Look At Me: The Artist & The Need For Recognition

In mid Feb a local artist smashed an Ai Weiwei art piece worth a million dollars. The spontaneous act of nerd rage/artist rage/extreme FOMO (you pick) happened at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where Maximo Caminero, a Dominican born artist, was so overcome by the vases that he was possessed by the devil and threw it on the floor.

A while before that Joburg also saw the great Facebook feud between MJ Turpin and Nicholas Christowitz (and sundry others) over a feature on Braamfontein, sponsored by Sprite and The Fader, that did not include the three independent local galleries in the neighborhood: ROOM, the Kalashnikovv Gallery, and the Ithuba Arts Fund.

This might be old news now, but it’s something that got me thinking about the way we think about artists and more importantly, the way they think about themselves.

In the past it was not uncommon for an artist or writer, whom  we now revere, to die in anonymity. Franz Kafka, after whom we have named a part of the English lexicon, died mostly unpublished and largely ignored. Vincent van Gogh died in abject poverty, yet today his art fetches stupid amounts of money at auctions and is revered among art lovers the world over.

Today artists are pretty close to being rock stars. Artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are coining it. Takashi Murakami is so well known and prolific his work can be seen being incorporated into the commercial world. His work for fashion house Louis Vuitton can be seen as one of the prime examples of how he blurs the line between high, low art and the mass production commercial side of the creative world.

The reason that Maximo Caminero gave for smashing the vase was that it was a statement about the fact that the gallery does not  give exposure to local artists. MJ basically levelled the same accusation towards The Fader and We Are Awesome.

 

The vesica art blog speculates a shift from traditional values of  trying to find an almost divine beauty, to a more egocentric approach to art. It is about what the artist sees and feels, and what they want. This often involves depicting people they admire (see Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe diptych).

However, art is almost a reflection of the zeitgeist it finds itself in. This drive for critical acclaim from the offset can perhaps be seen as a symptom of the ever increasing drive for material success that the world as a whole has shifted to. Not to mention our increasing narcissism. In his book The App Generation, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner makes the claim that young people spend 80% of their time on social media talking about themselves. That is narcissism on an almost sociopathic level.

Could contemporary art be a new outlet for the “look at me” generation? An Instagram for the culturally inclined? Look at me, look how arty I am. But most important, give me money. I don’t want a traditional 9 to 5 like my daddy. I want to spread my beautiful butterfly wings. With this kind of lust to be seen and talked about, not to mention that even artists need to put bread on the table, is it any surprise that local and emerging artists want to be seen?

In the great Facebook “throwdown”, Nick made the comment that, “The internet is always fun until it ignores someone”. It’s a statement that rings very true. We want to  be seen: as successful, as cool, even as laughingstocks (most YouTube sensations are sensations for looking like dumbasses, after all), and in the age where information is disseminated around the world in seconds is it too much to ask that people are allowed to say, “Hey, here we are, support us”? Etsy and to an extent deviantart are whole websites dedicated to facilitating this mentality.

We don’t even need galleries anymore.

That is not to say that they don’t have their place, as a way to exhibit the exceptional amongst the mediocre that becomes the norm in the wake of the democratization of creativity. This raises more questions: Were the galleries in Braam excluded due to time availability constraints (as was suggested by We Are Awesome’s Andrew Berry) or because they were not seen as being as important a facet of the community as some of the featured venues and businesses? Are Maximo and the other Miami based artists being overlooked because of international bias, or because they are kak?