Someone needs to apologize. I mean it. Because its clear that things aren’t going smoothly and someone’s obviously to blame. The works are gummed up and the sheets are soiled. Some miscreant has just tracked mud through the clean kitchen floor. And if we ask the folks who are in charge its quite obvious who the guilty are. Just look at this list of complaints that galleries have about artists. How much inconsiderate behavior are galleries supposed to put up with, really? (From an online e-course designed to straighten artists out)
The 6 Most Common Mistakes Artists Make When Approaching Galleries
Mistake #1: Presenting an inconsistent body of work.
Mistake #2: Producing insufficient work to sustain gallery sales.
Mistake #3: Delivering a portfolio in a format inconvenient for gallery review.
Mistake #4: Lacking confidence and consistency in pricing.
Mistake #5: Approaching the wrong galleries.
Mistake #6: Submitting art through the wrong channels.
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Well, well, well…. Isn’t that just horrifying?
Its simply galling what artists try to get away with! Stubborn willful artists simply can’t be trusted to play by the rules. Don’t they know that doing things ‘the right way’ is for their own good? They get it wrong and spoil it for the rest of us. How utterly selfish! Just think of the mind numbing back breaking inconvenience to those kindly angelic gallery owners. Its a wonder most galleries are content to only take 50% of sales and not more, just for the sake of principle.
If artists are responsibly adult enough about it they had better get down on their knees and apologize. Beg forgiveness for the inconvenience they cause. Its simply unconscionable that artists try pulling a fast one and do things the way they want. Without any consideration or sensitivity to the difficulty this causes the galleries! As if artists are entitled to some say. As if what they wanted actually mattered. Preposterous! Oh the temerity of it!
So there’s a system in place. If you want to play the game these are the rules. Is that so hard to understand? There are no other rules. There is no other game. If you don’t want to play you can pack up your toys and run home to your mommy and have a good cry. “Poor me! Nobody understands me!” Boo hoo…….
One of the biggest offenses in recent times has been artists trying to pedal pots as legitimate art. What are they thinking?! Isn’t it obvious that pottery is NOT art? Just look at it. I mean, its three dimensional but its not sculptural. And if its got an interesting surface its still not as important as something like painting. Even if the pots were painted on isn’t it obvious that pots are not paintings? Sure, paint murals on the walls of buildings, scraps of tin, old boards and newsprint. Those are things we properly revere and shine the limelight on. Just don’t think that you can do something ‘interesting’ on the side of a pot and call it “Art”…….
I mean, we can’t sell mugs in Art galleries. Galleries have to pay the bills, don’t they? Selling mugs hardly supports the Art business. You’d have to sell two-hundred and twenty-five $40 mugs just to cover one of these $9,000 sculptures.
Dan McCarthy’s untitled “face pots”, numbers 56 and 78, 2013 and 2014 respectively, at Anton Kern (2.1/J10)
Thank the heavenly muses that these are not ordinary pots! I mean, they might look like pots, but the price tag alone should tell you that the right people have seen it and determined that this is art and not pottery. If someone stuck some dried flowers in one of these the price would simply plummet. People would be confused. “Is it art? Or am I supposed to use it as an ashtray?” It would be like using the Mona Lisa as a placemat at Wendy’s. You just don’t make art work. Its not supposed to do anything. And for too long ceramic sculpture has been tainted by its associations with sweaty humble usable pots. Thankfully, as Alison Jacques (owner of the Alison Jacques Gallery) says, “Ceramic was once seen as pottery. Now it’s contemporary art.” Praise be! Glad we cleared that up.
Isn’t it obvious why mere pottery is inferior to these magnificent and engaging, erm… sculptures? No collector in their right mind would be willing to get saddled with a few dozen of even the finest mugs (let alone several hundred) if they can get their hands on one of these superlative creations instead. And its the gallery owner’s business to tell them that. For their own good. Sometimes these collectors don’t know what they are looking at so you have to lead them through the different things to care about. Pottery? Blah. Seen it all before. Not interested. There is nothing much about pots to draw the attention of Art galleries. If you could pay them to be interested that would be another matter…..
