Opening questions and orientation: How is art made and valued, how does it happen? what are the institutional conditions? how does the artworld as a system work? what is the artworld network, its nodes, and effects?

• Lecture Notes: Contemporary Art: Introduction to Themes and Problems
• Artists Case Studies for the seminar: exemplary artists over the past 20 years.
• Image Resources: Web Album
• Major directions and works in contemporary art: across all media and categories
  • Plurality of genres, mediums, conceptual arguments:
  • From materials-based (assemblage, found materials, appropriation of objects) to conceptual art (idea of work independent from the material or medium in which it is manifest
• Recent museum exhibitions as case studies (consider museum presentations and contexts):
  • Edward Hopper (National Gallery of Art)
  • Takashi Murakami (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, MoCA-LA

Case Studies for Discussion: Artists and Institutions

• Kehinde Wiley: Studio visit interview | Image examples
• Jeffrey Deitch becoming new Director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA-LA): NYT, LA-Times.
• The Venice Biennale and the US Pavilion (2005, 2007): the Institutional Network

Readings/Sources

• Hopkins, Chaps. 1-2. Beginning a historical view of modern to contemporary art.
• Defining Contemporary Art: the "modern" and the "contemporary" as institutional categories
  • Donald Kuspit, "Introduction: A critical History of 20th Century Art," Artnet, 12.14.05.
  • Donald Kuspit, "The Contemporary and the Historical." Artnet, 4.14.2005.
  • Defining art after conceptual art: Joao Ribas review of Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003). Artnet, 1.12.04.
  • Howard Slater on Conceptual and Politic
• Introducing the Art Market: Ben Davis, "Art Class," Artnet, Aug. 2007.
• Art Now: Consider these artists who have defined current directions in art: Barney, Cattelan, Currin, Gursky, Hirst, Koons, Mehretu, Murakami, Ofili, Rist, Ruff, Sherman, Struth, Wall (to be studied more thoroughly later).
  • Gursky exhibition at MoMA
  • Murakami: MOCA-L

Orientation to major recognized movements from Modern to Contemporary

• Post-WWII shift of art capital to the US and New York
• Abstract Expressionism and color field abstraction
• Pop art (Warhol, Lichtenstein) and new categories of New York artists (Johns, Rauschenberg)
• Minimalism and geometric reductionism
• Conceptual art and performance art
• Feminist art and rise of sexual identity politics in art
• Materials and materiality: art based on conceptual encoding of materials (Rauschenberg, Serra, Shinque Smith, Shawne Major)
• Rise of photography a leading art medium: photography to post-photography
• The use of video and film: analog to digital and beyond

Lecture Notes: The Artworld Visual System, c.1950-c.1980

Visual System Matrix

• Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting | Pop Art | Minimal Art | Conceptual Art | Hybridity and Pluralism (1990s-present)
• Beginning to theorize: semiotic matrix of interdependent meaning and value, intermedia/presuppositions, artworld reception

Hirshhorn Museum, Examples from Installations, 2004-2009

Assignment

Student Presentation

Contextualizing "Contemporary Art:"
Recent Art History and the Ideologies of Narratives of Art

To understand Pop, Minimalism, and the Pluralism of the 1980s to the present, we need to confront the constant "elephant in the living room"--the ideologies surrounding Abstract Expressionism, one of the first fully ideological art movements in modern America.

"Art history" is never a neutral catalog of facts: like any social history, "art history" is constructed from the rules for description and narrative, and us usually presupposes a teleology, a goal-directedness from an origin to a future state.

Arthur Danto on "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"

"what they [post-Duchamp and NY pop works in the 1950s-1960s] are about is aboutness, and their content is the concept of art. The artists might as appropriately have written a paper like this, called it The Transfiguration of the Commonplace--and counted their effort a contribution to the philosophy of art, the line separating the two having all but vanished."

Readings/Sources

• Hopkins, Chaps. 3-4
• Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997): Chap. 1, "Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary," pp. 3-19. Another copy here.
• Arthur Danto, "Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1974)," and recent follow-on debates:
  • Series of papers re-evaluating Danto's original argument: Contemporary Aesthetics, 6 (2008).
• O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube [Also Web version]
• Essays by Clement Greenberg: Often Cited as Theorist and Apologist for Modernism in Art and champion of Abstract Expressionism.
  • "Avant Garde and Kitsch" (1939)
  • "Modernist Painting" (1960)
  • "Modern and Postmodern" (1979)
• Barbara Jaffee, "Jackson Pollock's industrial Expressionism," Art Journal, Winter, 2004.

