Robert Storr
Commencement Address
May 8, 2009
They say that in life and art timing is everything. Well…
You might be thinking right now that you’re timing is way off. After all when you decided to go to art school everything was coming up roses. Never before in the history of this country was so much attention being paid to the visual arts. The arts were in the newspapers - you remember when there were newspapers. And in the glossy magazines which smelled like perfume shops in airports. You remember issues that were as thick as telephone books. Artists had become like pop stars, while quite a few pop stars advertised that they had formerly been artists. And art was what everybody who was anybody needed to have, as well as everybody who was nobody and wanted to be somebody and figured that art would do the trick.
Established galleries had let down the velvet rope and people flocked to them. Established museums were blockbustering as fast as they could. Meanwhile new galleries were opening every week or month depending on the size of the city you lived in, and new museums seemed to open every year. And then someone remembered that the one art form that you can’t fake is the art of paying your bills. Though I will say that recent events have shown that for breath-takingly long periods the masters of financial origami have shown us how to kite an entire world economy and make us believe that there was no gravity.
So now galleries are closing. And museums too – Brandeis. And art magazines are shrinking. And the careers of the overnight wonders are beginning to take the shape of one-hit pop stars. In short the world you saw in front of you is now behind you, and that must be a little scary and a little maddening. Maybe even infuriating. As far as the anger/fear/frustration part goes you may be ticked off at the people who sold you the mirage. And you may be ticked off at yourself for having believed your eyes. If I am wrong about you personally I am happy for you that you are not unhappy. But I know it is out there.
Not long ago at a gallery in Chelsea I was accosted by a young guy in a great suit who was working in one of the biggest of the big galleries. He was the friend of one of my former students and he wanted to introduce himself. We had a good warm chat about this and that. But then it suddenly took a turn to the dark side. This young man, standing amidst all this new art in a fancy show room, started to tell me how bad things were getting, and how hard they were going to be for young gallerists like himself and for the young artists they represented. I am basically a compassionate person and so I tried to express my sympathy for his predicament.
But at a certain point in the conversation I couldn’t prevent myself from commenting on how fancy everything still looked to me, and how many people were milling around us, and basically saying that if indeed we were witnessing the end of the world it wasn’t so terrible. And, anyway, even if things got a whole lot worse I said, this is where I came in: meaning a recession.
Because when I started making art, and paying for the privilege by working low paying jobs, it was the early 1970s and that was all anybody I went to school with expected. Back then the cities were falling apart, and were literally going bankrupt. New York, which looks so splendid now, looked like the dystopian fantasies you see in sci-fiction movies. New York was particularly desolate. In this city, parts of the PMA were closed because the budget would not pay for guards for all the galleries. I remember having to talk my way into the Gallatin Collection one day, and I remember how thankful I was that the guard who let me in had understood how much it mattered to me to see certain pictures that were temporarily locked away. Meanwhile there were almost no contemporary galleries here, and not all that many in New York.
In Soho, in 1971, even the famous were not rich. That didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s. And it didn’t happen to everyone no matter how well respected their work was among those who really paid attention to art. Think of where the old masters of today were then: Wayne Thiebaud, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari. Louise Bourgeois. And think of how rough it was for those out of “the mainstream”: Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, Peter Saul (who was just shown here at the Academy), Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. Golub had been famous in 1959, but by 1965 he was in Paris because his New York career was over. By 1977 when I first met him, it looked like he might quit painting altogether. By 1982 he was showing with artists twenty years younger - like Eric Fischl, Nancy Spero and with Susan Rothenberg.
So things go up and they go down. The truth is the art world is always fickle. In boom times the ups are higher. In hard times that the downs are downer. And at the bottom one may be tempted to chase after fashion. Back in the 1970s I remember reading an interview - with whom I can’t remember - in which a well-known artist talked about how you just have to stick to what you’re doing no matter what happens or doesn’t happen. Now you may have heard such things said with a kind of moral slant. And I would caution against being too moralistic when it comes to art. After all artists are constantly changing their stripes. Rather, the reason given in the interview was different. It was practical. It was because, said the artist, the spotlight on the art stage is always moving. It comes to you and lingers a while and then it moves on. But it will also come back. However if you aren’t there anymore - if you aren’t you anymore - it will miss you and you will miss your moment.
Which is to say that the life of art is a lot like any other life. You just have to show up. And you have to show up to work. The big difference is that nobody asked you do to that work. Which is why you can’t complain if you are an artist. Nobody promised you a rose garden. And if that sounds cruel just consider that that is what Louise Bourgeois has said to me countless times. And I can’t think of anybody who has paid her dues more fully. Or think of what David Smith said during the Great Depression: “Art is a luxury that artists pay for.”
Now back to the question of spotlights and how they come and go. It so happens that today you are honoring a painter who has experienced this more dramatically than anyone else I can think of. And it is happening right now. Barkley Hendricks is a few years older than I am, a native of Philadelphia, a graduate of Yale – who has taught at Connecticut College since 1971. He’s a product of the 1970s. In short, he’s a product of hard places, and hard times, of the brief moment of new realism and of the brief attention in mainstream culture given to African American artists. Which is to say, the grueling shifts from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power Movement to the Nixonian back- lash with the anger and frustration that is like nothing we have seen so far.
Indeed, thirty years on, Obama’s election spells the long delayed end of that era; of many years of showing up to work, of making the work, of working so that you can work some more; of living for work. Now all of this long winding talk is meant to cheer you up rather than make you feel worse. Because as bad as it is, this recession really isn’t as bad as it has been in my lifetime. As broke as you can get, they can’t stop you from making things. Only you can.
As lonely as it gets, you will always be able to recognize in others the spark that comes from their making things; it doesn’t much matter what. The art community isn’t made up of people who agree on what art should be - and never has been.
It’s made up of people who disagree in what art is, and invest as much effort as the others in trying to show that they are right. That is the whole history of modern art in a nutshell. Modernism is a miraculous consensus among the enlightened. It’s an argument, a family feud. So even if you have had to fight it out with your families to become an artist, you can look forward to invigorating disputes with your peers and with your elders. We welcome you to the squabble in progress.
And if you start to feel sorry for yourself and wonder whether the warning you were given about choosing a risky profession was right after all…Well just remember at the end of the day, you will always have something to do; that in the studio you will always be you own boss. If there is anybody you should feel sorry for it is your contemporaries who chose professions over vocations for the sake of security. The lawyers and brokers who were going to retire early and devote themselves to their true passion. They’re out there looking for a job. So count yourself lucky - even if you're looking for a job as well. You’ve got work.