But pots don’t sell for much. Why would they? 50% 0f $40 simply isn’t enough for the time it would take to argue a mug’s worth to some collector. Galleries actually lose money selling pots….. One 4′ x 6′ panel on a wall is more profitable with a painting in it than 12,000 square feet of gallery space crammed with pedestals filled with pots. Think about it. What Art gallery in their right mind would show pots when they could slap a few paintings on the wall and a few sculptures on pedestals?
Dead artists, on the other hand, are always a potential for vogue, and even dead potters can take on a relative sheen of glamour. That’s it, potters! Hurry up and die. We’ll make you famous then! Wink wink! Six feet of cold hard earth is just about the only thing that can enhance the reputation of potters in an Art market…..
So either get out your hankies and have a good cry or make something other than pottery. And if you are stuck on making pots just know that your stubborn refusal to bow down to the way the Art game is played is insulting to the folks who are in charge. It questions their authority and pretends they don’t know what they are talking about. If you are a potter or some other misbehaving artist you had better apologize and make things right. Make the right things, in other words…. Don’t you feel better now? You can dust off your knees. Lets hope that didn’t hurt too much.
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I hope everyone knows this is a parody of how serious the art industry sometimes genuinely seems to take itself. Some gallerists actually are angelic, and not every gallery scoffs at pots. There is a pervasive mythology, however, and the unwitting can often be easily seduced by it. Galleries themselves often align on either side of the perceived division between ‘Art’ and pottery. Keeping these things distinct in space only perpetuates keeping them distinct in our minds.
But if the world is slowly changing artists and potters in particular need to learn to stick up for themselves. Its too often accepted that we will simply bow down to the browbeatings we receive against our self interest and the interest of our art. We often behave like the victims of kidnappings who develop sympathetic and protective feelings for their captors, a twisted art version of the Stockholm Syndrome. If anyone needs to apologize for the way things stand I’m not so sure its artists.
Its almost like we were involved in a mugging and are being blamed for the inconvenience we give to the muggers…. We’ve got what they want, or if we don’t we’d better get our sh-t together. That’s the way this game seems to work. And artists are often eager to play because they don’t know any better. We can’t see outside the cage that has been constructed for us. And artists see the few examples who have made it, scored the big pay out. Is it any wonder poor artists want the big score too?
But the system is rigged. If reputation is what sells not everyone can be put forth as deserving. Its not and never will be a level playing field as things stand. But artists persist in this wishful thinking. Its almost like poor people voting for tax cuts to the rich because they hold the dream of one day owning the big mansions and fancy cars….. Its this dream that helps struggling artists line up for their institutional beatings and suffer the indignities with hardly a complaint.
That seems worth thinking about: If the system itself is corrupt, unfairly biased, or disadvantageous to all but a few, who exactly is it that needs to apologize? The 99% or the 1%?
Peace all!
Make beauty real! (Only you can)
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CARTER GILLIES POTTERY 
Amen, thanks Carter. Have to wonder though whether the price we put on our pots, which is almost universally terribly low relative to the actual value of our work, isn’t just a symptom of our apologetic victim status. This would be self perpetuating of course.
Sounds right to me. The complication is also that many artists do sell their work but are uncomfortable thinking about it as a ‘job’. Did you read my post about what makes art entrepreneurial and what doesn’t? The idea that many of us have a similar experience with our art as we do with other intimate expressions of ourselves just muddies the water too much to expect simple solutions. One problem I see is that we accept the model of the art marketplace as the default system of valuation. That’s a habit I am hoping we can break. For society to truly value art we must break the connection of what art is worth in the marketplace to what it can be valued for in a human life. Art’s highest value is not an investment for the super rich…..
This is what things look like when the sharks start to circle and Art becomes an investment plaything of the super rich:
Posted in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/culture/barnebys-auctions/10915104/Booming-art-markets.html The art marketplace tail is truly wagging the art/artist dog…….
More from that article:
So why shouldn’t a Doig painting sell for 9m Euros? Why shouldn’t this great painter get paid for what he does on a scale that doesn’t even come close to what sports stars or movie starts make. And if good art has real intrinsic value and if people are smart enough to want to pay money for that intrinsic value then resale value is part of the deal. Everything else in our world has resale value.