Artist/Movement Focus: One of the most important chapters of modern American art history centers around the rise and institutionalization of Abstract Expressionism as a culmination of modernism. We need to comes to terms with why and how.

• Examples of works by the Abstract Expressionists (web slide album).
• Works by abstract expressionists in the Guggenheim Collection.
• Jackson Pollock
  • Video documentary by Ovation TV
  • Video Documentary clip (News Hour-Jim Lehrer).
  • Works by Pollock in the Artchive. | Pollock bio |
  • See the statements by Pollock from 1943 and 1947. Note comments about the scale and process of making a painting.
  • See introductory essay by Carolyn Kinder Carr, "Rebel Painters of the 1950s," National Portrait Gallery Exhibition
• Brice Marden on Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko (video documentary)

Discussion Questions

• Describe the work of the Ab-Ex artists in as many contexts of the artworld as possible. Consider the work as a node in the artworld network.
• Why was the reception of Ab-Ex so strong in the artworld from the late 1940s through the early 1960s? For many people, Ab-Ex remains a paradigm, even the paradigm, of American art.
• How does O'Doherty see the reception of these artists on the wall space of the art gallery?

Student Presentation

Core Seminar Topic:
An introduction to the social and institutional theories of Art and the Artworld

What makes art? Instead of forming questions like "what is art?" (an unrewarding essentialist question), we should ask "how is something art?" and "when/where is art?": "how" = the social and institutional contexts that make something art vs. non-art, "when" = the historical conditions, and "where" = the institutional and location/container as precondition for Art to appear as such to us at all.

All this adds up to the social institutions in which learned codes, conditions, and contexts for Art to be known and visible. Here is where we see "art" fulfilling a cultural category.

The modern and contemporary artworld thus expands the management of the category of "fine art" as it emerged in the 18th century.

Readings/Sources

• To understand the artworld as a social-economic system, we must also recognize the history behind the category of "fine art" as distinct from other kinds of material and cultural goods, crafts, and artisans.
  • The idea of "art" itself has a history. For an overview of the question and arguments, see David Clowney, "An Exploration of Some Ideas from Larry Shiner's The Invention of Art: A Cultural History" (review essay), Contemporary Aesthetics, 6, 2008.
• Seminar Notes: Intro to the Institutional Theory of Art and the Artworld (Irvine)
• Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy (1964); see especially sections 3 and 4.
• Arthur Danto, "Art and Meaning" from The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2000): xvii-xxx, 416-431.
• Finish O'Doherty, White Cube.
• Bourdieu and the value system of the Artworld
  • Bourdieu's key concepts: symbolic capital, cultural capital, social capital, economics of disavowal, collective misrecognition (of economic and social base).
  • See the Wikipedia summary of Bourdieu's theory of symbolic and cultural capital (though this summary is very incomplete) as part of a larger institutional view of the conditions for art.
  • Introductory readings (we will study Bourdieu's theories in more detail later):
  • Bourdieu on the "Forms of Capital" (html) (pdf version)
  • "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods" (book version) (article version). Bourdieu on the theory of symbolic goods and the economics of disavowal or "misrecognition" of material economy in symbolic capital.
• Simplified model of an artwork in the Artworld network (Irvine)
• Presentation: Introduction to the Artworld Institutional Network

Topics for Discussion

• Consider "Art History" (the academic discipline) as one of the institutional nodes in the artworld.
• Consider the issues of artworld and art market concentration, the nodal effects, network externalities in attracting more activity to the same node.
• Where does art happen? Cities as central nodes in the artworld network.
• New York's nodes: aggregating art capital in Chelsea: Downtown Express article (this is now out of date, but it described the concentration or aggregating effect of Chelsea as an artworld node)

Contemporary Art as Global Institution: Globalized Locations and Markets, and the Global Networked City Effect

• Richard Florida's essay, "The World is Spiky" (as opposed to Friedman's "flat") (Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2005). Also here.
• Richard Florida's work on the "creative class" in cities maps onto the artworld as an institution distributed through nodal cities. Creative Class Website.

