by Sam Schultz
Three things happened this month that have furthered my belief that the art scene is imploding.
1. On Monday, December 1st longtime Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight posted on social media that his current column would be his last. Knight is known as one of the last remaining critics of the old guard willing to write a negative review, and now with the collapse of his column Los Angeles is slated to lose one of its last remaining actually critical critics. It stands to be seen if any of the regional arts publications will pick up the baton, but considering their advertising comes from the very institutions whose ire they’d have to risk to do so, the outlook is not good.
2. Several days before Knight’s announcement, Francis Stark, the well-regarded LA-based multimedia artist represented by no less than Barbara Gladstone, greengrassi, and Galerie Buchholz posted her own update on social media of a photograph of her flipping off the camera with the quote “35 years of my life I gave to this stupid art world and I’m left with literally nothing.”
3. And, weeks before that, in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s becoming mayor-elect of New York, comedic art critic and influencer Jerry Gogosian posted a social media critique of the art world turning “socialist” (a post she later deleted). There was an immense backlash and she followed up by posting that she now believes that she has been “canceled” by the art world.
What is happening here other than too many people are having personal freak-outs on their Instagram accounts? I see two things happening…
First, there seems to be an idea among the people within the art world, that the art world owes them something. That the time and effort they spent giving to an industry should in some way be rewarded.
Second, there is a willingness to bow out of said art world if it doesn’t justify the effort or validate them in some way.
Nobody is pretending that in the current market/industry downturn where collectors are hiding and galleries are clambering for pennies, that the world is nice or kind. It is not.
However, I’d argue that this is nothing new and I’m surprised why people are surprised. This isn’t an apocalypse, it’s Darwinism. There was a time in the recent past where, for a few decades, the art world in Los Angeles felt like it was fruitfully full of momentum and energy. I would even go so far as to say that feeling continued all the way into the 2020s with several New York galleries starting Los Angeles outposts. Then, just as quickly, these new spaces began to close up shop.
This is all to be expected. Aging critics who write glowingly about people like Jeff Koons should be retiring, rich white women who make postpostmodern inside-joke text-based art and produce insider commentary on such works should be freaking out at how unnecessary the world considers them. Things needed to change.
For genuine creative people, not being accepted and needing to piece meal together a living is par for the course and has been the typical artist’s lot for as long as history can remember. If everyone can just avoid mass panic, the artists, critics, works and writing that will survive will be those that actually have something useful to say about the world we are in.
Image: Ed Ruscha’s 1991 lithograph The End (posted by Christopher Knight on social media).