadaist idea of the machine?

DK: Right. But let’s take the famous statement by the surrealist poet Leautremont – the meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

DK: Yes but that’s his metaphor for sexuality which was picked up. But think of that – it’s all machines: umbrellas, sewing machines…

DK: Sadistic, absolutely. That’s what the opening of “Les Chants de Maldoror” is all about. The point is it’s all inhuman. It’s perverse. It breaks down the barriers. So now you have this sort of closed system. Now you have the computer model – our brains are like computers. Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Computers are not as plastic as brains.

DK: Most subtle, and the most complicated organ apparently ever created by nature from what I have read. All of this militates against affect and yet I believe affect is there unconsciously and it erupts from time to time. There are mass murders and you get these sudden enactments – and a lot of art is about that enactment. People like this guy at the MOMA, writing about himself in every little enactment in different modes – a “happening”….

Diane Thodos: Based on the German Expressionist art show we just saw [Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism at the Neue Gallery, February 26 – July 29 2009] I have an important question. Do you see any parallels between what is happening now and the circumstances that created the “Degenerate Art” exhibit in Germany in 1937 – that is – the individual vs. the doctrinal? If so is there a kind of covert censorship going on as to what art gets shown and what does not?

DT: Can you relate this somehow to what is meant by the individualistic vs. the doctrinal regarding the “Degenerate Art” show? To put this issue another way I read a wall text written by Jay A. Clarke from the recent exhibit “Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth” at the Chicago Art Institute that exhibited from February 14 – April 26, 2009. Here are the critical parts of it:

The Edvard Munch of popular imagination – a tortured bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in “The Scream” – was in fact a myth, carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself….The Norwegian art critic suggested that he suffered from the psychological condition known as neurasthenia…otherwise known as nervous exhaustion…Adopted and adapted by social commentators, the disorder was connected with decadence and degeneration and applied to the visual arts….Munch deliberately embraced disturbing subject matter and the personality of the sick, socially aberrant artist…[he] adjusted his emotional pitch at precise moments in order to achieve the outcomes he desired. Munch’s self portraits, such as the brooding blue hued “Self Portrait in Moonlight” and “Self Portrait with Cigarette”, offer a rich opportunity to explore this persona in the act of construction, reminding us of the artist’s central role in the process of his own mythmaking and reputation building.

I feel this writing reflects a historical “revision” of Munch’s work that intends to desublimate the power of his work by making him into an everyday huckster.

DK: Like contemporary artists – like the Jeff Koons of his day. That absolutely fascinates me – what the curator did, why the curator did it, what’s the argument behind it, what’s the proof?

DT: This brings me to the question – do we have historical revisionism today that’s working as a means of not merely avoiding the presence of emotion in art, but being destructive of the importance of emotional sublimation in art? Does this revisionism assert itself as a means of supporting a postmodern/postart agenda that keeps the emotions out of art?

DT: Do you feel it is like, in a sense, the way the Germans with the “Degenerate Art” show degraded Expressionist/Modernist art and displaced it with their own doctrinal kitsch that was the official art?

DK: What I would say has happened is the avant-garde – avant gardism – has become institutionalized. It has become a tyranny. It’s become a dogma, and for all the art world’s talk about diversity – echoing the social diversity – it’s not diverse. It’s an inertial system. So we go to a Whitney Biennale and we do not see the range.

DK: Exactly. The mandate of The Whitney Biennale is to show the range so you see different things.

DT: I was just getting to that. Fascist is an interesting word because when we speak of the “Degenerate Art” show we are speaking of the condemnation of Modern art by this doctrine.

DK: But there is something else going on. Let’s go back to the “Degenerate Art” show. I have this theory which I have written about. I argue that the Nazis were perceptive; they saw something that was there in the art; but what they did not understand what was there in the art was in the society. The artists were talking about – if you want – the degeneracy in the society: the savage etc. So the Nazis – in their corrupted notion of purity or Aryanism – felt threatened. They did not like the underside showing. They did not like their own underside showing – their own aggression, their barbarism. But there it was in the art, so they called it “degenerate” because it was threatening. It was threatening because it touched them on the inside. The fascinating thing about the Nazis is that they had a passion for art. Do you know the book “The Rape of Europa” [Lynn H. Nicholas 1995]?

DK: Hitler wanted to turn Linz his hometown and Berlin into big art centers. Speer assimilated a lot of Modernist ideas to make his art. He tried to subsume it, or dialectically sublate it – and some of the structures are still interesting like the Olympic stadium.

DT: He was part of the Modernist movement even though he was complicit in horrible atrocities.

DK: It’s a blindness. It’s a blind side. It’s not that they are duplicitous.

DK: I don’t think he knew there was a difference. I think Hitler knew there was a difference, I think the major anti-Semites knew there was a difference. I think he believed in the cause, he believed in Hitler, he believed Hitler was fine for Germany. He began to realize it was all going to hell, and he was one of the first to perceive it. There’s a fantastic book by Gitta Sereny – a thick book some 700 pages [Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth 1996]. It’s interviews she did with Speer after his imprisonment. He just had no perception. He was just like; organization – let’s do it…

DT: Do you think it is because in the culture there is structure before there is emotion?

DT: But was it structure before feeling, structure before perception? Was there a structural element that was built into the culture that made Speer that way?

DK: That’s a difficult question to answer. I think there are Nazis and there are Nazis. They weren’t all uniform. A lot of them were military men.

DK: Prussian. A certain notion of honor – that’s why they turned against Hitler.

DT: Yes. I have heard about these things too. But the interest I have is also that there was enough of a presence in the culture that had a strong structural element.

DK: Their obedience. Mitscherlich writes about that. “Gehorsamkeit.“ Put them in a line and they just keep going. They are brought up that way.

DT: In the Leni Riefenstahl film “Triumph of the Will” it is interesting how rigidly the soldiers march in tight box formations.

DK: “The Authoritarian Personality of Adorno” [first published in 1950]. Part of the new Germany is to go against that authoritarianism. Transparency of government – that’s why the Reichstag has a glass dome. The young people are very different. Now the Nazis were not unperceptive about Modern art – it’s just that they did not like what they saw because it was really a split off part of themselves.

DK: Yes, exactly. Unless it had that power they would not have responded to it so negatively.

DT: And they would not have wanted to destroy so much of the art. That’s why people hid the art both during and after the war, which is why a lot of this art did not surface at auctions for so long. Right after the war people kept the art hidden because they were afraid it would end up being destroyed again.