Current Example: Shepard Fairey's Retrospective at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art

• Boston ICA site
• Consider the accrual of symbolic capital and the kinds of cultural capital required for this artist to have a major institutionally produced twenty-year career Retrospective now.
• The arrest and copyright fracas: ArtDaily summary.

Artist and Art Movement Focus: Andy Warhol and Pop Art

What are the institutional frames in which Pop emerged and through which it continues to be transmitted, defined, and valued?

• Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol, 7-68.
• What network of prior and contemporary art and artworld players gives Warhol's work its meaning? In the 1960s? Today? What was Warhol reacting against in other art movements?
• How did the artworld containers (galleries, museum) frame the meaning and reception of Warhol's works?
• Warhol ranking in Artfacts.Net's artist ranking list.
• Review of 2002 Retrospective (Artnet)
• Douglas Crimp, "Getting the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture." Invisible Culture, 1, 1999. [Useful review of debates on approaches to Warhol: art history, cultural studies, visual culture.]
• Thierry de Duve, "Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected," October 48 (1989).

Resources:

• The Warhol Museum | Warhol on Artnet | PBS Bio | Museum Images of Warhol's Work | Warhol at Dia |
• Warhol, List of Major Exhibitions, 1952-1987.
• Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction, February 1958. [the article often credited with starting the notion of "pop art"]
• Richard Hamilton, Letter on Pop Art, 1957.
• Warhol Articles and Interviews (Warhol Stars).

Student Presentation

Photography and film have been at the center of debates and theory about contemporary art and the status of images and representation since the Modern and Postmodern eras. This unit provides an orientation to some of the conceptual issues and the transition to the current status of photography as both the high art and popular media forms of today.

• Classic theory statements that have become part of the modern and postmodern consciousness about the contemporary social and economic conditions of art:
  • Revisiting Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" [another online copy]
    [For our context, substitute "digital" for "mechanical," and "production" for "reproduction" throughout the essay. This essay is often reprinted and anthologized.]
  • Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [focus on sections 1-6, 10-11, 17-18, 24-30]
    [Debord (see bio) founded the Situationist movement and was part of a circle of political writers and avant garde artists in France (main influence in the 1960s-70s). Everyone who writes about modernism and postmodernism knows this statement. Baudrillard's theory of simulation and hyperreality extends some of these ideas into the contemporary scene.]
• Compare Foucault on the "author function:" author/artist no longer viewed as authorizing or authenticating origin of a work.
  • Foucault, "The Author Function" (excerpt): how does this view change the theory of originals, authorship, uniqueness (and by extension, the role of the artist and status of art works?)
  • Foucault documents and texts at Foucault.info | Primary Texts
• Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," from Mythologies (1984).
• George Dillon, "Art and the Semiotics of Images," University of Washington, 1999.

An Introduction to Photography in the Contemporary Artworld

 

Introduction to Photography (Powerpoint presentation) (Irvine)

 

A major turning point in the institutionalization of photography as an art form in the history of art is the Metropolitan Museum's new gallery and department of photography, which includes many recent acquisitions of contemporary photography (1960-present). Many other museums have expanded their photography collections, expanded departments, and added curators to manage the expanding use of photography, film, and digital media in art today.

Historical Overviews from the Metropolitan Museum

History of Photography Resources	Pictorialism in America (1880s-1920) | Photography and Everyday Life (1945-60)
Photography Department, Metropolitan Museum	Alfred Stieglitz and American Photography (1860s-1946) | The Pictures Generation (1970s) | Photography in the Expanded Field (1960s-80s) | Conceptual Art and Photography
Introduction to Photography and the New Gallery at the Met	Art and Photography: 1980s | Art and Photography: 1990s-present |

Introductory Theory and Statements on Photography

• Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Statement on Photography" ("The Decisive Moment" theory), 1933.
• André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly, 1960. (Focus on pp. 6-9.)
• Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," from Image, Music, Text, 1964.
  • Göran Sonesson (Lund University), Discussion and critique of Barthes' "Rhetoric of the Image."
• Rosalind Krauss, "A Note on Photography and the Simulacral," October 31 (1984), especially pp. 55-62.
• Christian Metz, "Photography and Fetish," October 34, 1985.
• Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art
  • J. A. Gonzalez, "A Contemporary Look at Pierre Bourdieu's Photography: A Middle-Brow Art," Visual Anthropology Review, 8/1, 1992.
  • Review of Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art in Contemporary Sociology, 21, 1992.
  • Bourdieu's book is one of the most important statements on photography from a socio-historical viewpoint. These articles are a good review of Bourdieu's theory, which is also cited in the Krauss article.