I get that it’s gaudy and that some buyers don’t really know what they are looking at. But stupidity exists with all kinds of buying, from cars to groceries to even art. And I get that this uber wealthy is hurting art institutions in that the wealthy end up out bidding museums for their collections. But too often this kind of media reporting(and there has been a wave of these types of articles about the big bad 1% art world) ends up picking at the artists and the art itself in derogatory means. That’s not fair and it doesn’t end up helping the plight of anyone who is involved in the arts or crafts.
Carter,
I think your parody is misleading. First off, if you want to be successful as a artist or a functional potter you have to do you homework. It doesn’t do me any good to take my landscape paintings into a craft gallery. Most good galleries have a particular focus. They have identified a customer base and have developed a program geared toward that group. A bad gallery has a little bit of everything hoping that someone will walk in the door. So I always recommend my students do their homework. Find out what is the program of the gallery and focus on galleries that deal in the type of work you make.
As to that age old gripe that some clay people have about Art, I suggest to get over it. I have a MFA in clay and I know work in the fine art world. Fine art does not have the same intentions or focus or even purpose that functional pottery has. There are some wonderful artistic aspect to a great functional mug. And there is a goodly amount of craft that goes into making a painting. But the two things are NOT the same thing. I’m not saying one is any better than the other, just that they have different intentions and purposes.
So i suggest that the system isn’t “rigged”. It’s not even one system. All the hullabaloo over the 1% uber rich galleries ( and it is a hullabaloo) is only a slice of a much bigger art world. And being an artist or even a functional potter isn’t democratic.
“That’s it, potters! Hurry up and die.”
So great.
The question was posed on a widely read board not long ago asking those that frequent the board if they considered themselves an artist, a craftsperson, a potter etc. and almost all that took the time to reply said ‘artist’ quite forcefully.
This struck me as odd at the time because this is the main board I frequent and had formed an opinion that almost all of the regulars make functional ware and, from their post anyway, it seemed to me that they made functional ware almost exclusively.
So is handmade functional ware art?
For years we had a beautiful salt fired pitcher on our mantel. When asked about it we always responded that it was made by a local ‘potter’. When it was bought it was really bought as more of an art object since it was more expensive than we would have spent, at the time, on functional ware.
A few years ago we started using it as it was intended, just a pitcher. So this guy used to be an artist and now he’s just a potter, sigh.
I think the way a question like that gets phrased matters. If you have to choose between different alternatives it can seem as though the choices are mutually exclusive.
Instead I’d argue that there are so many ways of being an artist that you’d have to say that a painter is one kind, a potter another, a jeweler yet a different sort, and on down the list of creative activities some of which we might not yet even have put names on. “Art” as many folks use it is a catch-all word for a variety of activities and perspectives on the world. It shares a ‘family resemblance between uses (as Wittgenstein might have put it) rather than anything fundamental. You can use that word liberally or conservatively.. You can be embracing and inclusive or restrictive and protective of where it gets applied. Using the word becomes an exercise in politics.
The ones invested in discriminating against the ‘have nots’ of a definition of the arts try to just pin down ‘art’ as only a few of these activities. They try to promote what they themselves are doing as somehow ‘special’ by contrast. How utterly self-serving! How boorish! And you can see that their defense of this idea is entirely wrapped up in and justified by their own profit and sense of personal value. As if the natural order of the world was handed down and they wound up on top as winners (as they somehow deserve) and the rest of the ‘losers’ had better just get used to feeding off the bottom…… Equality is as foreign to their minds as the possibility that other points of view have anything worth sharing. As if their own special status only suffers the more other things are seen to also be ‘special’. As if only their own prejudices mattered. “Its not a Democracy” until you start taking away their perks. As long as they are in control they can justify the uneven distribution of resources. It serves them to have more than their ‘fair’ (equitable) share of opportunities and greater access to the food trough and chow wagon. And as long as they are in charge you had better believe they are going to hold onto their privilege.
