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Letters - letters to the editor - Letter to the Editor
ArtForum, June, 2003
CRIMP MY STYLE
To the Editor:
I have no illusions about being able to control how the "Pictures" show I organized at Artists Space in 1977 will be understood historically, but for the record I did not, as Richard Prince claims in "Richard Prince talks to Steve Lafreniere" [March 2003], ask him to be in the exhibition or show him the essay for the catalogue. I didn't know Prince or his work at the time. Prince himself has written, in 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years [New York: Artists Space, 1998], "I wasn't aware of the Pictures show or what other people were doing. I'd been living in the West Village completely isolated and working at Time-Life.... I had a very punk attitude, a chip on my shoulder. I thought I was doing something no one else was doing, and therefore it couldn't possibly be incorporated into anything that was going on."
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Douglas Crimp
New York
To the Editor:
The April issue of Artforum has an interview with Ashley Bickerton in which he says, "I remember Sherrie Levine later telling me, 'Whatever Douglas Crimp was saying, I couldn't understand a word of it. But it seemed to work!'"
I was mortified when I read this. I can't imagine ever saying this to anyone. Douglas Crimp writes extremely lucid prose. And I am neither that cynical nor that stupid.
Sherrie Levine
New York
Ashley Bickerton responds:
The Artforum interview was conducted by telephone from halfway around the world, and a full twenty years have passed since the event discussed. At that time, Sherrie was my teacher, and although lam sure the exact wording has been lost to the years, I loved her for having said that. The conversational manner of the interview and the humor of looking so far back at events that had seemed so frighteningly all-important probably led to a somewhat glib and throwaway tone.
The point, the only point, I was trying to make was that Sherrie had been doing what she was doing as an artist for her own reasons and that Crimp was analyzing after the fact. This was an extremely liberating concept for me as a young student at CalArts, where there was a general assumption that one read theory and then somehow transformed it into a working model or an illustration ... or art.
Sherrie, in essence, showed me how to make art, and her thinking has been a crucial foundation for all my efforts since. It was wonky, it was driven by forces that were still turgid and lurking below the littoral of fathom-ability. One must go back to the particular climate of this moment to be able to feel the emancipating power of the sentiment I recalled in the interview. She never described any skepticism toward or disagreement with the analysis of Crimp-in fact, quite the opposite. What she said to me merely placed artists back at the edge, driven by our own sublime curiosities, and reconfirmed that we weren't followers at all.
COLLECTORS' CALL
To the Editor:
Peter Plagens's article ["Cents and Sensibility: Collecting the '80s," April 2003] oversimplified a complex decade. Though he wound up at almost the right endpoint in describing the current situation, he could have gone further in his analysis to include the misguided role that emerged for museums toward the end of the '80s and accelerated into the new millennium.
As obsessive collectors since the late '60s, we experienced much of what Plagens discusses, and we have a somewhat different take. While the Scull sale did indeed show that collecting new (i.e., Pop) art could be profitable, it was an isolated incident and did not in our opinion cause collectors to go off on a greedy speculative binge. For example, the market for AbEx painting was very thin, and we were informed in the early '70s that unless a painting was "A-quality," it basically could not be resold; if we did get an "A" painting, then maybe in five years we could resell it at the price we had paid-if there was still demand. Motherwell had his first show of large-scale collages at Knoedler in 1974 and sold only two even though the New York Times gave the show an outstanding review, putting the work on the same level as Braque's collages; de Kooning's paintings of the mid'70s were poorly reviewed, the street opinion concurred, and very few works sold at the time. The market for Philip Guston's work was essen tially nonexistent (due to his shift to cartoon works and the fact that a great abstraction owned by Rockefeller had brought maybe $15,000 at auction). Castelli was quoted as saying that Warhol was an important artist but that his output was so immense that he would never have an auction market. In essence, new art was not handled by the auction houses, and there were few outlets for it. It was by no means certain that collecting it was either profitable or prestigious, since history had shown that most artists rarely stand the test of time. The dealer and collector Eugene Thaw is said to have observed that contemporary art was the most expensive option.
The collectors shown in the group picture on page 210, all of whom we knew well, were not motivated by greed as is implied by the juxtaposition with Plagens's article. Instead, they were deeply committed and possessed a genuine appreciation for art and artists. They were mostly self-educated and knew their art history (which is often not the case today). Most of them didn't use advisers. They gathered, formally and informally, with artists, curators, and writers and knew it was essential to see an artist's mind at work in order to discern quality. Initially at least, it was not clear that collecting was a moneymaking endeavor; it was, rather, a desire to live with great works of art. Most of us could not afford to buy Cubist Picassos, etc., so if we wanted to live with (hopefully great) works of art, we had to buy new art. There were no young collectors' clubs at the museums (excepting one at the New Museum, but it disbanded after a few short years). To be fair, there were some people who did buy new art on a speculative basis, but they were few and far between, since there was little profit in it.