Wiki discussion

"Anything can be art now or in the future--if it works--and there are no hierarchies of style except on the basis of past performances. All these are powerless to govern the future. What may have been the high style of one period becomes the kitsch of another." Who said this, and when?

Seminar Resources:

Postmodernism Node: Working with Postmodernism

Modernism to Postmodernism: Readings/Sources:

• Hopkins, Chaps. 6-7.
• Donald Kuspit, The Semiotic Anti-Subject, Artnet, 4.20.2001. [Essay on the postmodernisms (plural) in recent art.]
• Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations"
  • Baudrillard bio and bibliography at the European Graduate School
• Harrison & Wood: Introduction to Postmodernism section: 1013-17. Pierre Bourdieu, 1020-25; Peter Halley, "Nature and Culture," 1042-45. Artists' discussion, "From Criticism to Complicity," 1051-54.
• Hal Foster, "Re: Post" in Brian Wallis, Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984): 189-201.
• Fredric Jameson:
  • "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" from E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Postmodernism and its Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988): 13-29.
  • Selections from Chaps. 1 of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991).

Lecture Presentation: Art and Popular Culture: The Art and Fashion Node

Artist Focus: Major Women Photographers Since Postmodernism: Slide Library (Picasa)

Cindy Sherman (multiple identities, breaking the iconography of the female image and the "indexical" function of the photograph)

• Ovation TV Video Documentary
• Images on Masters of Photography site | Artcylopedia | Artnet works available
• Bio at Guggenheim | Works in Guggenheim Collection
• The Complete Untitled Film Stills at MoMA, NY
• Tate Magazine, Studio visit, interview, works
• Salon Magazine review (1997)

Nan Goldin (snap shot aesthetic, intimacy, blur between direct and staged shots, image and identity)

• Nan Goldin: Artnet (works and galleries)
• Nan Goldin in the Artcyclopedia
• Mia Fineman, "The Nan Goldin Story," Artnet, 12/96.
• Nan Goldin at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris
• Jerry Saltz, Review of show at Matthew Marks, Artnet, 2001.
• Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks Gallery, NY.
• Nan Goldin in the Guggenheim Museum | Bio at Guggenheim

Inez Van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin: Post-Postmodernism meets post-feminism (fashion, nudes, portraits,disrupting images of the body)

• Van Lamsweerde at Matthew Marks Gallery, NY
• With Air de Paris Gallery, Paris (click on artists' names)
• Work with Bjork: photography: "I Love Daria" ; video: Hidden Place

Wiki Discussion and Student Presentation

 

The artworld functions (mostly) through a binary logic (maintaining the distinction between art and non-art): we need to analyze the art/non-art cultural categories and their fungible (exchange) value. Following the lead of Pierre Bourdieu, we will consider these important topics:

1. cultural capital and symbolic goods
2. the "economics of disavowal," value creation by using a discourse of disinterestedness (detachment, non-engagement with money) for denying economics, money, and business in the production, marketing, and purchase of art works
3. the fungible value of art works: at various points in a value sequence (value chain), works of art can be purchased and valued at a dollar amount
4. the development of the artworld as a semi-autonomous field and economic sector

• Art business often succeeds (like academe) by pretending not to be doing what it is doing (creating symbolic capital at a market exchange price).
• The function of the "economics of disavowal" and negation of the economic, appearing disinterested in financial capital in order to accumulate symbolic capital.
• Development of art and the artworld as an autonomous field.