DT: But getting back to my original question – do you feel that when we speak about the relationship between Fascism and the “Degenerate Art” show that this has a parallel with the contemporary postmodern censorship that seems to enforce itself against the validity of an emotional relationship to art…

DT: For example the way emotional or expressionist art is downgraded; how this text from the Edvard Munch exhibition focused on casting his art in the light of a marketeering strategist. This was profoundly distorting and in my opinion shameful.

DT: This is the creepy part of my question: It’s no longer about just the ignoring of expression, but trying to marginalize and degrade it. It is a different program.

DT: And that he’s a hustler, that we are all the same, and that this is an everyday kind of thing.

DK: And we all understand it because we are all the same – exactly. Unbelievable.

Diane Thodos: Do you see shades of George Orwell’s book “1984″ when the Whitney Museum claims there is great diversity in art when there is just the opposite?

DK: Well there are a lot of things happening, but they are not showing it. Anyone who takes an ordinary stroll through the range of galleries in New York can casually see all kind of different styles, different modes etc. The real power today is the power of money. Money is heavily invested in what used to be called avant gardism –and that controls it. Also there is the need for fodder for the machine.

DT: It’s only interested in the absolute mirror of its own image to itself and what is projected outward by the power of it’s capital, its money, patronage, connections…

DK: That’s it. What really needs to be studied is not so much the artist but who’s buying the art and why they are buying it – even more than the galleries. Like who is buying Koons, who is buying McCarthey. Why is McCarthey getting the Sculpture award from Skowhegan this year?

DK: I am telling you he is getting the award this year – or why is Bruce Nauman in the Whitney Biennale? Or let’s look at it another way; let’s go to the Museum of Modern Art. Why do we have pride of place, simply in terms of quantity of works given to Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman? You come into the Pollock room and you have almost a dozen. You turn another direction and there is large Barnett Newman piece. Then you have one or two Gorkys and you have a few deKoonings. Why is this shown the way it is? No doubt they are moving their collection around but there are certain fixtures that are there. Why coming, into that third floor, do you have a Wyeth, Christina’s World, a few other “American Realist” works, and then boom – you come into Modern art. [Before that] you have a Scheeler and a few other things – what happened to Ben Shahn for example? You have a Hopper that is a small example. Why are these artists not shown in depth?

DK: When you look at their selection of German Expressionists they have a few Beckmanns; they have The Departure. I’m talking about what I’ve seen the last time I was there when Kippenberger was showing.

DT: There is a prejudice for certain artists that follow a particular historical view.

DT: Getting into a big subject here – on your suggestion I have read Jacques Ellul’s book “The Technological Society” [first published in 1964] and was struck by his prophetic insight about the present. Can you briefly outline the most salient aspects of how technique, that is, “creating systems of ever greater efficiency” manifests itself in the current art world culture?

DK: I think it is, in a way, very simple. There is all this focus on video. My understanding of the Nauman show is that there are going to be sound pieces, with all this high tech, low-tech computer art. For me this is just an instrument. Look – it is like the invention of the paint tube – the paint tube made Impressionism possible. You could carry the tube out in plein air, where you didn’t have to make sketches and then go into the studio. All kinds of people were using paint tubes, but not everyone was a Monet: artists who we honor and admire. I think there is now a fascination with technology for the sake of technology. Technique for the sake of technique. This paradox was already pointed out in the late 19th century by the so called proto-existentialists – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so forth – that the very success of instrumental reason in industrial society reduces reason to simply a matter of technique.

DK: Not only do you get more and more efficient, is shuts out what you call the “dark area” – it shuts out emotion, because emotion is inefficient.

DT: Well right. It’s very inefficient, because its uneven, its unpredictable, it cannot be streamlined.

DK: Yes, and it can’t be short-circuited. If it does it will kick back, it will come back. You can’t throw it out. You can’t say, for example, typewriters are obsolete and computers are in, so this kind of fear is obsolete and here’s this new kind of fear. You can’t do that.

DK: It is too unpredictable for a lot of people and also involves what psychoanalysts call a “need for observing ego.” If you are looking inside – what broadly what is termed introspection – in a “Technological Society’ you do not want to be introspective. That’s the last thing you want.

DK: It doesn’t want introspection. You turn inward and you forget the techniques. Think about these Reality TV shows. All these people confessing what they have done – they had a bad relationship with someone etc. Think for a minute what is going on. What happened to privacy? What happened to the need to do what analysts call the working it through. Instead of working it through they are acting it out – performing it. They have real and serious problems.

DK: That’s a good word, but it’s not the whole story. They are performing and they think if they perform that will solve the problem.

DT: In other words they feel the need to do this in front of Judge Judy or whatever.

DK: Yes, exactly. Say there is a problem of somebody swindling someone else or they did not pay back a loan. They think if they are performing it in front of a camera somehow that’s going to solve the problem. They are very exhibitionist.

DK: Exactly, but that is part of the technology. Spectacle is connected to technology. You can create these fantastic Hollywood spectacles that are dazzling.

DT: It’s not like watching an Andre Tarkovsky film where you get this incredible Dostoyevskian poetic depth. Have you seen his films?

DT: Like “Andre Rublev”, “Solaris”, “My Name is Ivan”, “The Sacrifice”…

DT: And also Ingmar Bergman has extremely profound films. You don’t walk out of a Bergman film without being affected…

DK: Well you see there the camera is a means. He uses it very subtly – for example with the use of dark shadows – and he focuses on certain issues, and those issues aren’t going away. He works them through in a process. It is interesting you mention him because recently I saw his film The Virgin Spring.

DK: Yes. It just goes on and on and on, and you are working it through. It’s not just an act.

DT: He holds the traumatic moment with this tremendous tenderness and anguish at the same time…

DK: He is willing to express the trauma of existence, even when he is lighthearted.

DK: The camera becomes part of the experience. It is dominating the experience, or becoming the spectator of the experience.

DT: It is a witness to an internal experience that is amazingly constructed.

DK: Thinking of that what comes to mind is Robert Redford in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. It’s all pose, you get the profile, and there is no depth or sense of internal life. What the camera’s doing – actually something I like about the film- is it’s highlighting all the secondary features. There is no human being there.

DK: It’s very interesting to see this – the sets, the clothing, the environments they create – this Americana scene.

DK: When people talk about Americanization they are talking about standardization with a vengeance.

