Open Submission Art Exhibits in London and Houston

Robert Boyd

When the Salon exhibits began in France, the only artists who could enter them were members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. No amateurs need apply. The rules were loosened up over time, but the juries were notoriously conservative. Because of the complaints of many artists, in 1863, French emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte established a second salon, the Salon des Refusés, which anyone who couldn't get into the official Salon could enter. That first Salon des Refusés featured Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet.


Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet, 1863

In 1768, England decided it needed it's own official art body and established the Royal Academy. It started an annual exhibit in 1769 that has run continuously until today. And unlike its French counterpart, it is open for every artist to enter. The Times Literary Supplement's podcast, Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon, had a very interesting segment on the latest exhibit, which just opened. The exhibit is displayed salon style in a series of rooms. Each room is "presented" by an invited artist and tend to be somewhat thematic. Each work goes through three layers of judging--one to get selected for the exhibit, one to be hung (work can be "selected but not hung," which doesn't sound any better than being not selected at all), and where in the room you are hung (near the ceiling, for instance, is not as desirable as eye-level.)

Each year they have a different coordinator, so that changes the flavor of the show each year. The show is commercial--most of the works are for sale and the big catalog lists the price. Half the money goes to the artist and half to the Royal Academy schools. This is a big fundraiser for them, and apparently for many attendees, the one time each year that they may buy a piece of art (which can be as cheap as £90 to hundreds of thousands of pounds for big name blue chip artists). You could amazingly get a Cornelia Parker for £330 (it appears to have sold already). Many of the cheaper pieces looked absolutely great--I know I'd be buying if I were there.


Cornelia Parker, Stolen Thunder (Once Removed), Digital print on hahnemühle photo rag 300gsm paper

They get about 12,000 entries and there is a submission fee of £25, so before they sell a single piece, they've made £300,000 in revenue. The process of judging that many works, even if you have a committee involved, must be intensely grueling. It used to be that artists brought in their work to be judged, but now it is done electronically.

I don't know if there are any other open call exhibits with this kind of lineage in the world. But according to the TLS reporter, the Royal Academy Summer Show is very popular, and it is my experience that similar shows elsewhere are popular, too.  The first time I entered one was in the early 90s in Seattle. I had an idea for a cube-shaped painting on wood that would have a grid of nails protruding in all six directions. I was influenced by nail-fetishes, but thought it would be interesting if the nails face out instead of in. I made this very dangerous object and then heard about an open call exhibit in town. This was before the widespread use of jpegs, so works had to be submitted in person. There was a huge line of artists to get into the display space, including me gingerly holding my piece. (I didn't make the cut. Ironically, my friend Jim Blanchard later asked if he could have it, hung it over his breakfast table, whence it fell and punctured the palm of a friend of his.)

This is all a lead-in to discuss Lawndale's Big Show, which opens July 7. This is a juried exhibit that has been held almost every year since 1984. The rules state that "The Big Show is an annual juried exhibition showcasing new work in all media by artists living within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale Art Center." If you draw a 100-mile circle around Houston, it encompasses a huge area--Lufkin, Victoria and Orange all fall well within the circle, which extends into Louisiana to the east and almost to Austin in the west. Of course, driving to those places is further than 100 miles, but as the crow flies, they all fall within the radius. Consequently, every year Lawndale gets some work from the extreme hinterlands. This pays off in spades sometimes--like in 2013 when Port Arthur teenager Avril Falgout made Black Veil Brides and won a best-in-show award.


Avril Falgout, Black Veil Brides, 2013, paper maché, 75 x 50 x 105 inches

The jurors have been pretty great over the years. Among them have been Walter Hopps (1985), Luis Jimenez (1987), Paul Schimmel (1995), Lane Relyea (1999), Michael Ray Charles (2004), and Duncan MacKenzie (2103), who was the one who awarded Falgout the 2013 award.

For the past few years, the juror has always been from out of town. The last Houston juror they had was Don Bacigalupi in 1997, who was the director of the Blaffer Gallery at the time. One reason to use out-of-towners is to get fresh eyes on the art--to have jurors who are completely unbiased, who won't feel any social pressure to pick art by their friends and acquaintances.