Readings/Sources

• Pierre Bourdieu:
  • "The Forms of Capital." [Original version, 1983; English trans., P. Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in John G. Richardson, editor, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 242-258.]
  • Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen, "On the Wealth of Nations: Bourdieuconomics and Social Capital," Theory and Society, Vol. 32, No. 5/6, (Dec., 2003), pp. 607-631. [Good introduction to Bourdieu's theory of multiple forms of capital and relevance for cultural wealth.]
  • The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 1-25, 29-40, 75-111, 112-141:
    • "Editor's Introduction"
    • "The Field of Cultural Production" (extract)
    • "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods"
    • "The Market of Symbolic Goods"
• Hopkins, chaps. 5-6
• Artfacts.net: introduction to one market methodology for tracking value:
  • Artfacts Artist Ranking
  • Top 100 Artists
  • How the Artfacts Ranking System Works

"Cracking the Art Value Code: Thinking with Bourdieu" (Irvine) (Presentation)

 

Seminar Notes: The "Art" vs. "Non-Art" Binary: Describing the Strategies for Maintaining the Cultural Category of "Art" (Irvine)

 

Art Market Cases:

• Useful Summary Coverage of Art Market Trends on Artnet Marketwatch
• Sotheby's Red Auction (Feb. 2008)
  • Artnet report
  • Sotheby's auction results
  • Art Daily Article
• YSL Collection, Christie's Paris Auction (March 2009)
  • Artnet Report
  • NY Times Report | Time Magazine Report
  • Christie's Auction Coverage | Christie's Auction Results

Artist Focus: Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Richard Prince

• Jeff Koons:
  • Interview with Koons, 1986
  • Artist's Website
  • Koons' works at the Guggenheim Museum
  • Koons at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris
  • Koons in the Art Market, 2000 and in 2004
  • Koons at Gagosian Gallery
  • Artnet listing of works currently available
  • Koons at "Red Auction": Artnet Report
  • Jeff Koons: Artfacts.net data
    
    
• Gerhard Richter Resource Page (Irvine)
  • Richter Seminar Notes (Irvine)
  • Artnet listing of works currently available in commercial galleries
  • Gerhard Richter: Artfacts.net data
• Richard Prince
  • Spiritual America Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, NY.
  • Artist's website
  • Richard Prince on Artnet
  • Richard Prince: Artfacts.net data

Assignment/Discussion Topics

For the wiki discussion, write about one of the artists for this week with the methodology of analyzing art value.

Student Presentations

Readings/Sources:

• Seminar Notes: Introduction: The Situation of the Art Museum Today (Irvine)
• Artworks and the Museum as Interfaces: Velasquez to the Google Art Project (new) (Irvine)
  

Backgrounds in Museum History and Ideology

• O'Doherty, White Cube (conclusions and bringing back into discussion)
• James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001): 8-45, 154-161, 166-67 (Anthony Gormley, European Field installation), 184-191.
  • See also images: Gormley 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
• Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996): Chap. 1 | Chap. 2 (pp. 3-37).
• Neil Harris, "The Divided House of the American Art Museum," Daedalus (Summer 1999: America's Museums) 128/3 (1999): 33-56.
• Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999): 9-21, 39-56, 87-112
• Larry Shiner, "Architecture vs. Art: The Aesthetics of Art Museum Design," Contemporary Aesthetics, 5 (2007).

Museums and the Meta-Museum: Beginnings of Institutional Critique:

• Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins." (1993). Google Books preview.

Resources:

• Directory of Art Museums: International

---

Case Studies

• The Guggenheim Museums as Case Study
• Recent Guggenheim News (view Google news articles): Lisa Dennison left for Sotheby's, Thomas Krens departs: end of an era.
• Dia Beacon: New Center for Art of the 1960s-1990s
  • Dia Beacon site
  • New York Times review, Oct. 2003
  • Michael Kimmelman, "The Dia Generation," New York Times Magazine, April 6, 2003.
• The new Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY
  • MoMA site
  • Arthur Lubow, "Re-Moderning," New York Times Magazine, Oct. 3, 2004.
  • David Leonhardt,"The Shock of the New Entry Fee," NYT, Sept. 26, 2004.

