#mat gleason

[linusquotes]

— Mat Gleason  

Linus Quotes

[mhtedford-blog-blog]

Galleries, Labor and the Market

Critic and gallerist Mat Gleason recently penned a Huffington Post blog comparing art galleries and labor unions. His argument misrepresents the role of each in their respective industries, and in doing so he commits a disservice to artists.

Gleason's argument goes something like this: Labor unions negotiate with management in order to ensure the best possible wages and conditions for workers; similarly, gallerists negotiate with collectors to ensure the highest prices for works of art, which benefits artists. He then explicitly compares the Teamsters and Gagosian.

It's true that gallerists like to keep prices as high as possible, but so does Ford and any other capitalist. High prices for cars and paintings can result in higher wages for laborers and artists, but it's not guaranteed and it does not preclude exploitation. Labor unions exist to advocate on behalf of the workers with those they immediately sell their labor too. Gleason's reasoning would lead us to calling Ford a labor union. It's a remarkable argument.

An artists union would negotiate directly with Gleason and Gagosian on their behalf to ensure, for example, that the gallery doesn't take 50 percent of a work's sale price or that they provide health benefits to their artists. Such a union might also advocate on the behalf of gallery staff, who often earn terrible wages and receive no benefits. They would certainly take issue with the endemic use of free, exploitative and often illegal intern labor, which can have a deleterious effect on wages, employment and social mobility.

Earlier this year Teamsters Local 814 successfully fought on the behalf of Sotheby's art handlers to end a 10-month lockout and ensure modest wage guarantees at the auction house that conducts billions of dollars in sales. Are gallerists expected to picket themselves when their employees are unhappy? Is there reason to believe that gallerists are qualitatively different from business owners in other industries and should thus be entrusted with advocating for the rights of the labor they purchase? A fanciful notion indeed.

Car manufacturers and gallerists both have a role to play in society. They should not be vilified unless they do something villainous. But their should not be confused with those of others. They are both businesses that exist to make a profit for their stakeholders. Some businesses attain this goal ethically, some do not. Labor unions, NGOs, government regulators, lawyers and others can help level the playing field for workers who are at an extreme strategic disadvantage by themselves. At a time when wages are stagnant or declining, debt is skyrocketing, subsistence is becoming more difficult to ensure, it is irresponsible for Gleason to conflate management and advocacy, foreclosing on the possibility of economic equity in the art market.

[artcomingoutofmyfists]

"In the struggle to find a creative process that satisfies an artist, every creative person refines their way of thinking and develops their technique to reveal this pattern of thought as it becomes more honed. The individual creator visually articulates what it is that so deservedly ends up on canvas and the point is approached where theory can only take the artist so far. There has to be the struggle in the studio to produce the step beyond theory, to deliver a new world."

[postspecificpost]

It's a shame to have to repeat anything written by Los Angeles-based Mat Gleason, but these words do reaffirm the very point of contention that has been occupying threads of my most recent conversations.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Gleason glibly waxes over the pitfalls of the Western art world including this sentiment here:

"A painter struggles in his or her studio with a stack of canvasses, tubes of oil paints and nothing but time. It is a romantic vision we can all accept. It is also pretty much the only way that great painting takes place. But ask an art writer to write about your art and they want $3 a word. Where is the romance and pursuit of pure artistic vision for the writer?"

Initially blinded by the ridiculous notion that writers should not be paid out of some romantic pursuit of artistic vision, I completely overlooked this portrait of the "Artist." Summoned here as some literary trope, the Artist in all seriousness appears sequestered away in a private studio struggling with all those tubes of oil paint.

Gleason's a hack, but unfortunately he is also reflecting and reaffirming a dominant perspective that sits at the bane of being in the arts in the 21st century.

The inherent value of being a functioning member of the arts today sits in the shape of some deformed hierarchy, existing only as relations and reactions to the past or those who keep vigil of the past. I have been hearing and dishing my fair share of grand delusions and exhausted dejections about the arts, but they often oscillate as lamentations on surface issues. It's hardly disputable that arts funding is vanishing and art collectors are losing their minds, but these protestations are analogous to weeping over band-aid repairs for a palliative patient.

The structure and our reassertion of contemporary art and its function have become so nuanced and inbred that distinctions of myth and reality perpetuate each other. The primary attack of the arts is a disdain for elitist fodder, and the primary defense of the arts is the advocacy for specialized knowledge. Word choices aside, the very definition of "art" has been flattened into two sides of the same coin. This character of the serious and enlightened artist living on the fringes of society exists as both the hero and the villain, and he (and it's still usually a he) is not much more than a scapegoat, "special" by default rather than understood by any active connections to social contexts.

It's time to consider mythologizing another type of bildungsroman if we are still searching and advocating for the value of art, a value that cannot be diminished and determined by funding cuts and inflated speculations. Reassessing our modes of distribution is one way to start . . .

[justanotherpaintingblog-blog]