But this year, that has changed. The juror is Toby Kamps, a curator at the Menil and soon to be director of the Blaffer Gallery. He has long been an active participant on the Houston art scene, including his curation of No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston in 2009 at the CAMH. He sent out an email to many in Houston's local art community (including me) announcing that he would be the juror. My first thought was that the impartiality of the previous years would be out the window. Kamps knows a lot of local artists, and even if the judging is name-blind, he can tell the style and approach of artists he likes by sight.

I expressed this worry in the Facebook thread, and several artists (as well as Kamps himself) responded. One suggestion was that many of Houston's finest artists don't often apply to the Big Show. Why? I don't know exactly. It used to be that you had to physically bring the art to Lawndale, and that's a pain in the ass (especially if your art is big). But now it's electronic. Part of it is that you get rejected a lot, which sucks and seems especially like an unnecessary insult if you already have venues for your work. And I think another factor is that the Big Show has come to have a reputation for amateur work (in the best sense of the word) and showcasing emerging artists, which for an older, more established artist, may make the Big Show seem less attractive. In the Facebook thread, Kamps seemed to be specifically working against that. He sent out his Facebook post to a large selection of Houston's best-known artists. He seemed to want the Big Show to be a showcase for the best of Houston, like the old Blaffer Area Exhibits, which the Blaffer put on until 2008.

One artist contacted me expressing a worry that this change might make the Big Show seem less welcoming for emerging artists. The Big Show has been important in years past for giving emerging artists the boost they needed.

But Kamps addressed that concern. He wrote in the Facebook thread, "I want the Big Show to be really big. There'll be room for older, established artists, rising stars, and lots of new talent. I want EVERYONE to apply, whether I know them or not."

Other rule changes this year have been that artists can only submit one work (in the past, you could submit multiple works, which sometimes meant one might have several works in one show--such as the little suites of work by Matt Messinger and John Sturtevant in the 2011 Big Show). Director of Lawndale Stephanie Mitchell told me that she wanted to "challenge artists to hone in on one work made in the last year."

To encourage amateurs and emerging artists, Lawndale has reached out to schools for entries. And unlike the Royal Academy, there is no admission fee, so that is one obstacle that formerly existed removed.

Mitchell added, "Toby's line of thinking--which I very much agree with and I think is very much in the spirit of Lawndale--is that by showing a wide, diverse range of artists working across different media and at different stages of their career, everyone is elevated."

I wonder if in future Big Shows, they could sell the work as the Royal Academy does. Or would that be a bridge too far?

Museum Wrecking Earth Humping Chuck Close Infringing Links (NSFW)

Robert Boyd

With Friends like Eli Broad, Who Needs Enemies? The firing of Paul Schimmel from LA MOCA raised a ruckus, so damage control was called for. But an editorial by Eli Broad, a "life trustee" of the museum, has poured gasoline on the fire. He says things like:

Over the years, MOCA has mounted many great exhibitions. However, the museum has also curated a number of exhibitions that were costly and poorly attended, often exceeding $100 per visitor. In today's economic environment, museums must be fiscally prudent and creative in presenting cost-effective, visually stimulating exhibitions that attract a broad audience. ["MOCA's Past and Future," Eli Broad, July 8, 2012, Los Angeles Times]

Which leads to responses like this:

• “Home of the D-Cup: The Topless Girl in 20th-Century Culture.”
• “You Love Their Songs, Now See Their Paintings: The Art of Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.”
• “Collaboration and Conflict: Great Football Plays and Their Players.” 

Those are just a few of the exhibitions I think we may be seeing in coming years at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and possibly at other museums around the world, if current trends continue. ["Museums Are About the Art, Not Racking Up Big Numbers on Crowds and Revenue," Blake Gopnik, The Daily Beast, July 9, 2012]

We laugh, but since Jeffrey Deitch arrived at MOCA, there has been a trend towards celebrity fluff exhibits. Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times art critic (how nice that the Los Angeles Times has an art critic, don't you think?) put it very bluntly:

If you're confused by the convulsive goings-on at the internationally admired Museum of Contemporary Art, which culminated in the June 25 firing of the illustrious chief curator instrumental in putting the museum on the map, don't be. It's not that complicated.
In fact it's quite simple — as easy as one, two, three: 

1. In 2008, MOCA was operating a stellar art program on a dysfunctional business plan. When the U.S. economy tanked, the museum careened into a ditch. 