© Murakami @ MOCA-LA-Geffen Contemporary:
Museum Exhibition Case Study: Follow the Money and Symbolic Capital

© Murakami is made possible by endowment support from the Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment. The exhibition and publication are made possible by generous support from Maria and Bill Bell. Major support is provided by Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Generous additional support is provided by Steven and Alexandra Cohen; Kathi and Gary Cypres; Gagosian Gallery; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami; The Norton Family Foundation; Dallas Price-Van Breda; Janet and Tom Unterman; Ruth and Jacob Bloom; Marianne Boesky; David Teiger; The MOCA Contemporaries; The Japan Foundation; and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

• Museum Site (watch videos; see Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton) | Brooklyn Museum exhibition site
• KaiKai Kiki Company, Japan
• Murakami and fashion (NYT): collaboration with Luis Vuitton for a boutique in the museum exhibition
• Reviews of MOCA-LA show: Artnet review | NYTimes background on dealers contributions to museum show | All NYTimes articles on Murakami |
• Artnet: Works in Galleries
• Review of 1999 Show (Jerry Saltz)
• Review of "Superflat," 2001

Wiki and Student Presentations

The main sectors of the artworld "value system": art schools, dealers & galleries, museums and "non-profit" art exhibition spaces, art fair exhibition organizations and venues, auction houses, art media (press, publications, published commentary and criticism). How is value created in the whole networked economy?

Readings/Sources

• William D. Grampp, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1989), Introduction and Chap. 1, 3-39
• Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), Introduction and Chap. 1, 1-43.
• Note "art market" coverage in the art press and news media:
  • Artnet Artmarket Watch

Lecture Notes and Seminar Outlines:

• Introduction to Art Market Economics (Irvine)
• Economic Impact Studies of the Various Arts Sectors (Irvine)
  • The Economic Impact of the Arts (Museums, Galleries, Visual Arts activity and business)
• Public and Institutional Funding of the Arts and the Role of Art Bureaucracies
• The Structure of the Art Economy: size, sectors, sub-sectors: the Unmapped Economic Network (Irvine)

The Gallery and Primary Art Market System

• Art galleries and the art value system
• The role of art fairs: concentration of information, network economies, and transaction costs
• Coverage of Art Basel. Art Basel-Miami Beach, and other fairs
• The Art Newspaper
• Economist (Nov. 2009): "How to Make Art History."

Art Industry Case Study: The Whitney Biennials

The Whitney Biennial discloses the various nodes in the artworld economic network: see the funders list (which is only a small party of the story, since the value chain creators have been the artists' dealers, galleries, collectors, and prior artworld contexts that allowed them to be visible to the museum curators per se.)

• Whitney Biennial Site | The artists in the 2008 Biennial | The Whitney's own press list | Whitney Podcast (mp3 stream) |
• Reviews and comments: NYT review | (see the interactive 360 video feature) | Artnet review | Newsday Review | New Yorker | New York Magazine
• Curators for the 2010 Biennial (NYT)
• The 2006 Biennial

Biennials, Art Fairs, Museum Exhibitions as Institutions of Value

• The Venice Biennale and the US Pavilion (2005, 2007): the Institutional Network
  

Student Presentations

The traditional business question, "What's the Value Proposition," also applies to art and cultural goods.

The "art value chain:" the network of value exchanges. How the system of symbolic capital circulates and creates fungible value.

Readings/Sources

• Dave Hickey, "Frivolity and Unction" in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997): 61-72, 199-209. [countering the moral views of art as "good for you."]
• Grampp, Pricing the Priceless, Chap. 2, "The Acquisition of Art," and Chap. 4, "The Art Market": 40-78, 123-166.
• Robert Lacy, Sotheby's: Bidding for Class (Boston, New York: Little, Brown, 1998), 255-61; 270-71.
• András Szántó, "The Business of Art," American Prospect, 11/8, February 28, 2000 [critique of aspects of the art business]
  

The Art Value Chain and the Art Economy Network (Irvine)

"Cracking the Art Value Code: Thinking with Bourdieu" (Irvine) (Presentation)

Online Art Market Sources

• The Mei-Moses Art Index (ArtAsAnAsset.com)
  
• Artnet
• Latest news on the Art Market (Artnet)
• Art Auction Reports (Artnet)
• Artnet Art Market Watch articles
• "How to Value Art," Artnet Auction site
  
