As always when attacking a group of people, I should start this with a disclaimer that I don’t necessarily believe everyone who does this does it in bad faith. Sometimes it’s just a genuine lack of understanding, but often it is done to manipulate and profit and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
The grift as the thumbnail shows, is this:
Capable artists cutting between footage of performance art pieces or modern art that they deem terrible, then back to their own personal works, with some message along the lines of “Work that’s in galleries vs what I make”, or a direct complaint that they don’t make any money or have any gallery spots.
This is a phenomena I see more and more often these days and every single time there is a really high engagement rate, with lots of comments saying that the poster’s work should be in galleries, the art market is all corrupt or that it’s all unfair and they feel sorry for the artist. On the surface these posts seem like a legitimate complaint of struggle, work that looks low skill succeeds while these impressive skilled items are stuck groveling on socials. We see clear talent seemingly not getting rewarded; feel sorry for them and immediately empathise with the post. Part of this I think is due to general hostility over modern and performance art, but I like to think a big element of why this is so successful is the empathy element.
So… Why is it a grift and why do I hate it? The crux of the fraud is this: probably 90% of all items on display in galleries around the world are works like theirs, so called “rejected stuff”. The targeted modern/performance art evils that are allegedly stealing all the gallery space only exist within a handful of modern art galleries per country. I’ll talk about this more in a separate post, but I visited every gallery in my home city and most of the art on display is for sale and caters to the taste of buying audiences. There’s an excess of landscapes, swathes of impressionistic pieces, and a good range of sculpture. Many of the artists posting this side-by-side pity plea choose to omit the fact their work could very easily be in local smaller galleries, and the existence of MoMA and the Tate modern has absolutely no interference with this.
You may fairly say, well they aspire to bigger things than local galleries, the complaint is that seemingly low effort art is getting the big bucks and fame. I think this stems from a systemic misrepresentation and lack of understanding as to what the national galleries are and what their purpose is. Large national galleries exist to display the history of art. It’s a little reductive but in essence that’s it. They exist to set out timelines, and exhibit little snippets of the winding path of change that art has taken across the last several hundred years. If you were to repaint a Rembrandt better than he did, they wouldn’t replace his works with yours: he did it first. The significance of the piece is the role it played in shaping the art scene and techniques of the period. The same applies to modern art. The primary significance in a piece, what gets it on national display, is the breaking of new boundaries.
If you submitted a blank canvas, it wouldn’t be new. If you got an eraser and painstakingly rubbed out every line of a famous successful artist’s work and framed the smudged, rubbed out canvas… You’d be over 70 years late because Rauschenberg already made “Erased De Kooning”. Want to just stick your signature on a random existing object? You’re 100 years late for ideas like those. All of these things get exhibited not for their beauty but for their role in history and in asking challenging questions like “what constitutes art?”. You don’t have to like them or think they are pretty to recognise why they are in National Galleries ahead of pleasant paintings and sculptures.
To try to compare the 2 objects on aesthetic value is like judging a car based on how effective its bonnet, when removed, would work as a surfboard. It fundamentally misses the point of what those modern art pieces attempt to be, and what the gallery displaying it is attempting to share. The absolutely most amazing part of this is that if you don’t care about the more philosophical side of art which modern art delves heavily into, you can just not go, nobody will make you spend a penny or a minute on it.
If you’d rather look at an ornate woodcut, ethereal landscape or striking sculpture, your nearest city will have hundreds on display, and it’ll be a good day out too. We don’t have national galleries of this stuff because to put it plainly there’s so much of it that the gallery would become a city in its own right. For every 1 major innovation in what an artist has dared to do, there are over a 1000 works of creative spirit and high talent which are lacking in any new techniques, ideas or difficult questions.
If your national gallery wanted to do an exhibit on pretty bronze sculptures they could find 3000 and flood the place with similar pieces all by different artists. That’s no insult to the artist, the art doesn’t have to be something wild and never done before to have artistic or aesthetic value. But, the exhibit would be rather boring. And that is why these engagement bait posts annoy me. Not only are they lazy dunks on popular to hate pieces but they are also perpetuaters of misunderstandings of the roles different types of gallery have and I think it’s legitimately damaging to the wider art community to push the narrative that the art world is all corrupt and they only reward people who tip over buckets of sand in front of lots of cameras these days.
The worst offending accounts of this have done effectively the same post 10 or more times, and just continue to milk this damaging perception for every angry, sympathetic or confused comment they can. It’s worth noting that nowadays a successful set of social media accounts that consistently get good engagements on their artworks is very likely to be more wealthy than many artists in galleries, and also do far better than conventional artists in terms of being seen and observed, which is usually the art goal for any artists insistent they don’t want money. A lot of the accounts that make these pity plea posts really do not need your special sympathy compared to other artists. There is a very strong argument that arts more broadly are underfunded, but that’s a wholly different matter, and ones that affect social media successful less than other art students and professionals.