2. In 2010, MOCA announced the unprecedented decision to put an accomplished businessman, one who built his career in art, in the director's chair, charged with fixing the broken business side. The reins were handed to a successful New York gallery owner with virtually no experience running a large nonprofit. 

3. By 2012, the new director had made little progress in repairing the museum's dysfunctional business plan, but he was far along in dismantling the once-stellar art program. Dumping the chief curator ignited an explosion. 

That's all there is to it. One, two, three. 

A great art museum whose board of trustees has a combined net worth far in excess of $21 billion shouldn't have financial problems. But welcome to MOCA. ["Critic's Notebook: Seeing L.A.'s MOCA as a company — therein lies the rub," Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2012]

He goes on for quite a bit laying out his case, but this is the essence. Essentially, the trustees of MOCA have decided to "save" the museum by turning it into a clown show.

The thing is, museums have been doing crowd-pleasing, money-spinning shows for decades. So-called blockbuster shows where there are lines around the block. (I remember as a kid waiting in a line that snaked through a public park for hours to see the big King Tut exhibit in New Orleans.) So is what is happening at MOCA (in terms of exhibits, etc.) any different? Why not let James Franco or Mike D curate some shows? Or let some bank curate an exhibit? (I heard the Mike D show was good, after all.)

The problem is that when you start using the metrics Broad uses (cost per visitor), you crowd out other criteria, such as scholarship and taste. Sure, costs have to be contained, and support must be adequate. Maybe you need the occasional blockbuster to keep membership levels high.  But you also need to serve art through exhibits that may not create around-the-block lines but instead feature challenging or uncompromising work and serious scholarship. Some sort of balance must be struck.


The Humping Pact Trailer from Diego Agulló on Vimeo.

Earth Humpers. And now for something completely different. Actually, when I saw this video, The Humping Pact by Diego Agulló and Dmitry Paranyushkin, it reminded me of a piece of art I had seen at LA MOCA, The Garden by Paul McCarthy. (The video above appears to be a mere excerpt of the movie as a whole.) It also made me think of the scene in the novel Friday by Michel Tournier in which Robinson Crusoe in an act of supreme horniness has sex with the soil. And that in turn made me think of the great Milton Nascimento song, "O Cio da Terra" ("The Earth in Heat"). And what does it say to me that when I see this video, I can instantly think of several other artworks, in various media, dealing with a similar sexy subject? Excuse me while I go take a cold shower. ["The Humping Pact," Pas un Autre, July 10, 2012]


Scott Blake self-portrait made with color tiles (2008)

Don't Fuck With Chuck Close. That's the lesson Scott Blake learned when he got an all-caps email from Chuck Close in regard to his website freechuckcloseart.com. Chuck Close wrote Blake the following in 2010:

YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO USE MY WORK WHICH IS COPYRIGHTED. NOR DO WISH TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR PROJECT. YOU MUST SHUT DOWN YOUR WEBSITE IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL BE FORCED TO TAKE LEGAL ACTION.

This was followed by a very level-headed email exchange where Close calmed down a bit, but was still insistent. Close made the following argument:

I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name.

And this is semi-true. It was one of the weird facets of copyright law that if you allow some people to use your copyrighted material without your permission, you give up the right to disallow others from using it. You in effect allow it to become public domain. That's how Robert Crumb lost his comic page "Keep on Truckin'". After this image became ubiquitous in early 70s hippie America, his lawyer stared sending out cease-and-desist letters. But it ended up in court and there were enough instances where Crumb had ket it slide for friends that the images were declared to be in public domain. (That's the story I've read, anyway.) However, this weakness in copyright law should be moot now that the U.S. is a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention. (It goes without saying, I am no lawyer or any kind of expert on copyright law.)

