Piece by peace
Is the business behind art ruining it for you?

By Glen Helfand

ON MARCH 19 , the night U.S. bombs started falling on Iraq, a segment of San Francisco's art community gathered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the already scheduled opening of a show honoring four local artists. It was a gloomy, rainy night, and on the approach to the museum, you could hear the distant rumble of protesters on Market Street. There was a different kind of hum to the museum lobby, where people air-kissed and gossiped, some not yet aware the U.S. attack had just begun in earnest. The crowd, made up primarily of hip, youngish artists and more-mature dealers toasted with plastic cups of cheap wine, listened to a couple of local bands, laughed, and still had a night to pretend that war wasn't in progress, that the U.S. government hadn't made the first move in a very dangerous game. Hearts were sinking beneath the mask of cocktail chatter. Clink!

I was there and implicated in this unfortunately timed party. My conversations alternated between assessments of the show and anger and confusion about the war, the latter subject discussed in hushed tones of resignation and uncertainty. The idea of reconciling the two current events – the artistic and the geopolitical – seemed insurmountable.

High art is a thorny realm, one fueled by big money – just like war is. Art and politics are seemingly forever thrust together in an uncomfortable symbiotic relationship, an unresolved, unspoken, still stereotypical economy of financially struggling artists and wealthy benefactors whose bank accounts oil the system. The collectors and donors may be aesthetically adventurous, but chances are they're as politically and fiscally conservative as their demographics prescribe.

Yet ever since 9/11, museums, and to a lesser extent galleries, have positioned themselves as places defended from the us-versus-them polarizations that come from the White House – as sites of safety and solace, of quiet reflection on the bigger, deeper things in life, like human expression and soul-searching. But as the recent pillage of the National Museum of Iraq attests, cultural treasures as a shared gift don't necessarily mean much in a world driven by greed and inequity. In such a climate art and politics have become more difficult to separate. Artists question how to address the moment – does art even matter when the world's in turmoil? – while collectors make a more surefooted retreat from art purchases because of the uncertain economy. The thing is, there has been little artwork that has bridged the two, or perhaps more appropriately, the thick walls of museums and galleries have yet to be made more permeable to the discomfort of this historical moment.

Perhaps they have, in deceptive ways. Museums, as a form, were historically founded as showcases for the refined tastes of the well-heeled or royalty, who amassed treasures and commissioned artists as forms of entertainment, intellectual curiosity, and conspicuous consumption. Over the centuries museums evolved to take on more pronounced public roles but always with that foundation of wealth. In the United States a few of our most prominent institutions were created as a way for savvy, ruthless industrialists to clean up their images for posterity with stately edifices sometimes bearing their names – they're remembered for art and culture, not shifty labor practices and powerful monopolies.

These days art institutions may be more inviting to the public, as evinced by an impulse to lure bigger crowds that began in the 1970s with the advent of the blockbuster museum exhibition and continued through the end of the 20th century with glamorous building projects, community education imperatives, and social events for singles and the tech nouveau riche. Yet museums never shed their status as inherently elitist, moneyed institutions intended to safely house masterworks and teach the public about art and objects they could never afford to own. The imperative to reach the masses stemmed from shifting financial models, from a stable and hands-off influx of public money – from the National Endowment for the Arts – to a steady move to privatization. The Reagan era's tax changes made corporate involvement in the arts more attractive. Is it a coincidence that during the same time, the so-called culture wars, the right-wing attacks on artists with dissenting views on religion, or who simply expressed a marginalized identity, employed a "not with public money" argument?

Far from a sanctuary, the art world these days rotates on the same axis as the real world – it depends on the kindness of business interests. Just have a look at those etched donor plaques in museum lobbies. Over at SFMOMA, which is a private not-for-profit enterprise, not a public one, you'll see familiar powerful names like Charles Schwab, investment entrepreneur, and Donald Fisher, founder and chair of Gap, men famous for their multibillion-dollar fortunes and interest in conservative government.

To some, the involvement of such partisan players violates the museum, yet at the same time the influence of powerful donors is difficult to gauge. The idea of a trustee lobbying for a show of an artist in his or her collection may seem benign, but conflicts of interest (for example, increased market value) may result. Think back a few years to the fracas caused by the multimillion-dollar donation Giorgio Armani made to the Guggenheim Museum right around the time the museum organized a massive show of his fashion work.

In the '90s, when the swollen stock market filled corporate coffers, museums engaged in an expansion phase – the Guggenheim, which seemed to adopt a franchise model, building splashy edifices in a Spanish backwater town and even Las Vegas. The latter experiment fizzled, and the Guggenheim, like most museums across the country, has implemented layoffs, hiring freezes, and cut back its exhibition schedule. The sense of retreat is a definite sign of the times, a direct mirror of the business world.

There's a commonly held assumption that the most interesting contemporary art is a reflection of the culture as it is being lived – it's a representation of the zeitgeist coated in a cool veneer of fashionable colors and intellectual aloofness – and it's interesting to note how strains of art and popular culture follow the pendulum of partisan politics. The art star of the moment is Matthew Barney, who works on the monumental scale of dudely sculptors Richard Serra and Michael Heizer, who engaged in the brazen act of moving mountains in the California desert (these aging artists, coincidentally enough, are facing renewed interest with the recent opening of the Dia:Beacon musuem in upstate New York, where they are showcased). Barney's undeniably visionary work uses the male genitals as the guiding metaphor in his work, certainly not a politically progressive impulse. Similarly, one of the biggest figures in pop music is Eminem, whose stance is clearly misogynist and homophobic – yet he's hugely revered by critics and the public. Contrast this with the postmodern '80s and early '90s (a political era that shares something with our own). At that moment the big-guy artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle were counteracted by the leftist inflections of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman, as well as by the outsider positions of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

The reception for the ideologically brave right now, not surprisingly, is fraught with contradiction. San Francisco art dealer Jack Hanley produced an antiwar T-shirt by Chris Johanson (who is currently featured at SFMOMA) to bring to the Armory Show, an international art fair held in New York this March. The shirt features a squared-off peace sign with text in the artist's signature scrawl. "No War," it reads across the top. "Stop Peace Control by the Fascist Square Energy. The Way You Spend Your Money Is as Political as the Way You Vote." Not an outrageous or unheard-of sentiment, but it came as a big surprise to Hanley that the shirt provoked controversy among the art-buying public. One collector called him "an embarrassment" for bringing them to the fair, while another decried the shirt as being unpatriotic even as she bought one of Johanson's paintings. (The upside, Hanley says, is that noted artists and critics such as Brice Marden and Jerry Saltz purchased the shirts. Hanley's currently working on a series of peace buttons designed by artists and considering reprinting the Johanson tee.) The dealer's experience is indicative of the deep ideological rift between artists, dealers, and collectors.

Just what was that antipeace collector buying? Johanson's cachet is the gritty street and a seriously lefty California political perspective. With his T-shirt, he's clearly come out against war, fascistic impulses, and capitalist greed. There's no clear answer as to how much the message gets diluted when it's displayed in a million-dollar loft space or a spotless museum gallery instead of an alternative space (which lives off donations from large companies and dwindling hotel tax funds). Does his work have more impact in the funkier context of the Luggage Store or Adobe Books, both of which mounted antiwar exhibitions?