Leigh Conner's Top Ten List

Leigh Conner, the hardworking gallery owner of Conner Contemporary, easily one of the best galleries in the region, walked Art-O-Matic last Wednesday and picked her top ten picks. She matched a few from mine and offers her own selections in alphabetical order:

Overall top pick: The Union Station Music Stage Room + Main Entrance

- JTW Black
- Alan Callander
- Richard Dana
- Liz Duarte
- Matt Dunn
- Linda Hesh
- Michael K. Ross
- Tim Tate
- Kelly Towles
- Ami Martin Wilber

Photographer James W. Bailey steps into the Artomatic firestorm with the following very inventive note:

Is Blake Gopnick possibly sending the art world a coded message about Artomatic 2004?

Anterograde Amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is a selective memory deficit, resulting from brain injury, in which the individual is severely impaired in learning new information. Memories for events that occurred before the injury may be largely spared, but events that occurred since the injury may be lost. In practice, this means that an individual with amnesia may have good memory for childhood and for the years before the injury, but may remember little or nothing from the years since. Short-term memory is generally spared, which means that the individual may be able to carry on a conversation; but as soon as he is distracted, the memory of the conversation fades.

It is now becoming apparent that while anterograde amnesia devastates memory for facts or events, it may spare memory for skills or habits. Thus, an individual with amnesia can be taught a new skill, such as how to play a game or how to write backwards. The next day, the amnesic individual will claim to have no memory of the prior session, but when asked to try executing the skill, can often perform quite well - indicating that some memories have been formed. It is an important area of current research to document exactly which kinds of memory can be formed in amnesia, and how this may be used to help rehabilitate amnesic individuals.

Is it possible that Mr. Gopnick suffered a severe trauma incident at Artomatic 2002 that has resulted in him being unable to form post Artomatic 2002 memories?

Is it also possible that Mr. Gopnick has formed the new ability to write backward and that his review on Artomatic 2004 was thus written backward?

I have taken the liberty, inspired by William S. Burroughs’ Word Cut-Ups method, and repositioned Mr. Gopnick’s paragraphs in what I believe to be their proper sequence.

I believe Mr. Gopnick may be trying to send us all a coded message.

Hanging Artomatic 2004 Is Good for It, Too
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 11, 2004

Artomatic costs more than $100,000 to put on, drawing funds from the artists themselves as well as from the public and private sectors; it absorbs major gifts in kind and vast amounts of volunteer time; it gets plenty of media coverage and pulls in tens of thousands of visitors. And all the money and resources and attention that go Artomatic's way are, by definition, not going to serious art that needs a boost, and deserves a higher public profile. Artomatic isn't only good for nothing. It's bad for art that matters.

It's not as though we are a society that fiercely discourages the making of art, one that needs an Artomatic just to make sure anything gets made at all. More art schools turn out more trained artists every year, and they all have to compete for a slice of the same meager pie of patronage, funding and public attention.

What the District truly needs is more displays of carefully selected, quality contemporary art, so that local emerging artists -- and, just as importantly, their public -- would have more and better examples of how serious creativity can work. As things stand, too many local artists, as well as a few of our dealers, get attention they wouldn't get in any city where they faced some decent, savvy competition. The region needs its artistic bar raised another notch or two. Whereas Artomatic, of course, removes the bar entirely and invites anyone and everyone to stroll on in and strut their stuff.

Despite public perceptions, the art world isn't anything like a closed shop: Curators, dealers and critics are always on a desperate hunt for new makers of new kinds of art, and they'll take it absolutely anywhere they can get it. Well-known mid-career artists are the ones who tend to face neglect; the hot young things that no one's seen before are where the action is. I guarantee that anyone with talent who might be discovered at a show like Artomatic would have had a fine chance of being discovered anyway.

After all, there are already lots of institutions dedicated to finding and displaying novel talent in the arts. Several alternative and artist-run spaces in the Washington area -- DCAC, Flashpoint, Transformer and others -- consider almost anything that comes over the transom. Their organizers tell me that the problem isn't a surplus of submissions; programming tends to suffer because they have too few options to choose among.

There may be a remote chance that such a person has been laboring unrecognized in a garret somewhere in Washington and that only Artomatic could have coaxed him out of hiding. But it's about as likely as finding a genius cavity-filler lurking in our dental open house.