• Artprice
  • Artprice Art Market Insight reports [see latest market and auction coverage]
  • Art Market Trends 2004 (annual report); Trends 2005
  • Artworks sold twice on art market: prices from 1st to second sale
• New York Times Art Market Coverage
• Artfacts.net
  • Artist Ranking
  • Econometric model used for Artfacts.net ranking system
  • Artfacts.net short essay on the structure of the art market

Auctions and Results from the Auction Houses

• Art Auction Reports (Artnet)

Case studies:

Picasso's "Boy With Pipe". Compare the background on the sale of Van Gogh's "Irises" at Sotheby's in 1987 and its effect on the art market (in Lacy, Sotheby's). See:New York Times, May 7, 2004 Artnet review of Sotheby's sale (Art Market Watch, 5/6/04).

Student Presentations

The function of media criticism in the matrix of relations with galleries, collectors, museums, auction houses. The kinds of art discourse and how they constitute art objects and how people know them.

Readings

• Review presentation on "Cracking the Art Value Code: Thinking with Bourdieu" (Irvine)
• Seminar Intro (read first): The Universe of Art Discourse and the Construction of Art as an Object (Irvine)
• Dave Hickey, "Air Guitar" in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997): 163-171.

Become familiar with the major art journals and magazines:

• Major Art Publications (Course Art Sources)
• List of major art periodicals (Artnet)
• Compare print magazines with their websites:
  • Artforum
  • Art in America
  • ARTnews
  • The Art Newspaper (London)
• Role of Web news aggregators for the art industry:
  • Artnet.com
  • Artinfo.com
  • Artfacts.net

For seminar discussion:

• Review copies of the latest issues of ARTnews, Artforum, Art in America, Art Newspaper (London).
• Other influential art writing in The New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine.
  • Compare with levels of discourse in The Washington Post and other regional papers.
• Art criticism in the art press has become something like analysts reports from investment firms (eagerly involved in influencing the marketplace and tied in with gallery advertising).
• How journalistic art criticism constructs its objects: news writing templates, style, audience, idea of  "news coverage," arts and personality journalism (cover the artist, not the art), positioning art as middle class accessory, celebrity and fashion, art and luxury goods co-branding.
• Discuss the function of major magazines and journalistic styles:
  • ARTnews, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art (and companion websites)
  • Art criticism in the major newspapers and weeklies (NYT, New Yorker, Time, New Republic, Village Voice, etc.)
  • What kind of advertising?
• Websites as magazines for art: Artnet, Artinfo, etc.
• Some major art critics and their influence: Roberta Smith and Michael Kimmelman (NYT); Jerry Saltz (Formerly Voice now New York, Artnet)
• Artforum vs. October: Supposed "collusion" of art criticism and publication with commercial art interest occasioned founding of October journal and left-leaning critics abandoning Artforum in 1976.
• Review and discussion of Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews; major newspaper and newsweekly critics.
• Common art discourse and the circle of "collective institutional misrecognition" (Bourdieu): how does the pressure to maintain "common sense" discourse work to repress questions and challenges proposed by other (theoretical) discourses?

Student Wiki Presentations

Photography is the medium of our time: almost all other image-making--and abstraction--assumes the photographic image as a reference point, source, or implied comparison.

Photography has a more recent history in the "fine art" world: the art collector's market and serious museum acquisitions emerged gradually from the 1970s to the present. Now, it's taken for granted. Consider: the adoption of some kinds of photography within the art category, and emergence of the photography market in contemporary art. The cross-over and merging of sectors in photography: artworld, fashion, design, architecture, advertising, popular media (film and television).

Important points: it's not useful to talk about "photography" in general: we should ask, what are the social uses of the photograph, what genre of a photograph are we dealing with, how do genres of photographs and arguments about photography play out in the artworld and the art value system?

Readings and Sources

• Campany, Art and Photography, Preface and Introduction. pp. 1-41.
• Introduction to Photography (Optics to Post-Photography) (Irvine)
• Photography to Post-Photography and the Hybrid Image [Resource Page] (Irvine)
• Photo Gallery Slide Show: Contemporary Photography Examples

Important arguments and theory about the role of the photographic image

• Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Statement on Photography" ("The Decisive Moment" theory), 1933.
• André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly, 1960. (Focus on pp. 6-9.)
• Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," from Image, Music, Text, 1964.
• Douglas Crimp, "The Photographic Activity of Post-Modernism," October 15, 1980.
• Christian Metz, "Photography and Fetish," October 34, 1985.
• Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. See especially Part 1, sec. 2. pp. 73-75 on "The Social Defibition of Photography."