The article Blake writes is quite interesting--he describes how his own Close-like computer images came into being, and he traces the history of computer-pixelated photography to a few years before Close started painting his photo-real images. I don't think there is a clear villain here--Close, for the reason outlined above, feels he has to protect his copyright vigorously. One would hope, however, that there would be a way for Blake and Close to cooperate--for instance, some kind of legal licensing agreement. ["My Chuck Close Problem," Scott Blake, Hyperallergic, July 9, 2012]

When Billionaires Attack

by Robert Boyd

A big piece of news in the art world this week was the summary dismissal of Paul Schimmel from MoCA in Los Angeles (some MoCA board members insist he resigned). He was MoCA's chief curator for over 20 years. One of Schimmel's first shows was Helter Skelter in 1992, a group show that was generally panned at the time but in retrospect seems very important. Personally, I loved Helter Skelter. When Misfit Lit, a show of alternative comics that I helped to curate, went to LACE, I flew down from Seattle with Larry Reid and Pat Moriarity to help install it. While we were in LA, we went to see Helter Skelter at the big Temporary Contemporary building (now permanent, it is called the Geffen Contemporary). At the time, what got to me was how dirty the show was--Paul McCarthy's robotic mannequins fucking trees! Robert Williams' paintings full of tits and ass! But in retrospect--and very influentially from my point of view--was that it combined very grungy aspects of performance and conceptualism with figurative "low brow" art, and the combination worked beautifully.

Schimmel (who was a curator at the CAMH in Houston in the late 70s) was at MoCA for 20 years, so he must have been doing something right. So what happened? Here's how Mat Gleason described events:

Paul Schimmel was fired at MOCA - it was the end of the fiscal year and they tightened the belt. It is easier to have a corporate sponsor pay a guest celebrity curator - the curating has been outsourced.

The design department is outsourced to Sheppard Fairey’s design company, the education department gets grants and therefore competes with the Board for power so people there are being hacked away left and right, but the cutting off of Schimmel is a bold move by the Jeffrey Deitch/Eli Broad consortium to advance the outsourced party time event based museum that will not function as a repository of great art but of great parties. 

If Moca is downsized into a celebrity-curated kunsthalle style circus, it will give the blue chip Broad across the street more Gravitas. And then of course when MOCA is broke yet again - who will save MOCA by purchasing the best paintings in the collection because the museum is more concerned with event programming? The Broad Museum across the street of course. [Mat Gleason, "MOCA Fires Curator Paul Schimmel," Coagula, 6/27/2012]

Eli Broad is being fingered as the evil mastermind, with Deitch as his hatchet man. Art Fag City lends some credence to this theory by pointing out Broad's recent involvement with MoCA.

According to the email, Schimmel was let go in conjunction with a number of curatorial assistants and other employees. This news comes just four years after wealthy benefactor Eli Broad pledged to donate up to $30 million over five years to the museum with “the expectation that the museum’s board and others join in this effort to solve the institution’s financial problems.” At the time, it was hailed as “the billionaire’s bailout” for the museum, which suffered losses in investments due to the stock market crash. Broad will match contributions to the endowment up to $15 million, and make annual donations of $3 million earmarked for exhibition support. ["Why Would MoCA Fire Chief Curator Paul Schimmel?", Art Fag City, June 28, 2012]

But if Broad was set on taking over MOCA or acquiring some of its best work for his own museum, how would Schimmel pose a problem? AFC suggests the issue was animosity between Schimmel and Deitch.

Reporters have cited the acrimonious relationship between MoCA’s new Director Jeffrey Deitch and Chief Curator Paul Schimmel as a possible cause for dismissal. The LA Times’s Christopher Knight wrote over Twitter this morning that “[t]ensions had been brewing for a long time.” 

This March, The LA Times reported that key financial personnel left the museum. Should personality conflict have been an issue, it would not surprise many. Schimmel is widely respected for exhaustive, thought-provoking exhibitions. Deitch is infamous for his belief that no distinction should exist between art and entertainment. Their personalities could not be more different. 

More broadly speaking, however, the firing harkens back to the fears of critics who expressed trepidation about Deitch’s appointment in 2010. Would a man who so indiscriminately embraced kitsch be a good match for the country’s best contemporary art museum? We already had questions after we saw the cancellation of their Jack Goldstein exhibition for a show of paintings by the late actor Dennis Hopper. The firing of an internationally renowned curator only further calls his leadership into question. ["Why Would MoCA Fire Chief Curator Paul Schimmel?", Art Fag City, June 28, 2012]

Jerry Saltz expresses similar opinions, fingering Broad as the man behind the scene.