Real, worthwhile art, the kind that says something that hasn't been said a million times before, requires carefully honed, hard-to-acquire skills -- sometimes manual, always visual and intellectual. Almost all artists worth the time of day know what's come before them, understand what's being made around them, and then -- against the odds and with terrifically hard work -- manage, every now and then, to make an art object that can contribute to the larger cultural conversation.

But somehow, over several decades now, we've bought into the nutty idea that fine art matters so very little, and is such easy stuff, that everyone and anyone can make it. (Actually, the idea has disappeared almost entirely among the kind of art professionals and intellectuals who suggested it in the first place, around the turn of the last century. The idea of art-by-anyone at first met with stiff public opposition, even ridicule; I'm only sorry it finally managed to catch on.)

For almost the entire history of Western culture, art was not conceived as something just anyone could or should make. Imagine living in Renaissance Florence and telling one of your Medici pals that you were going to have the family altarpiece painted by Joe Blow the baker, who felt like giving it a try. It would have seemed a joke. An Artomatic would have seemed sheer lunacy. Ditto if you had lived in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, Gainsborough's London or the Paris of Monet. For most of the last 500 years, dentists have been seen as less professional a bunch than artists.

Or worse. A show like Artomatic, in theory organized and stocked by lovers and supporters of fine art, is actively insulting to all the genuinely talented artists who have managed the long slog to a professional career.

You'd think that the purpose of a public exhibition would be to give the public a fair chance of seeing interesting art. Or you might think that it could serve emerging artists, too, by giving them a chance to learn from the best work that's out there. But what useful purpose is served in showing work by anyone who wants to have it seen, however awful it may be? How can an art exhibition be counted as anything other than a dismal failure when it's so bad overall?

I don't blame the people who made this work, bad as it mostly is. This is, as they say, a free country, and if someone wants to mess around with art supplies at home, then only their nearest and dearest have the right to complain. It's the basic premise of this show that is so badly at fault.

There may just be a few decent things hidden in the mix -- with so many thousands of objects on display, the law of averages says there must be. But three hours' worth of looking didn't spot too many. Some of the glasswork looked all right. (Glass is such a gorgeous medium it's hard to screw it up, and you need some basic training even to begin to work in it.) There were a few political one-liners that had some heft. But with works hung pell-mell and cheek-by-jowl in every corner of five floors of shabby rooms and corridors -- lighted by fluorescent tubes and the cheapest clip-on floods -- anything good was bound to get obscured by mediocrity. There's not even an attempt to keep like works together, or to craft oases of somewhat more polished art.

I won't dwell on the art. And I certainly won't name names. No one needs to know who made the wallfuls of amateur watercolors, yards of incompetent oil paintings, acres of trite street photography and square miles of naive installation art that will be polluting this innocent old building for the next three weeks. There's something for everyone to hate. The rest are works only a mother could love.

The result is the second-worst display of art I've ever seen. The only one to beat it out, by the thinnest of split hairs, was the 2002 Artomatic, which was worse only by virtue of being even bigger and in an even more atrocious space, down by the waterfront in a vacant modern office building.

After all, it could hardly be more excruciating than this year's Artomatic, the fourth edition of the District's creative free-for-all, which opens tomorrow. Organizers have gotten about 600 local "artists" -- anyone who could ante up the $60 fee and 15 hours of his or her time, in fact -- to display their creations. They're on show in the sprawling, scruffy building in north Capitol Hill that once housed the Capital Children's Museum and several charter schools.

I'll be at the front of the line.

Here's a fine idea. Let's find an abandoned school and then invite local dentists to ply their trade, free of charge, in its crumbling classrooms, peeling corridors and dripping toilets. Okay, so maybe we won't get practicing dentists to come, but we might get some dental students, hygienists and retirees to join in our Happy Tooth festival. What the heck, let's not be elitists here: Why don't we just invite anyone with a yen for tooth work or some skill with drills to give it a go. Then we can all line up, open wide and see what happens.

MY [Bailey's] WORDS:

Let’s not be too rough on Mr. Gopnick. Antereograde Amnesia can be terribly debilitating and frequently leads to a great deal of confusion when communicating with a person who has lost the ability to form new memories.

