Marissa Paternoster, Untitled, 2020, Ink on paper, 7 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist and Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art.
I. Hanging Papers turns one.
It’s hard to believe that a whole year has passed since Hanging Papers launched, but this is our 54th weekly post. Fifty thousand words and hundreds of pictures under the bridge, but a better marker of just how far we’ve traveled since June 1, 2021 is to look back at the first post — “There’s Nothing in that Black Bag for You” — and reflect that 9 out of 10 conversations I had that month involved NFTs.
That chapter has closed almost exactly a year later: June 2021’s thriving economy of useless tokens has been swapped for June 2022’s stumbling economy of less and less useful dollars. Employment is up and the dollar buys less, so it sounds like we’re all working harder for less. I don’t worry; I understand it builds character.
If NFTs have given us nothing else — and they have given us, so, so little — it is a name to a miasma of dissonance that pervades the art world. The wealth that was spectacularly created before magically vanishing confirms a superstition that artists have the alchemical powers to turn nothing into something of extreme financial value. That superstition has existed throughout the twentieth century and possibly since antiquity, but NFT-space put it on bath salts1 and all the red yarn leads back to one question:
Who keeps the gate on this magic power?
The NFT space metastasized on a skepticism about gatekeepers that has been boiling over in a thousand different pots, from Occupy Wall Street to January 6: behind the stony edifice, all institutions are human contracts at bottom, and it may be time to renegotiate. That was part of the promise of NFT-land: anyone can make one, anyone can trade one, anyone can collect. Couple that open door with the broadening acceptance of the idea that a diversity of voices must be reflected institutionally, and the critique blossoms into a relentless invasive, teeming tendrils of endless tokens.
Here at Hanging Papers, we took the rhetorical question seriously: who’s minding the sorcerer’s magic wand?
While the story of European gatekeepers goes from monoculture to polyphony,2 in America the question of who gets to be an artist has been fragmentary all along. The first museums and schools stumbled; early attempts to establish a certificate culture fell apart in only a few years. For a surprisingly long span, the military trained many of the best artists in the country, and that period of influence cast a long shadow across two world wars and a State Department scheme to influence global affairs through radical modernism.3 But both of these credentialing regimes faltered when modernism arrived. Partly home-grown, partly imported by artists fleeing Europe, modernism attended a power vacuum: a period, not so unlike our own, when no one was really sure what art was, what it looked like, and who got to make it. Unsurprisingly, it was a fertile period in American art, and the greatest practitioners to emerge would not have found support in earlier credentialing regimes — from revolutionary voices like Elizabeth Catlett4 to the resolutely parochial Grant Wood; the shimmering collages of Romare Bearden5 to the spectral urban visions of Isabel Bishop. This period of exuberant anarchy ended with the rise of the MFA system — the public-private partnership of galleries and university credentials that has propelled the stability of fine art as an investment vehicle since the 1950s.6
That MFA-gallery system of credentialing holds most of the marketshare even today, but it has never succeeded in crowding out alternatives. Some of those alternatives — like the co-op galleries on Tenth Street7 — built on the foundations of earlier abandoned experiments; others exerted a radical resistance to establishment structures. Both sowed the soil for the tumultuous times of today — times that feel very similar to that inter-regime period of 1913-1945: artistic styles and strategies in total disarray, huge speculative bubbles associated with a very small number of radical artists, and a widespread skepticism about the future of the existing credentialing order.
And, as before, the present moment is a churning cauldron of new ideas and new voices. Claes Gabriel8 sometimes responds to the work of Romare Bearden and Frank Stella, and Marissa Paternoster9 references Agnes Martin — but both of these interdisciplinary artists are so new in their methods and meanings that it’s hard to imagine their work existing any time before right now. Paul Shore maintains studio practices that would have been familiar to artists at the dawn of modernism, but he documents an uncanny moment in history from his deeply personal lens.10 Carrie Beckmann’s work feels familiar but grows more and more exotic the longer you stare at the visual explosions.11 Kieran O’Hare’s labyrinthine investigations of internet culture and alternative stores of value12 examine some of the opportunities that gave us the NFT space.
This brief moment of NFT explosion and implosion underscores the potential and perils of these volatile moments, with new voices welcomed and new ideas rifled through. But because the NFT moment was driven by automated investment processes, the useful innovations were buried under the mountains of totally useless ones. It grew from a skepticism about vetting procedures, and it grew too large to be vetted. Radical foment brings much-needed change; radical foment needs to be evaluated.
Curatorial gate-keeping is a living, dynamic function. It is vital to the life of the art ecosystem. In American history, its dynamism is the rule, its ossification the fleeting and rare exception. Neelon Crawford’s film retrospective at MoMA13 and Boca Raton Museum of Art’s spotlight on George Gibson’s very different contributions to film14 design demonstrate the dynamism and flexibility in museums today: film can be a lot of things, from The Wizard of Oz to Koyaanisqatsi. The new interpretation of Winslow Homer, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates the dynamism of those institutions even when evaluating a static body of art.
What will the future of paper-hanging hold?
We decorate; we write checks; we display our diplomas.
Keep reading Hanging Papers and find out.
Carrie Beckmann, Fireworks, 2022 Watercolor on paper 40 1/4 x 26 1/2 inches
II. Lottie Kay Spies turns zero.
Hanging Papers is the propaganda wing of Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art, and though my name is at the bottom of every post, this is not a one-person operation. It’s a teeming army of brilliant minds — I try to thank the dozens of artists, curators, historians, collectors, and students as we go along — but I want to thank in particular my amazing wife, Alexis Dean, who proofreads every post, queries dozens of references, and indulges my often whimsical linguistic constructions. This may be the first one she skips though, because she’s just given birth to our second child, Lottie Kay Spies — born 8 pounds 5 ounces at 9:38 PM on June 19th.
We’ll be back at it next Tuesday with another year of Hanging Papers, but the next few weeks are going to be lighter reads as I turn some energy to my growing family. Keep those comments and questions coming — all mail will receive a response, but not today!
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Our article on Catlett here, but see first the Heather Nickels’ extraordinary Persevere and Resist The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett. Essential reading, and a cool video of related investigations here.
For a case study in speculative history, see “Transitional Years: 1870-1953.”
Paternoster’s visual art incorporates textual tools from comics and illustration, but she also weaves her poetic vision through her music, both under her own name and in the band Screaming Females.
On Gibson, here.