Rumors of bad-blood between Schimmel and the duo of Deitch and Broad have circulated for years. That's not surprising, considering that go-go impresarios and a hard-nosed curator are like hydrogenated oil and muddy water. I've no idea whether Schimmel's shows are extravagantly expensive (as is rumored) or whether he was hard to handle (ditto). I know it's the job of a museum director to make sure curators don't run amok and overspend, though I should note that it's also a curator's job to want more. I suspect here that Deitch is probably just a pawn in Broad's game, someone to do his bidding, and that he'll eventually be gone, leaving total control in the hands of Broad and a board that he's hand-picked. (Broad is already building his own museum across the street from MoCA.) 

From where I sit, the whole thing stinks. Despite solid attendance numbers, MoCA seems to be in the state the Guggenheim entered in the early 2000s, under its megalomaniacal director, Thomas Krens. MoCA is becoming a tourist attraction for one-shot visitors, a rogue institution stripped of the reputation won for it by generations of artists. Schimmel's leave-taking confirms what was already known: The institution is being damaged, enough to suggest that MoCA may no longer be a genuine member of the artistic and creative community of Los Angeles. ["Saltz on the Firing of L.A. MoCA's Chief Curator, Paul Schimmel," Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 6/28/2012]

I think he may be onto something here. Broad brought in Deitch. Broad thinks his tastes and ideas, expressed through Deitch, should rule the day. Why should a curator have so much power over what art is shown? After all, it's the Broads of the world who determine what good art is these days. They do it through the auction houses, at the art fairs, through their private museums, through their displays of their private collections at public museums, and so on.

This reminded me of an incident that has been in the news the past few weeks. This is the firing (and subsequent reinstatement) of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan. Sullivan, who had been president of UVA for two years, was abruptly fired by the Board of Visitors (UVA's version of trustees). The story here is complex, but similar to the MOCA story. Powerful donors and Board of Visitors members didn't like the direction Teresa Sullivan was going with the university--specifically, they wanted a very quick transition to online university classes on the Coursera model, which seems to be the flavor of the month. And, because they are rich and successful, they figured that whatever disagreements they had with Sullivan were a result of her inadequacies. The story of the scheme was leaked to the public and it quickly fell apart. The governor of Virginia quickly appointed a largely new Board of Visitors who reinstated Sullivan.

Some commentators have suggested that what the Board of Visitors was doing was part of a general attempt by conservative Republicans to seize control of higher education, which they see as one of the bastions of liberalism. After all, Virginia Bob McDonnel is a Republican and appointed all of the Board of Visitors. The suggestion is that if state universities are transformed into primarily trade and professional schools and away from the research institution/university model, they will no longer be liberal redoubts. And maybe this is true, but I think there is a slightly different (if overlapping) explanation, one which Siva Vaidhyanathan, writing about the Sullivan debacle for Slate, put his finger on.

At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That’s why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20^th century. ["Strategic Mumblespeak," Siva Vaidhyanathan, Slate, 6/15/2012]

And I think we are seeing this in the art world. It's a world that has always been controlled by rich people, at least on an institutional level. But there is a complex dance between professionals (curators and directors) and the big-money trustees and donors. What the MoCA firing suggests is that big money is getting impatient with this dance. And this impatience is evident everywhere these days--the museum shows highlighting specific collectors, the private museums to show off super-rich collectors' collections, etc.

But hasn't it always been so? Didn't Nelson Rockefeller and Stephen Clark fire founding MoMA director Alfred Barr in 1943? So how is Broad, acting through Deitch and the trustees, firing Schimmel any different? I don't think it is qualitatively different. But what we have seen is the massive rise in the number of super-wealthy individuals and a rise in this kind of meddling--whether at universities or at museums. In some cases, these wealthy individuals might be self-dealing. They get a museum to show their collection, and that causes their collection to become more valuable. But I think probably just as often there is a sense of, I'm rich, I earned my money through my wits and my savvy, therefore I am imminently qualified to be a curator or museum director--or at least pull the strings of any nominal director or curator.

In short, events like the firing of Schimmel may be just one more sign of how the balance of power in the U.S. and in the world generally has shifted away from the 99% all the more firmly into the hands of the 1%--or more realistically, the .01%. (Since the expansion of the .01% has been largely driven by economic rents extracted by the financial industry, I think we should call these people the "basis point," which is finance jargon for 1/100 of one percent.) Broad, with his fortune derived from home building and insurance, is one of the top basis points in the U.S. And he is letting us know that when it comes to running an art institution, he knows better than any seasoned professional.