Sincerely,

James W. Bailey

The Washington Post's online forum on Artomatic and Gopnik is finally accepting new comments. See them here.

J.T. Kirkland over at Thinking About Art steps into the Artomatic firestorm and gets an earful from his commenters. He also challenges Victoria McKernan's dismissal of Dan Flavin.

This is all a measure of Artomatic's success no matter what you think about the art. Both the BLOGsphere and the lamestream media are full of letters, comments, articles, etc. about the show.

This says that (regardless of how you feel about the art and the artists), this is the most important art event that happens in DC every couple of years.

And who knows whom the undiscovered jewels in this year's Artomatic are?

I have several top ten lists in the wings waiting to be published. Past Artomatics have given us people who are now well-known respected artists such as Dan Steinhilber, Tim Tate, Adam Bradley, Dumbacher Brothers, Richard Chartier, Scott Hutchison and many others.

Victoria McKernan jumps into the Artomatic debate:

Blake Gopnik's review of Artomatic was so sensitive and insightful.

I'm looking forward to more.

What is he planning to take on next? - handicapped greeting card art? Nursing home poetry collections?

Such Diogenic wit ought not to be wasted.

Of course this is a big, sloppy, mish-mash exhibit full of trite and naive dross.

Hello! - welcome to our species.

Overwhelming mediocrity punctuated with occasional genius is our pattern in everything from art to politics. The brilliant thing about art is that it is not a finite universe where bad work pre-empts or excludes good. The human brain is not some shoe rack in danger of being filled up by one giddy splurge at Payless.

"What is the useful purpose," Gopnik asks, "of showing work by anyone who wants to have it seen?" Oh gosh, maybe something like opening up a door to a world beyond homogenized drone existence; indulging in something called a creative spirit, and suggesting that spirit is present in each of us, and with some exercise, coaxing, or just play, could possibly flourish?

Could you run that one by your exhaled committee Comrade Gopnik?

Perhaps that flourishing will only ever produce lame paintings and bad collage but is that such a threat to fine art that it ought to be so vigorously repressed?

I envision troop storming the aisles of Michael's crafts, carpet bombing Towpath painters and raiding cubicles across America to snatch away Aunt Maggie's watercolor pansies!

Does he know about knitting clubs springing up all over town?

Joe Blow the baker was not painting during the Renaissance because paper and pencil, let alone paint and canvas, were largely unavailable to the unwashed masses. It could be that four years of Artomatic have not yielded a single brilliant artist, but 400 years of European civilization have given us only a handful.

I wonder how many Reubens or Raphaels could simply never get their hands out of the kneading trough?

This is not only a grudging and mean-spirited screed, it is fundamentally wrong to suggest that a dozen Michelangelos are starving now because of the diversion of public funds to support Artomatic. How much money did the National Gallery spend to mount the current Dan Flavin show, which, in my humble, plebian opinion could have been constructed by chimps raiding the lighting department at Home Depot?

It would be great if more "established" artists would participate in Artomatic, but for whatever reason they choose not to. It would be great if more people supported more artists in general, but they don't.

It would be great if everyone in the world were supremely enlightened and shared Mr. Gopnik's exalted artistic standards, but I'll settle for the glorious mess of artistic play that results in so many people participating in a show like this.

I sincerely hope Mr. Gopnik has no children, or at least no refrigerator.

For the record: Past and present Artomatics have yielded artists who have been subsequently selected for the Whitney Biennial, for the Corcoran Biennial, and for DC area galleries such as Alla Rogers, Conner, Fraser, Fusebox and Numark, as well as museums such as the Whitney, Hirshhorn and the Renwick.

Jesse Cohen from ArtDC delivers ArtDC's List of Top Artomatic artists:

In Franklin North Carolina, there is a historical tradition with roots in emerald mines. As a tourist, you can visit, view the real veins, and then buy a bucket of dirt. Hours are spent sifting your dirt at a sleuth to find sapphire chips, and ruby specs, “salted” by the local tourist industry. Occasionally, as I did, one lucky summer day, I found a 100 plus karat sapphire.

A trip to the ’04 Art-O-Matic lent the same feeling, sifting through, and recovering great beauty. It will take several passes through the water to uncover the wealth. Starting on the 5th floor, we ran into the Glass Attic, a group of fine glass artisans; full of colors, patterns, and appeal.