11 Responses to “An interview with Donald Kuspit by Diane Thodos — New York City, April 29, 2009 — Part 3”

DK: That’s right, but he’s not interested in that. What he is interesting in is the exhibition value – a term that [Walter] Benjamin uses…

DK: It is a different theory. It subsumes what Marx called use value and exchange value. The thing acquires its use value and exchange value by being exhibited. The moment it is exhibited it becomes this technique of exhibition, of staging. Think for example of Warhol who begins by doing windows for Bonwit Teller. Rosenquist begins by doing advertising posters. That is staging a product – a commodity – in some way.

DT: It’s like you could put a pair of shoes in a thrift shop and no one would see them. If you put them in a window for Bonwit Teller and surround them with all the right accoutrements you can sell them for $500.

DK: That’s exactly it. There was a very decisive moment in the sociology of art, in our business culture – generally – the Warhol idea…

DK: Yes – but remember when there used to be the Soho Guggenheim that was at the corner of Prince Street and West Broadway? It closed and was replaced by a Prada store. It is still there. The Prada store was designed by Rem Koolhaus – a very hot architect – you know who he is.

DK: I don’t think they do this anymore, but the shoes are brought out every morning and exhibited like precious objects. Remember [Hiam] Steinbach who showed sneakers…

DK: Well he did sneakers too. He had a whole exhibit of sneakers and I showed this to my class. A student said “Oh God I wish I had those; those are collector’s items.” They were brand new sneakers from a certain period – the 70’s – and they were 50 years old.

DK: That’s right. That’s what happens; everything becomes collectable. So the point is here was this place which had been an art site but now becomes, shall we say, another art site that is fused with business and the product.

DK: Yes, quasi museum/store. I don’t know whether these shoes are worth whatever the price is. Another example; you may remember up in Chelsea there is a Comme Des Garcons store that looks like a hole in the wall from the outside.

DK: You go in this high tech metal tunnel, and then you enter. There are these dungarees with tears in them for $350 a shot.

DK: You are paying for aesthetic marketing and the people who are the salesmen are more like Maitre d’s that are doing you a favor by showing you to your table…

DK: Yes, but you see that’s an outside judgment; you are not becoming part of the spectacle/exhibition.

DT: Yes, it obviously wouldn’t be there if it didn’t work. It’s all about sales.

DT: Is marketing as you see it – the way this American Capitalist marketing system operates – part of the efficiency of “technique” in a sense?

DK: That’s very well put, yes. I think it is part of the efficiency of technique; but it also may be technique running away with itself. You finally have to ask what’s the value of technique?

DK: Well – let’s talk about cameras. Everybody’s got a camera. Taking photographs is useful, but when you think about it you got the camera so you got to take the photograph because if you don’t take the photograph then the camera is useless. So you have to use the technique to get the value. There is the person of the American tourist. They go to Versailles or the Eiffel Tower and they take their photograph. They look at the photograph – not at the building or structure. They don’t see it. They don’t have a perceptual experience.

DK: They say “ I have been to the Eiffel Tower, here is my photograph, I took it at this particular date: look there’s proof, it’s printed out on the side of the film”. So technique takes over the experience when it is meant to serve the experience. You need technique; but if technique takes over the whole process then what is the point of it?

DT: So the question is who is in control, which leads to the next question. Has “technique” become so all encompassing that individual initiative is completely excluded within the context of the art world would you say?

DK: No, I think agency is still possible, but I think the agency has to fight. It has to somehow break the compliance to the technique. That is a paradox because in the Modern Art movement the artists broke compliance to every Old Master technique around – then any piece of junk could become art.

DT: There is no meaning left. On that point, what advice would you give an art student entering a university program regarding what you refer to as the “organic” and “existential” necessity of art? I know this is a very generic question, but in fact I have met a lot of people in art programs who find themselves bumping around lost in a labyrinth without a light. They do not really understand why they are dissatisfied with their school experience.

DK: The only thing you can get out of art school – the main reason art school should be around – is it should teach you every technique that has ever been around; from stained glass to carving stone to working with video. You should learn every technique.

DT: Painting, printmaking…it should be a pluralistic experience of all media.

DT: They want to get rid of drawing, painting, and traditional art. So what would you say to a student to be on their guard against the kinds of programs that may wish to have them narrow their scope?

DK: Unless you want to have success for five minutes after getting out of the program – it’s shorter than 15 minutes these days.

DT: Conceptualism wants to create it’s own self-fulfilling propaganda and have no dialectical relationship outside of that?

DK: There are certain modes of stylistic dominance as well as technological dominance. I remember [sculptor] George Segal who went to art school here in New York. He was very interested in German Expressionism and figuration. His professor told him “You’re an idiot – you don’t want to go that way; abstraction is the way to go.” It’s the truth. He writes about this. I’m quoting him now.

DK: He just stuck with it and made this special amalgamation of expressionism and the figure – but he had the strength of will to do that.

DT: So you need the strength of will to separate yourself from the things that do not give you the diversity of experience you need?

DK: You cannot fall for any party line. There are always professors who say, “This is the way to do it.” But that’s the way they’re doing it, and usually when they’re doing it, it’s reified. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. There are people like Ad Reinhardt who was a professor at Brooklyn College for a long time. He had his own ideas of art but from what I understand he sort of encouraged other modes. I don’t know how it works that way. I have seen a lot of works by one student of Hans Hoffmann, a woman student, and he went over [her work] and in fact turned everything into a Hans Hoffmann – so there’s a problem.

DK: You have professors who are very concerned about their own identities and want…

DK: Right. Students reinforce it the more students you get – and that will end up with the kiss of death. A famous example of this is Frank Lloyd Wright who developed a school of architecture, but no significant architect of similar stature to him has emerged from it. You got some very good architects working in the Frank Lloyd Wright mode, so it’s very good to have a master but…

DK: And there is the argument that Harold Rosenberg made in relation to Arshile Gorky, that his apprenticeship was good – Picasso to Miro – and his work was quite different from theirs, derivative but an interesting derivation at that. So it’s tricky. You have to be an apprentice somewhere and learn thoroughly one mode that you are inclined to, but then you have to have the guts to sort of break with it but develop it, move it somewhere else or get to your own creativity on the basis of it. But In art school you also have a great opportunity for a real learning experience: to learn all the media and to learn art history.

DT: So you have to be very selective about the school you choose: that it offers the range that gives you an opportunity to learn.

DK: I think the Bauhaus had a good idea. That seems to be, from what I have read about it, the model. The first year of apprenticeship you had to learn all the properties of all kinds of materials and all kinds of techniques. Then if you finished this you were admitted and you worked with a master – but that didn’t mean you had to work in the master’s manner. He would just sort of critique you, if I understand it correctly.