The story of your pitcher points out exactly how these divisions play out. The important stuff we’d like to call “art”, but when it loses that lofty status it becomes just a pot. How amusingly arbitrary! Same object, different way of looking at it. The problem isn’t the objects themselves as much as that we have been conditioned to think about them in certain institutionally approved ways. And once you see that the way of dividing the world puts ‘artists’ as winners and ‘potters’ as losers you can’t help bur question why you are being made to sit at the back of the bus if you are a potter. If you are a painter, say, you might actually defend your right to sit at the front of the bus. Sharing the best seats may not be perceived to be in your best interest….. If the status quo benefits you you defend it. If control starts to slip from your clenched cheeks you get nervous and throw stones at the barbarians sitting outside the gates. Its sort of amusing watching them flail about, but unfortunately there is still too much damage being done by their politics of privilege. The vestiges of these institutions still carry far too much weight………
Thanks for chiming in Stephen! And thanks for your story!
Hi Carter,
Well I was being facetious, we love the pitcher and a few years ago made a decision to start using the functional pottery we had on display in our home and enjoy it every day as we perceive the potter we bought it from originally intended. But we are potters (well the other half is and I’m working on it 🙂 so we of course appreciate it for what it is, both on the mantle and on the table. To us it is a work of art. I do however completely understand why it would not be in a fine art gallery. I truly doubt the potter in question would feel slighted by this distinction and this particular potter may well have fine art pieces in galleries, I simply don’t know, but I’m fairly sure this pitcher was made for daily use and not to be displayed as fine art.
I’m not sure I can totally get your outrage? Are you outraged? It seems many skilled potters have moved in fine art circles, even of the elite, if that was their desire. I think Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner and several of their elk are good examples of skilled potters whose works tilted toward fine art as their careers progressed as potters, educators and artist. They were very instrumental in opening many doors for those that have come since and want to be part of the fine art world. I don’t however think the artist you mentioned in your post, Dan McCarthy, is a potter but rather he is an artist that works in multiple mediums and clay is one of them. To compare his work to potters that make mugs, pitchers and plates seems confusing. The artistic work of all of these gentlemen may well be of equal stature but the back story is different and certainly the intent of functional ware is not to be displayed in a gallery but to be a prized possession in ones home, in the kitchen or spread out on the dinner table. I do think that people that buy handmade pottery from local potters at a much higher price than mass produced alternatives do so because they consider the pots to be better, more artistic and more often than not they also like to support local artisans. I don’t cringe at the word ‘artisan’, I am not an artist and don’t aspire to be one. I respect those that do but it is not something I personally seek so it is entirely possible that I simply don’t walk in your shoes and thus do not feel the frustration. I love your work and because of the artistic and whimsical nature of what I’ve seen I have assumed you produce functional pottery AND fine art pieces so have thought of you as BOTH an artist and a potter 😉
The two terms can be mutually exclusive for some of us.
Yeah, I DO get carried away at times, and it felt like the time for a little spleen venting. Sorry it came out in response to your statement!!!!
I did see the humor in your tale, and I never felt you were disrespecting the pot. I do think you are right that it DOES make sense to look at things differently depending on the circumstances, but I do get tired of having to defend things like pottery from an institutional prejudice against them. When I was in school folks were still battling the question “Is it art or is it craft?” and it only seems like the potters in the discussion have capitulated. For no good reason that I can see. They appear to have given up more than they lost the discussion. The odds really are stacked against potters having their voices heard in some quarters……
But this question only underlies a more systematic discrimination that I was already very aware of. The school I went to was a good introduction to what sorts of things can go wrong under the influence of these sorts of bias. I took my first classes from Ron Meyers, and soon after he retired without having been made a full professor. That stuck in his craw and its still inexplicable to me from a perspective of what was deserved and his quality as an artist. As I continued to take classes it became increasingly clear that without Ron there to defend pottery things were going in a different direction. At the expense of pottery. By diminishing and disrespecting the value of pottery. How could you be a potter and not feel slighted by that? Why would a potter not be outraged?
So in grad school it was actually made clear that pots were an inferior and inappropriate artistic expression. I was actually persuaded not to make pots for almost a year. But imagining myself a student who was there to learn I went with it. The problem is that you see potters enter the institution and leave doing something else. And years after I had graduated it started to look as if I would be the last potter they actually admitted. Which only has the consequence that the folks teaching pottery to the undergrads are neither experienced potters or invested in the process. How does the next generation learn pottery if there are no potters teaching it? If the message ends up being that its not worth doing, or that pottery isn’t a good value for your education how does this influence things on down the line?