Half way through the bucket, we found Stephon Senegal. I was shocked by the mortality of his sculpture. His booth is worth a second visit.

Through the journey of the veins, more goodies were found, along with nice collections of photography. Such as, Gay Cioffi, and her Glass Quilts, an excellent study of form. Along with Frank Fiorentino who produced a collection of, well, Barbie Porn; dolls in suggestive poses. I’ve seen this by other photographers at Conner Contemporary art, but less suggestive.

And then there was Thomas Edwards, Sycophant Head, and School of Fish Pain installations. The annoying slum head that follows you around the room, and the fish dying out of water. Original: The one word sums it up.

Finally, as we were pushed out for closing, I entered John Aaron’s Congressional Confessional, brilliant, with a sense of humor. I cast my vote in the journal, and chatted with John and Andrea. I’m glad to see politics roll into AOM.

15 minutes into our trip, we found our 100-karat stone. The atmosphere, and environment created by piling 1000s of artists, spectators, collectors and friends in one space with a reason to be there made the show valuable. It was, a happening.

Far from a list of ten, six stood out from a 2-hour time period through the sleuth. With more time, there will be no problem uncovering many lists of 10.

Tracy Lee is a very, very good photographer who recently decided to go for her MFA at GWU.

She responds to Jamie Wimberly's posting as follows:

My two-cent quick and dirty reply to Jamie Wimberly - without having seen ArtOMatic but just commenting on his points (which I appreciate and mostly agree with -- It's refreshing to hear other artists also feel the same.):

1) I believe contemporary art is devalued because no one except the artist and the gallery elite are interested in it. This is not art that the masses can understand or appreciate. It's not art that even I - a person with an art degree and background - can always understand or appreciate. I believe that the lack of focus on technical and the complete focus on the concept is the downfall of contemporary art. "That's not art, I/my kid/my dog could do that" is a common response to contemporary art. For me and others there needs to be at least an appearance of skill behind the work. This puts me at odds with my professors.

2) Art schools & teaching art. I'm in a grad program and I'm being taught concept and no technical skills; the medium doesn't matter. My technical prowess doesn't matter. All that matters is the idea behind my work. I'm not being taught how to fine tune my skills to better get my message across, I'm being taught that I should feel free to drop my chosen medium and pick up anything else if I feel it can better represent what I'm trying to say - regardless of my familiarity or skill level with any other medium; this bothers me a lot. I can agree that I shouldn't feel restricted to only be a photographer, that I should use whatever is at my means and not feel restricted to try something new. But I also know that unless I invest the time and effort to learn the technical side of another medium that my crossover work would suffer from inexperience and look amateurish and sloppy.

4) Public apathy: See #1. I"m certainly not advocating creating art for the WallMart masses, but I feel that the pendulum has slipped so far to the elitist side. No one understands what they are looking at anymore, but there is a "the Emperor has no clothes!" attitude and most people are afraid to acknowledge (let alone voice out loud): Wow, that art really sucks! That's silly, that's just stupid, my dog could do that! I feel that the elitist art world needs a slap of reality and told to "get over yourself!" Also going along with #5

6 - Superstar artists. It's all about the message; doesn't matter who does the work, it's about who had the idea. My Old Skool traditional art background fights this but it is the present day attitude.

7 - Artists get laid? What a second!

And to his points about what she thinks The Art World Needs - I'd just like to say that the first two are things that I'm being taught *against* in school, especially Aesthetics. "Beauty" is a four-letter world. You aren't allowed to say that anything is "nice" or that, heavens forbid, you "like" it! The horrors! It must be visual interesting, stimulating, thought provoking, disturbing, disgusting or invoke any other such reaction but the word "Beautiful" must be avoided at all time. That Is Not Art. Too simplistic. Too easy.

P.S. About what is art and the idea that everything is art....

To quote from mainstream entertainment: "Everyone's special, Dash."

"Which is another way of saying that nobody is."

and

"And when everyone is super, no one will be." (From The Incredibles).

Also along the lines of the Kurt Vonnegut short story Harrison Bergeron - "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else."

And Ann Rynd's Fountainhead series: When everyone is special then no one is.

When everything is art then nothing is.

Give them hell Tracy!