DT: So we have a problem today with there being this attempt by the art world to canonize the past and rigidify it…

DT: Yes, a certain limited past. There is a lot of censorship which disallows students from going back to learn certain modes of art making. Is this because there are a lot of teachers who don’t know these techniques are just trying to, pardon the expression, “cover their asses” because they lack the knowledge?

DK: That’s one way of putting it but I don’t think so. They just don’t believe in the art techniques.

DK: They don’t believe in them. “Who wants to paint? It’s obsolete. The death of painting. Who wants to paint? I can do it all on video.” I have heard students say this. I have heard teachers say this. You must know this.

DT: No and it’s not connected to life. It really has to be “disconnected” from life for – as you have written – a student to become a card-carrying member of the “contemporary art” party. It has to be “disconnected” from emotional life, which is really the death knell of art ‘s potential.

DK: Or your emotion can be focused through this mode. I think it is still possible for example to make very interesting Abstract Expressionist works today. I have seen some.

DT: I myself as a critic have always tried to find artists who have that emotional connection to what they do, whether it is figurative, surrealist…

DT: Well, the work can stand on it’s own. It does not need texts. A single image can arrest you and engage you because of the power of what is inherent in it.

DT: Getting back to the issue of exclusion and censorship I remember once you talked about – and I think it’s absolutely true – in the late 80’s how women were starting to enter the art world more and more but their work was very novelty oriented in the neo-conceptual art mode.

DK: It has been a lucky experience that I have met women artists in their 60’s who have been working for years and who I think are making pretty profound art.

DK: Lynn Stern is a first rate photographer. She’s done incredible images of death heads in black and white. When she was shown in a New York Gallery the images were too strong. Nobody wants to look at skulls.

DT: Well, I don’t know. For me it was hard to look at the Otto Dix “War” series but the fourth time I looked at them they sunk in. For me his skulls made a reverberation over time.

DK: You have to be in touch with death inside yourself first of all. So she is one. I have supported these people and we just sort of met. Maybe it has something to do with the fact of my age. I am interested in older artists, older women artists, and women artists who know how to work with materials, whatever their material is – paint or black and white photography – and who have a certain serious intentions.

DK: That’s my opinion – but Alice Neel is fine. Maybe it ‘s because these are people of my generation.

DT: That is a very important point because their schooling would have dated from a time when you could learn techniques.

DT: And now I don’t think you can. When I look at my alma mater Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, students aren’t producing anything like the variety of art that was there in the early 80’s. I was very lucky to get the figure drawing and painting training that I did; it is no longer available at the same school.

DK: What these artists have is also a persistent curiosity about learning and are knowledgeable about many other things. They completely develop themselves. They are not resting wherever they have been. They have open horizons.

DT: So it’s like the stream of life is the effective force that brings the art along, as witness to it.

DK: That’s part of it, but also there’s a very solid sense of what it is to make art.

DK: No. They know their history and have a certain way of doing things. They keep developing it and the works are fairly stunning.

DT: When I was a student here in New York at School of Visual Arts from 1987 – 1989, one thing that confused me tremendously was how trends occurred in the art world. The artists who would hop on the bandwagon to imitate these trends kept changing their style. Then you’d get weird hybridizations of the last trend with the present one. For example you’d get Neo-Expressionism with some conceptualism mixed in.

DK: But of course SVA has always been about being au courant about whatever is “hot.” I haven’t been there for a while. There are always certain places that think that it is important to attract students because they are a place that is “with it.” You got to do latest “thing” and this will help you “make it.”

DT: I was in New York from 1987 – 1992 starting with two years graduate school when you were my teacher. I continued taking your class because I worked for SVA and was allowed one free class, so it was for five years total. Frankly I wanted to continue because you were the only person I knew who could answer the questions I had about what was really going on in the art world. It made a big difference in my life.

DT: Well, yeah, before the art world completely destroyed itself – before it imploded. I remember you saying back then that the art world was like a jet without a pilot. It had powerful force but had absolutely no steering to determine its course.

DK: Yes. There is a book you should read called Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi by John Walker and Rita Hatton. It’s really worth looking at. I did a review of it years ago when it first appeared. Walker is a sometime artist and admits that the book is sort of Marxist in orientation; but what he and Rita Hatton have done is an absolutely brilliant piece of investigative reporting and documentation of the Saatchis from the very beginning and with artist’s comments about what it is like dealing with them; just well researched like you’ve never imagined.

DK: Walker also did a first rate little book about media and art. He has a very smart mind and as researcher is very perceptive. The book on Saatchi is just incredible. Sacchi got where he is through advertising. He invented Margaret Thatcher. Walker documents this.

DK: Whatever you may think of Thatcher, Saatchi understood the connection of art and advertising in a way that even Warhol didn’t – the connection of art and publicity. Did you ever read from the series I have on artnet.com, A Critical History of 20th Century Art?

DK: I have a whole section on publicity. Henri Lefebvre wrote Publicity is the Only Ideology of our Time. It is the quote heading one of the chapters. He’s a French sociologist and very brilliant. He wrote the book Everyday Life in the Modern World. But Saatchi knew how to take over publicity, just like Damien Hirst does.

DT: He’s got his own auction going. You’d think it’s about the efficiency of technique brought to a hyper level of being.

DK: Plus the power of money. I was in Amsterdam not too long ago and I went to the Rijks Museum – a classic museum. The Rijks was being restored and rebuilt but they kept one section where they had a number of their older works. When I went there – and I didn’t know this would be the case – they had Damien Hirst’s diamond skull on display. Not only did they have the diamond skull, but also at the beginning of every room – and it’s no exaggeration – they had a little plaque that said something like “if you keep on going you will get to the Damien Hirst Skull.” I didn’t ever see anything saying “if you keep on going you will get to Rembrandt’s Night Watch.” So then you got to a room that was roped off like for a movie marquee with a velvet rope which you stand behind. Then you went into a room, and there it was alone. I was really irritated by this thing.

DK: This is not the end of it. The signs lead through a circuit because there was a part of the museum that was cut off. There was one last room where they had arranged a nice selection of old master works, relatively small, with a little text explaining provenance etc. discreetly next to each. Above each of these works in bigger lettering and in a different coloring (I think it was pink) was a commentary by Hirst on each of these works. The most insipid banal crap I have ever heard as comments: so he gets the voice over this old master art and then people read it. When you exited, following the circuit, you noticed on the side there was a big black Damien Hirst tent, and if you liked you could go in there to buy catalogs and write your comments. So I met the director of exhibitions at Gemente Museum in The Hague and I said “what is going on here? Has anyone protested? Is that what the Reichs Museum is about?”

