I’ve been in love with both art and writing since I was a kid growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana (incidentally, the same place Bruce Nauman is from), and finally managed to reconcile these two addictions in my decision to write about art sometime in my late twenties. After much too-long a hiatus from art writing and criticism to deepen my involvement in the art market, I’m delighted to announce that I am joining the ARTINFO blogroll with True Stories: Life in the Art World. Blame Jerry Saltz, who suggested the idea to me a few months back.

I expect True Stories to situate Chicago as a pivot point in the compass of my writing about art, both throughout the States, and wherever else my interests, historically stretching both far and wide, may take me. I started off scribbling about art more than ten years ago at the offices of the now-defunct New Art Examiner, where I received my first byline—as so many Chicago critics once did. When NAE folded in the early-aughts, I found a port in the storm at Newcity, the more arts-inclined of the city’s two alternative weeklies (once also the home of Marc Spiegler, who today runs Art Basel) where I pioneered the paper’s first column on visual art which, I’m proud to say, still appears today. I also served for two years as the Chicago correspondent for Flash Art, for whom I am also once again writing. As well, I keep my hand in the local Chicago scene on staff at Gaper’s Block, the city’s longest-running online-only magazine.

I’ve spent roughly the last five years running a series of experiments in art businesses in the form of small and not-so-small art fairs, starting with Artboat (which regrettably is where that dreadful Sea Fair monstrosity got the idea), then Nova, Bridge and most recently, Verge and Art Brooklyn. Those experiences have yielded endless anecdotes. Besides providing me with a day job of sorts, these fairs have also given me an opportunity to learn a lot about the art business, its prejudices, and about the myopia that the art culture suffers in general.

Sadly, it’s the nature of business to wrestle the Darwinian contours of trade, which hardly ever goes smoothly and without dispute. But in the art world, it’s made worse, since the corruption of the patronage system rules it, with those private interests sowing entitlement and ignorance, and often snuffing out worthwhile artistic efforts and entrepreneurship alike in the process. In any case, I set aside my writing some time ago when the market share of my efforts was larger and the business required much more of my attention. These days, the frenzy has slowed to an economic simmer and I’m freer to divide my attention.

So now, I’m back to writing. I’ve always tried to bring a literary sense of a personal encounter with art to my writing about, and criticism of it. Because, for me, it has a very practical purpose. Art is insuperable for me from the society in which it is made, which informs and sometimes challenges that society’s understanding of itself. Simply put: art is inquiry, sometimes into politics, spirituality, language, economics, or notions of the self. Both art and society have changed radically in the last ten years. No doubt, this is due in no small part to the transformative influence of the internet on how criticism and art writing are disseminated. While a glut of media may indeed reflect our current living environment, it is not capable or sufficient, despite intuitions to the contrary, of defining the crucial need for a meaningful debate. If the public dialogue surrounding art has lapsed into convention, it seems to have collapsed in part into simplifications reflective of the attempt to answer how to utilize these various still-nascent media that are the tools of our contemporary means of communication. This is natural. My philosophy background pricks up its ears at such seemingly minute tectonic shifts in the culture as the introduction of a new technology, and I can’t help but appreciate how accurately the changes it has caused mirror the shifting constellations in our own ever-evolving social and artistic self-awareness.

In this process, some institutions are strengthened, others fall, and yet other, newer ones are raised up with all the clamor and frenzy of a near-apotheosis. My early journalism training of reporting as an organized check against state power is unrecognizable compared with reporting that has become a populist pursuit open to anyone with a laptop and the right software. I’ll admit, I can’t help feeling something is lost when criticism becomes mere punditry, and reporting gets reduced to simple “coverage.” But regardless, these are vivid and profound revolutions, as basic and sweeping in their transitions as our concept of time shifting from something absolute and beyond our grasp to a notion of time that, with sufficient discipline, has become something we can exert control over in our own use of it. All we need do is recognize the shortcomings, and adjust our practices accordingly.

Art and its institutions, functionaries, and adherents who make it their occupation or profess to answer its calling also reflect these profound shifts. Artists no longer merely articulate the dictates of organized religion, nor merely serve to aggrandize court royalty or wealthy lords. Once the merchant classes began to exert their influence and covet the trappings of nobility, artists were backed into negotiating the value of their own works in a new strata of price-value castes. Nowadays, to compete in the marketplace, artists variously conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs, or anti-capitalist activists, outcasts and quasi-mystic misfits. At the extreme outside edges of all this fluctuation and change has emerged a polarizing struggle between the entrenched proponents of tradition opposite those equally entrenched proponents of innovation. In the midst of this ongoing tension has emerged a proliferation of art fairs and expansion of market influence on the one hand, and the advent of resistance movements zeroing in on the abandonment of previous material categories, and a dematerialization movement emblematic of the fascination with various forms of new media, on the other.

This polarization has gone supernova and now informs everything in the art world: its press, museums and art institutions (curators and critics), its highly imperfect system of patronage (for more on this subject, see my forthcoming essay “The Problem With Art” in the October issue of Proximity magazine, published here in Chicago), even how artists engage the task of art-making. It’s hard to be a moderate both in and outside the art world today, navigating the surface tensions of this fractious state of polarization, with dogma and assorted cant driving both ends of the spectrum against one another and, by extension, against any mode of thought construable as advocating compromise between these two extremes. And yet, the art world necessarily operates in some degree of relation to and in isolation from the rest of the world, often while pretending to exist wholly within a closed system of its own making.

My experiment here at ARTINFO is to bring the context of my own personal experience into the encounter with art, not simply holding up objects, faddisms, or received wisdoms as the measure of any art’s ultimate value, but to try and operate from the center of the dialogue, charting the outlines of this abundant and largely neglected territory, and report back what stories I find. I have some favorite themes and subjects, and I’m sure they’ll nudge their way into my writing occasionally. I also have the ability to occasionally flub it all badly and generate a truly miss-the-mark opinion. Bear with me. Until next time, dear reader, I hope you’ll enjoy this, one of my favorite videos of Nauman, “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square.”

Image credit: Dianna Frid, “Night Spectra,” 2011. Part of the series “Imaginary Monuments for Chicago: An Artists’ Project” produced for the September 7 issue of Newcity Chicago. Curated by Jason Foumberg. Image courtesy www.diannafrid.net.

Tags: Artinfo, Bruce Nauman, Michael Workman, True Stories, Verge