Richard Prince on the Paintings of Bob Dylan

Richard Prince’s remarks about the paintings of Bob Dylan recently appeared in a blog published by The New York Review of Books, of all places. This is the staid literary/political mag that used to run simple-minded attacks on Andy Warhol by Robert Hughes, the blunderbuss from Down Under. Did I say simple-minded? Simple-mindedly vicious is more like it. It was as if the world could be made safe for middle-brow solemnity if only The New York Review of Books was snotty enough about Warhol. And now they’re showcasing the faux-hip ramblings of Richard Prince, one of the many faux-Warhols who sprouted like mushrooms in the darkness that came over the New York art world in the 1980s. Did I say faux-Warhol? Sub-Warhol would be more like it. Prince performs as many of Warhol’s tricks as he can manage. The trouble is that he considers them tricks. That is because he is too mediocre in mind and spirit to understand Warhol’s gambits as the subtle plays of irony that they were. Am I being vicious? Yes, Your Honor. Guilty as charged. But I would argue in extenuation that I am not being simple-mindedly vicious, as you will see if you work out the distinction I have made, between Warhol’s still-surprising brilliance and Prince’s rule-bound predictability..
.
Prince’s remarks, which appear in the catalog of Dylan’s recent show at Gagosian, are online at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/05/richard-prince-bob-dylan-fugitive-art/.
.
In any case, Bob Dylan’s paintings are not bad. He can’t draw but, then, who can? His brushwork is earnest and scratchy. His colors are glum. His compositions, his handling of depth—it’s all respectable but dull. He takes his subjects from daily life in the Far East and presents them from the outside—a slide show of the exotic. So this is the picturesque in a down mood. For a look at Dylan’s paintings, see the Gagosian website. This was not an especially interesting show. What’s interesting is the light it shines on the notion of value in art..
.
In recent years, Gagosian has offered exhibitions of work by artists most people would consider major: Picasso, de Kooning, Lichtenstein. He also shows such mediocrities as Richard Prince and John Currin. You see disparities like this at all the powerhouse galleries—Pace, Zwirner, and so on. The usual understanding is that the lousy artists gain some luster from their proximity to great artists. And indeed they do. Thus you hear people saying, well, Currin is no Picasso but Gagosian shows them both, so maybe Currin is better than I think he is. After all, Gagosian is very bright and he’s supporting Currin so it’s possible, I guess, that Currin is really great and I just can’t see it. Anyway, shows at Gagosian are big events, so why not just drop by, check it out, suspend judgment . . . at least I won’t be swimming against any powerful art-world currents . . . .
.
Understood this way, the proximity of bad artists to great ones in major galleries is a problem of aesthetic value: the bad artists tend to be overestimated. But Bob Dylan’s appearance on the Gagosian roster shows that the problem is far worse than that. At the art world’s upper levels, aesthetic value is no longer at stake. What counts is the strength of the brand. Dylan’s is very strong. Arguably, it is stronger than Picasso’s. That is what got him into the Gagosian Gallery. And what earned de Kooning’s paintings a place on Gagosian’s walls? De Kooning’s splendid brushwork? No, the strength of the de Kooning brand. This artist’s greatness as a painter is beside the point. Likewise, Currin’s badness is beside the point. Richard Prince’s sheer cheesiness is beside the point. The point is that Richard Prince, like John Currin, is a brand. Their brands are not as big as Dylan’s or de Kooning’s but they’re big enough to be profitable for Gagosian. That’s why he shows them. Aesthetic value has nothing to do with it.

The High-End Art World-2

In an earlier post , I suggested that the high-end art world is a work of the imagination. Whose imagination? That is difficult to say, for this art world is the product of many imaginations working together—dealers working with collectors, collectors working with artists, artists working with critics and curators and museum directors. All them interacting in every possible permutation. For the high-end art world is an environmental niche where certain forms of life evolve and thrive, and it is through such interactions that such niches are created and sustained. So far, so good. The dynamics of the high-end art world are no different, in principle, from those of any social environment. But, here's the thing. If we view a social environment as a work of the imagination, a collaborative artwork, a question arises: what is its medium? A painter uses paints. A sculptor of a certain sort uses uses sheets of cold-rolled steel. What, then, is the medium of the high-end art world? What else but works of high-end art—pricey items by the likes of Jeff Koons. Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, et al.
.
The problem, of course, is that works of art are difficult to see as raw materials, unformed globs of stuff equivalent to globs of paint squeezed from a tube. So the primary job of critics and curators—not to mention the anonymous functionaries who write press releases and wall labels—is to simplify the meanings of the pertinent artworks to the point where they can be seen as raw materials. In the high-end art world, interpretation is simplification, the more brutal the better. The goal is to produce a slogan that can be attached to an artist's oeuvre firmly enough to block the demand for any more nuanced response. So the policy of raising prices to nonsensical levels has a hidden cost. It reduces works of art to empty counters in an ultimately empty game.

Ghost Meets Manchurian Candidate

Robert Altman's The Player is one my all-time favs among movies, so I was happy to see it celebrated in The New York Times the other day. The clip posted by The Times includes the great opening scene, an unbelievably long pan that shows, amid all the other activity in this sunny ant farm, shots of screenwriters pitching movie ideas to producers. The movie biz demands, absolutely, that the new must be old. The innovative is the tried and the true remixed--Frankenstein reassembled or should we say resutured? So the writers talk of "Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate" and "Psycho meets Gidget Goes Hawaiian." And so on. The possibilities are so very endless that they have spilled over into the art world. Thus Richard Prince's one-line joke paintings are Henny Youngman meets Generic Monochrome. Jeff Koons's new paintings, mentioned in an earlier post , are Sue Williams meets Alain Jacquet, a Nouveau Realiste from the 1960s. As for Damien Hirst's new paintings, Nothing Matters, these are Early Francis Bacon meets Later Francis Bacon. What does it all mean? It means that in the high-end art world, art is product. But we knew that already. Old Thought meets New Examples. Insight recycled--or, shall we say, resutured?