DK: Exactly. He said there was a new director and he wants to bring in more people.

DK: But that’s what it’s about. He told me that Hirst had a contract – something like a hundred page contract – that everything had to be done just so. The assumption is that the museum got a lot of money for this, and they just followed the contract to the letter allowing the artist to control. The artist took control just like he did with the auction. What are we interested in here? We are interested in the demonstration of power. We are interested in the spectacle and what he as done is degrade the other art with his insipid comments. It is not historical interpretation of any kind or critical consciousness. There is a skull with diamonds in it for 20 million dollars: everybody is looking at the money

4 Responses to “An interview with Donald Kuspit by Diane Thodos — New York City, April 29, 2009 — Parts 4 & 5”

An interview with Donald Kuspit by Diane Thodos — New York City, April 29, 2009 — Parts 4 & 5

Diane Thodos: Do you feel, in reference to Jacque Ellul’s book “The Technological Society”, that technique as an absolute standardization of means also relates to how artists have become these sort of glorified commercial producers of brand name products: in other words formatting the product to streamline the marketing system? For example there’s hundreds and hundreds of these post painterly abstractions all equally looking like slightly decadent wallpaper patterns of some sort or other…

Donald Kuspit: That’s one way of putting it. Let’s put in another way. Let’s take Mr. Koons who is always a good example: a sort of capitalist art about Capitalism. Now here’s a commodity; taking something we know – a vacuum cleaner – and it’s new. So there’s newness, and it’s American, and it’s “art” which is supposedly to “make it new. “ What he is doing by putting it in a vitrine and exhibiting it as art is he gives it this exhibition value, which is the only art value now. What he is doing is highlighting something that is meant to be exhibited, initially, to get you to buy it – and then it has certain use value.

DT: A janitor can use it to clean up the museum later on.

DK: That’s right, but he’s not interested in that. What he is interesting in is the exhibition value – a term that [Walter] Benjamin uses…

DT: …is that the “aura” of an object, or something different?

DT: Right.

DK: It’s now called “incentive marketing.”

DK: Right.

DT: So it is all contextually based on how it is presented.

DK: That’s exactly it. There was a very decisive moment in the sociology of art, in our business culture – generally – the Warhol idea…

DT: He said, “Business art is the best art”…

DT: Yes.

DK: I don’t think they do this anymore, but the shoes are brought out every morning and exhibited like precious objects. Remember [Hiam] Steinbach who showed sneakers…

DT: Yes, garbage cans and masks and things on display shelves…

DT: A collector’s item – even though they are everyday kitsch stuff.

DT: A quasi museum/store.

DT: Yes, I was in there.

DK: You go in this high tech metal tunnel, and then you enter. There are these dungarees with tears in them for $350 a shot.

DT: You are paying for an experience I guess.

DK: You are paying for aesthetic marketing and the people who are the salesmen are more like Maitre d’s that are doing you a favor by showing you to your table…

DT: It’s extremely pretentious garbage.

DK: Yes, but you see that’s an outside judgment; you are not becoming part of the spectacle/exhibition.

DT: No, I don’t trust it, but it works.

DK: It is the art industry – it works…

DT: Yes, it obviously wouldn’t be there if it didn’t work. It’s all about sales.

DK: Marketing is the term that is used.

DT: Is marketing as you see it – the way this American Capitalist marketing system operates – part of the efficiency of “technique” in a sense?

DT: Is it a sort of absolutization of “technique” for its own sake?

DT: They don’t linger and wonder about qualities of what is before them.

DT: So all the rules were broken and then there were none.

DK: And that was the rule: break the rules.

DT: And then there were no rules. So we now have chaos.

DK: That’s right.

DT: It’s total chaos and it’s all up for grabs.

DK: What is the meaning?

DT: Painting, printmaking…it should be a pluralistic experience of all media.

DK: Exactly – of all media.

DT: And it isn’t anymore in many places.

DK: They want to get rid of the “hand”…

DK: Stay away.

DT: Stay away and don’t enroll.

DK: Unless you want to have success for five minutes after getting out of the program – it’s shorter than 15 minutes these days.

DT: There has been a tremendous degradation in a lot of art education.

DK: Yes. I think it’s a disaster.

DT: And what has brought this about?

DK: Conceptualism.

DT: Conceptualism wants to create it’s own self-fulfilling propaganda and have no dialectical relationship outside of that?

DT: Incredible.

DK: He just stuck with it and made this special amalgamation of expressionism and the figure – but he had the strength of will to do that.

DT: So you need the strength of will to separate yourself from the things that do not give you the diversity of experience you need?

DT: There is the problem of this sort of a dogmatic overlay?

DK: You have professors who are very concerned about their own identities and want…

DT: …the perpetuation of their own system?

DT: …individualism becomes subsumed by the larger purview?

DT: So you have to be very selective about the school you choose: that it offers the range that gives you an opportunity to learn.

DT: So we have a problem today with there being this attempt by the art world to canonize the past and rigidify it…

DK: …A certain limited past…

DK: That’s one way of putting it but I don’t think so. They just don’t believe in the art techniques.

DT: They don’t “believe” in them?

DT: We really are in a “post-art” age.

DK: Yes. Exactly.

DT: That is precisely the point.

DK: It’s all conceptual.

DT: Producing pseudoistic stand-ins for what art was.

DK: And also art doesn’t become a learning experience anymore.

DK: Or your emotion can be focused through this mode. I think it is still possible for example to make very interesting Abstract Expressionist works today. I have seen some.

DT: I myself as a critic have always tried to find artists who have that emotional connection to what they do, whether it is figurative, surrealist…

DK: And that the emotion somehow comes through the work.

DT: Yes.

DK: There is a transference in fact.

DT: Well, the work can stand on it’s own. It does not need texts. A single image can arrest you and engage you because of the power of what is inherent in it.

DK: I’m with you completely.

DK: I think that has changed.

DT: You have found different types of women artists today?

DK: It has been a lucky experience that I have met women artists in their 60’s who have been working for years and who I think are making pretty profound art.

DT: Wonderful. Name some names.

DT: Well, I don’t know. For me it was hard to look at the Otto Dix “War” series but the fourth time I looked at them they sunk in. For me his skulls made a reverberation over time.

DT: Like Alice Neel?

DK: Some of these people are even more interesting.

DT: Really? That’s good to hear.

DK: That’s my opinion – but Alice Neel is fine. Maybe it ‘s because these are people of my generation.

DT: That is a very important point because their schooling would have dated from a time when you could learn techniques.

