What ' s More

Panel 45: They arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North, in large numbers. from Jacob Lawrence's 60 panel work The Migration of the Negro(1940-41)

I just finished reading Holland Cotter's review of two current exhibitions of Jacob Lawrence's The Migration of The Negro. I look forward to seeing the shows when I'm back in NYC and the whole article is a terrific read, as his reviews always are*, but his closing sentences really jumped out at me:

What’s more real, after all, art or the feeling of it? History or the telling of it? Medium or message? We know the conventional market wisdom. It’s important to have the alternative.

Variations on these questions have been at the core of a diverse array of open-ended conversations I've been having over the past several months with artists, collectors, other dealers and friends. (Basically any person I'm conversing with is in jeopardy of being lured into some version of the discussion.) I love the conversations, love them, but also find them incredibly frustrating. My own opinions are infuriatingly mutable, not because of indecision but because I can't nail down exactly where to establish my perspective from. (Which is kind of cool, in a way, but frustrating nonetheless.)

*This past Summer's review of Nina Berman's exhibition was written by Mr. Cotter. Lucky Nina, lucky me.

Comments

[Bullet Shih]

I am currently reading "The Girl with the Gallery" by Lindsay Pollock about the gallerist Edith Gregor Halpert who originally showed Lawrence's series, and she makes it pretty clear that Edith took great pains to keep the series intact. A better question is whether it is better for a gallerist to get 26 photos published in Fortune or none at all? Is it better to sell the series in two tranches or let the artist who at that point had limited commercial success sell his own works. I believe that it is only the thoughtfulness of the gallerist that the works remained intact and preserved in the collections the MOMA and the Phillips.
In response to the above question, I believe that the answer is that art is both the medium and the message. It is both history and the telling of history. If the question is "What is more real?", I would answer for Edith Halpert who stated that there are only two types of art, good art and bad art. Reality is Hugh Hefner living on TV with three bimbos, reality is a Mona Lisa coffee mug, reality is a series of 60 small works displayed in their entirety at two to three times original size, and reality is getting your teeth knocked out by the "imaginary artist", Lester Hayes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Hayes after catching a pass up the middle of the field against the 1980 Raiders.
Happy New Year

[John Sarsgard]

Time and place are important elements of the discussion. Art is created, and events in history happen, at or over some particular time. Creators and participants may be a small number or many, but they're finite, and eventually gone. Unlimited numbers of people over an unlimited time may have feeling for the art or particpate in the telling of the history. The feeling and telling are so much more accessible than the creation of the art or the events of history. Can my feelings for Monet's haystacks be more real than his feelings were. I'd say yes, and Claude would probably disagree, but he's no longer around, and that's part of the point. Feeling the art and telling the history aren't more real than creating either, just different. But then there is the art itself, and the history itself, apart from the participants. How does that compare to the feeling and the telling? Still pondering that part.