Some Key Topics for Discussion:

Genres, styles, approaches, arguments within the practices of contemporary photography

• Street Photography: modern exemplars: Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand
  • Robert Frank: The Americans: first published in 1958, a turning point for modern photogarphy
    • Wikipedia background | National Gallery site | Frank in context: the Modern Photography Book (NGA) |
  • Winogrand background
  • On Gary Winogrand's Figments from the Real World
• "Snapshot esthetic": Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Wolfgang Tillmans
• Conceptual composition and use of scale: Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer.
• Post-digital scale, staging, cinema effects, narrative: Gregory Crewdson (on Artnet), Kahn & Selesnick (at Irvine), Anthony Goicolea (on Artnet), Philip-Lorca Dicorcia (on Artnet)
• Post-digital, post-pop, post-fashion fusion new definitions: AES+F Group,
• New interpretations of portraits and intimate narratives: Kelli Connell (at Yossi Milo), Nikki S. Lee, Alec Soth (at Magnum Photos), Tina Barney (on Artnet)
• Artworld fusion with fashion, portrait, glamour, eroticism, fetish: Mert Atlas and Marcus Piggott, Inez van Lamsweerde, David LaChapelle, Marla Rutherford
• Global identity, political portraits: Shirin Neshat, Zhang Huan, Pieter Hugo
• Digital and "post-photography" photography: photographic images made with and without a camera or lens, the role of digital production.

Art Market Sources and Information

• AIPAD: Association of International Photography Dealers
• Auction Houses (Photography Departments and auctions): Sotheby's | Christie's | Phillips

DVD-video on various artists and their studio practice (from Photography Contacts Series and PBS Art21 series): in class

Student Wiki Discussion

The "visual culture studies" debate in the artworld: Can the study of visual art and the artworld be subsumed under the new field of "visual culture studies"? Consider the contexts, debates, theory traditions.

The ongoing hybridization of genres, materials, and high/low cultural sources is one aspect of the real-time artworld that corresponds to the "visual culture" debates.

This "always already" hybridity and cross-mediality of today's visual culture and the artworld may be one way of arriving at a post-postmodern view that does more than recycle the old debates about modernism and postmodernism.

Is this consolidation of art theory useful to the institutions of the artworld beyond careers in academe?

Readings/Sources

Required

• Seminar Notes: Introduction to Art and Visual Culture (Irvine)
• Visual Culture Studies: Inventory of Definitions
• Visual Culture Studies: Discipline Map
• Kevin Bamhurst, et. al., "Mapping Visual Studies," Journal of Communication, Dec. 2004.
• W.J.T. Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin, 78/4, Dec. 1995.
• Definitions of Visual Culture from the University of Wisconsin program on Visual Culture
• Nicholas Mirzoeff, "What is Visual Culture," from The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff.
• Irit Rogoff, "Studying Visual Culture," from The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff.
• The October Debate (1996): Art History and Art Theory Critique Visual Studies
  • Note the professional-institutional turf battle going on in the discourse and arguments: who is legitimized or authorized to speak about "art," "culture," "the visual;" what discourses are validated as constructing the "right" objects of inquiry and knowledge for the academic discipline implicated in "visual culture studies"?
  • October, 77 (1996): Introduction (Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster)
  • Visual Studies Questionnaire (ed. Rosalind Krauss, et al.) [Professional academics critique the trend of visual culture studies in art history and the humanities.]
  • Rosalind Krauss, "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution." October, 77 (1966). [Art historian and art theorist's critique of "visual culture studies."]

Recommended: Additional Reading and Theory Resources

• Visual Semiotics | Pictorial Semiotics: Intro and Theory Resources
• The Ongoing Question of Representation: Donald Kuspit, "The Matrix of Sensations," Artnet, 2005.
• Visual Culture Slide Show

Student Presentation

Final Wiki Project Instructions

Group review of Wiki content and presentation of final Wiki project ideas.