I am perhaps sensitive to the issue of discrimination. Its easy to overlook if you are not being harmed by it or if you don’t know any better. We grow up with insidious prejudices just as part of our upbringing, and its important to recognize when diversity is less meaningful than what draws us together. I don’t have a problem with not calling pots art (as long as they are being respected appropriately), but I do resent the idea that the necessary fallout from this is that pots are less meaningful and less deserving, a lesser thing in themselves. That almost seems to be universally implied in the institutional perspective. You mention Voulkos. How long did it take for him to quit making functional pots and start exploding things in his kiln? What was the pressure that told him it was no longer alright to be making pots? That if he continued to make pots he would be irrelevant? How is this not the same sort of discrimination that in other circumstances marks out some people as inferior to others? Makes them sit at the back of the bus?
The one real sticking point I have with what you say is that the intent is what matters. If that is true then literally anything can go in a fine art gallery, as long as you have that intention. A piece of toilet paper is as worthy as a Picasso. Intention only gets us so far. Intention is a slippery customer that doesn’t play by the rules. I can intend things that will never come true. My intentions can be pure fantasy and delusion. If that’s the stuff that marks out one thing as art and others as not art then we have a problem. Every addict knows that the intention to quit isn’t the same thing as quitting. The intention is nothing special by itself. And we can change our intentions on a dime. Or later in life. I heard that line about intentions somewhere recently and I was shocked that it could be that simple. If anything, simply having the intentions for art opens the door even more than it closes it. Its not as if the gatekeepers are checking peoples’ intentions at the door…….
Which says nothing about serendipity and exploration. The intention there being to simply see what happens. When asked where his ideas come from Picasso famously responded “I don’t have a clue. Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”
Don’t make intentions out to be anything grand or celestial. They are not the saving grace of art anymore than they are the saving grace of addicts. Or so it seems to me…….
Damn! Sorry if I’m ranting again…… I hope you see that some folks truly are p-ssed off by the way things have fallen out. The fact that some potters simply shun the art world is just a measure of how fed up they are or how excluded they feel themselves to be. And if you can straddle the lines and play both games, good luck to you! Dan McCarthy not being a potter but making $9000 clay vases is just symptomatic of the lack of respect that actual potters get. Of all the potters I personally know there isn’t a single one who has sold a pot for anything close to that. What makes McCarthy’s vases so expensive, I wonder? Respect as an ‘artist’?
Oops! gotta stop rambling! USA Germany is on! Time to run down to the pub!
Some great points and I love it when you get carried away, almost always gives me plenty to think about. After reading your response I do see how artist like yourself are tired of the overall attitude of pots somehow being less and that as a potter you must change and conform to be taken seriously as an artist. It’s artist like yourself that will cause change by balking at the status quo and having the discussion in the first place.
I guess I didn’t really see it because I (and most people in my life space) have such a high regard for potters and although I guess I do normally view potters as artisans I didn’t/don’t see potters as less but rather different and to be honest in a little higher regard. I just assumed that most of the noted artist that work in clay as a medium but can’t throw are naturally jealous of a potter that can do what they do AND throw a beautiful coffee mug 🙂
Thanks Stephen!
This is related, so I’m going to repost the entire essay. Its from the amazing Arlene Goldbard’s blog, just posted today:
More from my inbox this morning. Julian Baginni:
From the Financial Times:
Typology of Nubian bowls. 3000-1550BC. Collection of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.
Garth Clark tells it like it is:
Tales of a Red Clay Rambler interview 36:30
More Garth:
Witness the frustration of the gallerist that the usual link between who made a thing and what it can be sold for didn’t hold true any longer. These two values being supreme in the art market, but also typically reinforcing one another. Forget about the art itself…… ‘Ceramics’ became a dirty word. That’s the world we live in, right? Any denying that these dynamics tend to rule some of our opportunities?
YANSS Podcast 029 – How labels affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with Adam Alter
“The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.” Roxane Gay