DK: Yes. That’s quite true

DT: So it’s like the stream of life is the effective force that brings the art along, as witness to it.

DK: That’s part of it, but also there’s a very solid sense of what it is to make art.

DT: Yes. There’s no confusion; no jumping on the trend wagon.

DK: No. They know their history and have a certain way of doing things. They keep developing it and the works are fairly stunning.

DT: So there is a concentrated essence that keeps evolving.

DK: Yes.

DK: They had no identity of their own.

DT: Yes, it was very confusing.

DT: I was in the graduate painting program.

DK: What year were you there?

DK: That may be before I was disillusioned.

DK: The pilots are now people like Saatchi who invent whole movements.

DT: They have hijacked the plane.

DT: I’m going to want to read this.

DK: I reviewed it years ago for artnet.com.

DT: I will certainly be checking it out.

DT: Yes, he ran the ad agency that put Thatcher on the map.

DT: Yes. I’m about three quarters of the way through.

DT: He’s got his own auction going. You’d think it’s about the efficiency of technique brought to a hyper level of being.

DT: That is just perverse beyond imagination…

DT: It destroys the credibility of the institution.

DK: Exactly. He said there was a new director and he wants to bring in more people.

DT: What a total joke.

4 Responses to “An interview with Donald Kuspit by Diane Thodos — New York City, April 29, 2009 — Parts 4 & 5”

Donald Kuspit: You know what has happened to art now? It is exactly like the way the magazines announce a movie that is opening. They say, “This movie is the best because it brought in 20 million dollars” and “this movie number two because the first weekend it brought in 18 million.” Now there’s no evaluation. What are these movies about? They give you some narrative line, but what about the cinematography? What about the acting?

Diane Thodos: It’s just the sheer power of money speaking for itself. The Rijk’s museum exhibit of Damien Hirst’s “Skull” is also an attempt to destroy the authentic art that was already there in the museum.

DK: Yes, he said explicitly that he has “no integrity” – that’s a direct quote.

DK: Well it is the “hot” thing to say. He is saying, “See I have no integrity, I’m the new bandit, I’m the new hotshot gangster.”

DK: He’s saying “I’m the bad boy and the godfather” and you know there’s always a role for this in a popular culture. Have you ever seen him? He looks like a sly gopher or something.

DK: What I mean is the sociology of the contemporary situation is in some ways more interesting than the art. Don’t kid yourself. It’s about what is the social role of art and how people are invested in art. This is why opening parties are such big events. Art is an occasion for socializing.

DK: And art openings have an atmosphere a little different than if we met in a boardroom or a restaurant where we would eat, chat, or make our deal. It’s interesting that art is a status item; it’s all about what is your status?

DT: Everything is getting extremely distended and abstracted from any meaningfulness in terms of what is sold and what the art actually is.

DK: It’s getting abstracted from experiential meaning and from aesthetic meaning. It’s even getting separated from any kind of serious social commentative purpose. Who cares what you are transgressing? Nobody cares. Art has lost its way.

DT: Yes, it’s a completely lost situation. I recall reading an essay by Robert Hughes about Willem de Kooning. He made the observation that his kind of expressionism was rare in American art. Why is this so? It is rare in terms of established practice within the American art tradition. In other words de Kooning was pretty unusual. Compared to Pollock, de Kooning brought his work closer to what the German Expressionist tradition was about.

DK: Well he was European. Gorky was European. Hans Hoffman was European: it goes back to Europe. If you look at the history of 20th century art the largest amount of art produced, the most continuous stream of art – for better or worse – was Expressionism, whether it was figurative expressionism or Abstract Expressionism. Now in America the art may have to do with some sense of Puritanism – a sense of shame about “letting it all hang out” unless of course you got a TV camera in front of you.

DK: Unless it’s about spectacle. Also I think it’s very hard to sustain genuine Expressionism. It’s really a kind of intuitive painting. You have to be with it. When you look at a Kirchner painting full of dashed lines and marks you got to be totally focused, totally absorbed. Saul Bellow once said we live in a distraction society. That’s why it’s hard to sustain focus. There is also a strong figurative tradition in American art.

DK: Let me put it this way. Warhol is another social realist in a certain sense – a social realist who is dealing with things like Hollywood stars, celebrity, whatever. That is a strong American tradition. Forget about any stylistic considerations – it’s about observing the society. Warhol said, and I think he’s right, that his best works were about death. A lot of them deal with social violence. That’s social observation: social realism. In a certain sense he’s a kind of Hollywood and New York regionalist. So there is a lot of art like this and that’s an art that comes from the outside. Some of it gets inside but it starts from the outside. I think there is actually a need now for what I call a new objective art. It starts from the outside and pays attention to observation. I think this is happening, but this is more of an American tradition than Expressionism, which comes from the inside out.

DK: It is the externalization of the internal through this mode. When you look at the paintings of Kirchner you can sort of follow the lines. But if you look at de Kooning, particularly some of those black and white pieces from 1948 – 49 it gets very hard to follow what’s going on. You have to sort have to of immerse yourself in the image and do this unconscious scanning. It’s a difficult thing. It’s much easier to stay with an object – be it a landscape or a movie poster.

DT: Knowable human content is easier to grasp that the sort of attenuation of abstraction into, if you will, more and more of a conceptual mode?

DK: Yes I think so. The problem with the conceptual mode is that it signals a certain end of observation – of looking at the object out there –and then it gets filtered through the media and gets lost. But then there are people like Philip Pearlstein: artists still looking at the human body.

DK: There are people like that – people who get a balance of inside and outside. That’s the heart of it. They are looking at whole objects, not fragments; some resonance comes through. I think the conceptual mode has kind of run away with itself. If you look around you can see other things but certainly the conceptual mode seems to be market dominated or given pride of place.

DT: Well, what I meant was there is a leap of concept that occurs between, let’s say de Kooning’s “Women” paintings of the early 1950’s and the more abstracted landscapes he did in the 1970’s: there’s a subtle shift of concept.

DK: De Kooning had something else: he had a hand, he had touch, and he had skill.

DT: He had draughtsmanship, he loved Soutine, and you could see the lushness of the color. He liked Matisse. He was integrating a lot of traditions plus the influence of Arshile Gorky. Gorky really turned him into a poet of paint. Without Gorky he couldn’t have done the transition. Gorky brought this great soul to his art that you don’t see in de Kooning’s work from the time before he met him.

DK: De Kooning was a very accomplished abstract artist. That’s all gone now. Today you don’t need skill in the arts.

