(To reiterate: this is much more a platform for me to sort every thing out, than it is specifically intended for you, the viewer. This post will change, at random times, when new connections are made, when I have more time to research and edit. Try refreshing the page, it may have updated already)
DRAFT—->
The Idea: We’re at the end of art for art’s sake. Not the end of Art, that’s still happening. Yet just as the Avant-Garde of Greenberg turned away from the Bourgeois and separated themselves from popular society, so too is today’s community of artists now turning away from the Art World, back towards the society of culture.
The Art World grew out of the Avant-Garde’s desire to separate itself from popular culture in a desperate attempt to preserve the notion of ‘Fine Art’ to spite (or in spite of?) the homogenization of taste of the popular culture. It built walls, and painted them white, and built a value system and a business model. From the successes of post-modernist art – ‘Art’ as an industry – grew institutions for art education. The exponential grow of these institutions has solidified the notion of ‘Art’ that Greenberg’s Avant-Garde so desperately sought.
This new Institution of Art has bred an entire class of citizens who have been formally trained in the discipline of modern art – art for art’s sake – within the context of the Art World. Now that this institution supports the ideals so effectively, the walls of the gallery are becoming less important. Today’s art experiences are exploding from within the white walls, they are no longer needed.
Instead, today we see a dramatic turn towards community in art, a turn back towards the populis culture which the Avant-Garde disregarded. Sometimes in an attempt to have a conversation with it, other times in a desperate creative act to form a community around itself. Engagement with community is essential for this modern experience of art, to define and reinforce it. The modern Art Community is watching as communities of artists take the place of a system of galleries and critics, to define and reinforce the denial of the Art World.
Today’s art more and more finds itself in a world where it no longer needs (nor often times has much use for ) the Art World. Technology fills in most of the logistic gaps a gallery traditionally fulfilled, and in some cases is much more effective than the established business model (Zoe Strauss, ArtBlog eg.) Where there is still something lacking, such as a community to consume their art, artists are forming collective and collective exhibition space where art is made for artists sake. And as these communities grow they effect the physical communities they are approximated to, cultural lines begin to blur and community art begins to once again engage the populous.
An entire class of citizens has emerged from the growth of educational institutions for art. In Philadelphia these institutions abound, and droves of young artists make their way to the city each year. And they stay. This city has an enormous population of young creatives, independent workers, crafters, artists, and producers. They form communities and rent space. They get together and make things. They create an inertia, a standard for production, and are growing into a critical mass in pockets throughout the city.
This mass has an integrated geography aiding and abeding its growth. Old City as the established location for gallery-style Art World also houses Indy Hall, an independent Technology Co-working Facility, along with a scatterings of collaborative exhibition spaces emerge (Jewish Arts Center, Clay Studio, Fuse). Chinatown is home to a rich group of Collective-space communities like N. 111th Street and 1024. With its central location right between Old City and Center City, Chinatown is an ideal space for artists from all over the city to come together and create. South Philadelphia’s row-home neighborhoods houses the artists, many of whom traverse the city daily from top to bottom. They bike and transit to North Philadelphia from South, to areas like Fishtown and Kensington where warehouse space is cheaply available.
Undoubtedly Philadelphia’s proximity to New York City, the official headquarters of the Art World in America, give it an advantage. As much as this community of artists is struggling to re-create their discipline, they still rely on that scene to define a context, a raison de etre. Just as the Avant-Garde before them defined themselves against the Bouigeouis as they emigrated to Bohemia, so too is the important movement in art taking up residence in the cost-efficent regional geography that is Philadelphia in a denial of the over-priced, over blown, insufficent art community of New York City. Separate, but not too far to continue the conversation, or the ongoing negotiation of terms with which both might co-exist or become something altoghether different.
This separation from the stronghold of the Art World is comfortable enough to sustain the act of re-creation. The city’s geography and low-investment (low-stakes?) lifestyle allows artists to more effectively seek out that which this community of art needs to define itself, sustain itself, and realize its purpose. This is a self-aware art which does not rely on much outside of collaborative exhibition space, has little money flowing through it, and thus less ego.
Yet this community of artists is now realizing that what it’s lacking might be a body of criticism. A way to educate an audience, expose its creative energy, perhaps even form a business model to define its cultural and societal context. This change must come from an educated group of citizens working from and with the same assumptions the artists that form these communities were educated upon – those of the Art World its seeking to distinguish itself from. Herein lies the challenge – re-creating a discipline using an archaic set of tools, a less and less satifying means of communication, a used-up language that doesn’t quite do the trick any longer.
(Perhaps as Libby observes the community of art needs a couch and an analyist to sort itself out? heh)
