“We can’t be partners, you're lactating”
The dynamics of how identity politics and social media has changed the field of Art continues to get more and more strange as we slouch into the third decade of the millennium. This morning, I came across a group of successful female artists on instagram who reshared an anecdote about how Takashi Murakami told his one time dealer Marianne Boesky that he was giving his representation to Larry Gagosian because the pregnant Boesky was “lactating”. The text goes on to claim that patriarchal oppression is still very much a thing in the Art world and that motherhood “is the last taboo in Art”, as illustrated by Murakami’s actions. That backward business practices and worldviews populate the eschalons of the Artworld elite is so obvious, it almost doesn’t bear treatment. And, I can’t help but think that Murakami told Boesky this as a weird and cowardly stand in for “I’m ending our relationship for a higher status and more financial profit”--weird bc Murakami made the calculus that he’d rather be misogynistic than greedy. In the sordid power game it seems that you must pick your poison. You might ask, “what’s the problem? This guy is a misogynist and deserves to be called out and lumped in with all of the other powerful d-bags in the A-world.” My issue concerns the spin, and how the identification status of participants in the Artworld has been redrawn by a few, at least when it comes to self-reporting. Artists that claim victim status have this way of conceptually gerrymandering the field, even as they successfully navigate power structures. They carve up the art world into camps, positing foul play by the patriarchy when there’s no central authority to impose either a de jure or de facto discrimination. This usually occurs in the absence of any notation of the umbrella indignities that encompass other victims--the quality of the field being unregulated, unstructured, devoid of accountability, full of insider trading, lying and cheating in service of creating fortunes, distorted historicizing, suppression of innovation, winner-take-all dynamics, ect, ect. When all participants engage in politics, the collateral damage piles up. Lack of trust becomes the norm, and political gamesmanship becomes part of a runaway effect that transforms innocent actors into bad actors. Social media reinforces this phenomenon. When those on the low end of the power spectrum, reinforced by the dynamics of social media, decide to join rather than beat em, you end up doubling all of the worst aspects of the political edifice that we hate-constituency building, gas-lighting, disinformation, eschewing belonging for creative division all become common-which end up eroding foundations, raising mistrust, and fixing toxic behaviors that run the risk of making the field that i’ve struggled to establish a modicum of valence, even more exclusive.