DT: But on the other hand I think that you do – if you are going to engage that inwardness you need to have the linguistic means of transposing it outwardly. I think of the great discovery of automatism that comes from Surrealism. On this point I don’t think it is well known that a former teacher of mine – Stanley William Hayter – had a big impact on the American Abstract Expressionists. Originally he had set up his print shop Studio 17 in Paris where a lot of the avant-garde artists there came to print. He fled France because of the invading German army during World War II. He had been producing pamphlets in his print shop on how to blow up German tanks.

DT: He was extremely anti-Nazi and Hitler had placed a bounty on his head. Hayter was a pretty tough individual. When he fled France he experienced a month long trip across the Atlantic on a boat that was dodging submarines. He finally arrived in New York City around 1940 where he set up his Studio 17 print shop anew. This was an important meeting place where all the expatriated European artists would come to do art and interact. Printmaking is fortunately an art of praxis – artists have to come together to use the same press and equipment. Technical necessities bring printmakers together; with that comes an experimental chemistry of exchange. The American Abstract Expressionists knew all these famous artists like Andre Masson and Max Ernst who came to do work at Studio 17: the artists they had read about were suddenly here in the USA. Many came to Studio 17 to have contact with members of the European avant-garde who they revered. From what I understand Hayter had artists do preliminary exercises on test printing plates: exercises in automatism. This was the exercise he had me do in 1984 when he was my teacher and it was the same one that Jackson Pollock had done in 1944 – 45. It is very interesting to see the transformation of Pollock’s work compared to what he had done previously. He was painting abstract work based on American Indian symbols and iconography; these had some movement but were not completely open and gestural. After he did the experimental plates with Hayter the subconscious gestural element started coming out and began his launch into the drip paintings.

DT: For about 4 months in the fall of 1984 in Paris. This experience at Studio 17 transformed me completely because the discovery of automatism – the subconscious and spontaneous flow of gestural line – made me understand the mystery and meaning of the abstract plane in a completely new way than had previously existed. It liberated a potential that I could not have perceived before. This same abstraction was a mystery I had seen in de Kooning’s work that I could not have solved until I had done this exercise. de Kooning had worked in Studio 17 too. After Pollock practiced automatism and it entered his painting the idea caught fire with de Kooning. Even then de Kooning transferred these ideas to his friend Franz Klein. So there was this ascendancy that was happening.

DT: Through the exercise of automatism. Hayter’s work in automatism actually had a fairly dry biomorphic quality to it, but the important thing was that he created an environment of serious and open experimentation which allowed the transmission of some important Surrealist ideas. The use of automatism to delve into abstraction and the subconscious was essential to Abstract Expressionism.

DT: It was by chance really. I had a printmaking teacher at Carnegie Mellon University named Joanne Maier and I told her I was going to study at the Alliance Francais in Paris for a semester. She noticed I was a complete fanatic about printmaking – I couldn’t keep the ink off my hands. She knew Studio 17 in Paris and wrote me a letter of introduction to Bill Hayter. I believe anyone could study there as long as you were a serious printmaker and you followed his instruction making the experimental test plate. At the time Hayter did not have a high profile status the way de Kooning and Pollock did.

DT: It has always been there and Studio 17 is important as a junction of exchange between Europe and the US. Much teaching about printmaking was brought to this country and spread by his students, like Mauricio Lasansky. Many printmaking departments were created in art schools because of Bill Hayter’s influence. It was a wonderful gift to this country and what I learned was a wonderful gift to me. If I hadn’t tripped upon the circumstance of studying with Hayter I don’t think I could understand art the way I do today.

DT: I am also grateful to have had you as my teacher for five years. You were the person at the right time and the right place to answer critical questions I had about the art world and to give me the perceptual distance I needed from what was happening in the New York art world. I needed to unravel the history even as it was happening around me. Your teaching gave me the perception and tools I needed as a way out of the puzzlement I was feeling about the art world. I was very confused about how it operated – what was its modus operandi. By that time in the late 1980’s anti-art already had a very strong hold within the art world.

DT: By that time it was very strongly entrenched. I needed someone who could give me some real answers. I recall you had once criticized certain art of the 1980’s as being the equivalent of junk bonds. In today’s art world do you see the work of Jeff Koons and those like him being similar to toxic assets – both financially and spiritually – to use a current terminology?

DK: Yes – a simple yes. They represent the spiritual bankruptcy of art. Art is no longer spiritual: I use the German word Giest. They are anti-Giest. The word “corrupt” is too generous. They don’t know what it would be to not be corrupt. The word corruption does not figure in their way of thinking.

DK: I would say it is ultimately nihilistic. I think it is not only anti-art – it is anti-life. Let’s just think for a moment of what Koons did with Chicholina – I’m referring to his sculptures of her. She was his Italian wife, also once a member of the Italian Parliament, and some say a prostitute or call girl or model as well as a celebrity of sorts. They’re now divorced. The sculptures were on view at the Sonnabend Gallery. In one work she looks like a glamorized not to say whorish belle femme sans merci–the eternal feminine downgraded/degraded to a media slut — anti-life indeed.

DK: Yes, but pornography does not have to do with the spectator, it has to do with Eros.

DT: I remember very clearly the day in class you described the difference between the erotic and the pornographic.

DK: There has been a lot written about this by Robert J. Stoller. [Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred 1975]

DT: And also about how the Christian religion downgraded the body and split the body from the spirit, demonizing Eros.

DT: This distinction struck me because I have something of a Greek ancestral background, not that the modern Greeks are just like the ancient, but I had some exposure to the pre- Christian Greek art of antiquity. I had a different perception growing up. That didn’t always have to do with the current society, which is shaped by different forces.

DK: Yes, I think so. It’s interesting to me that contemporary artists appeal to very rich people. It’s very important to have a high price. There is a kind of saying in the art market – you may have heard it– that if you put a work out there with a low price on it people will say it can’t be worth very much.

DK: They perceive low quality because the price is low. I remember a dealer who once said that people were questioning him about piece of art because it was for $200,000.

DT: As if to say “The price is too low – what’s the matter with the art?”

DK: Yes – It is as though if it were priced for $300,000 they would consider it. They look at art with the dollar sign.

DK: You know this piece I wrote called Art Values or Money Values [artnet.com March 6, 2007].

DK: That’s what it is all about. You remember there was this dealer who started an operation in Miami with artists whose prices were $2000 or $5000 a work? Now they have changed their prices to $10,000 to $20,000 a work and somehow that is supposed to give it value. You know $10,000 is a lot of buckaroos, at least to some people.

DT: There are also covert relationships to fix the art market between dealers and collectors.

