Anastasia Hayes: The Artists Take New York

I appreciate the selection from Ada Calhoun’s St. Marks is Dead as it complicated the idea of “downtown.” As much as it was a space for libertines who ushered in important new artistic movements, it was also the scene of displacement. The “day people” were overwhelmed by a group whose way of life was completely at odds with their own. It illuminates some of the tensions inherent in art: it can cloak itself in elevated language while engaging in some less-than-appealing behaviors. I found that the New York Times article on the galleries of the sixties added another element to consider when thinking about the arts in their modern incarnation. The arts should be all about unlimited creativity yet galleries become slaves to trends, excluding those with different visions because their work won’t sell in the same way. Returning to my earlier consideration of places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and how they are defined both by the people behind the museum and the people who visit it, it becomes essential to reflect on the role of economics. Museums, for all of their devotion to preserving our cultural legacy, must also make money. It is essential to keep that in mind when surveying the collections and thinking about how each object, piece, etc. earned an inclusion. It also reminds me of a recent article I read on Damien Hirst’s plans to retake the art world at the Venice Biennale. He had previously alienated collectors when he flooded the market with his pieces, bringing down the value of his work. This struck me as fascinating. If something is truly a work of art, shouldn’t its value be absolute? Apparently not, as Hirst collectors have begun to call for a catalogue of the artist’s total output so as to be to determine a piece’s merit relative to the whole.

On a whole, I have been forced to reconsider where I envision myself in the 1960s. My first impulse was to seek out the life of an artist on a street like St. Marks, swept off my feet by visions of living next to W.H. Auden and being “just a kid” like Patti Smith. While I still want to see myself as arts-adjacent at least, I’m no longer so convinced that I could’ve been a Bohemian, faux or no. The creative world is  far more cynical than it can seem from the outside.

P.S. Interesting article on Donald Trump and the Arts. I find it interesting to think about how one’s relationship to art can be weaponized. It’s of course a tragedy that the president seems to have very little regard for them but there was a note of compassionless elitism in one of the censures I read toward him. The writer sneered at Trump for only having a reproduction of a masterpiece, instead of buying an original for himself. In this way, art becomes less about what actually appeals to us and more about communicating our status to others.