How To Get Over In The Museum World Game

Understanding the Museum world game: an interview with Art Critic Professor Lane Relyea By Nathaniel (the insider) McLin , Northwestern University Professor Lane Relyea who is America's leading expert on application of System Theory within art institutions. System Theory in its social context is the mapping of institutions as networks of relationships. Using the decline of art criticism as a starting point, he articulates how the consolidation of academic and museum networks transformed museums into highbrow amusement parks, Artist into discursive cartographers, and collectors and art patrons into passive consumers. For reason of length, this is an abridged version of an extensive interview. However, I have provided links to some of Professor Relyea’s other articles where he explores these issues in depth. According to professor Relyea, In the old network, art critics, art audiences, museums and the university operated as an interrelated system that determined how artists succeed in the art world and which art gets displayed. Critics do not simply highlight particular artists. Critics like Clement Greenberg {Abstract Expressionism} would define art movements and were ever grooming the taste of their peer constituencies. Journalistic criticism provided independence legitimacy in contrast to the mercantile interest of galleries or the taxonomies of the museums. Critics named or promoted most of the important movement of the twentieth century from Cubism, Impressionism, to the Post modernism of

today. While art historians and museums, lionize artist after an art movement was dead or safely assimilated Museums and the university also have undertaken strategies that would subsume the art critical function within their academic apparatus. With the success of the blockbusters touring shows, museums discovered that with art audiences traveling to the twenty international biennials and fairs, money could be made by emphasizing spectacle, tourism, and entertainment laced with a touch of just enough fashionable art theory to intellectuality tantalize the masses and satisfy their trend chasing corporate sponsors .As Barnum hunted for the sensational exhibit, museum curators are bankrolled to travel the world looking for new intellectually provocative entertainments. Curators are approaching artist directly and often adding them to their museum’s collection. These artists are required to design mammoth works that can only be displayed in a museum setting. So, curators are replacing art critics as first responders and trendsetters and museums are replacing collectors. For is not the public better served by the museum than an inaccessible private home? 'The argument is if collectors want to support art. They should support the contemporary art museum as the egalitarian component of an international entertainment network. So, institutions are absorbing the critic's role without the pretense of being disinterested parties. The questioner in red is art critic Nathaniel McLin.

Do artists create art with critics and institutions in mind? A dominant trend among artists today is to make-work with institutions in mind. Not with criticism in mind. Actually, the two things might be mutually exclusive. Institutions are where the action is right now. What does this mean for artist?

This is both good and bad news for artists. Unlike the oldfashioned critic and dealer, who would "stick it out to the end" with the artists they adopted, biennials and museums do not get into a personal pact with young artists, they treat young artists as disposable, a content provider. (For more on art and tourism see my review of "Universal Experience," http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200506.) Has marketing specialization into competencies and apparatuses made criticism irrelevant? Sadly, yes. This is something I talk about in an article from a few years back called "Allover and At Once" (http://www.xtraonline.org/vol6_1/all_over.html). In your opinion, has the relationship between the collectors, museums, galleries, artists and critics changed in the public interest or not? How can or should an artist of color get into the "system"? Education, as much as anything else, carves out today's distinctions between haves and have-nots. The experience of art is more and more touristic, superficial: audiences learn just enough of a certain art "language" to be able to claim value from their experiences in museums -- and their need for that value, that cultural capital, stems more and more from rising competition within the sphere of culture Even Dunkin Donuts has to sell cappuccino now. What would help is more politicizing of education, especially higher education. The academy still hides behind an image of idealistic pursuit of innocence, neutral knowledge, and this has to be confronted. For example, while identity politics and multiculturalism have receded from the art world spotlight over the last ten years, the recruiting of minority faculty and students is still an issue in university art programs, and should be made more of an issue. The effect

had by someone like Kerry James Marshall here in Chicago, or Charles Gaines at Cal Arts in L.A., is immense -- not just in their roles as artists but as teachers at University of Illinois of Chicago. One way to get more art and artists of color into the system is to graduate and tenure more artists and art historians of color. Changes in art and its discourse will follow. Lane Relyea is one American leading art critics with articles appearing in Artforum, Frieze, and numerous museum catalogs. He is also considered America's leading expert on the application of Systems Theory (The mapping of social and environmental events as networks of relationships) to social systems in the visual arts world. Nathaniel McLin has been an interviewer on 89.3 F.M. WKKC for eighteen years and is a former board member of the Art Institute of Chicago’s African American Urban Partners Corp. He has been a critic fo Chicago’s largest black weekly N’DIGO, the South Street Journal, The Chicago Community Register, Nationally for Paint Magazine.Bronzecomn.com He has written the artist statements for many African American Arts organizations: The Southside Community Art Center, The Seven Black Artist Collective, The Creative Artist Association and was a contributing expert on African America board volunteerism with mainstream museums for Kerry James Marshall’s One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics catalog.

Copyright Nathaniel McLin ©2005 all rights reserved