Columbia
Review by David Starkey
If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some greater ideal, then you will recognize the authorial voice of Marin Kosut in Art Monster. Books about art that are both insightful and compellingly readable (not to mention funny) are exceedingly rare, but Kosut has written just such a work.
A sociology professor with an artist for a partner, Kosut’s heart is very much in New York, a place she both loves and loathes. Art Monster’s subtitle is The Impossibility of New York, but while acknowledging how nearly impossible it is to survive as an artist there, the book’s gist is how impossible it is to make art outside of Gotham, a place she argues “is as essential as a glacier or a rainforest…its people, buildings, parks and trees must be protected as an irreplaceable resource.”
Kosut’s villains are the smug successes of the art world, the owners of the big celebrity-friendly galleries who may charge a 50% commission, and the uber-wealthy artists—think Jeff Koons, for example—who may never be physically involved in the creation of their own work, but simply come up with ideas for others to execute. These contemporary artists make the Renaissance painters who employed apprentices to finish painting the background foliage on a large canvas seem like hardworking craftsmen. “Artists represented by megadealers are aided and abetted in every conceivable manner. Staff nod and beam, tolerate bizarre and obnoxious behavior. Indelicacies excused, their every quirk and desire honored without question.” Indeed, the real malefactor in the art world seems to be money itself: “Activity that doesn’t court capitalism is suspicious and unprofessional.”
Among her heroes are the people who help keep the arts machinery running. She writes about artist assistants, who do the bidding and grunt work of their masters, and the museum security guards and “art handlers,” who oversee the moving of multi-million dollar works from one place to another. Granted, these folks “commune with the sacred. It’s intoxicating to have access to invaluable objects, to be alone with them, to touch them, to be so close.” And yet, of course, this proximity is mitigated by the fact that the art belongs to someone else, and those guarding or moving the work can be “the subject of, or witness to, tantrums and meltdowns.” Kosut concludes that while “emotional labor,” not to mention ubiquitous “occupational sexism” are “often demoralizing,” ultimately, “it just part of the job.”
Above all, the people Kosut admires are those who persist in making art while finding ways to stay in New York and do it. We meet Anika from Kiev, Billie from Appalachia, Harper from Oklahoma, and Liam from Ohio. Like Kosut, after moving to New York, they have struggled financially while pursuing their goals. These artists vie for “public recognition—a visible yes,” while hoping to avoid creating work that is ignored and, stacked up in storage, “begins to shift from a material representation of artistic productivity to a token of defeat.” They have learned to live with “forced flexibility. You’ll deal with a broken elevator if the heat still works. The landlord increases the rent a hundred dollars a month without written notification, but you don’t call him out on it because you can’t afford to move.”
Not surprisingly, Kosut is nostalgic for “Bohemian New York [which] granted freedom from social constraints—a safer environment to be queer, to be wasted, to be a broke artist, to be yourself.” She’s especially enamored of the Chelsea Hotel, “the greatest experiment in Bohemian living in the history of New York,” and of one resident in particular, Viva, a Warhol-era actress and model. “Viva was usually broke and late on rent,” but she was an integral part of the Chelsea’s chaotic, artistic vibe, a memorable resident in “New York’s imaginary home.”
Kosut’s main contribution to the art world, as described in Art Monster, is the creationof Pay Fauxn, a disused and derelict phone shell (not even an entire phone booth) next to a bus stop near her apartment in Brooklyn. In this makeshift “gallery,” she holds monthly openings, in which she grants herself “curatorial freedom. I make up the rules and break them. The shows will be short-lived and the artwork unprotected, free to any collector on the street.” Kosut organizes twelve shows over fourteen months—wax candles shaped like nurses are one exhibit, four small cardboard boxes painted like monsters are another—and then, like thousands of other New York galleries before it, Pay Fauxn abruptly comes to an end.
As does the book itself. Kosut declares she “will not wrap up the city—it’s too queer and erratic.” Instead, in her “Oblique Attempts (Toward a Conclusion),” she follows “the artist who makes something that transcends living. I will make a casserole of confusion. I will use an unacceptable color. I will never touch the center. I’ll go slowly all the way around outside.”
Perhaps the ultimate accolade I can give Art Monster is that after reading my reviewer’s copy, I ordered one for my daughter, a New York artist who I thought would be inspired by the author’s persistence, rage and sense of humor. I didn’t want to send her my copy, as I was already reading it again.