DK: There have been some cases which you may know about that have been printed in the newspapers. A work sold at auction for a certain amount – then it turned out there was some sort of kickback. It was not really the stated price but less. The gallery was partly financing the auction bid and this act of manipulation was reported in the news. There was a wonderful piece in the Financial Times, which covers the art market very extensively because art is big business. They had a piece on one of the last auctions around a year ago about an Ellsworth Kelly. They showed a picture of the art and said, “Is this blob work worth one and a half million dollars?”

DK: They talked about how there was uncertainty that was entering the art auctions. What’s the relationship between this blob and one and a half million dollars?

Bob Stanley
December 16th, 2009 at 9:00 pm

For a strong art critic (Kuspit) and a great theologian (Ellul) to discount the good and focus on the bad (Koons, reality TV, technique–in Ellul’s specialized definition) is an understandable human condition.

Yet, it is this very human condition that demands privacy, uniqueness, and meaning, as well as gossip, security, and play. Fret not about the fate of art and life. Some just get ignored and trampled, as has happened forever and will happen always. The “powers that be” can only handle so much, and depend on status and opinion rather than personal judgment of worth. No news here. One just works hard and true, and knows that chance plays a huge role.

Mark Staff Brandl
December 17th, 2009 at 2:07 am

Fabulous, once again. “Working things through,” the displacement of interest away from art and artist, “instrumentalism” or the fetish of new tools as a repression of any real thought — all amazingly important insights.

Dan Andre
December 17th, 2009 at 9:45 am

I am in agreement with Mr. Stanley, ” One just works hard and true and knows that chance plays a huge role.” Here is the “but”, without throwing the dice, writing about and discourse, there would be nothing to chance with. I am sure Mr. Koons did not sit in his work space and hoped and waited to be discovered. in my opinion, he spends much of his time on the schmoozing, instead of the artwork.

Victoria Webb
December 18th, 2009 at 5:25 pm

Once again, thanks to Ms. Thodos for an insightful interview. I am struck with Mr. Kuspit’s idea of emotion not being easily streamlined, and technology (video art, etc) becoming a spectacle. And the idea of exhibitionism in reality TV.

And perhaps over the last 3 decades art has become less introspective and more exhibitionist-I’m thinking here of performance pieces that are variously political and/or gender based. But if art reflects the culture or its time, then hasn’t it done a pretty good job? We’ve come out of an incredibly selfish and greedy period.

I wonder what transformative art will ensue from a more compassionate and less ego driven society. What I do see coming from most art schools or mid career artists (45 now seems to be mid-career) in NY galleries is a preponderance of ironic and cold work, even in portrait work that feels empty and doesn’t ‘move’ me in any way.

To be obsessed with light, or emotion or even color, say the way Hopper once was – is scorned. The fact that almost every online ‘art’ site shows the exact same trends is also disheartening.

I maintain hope though. In the same way that Slow Food has infiltrated the psyches (and stomachs) of the country, maybe slow art- work that is thoughtful and passionate and emotional- will begin to take back the spotlight. Something’s gotta give and people are starving.

thomas masters
December 24th, 2009 at 4:14 pm

I really enjoyed this last conversation between DK and DT.
One point really hits rather powerfully when DK suggests that it would be far more compelling to observe who is doing the collecting rather than the creating. Because, as it now stands, the collecting is driving the creating and not the other way around. This, to me is the great truth of our contempoary scene, and also a good reason not to trust it.

Bob Stanley
December 27th, 2009 at 1:33 pm

@ Victoria Webb
Excellent analysis, both of art’s reflection of current culture and a deep, current desire for the once-banned “retinal” and deeply personal.

An interview with Donald Kuspit by Diane Thodos — Part 3 | Chicago Art Magazine
January 3rd, 2010 at 1:24 pm

[...] Graciously permitted to republish from Neoteric Art. [...]

Crazy Face
January 8th, 2010 at 3:42 pm

I’m so pleased I stumbled upon this interview. When trying to navigate the formal art world I feel like I must have left home without any pants, like I’m mad. I’ve been advised by my colleges and teachers to hide my pessimism and contempt, I’ve been instructed to hold my tongue in regards to emotional factors and rather discuss technique.

Though I know my advisers have a deep caring for my career and well-being they glaze over the burden that repacking emotional disclosure as “esoteric intellectualism” has on my soul. I fear my heart may explode. I’ve seen too many brilliant colleges fall by the wayside for their emotionally charged content.

I hope for everyone’s sake that there is a resurgence in introspection, and an acceptance of emotion outside the controlled and spiteful context of fabricated “drama.” Thank you Diane and Donald for a breath of sanity and a renewed sense of hopefulness.

Bob Stanley
February 8th, 2010 at 3:30 pm

Kuspit and Thodos adeptly point out the worst of our tradition: Puritan distance and focus on success. Theory (from Dada through Postmodernism to today’s status-focus) de-emphasizes a huge part of our humanity, to wit, the part of us that senses visually and touches/makes. These activities, which involve huge amounts of our brain and give great pleasure in looking at beauty and making something well, are dismissively called “retinal” and “hand” by many of the establishment. How long can this last? Not much longer, I’d say.

Because we are human, we get mental and physical elation from putting images and techniques together. We seem hard-wired to “read” such things. The poor Hirsts, Saatchis, and numbed art world followers focus on words and financial success to the exclusion of our whole being. They cannot last. Like al Quaeda, they are just in the way, and are destroying much, without any real chance of success. Our natural love of Form and Making will out, unless we evolve in the net 20 years as much as we have evolved in the last 100,000.

Annie Markovich
February 8th, 2010 at 4:03 pm

A clear, insight into what is going on, I was so bogged down with the rhetoric and ad hype that I couldn’t see the forest through the trees, thank you so much for the courage to be honest about this period of history. We’ll just have to push on and hope, trust, work that the light will go on, a searchlight to reveal the delusions the artworld has been operating under for several decades.

Adrian Lvrkhn
February 8th, 2010 at 5:01 pm

Thanks for some very good insight.

Regarding art education, and something that ties into the generational aspect: art students in the late 70’s and in the 80’s were not encouraged to pursue technical aspects of art-making. In that respect, the only thing that’s changed is the scale of things. The people that were driven enough to pursue the technical side had to do it more or less on their own. Of those, the ones that now teach in art schools are the least intrusive conceptually on their students’ work and they have a lot to teach on technical aspects. They are a minority, and they’ve developed a thick skin to the confusion around, so they they tend to be hard to spot, but they’re there and I had the good fortune to meet some.