Corporate Bohemians
In 1981, a radio interviewer asked Andy Warhol if the artist would like to see his paintings on as many walls as possible. Warhol replied, “Uh, no, I like them in closets.”
A self-proclaimed lover of celebrity (and sarcasm), Warhol rarely shied away from trumpeting his own success. His achievement as an artist was contingent upon his ubiquity in American culture, a quality steeped in the culture of the modern businessman. His mass-reproduced silkscreens of subjects like Campbell’s Soup cans dared other artists, too, to break the boundaries between product and process. In other words: art for art’s sake, my ass.
But according to prevailing cultural lore, the very lifeblood of the art world relies on the truth of that maxim. The painter or actor who doesn’t get a break depends upon the legacy of the bohemians who have championed it. Without it, a failure to make money would mean a failure to make art, which would mean just quitting already. Without belief in art for art’s sake, it seems like most artists would be forced to put down the paint brush and pick up the law school textbook. Still, such a scenario seems unlikely: in the tradition of bohemians everywhere, artists will always measure the real against the ideal, and they will always choose the creative over the practical. Right?
There are crayons cluttering one East Campus high rise. And they’ve made it onto the walls, too, as scribbles and drawings—but the tenants aren’t cleaning it off. Describing herself and her suitemates, Cecilia Fix, CC ’07, notes that they are “pretty arty people,” a statement illustrated with one look around the suite. On one wall is a crayon rendition of a stoplight; above their couch is a chicken-scratch drawing of a green penguin; Polaroids of the happy homemakers are tacked up near the stairway. Fix chuckles at their decorations: “Our walls are covered in crayon at this point—which is fun now, but maybe it won’t be so fun at the end of the year.” Unless, of course, the room’s next tenants want pre-decorated walls. Art as business or moneymaking seem as far from Fix’s mind as her concern for cleanup in May.
Since long before her crayon-covered walls or even her arrival at Columbia, Fix has been avidly “arty,” her main passion being photography. Her creative sensibilities are immediately obvious. From her suite’s decor to her oversized neon plastic hoop earrings and bright red canvas tote with black polka dots, the incorporation of art into Fix’s everyday life pervades her extracurricular activities as well. She curates for the campus art gallery, Postcrypt, brainstorming themes and seeking artwork to entice patrons to the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel, where the club holds its exhibitions.
Last semester, Fix’s suite threw a party to prepare for a Postcrypt exhibition she was to curate. Her plan was to use the works created that night as the gallery’s featured art. The theme of the exhibition was “Destruction,” hence the theme of the party. The suite provided materials, space, and booze, and Fix estimates that about 40 people showed up, triple what she had expected. A massive amount of plain cardboard at the beginning of the night turned into an array of posters and collages by the end. Fix says the event was a success, with plenty of pieces now ready for her exhibition. “There was definitely some garbage but there was a lot of good art that came out of it, too,” she laughs.
Postcrypt Art Gallery has been showcasing undergraduate student art since 1989. It runs out of the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel as an exhibition space that affords undergraduates a wall to curate—a teaser for the stark, hallowed Chelsea galleries. Earlier in her Columbia life, Fix’s photography landed in some Postcrypt exhibitions, and she found the similarity to a “real” show thrilling. “It’s a really nice organization because it does feel like your stuff’s in a real gallery. We have openings where there’s wine and cheese and all that. Plus it’s just a nice space in itself.”
Because the gallery is limited to Columbia student artwork, the students whose works of art make the exhibitions at Postcrypt are obviously not students at a specialized art school like New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Nor are they even necessarily art majors. A visual arts major at Columbia demands similar course-point minimums to other majors, requiring 35 points in the department, just a few more than the English and philosophy departments. In contrast, four years and a 120-credit course load earn a student a Bachelor of Fine Arts at SVA. At the end of the day, one would be hard-pressed to find a gallery that quizzes an artist on Immanuel Kant or The Iliad. So the question is, why should aspiring studio artists bother with the Core when it won’t directly help them hone their craft?
According to Stephen Murray, former director of Columbia’s undergraduate art history department, a well-rounded education is (surprise!) integral to becoming a well-rounded artist. The specialization offered in art school does not necessarily lend the student an advantage over one pursuing a liberal arts degree. Murray is a bright-voiced son of Britain whose expertise in medieval art and Gothic architecture are as stereotypical as his rounded sentences and chirpy enthusiasm. In reference to how one should best study art, he says, “I’m very committed to the idea of practice and historical studies, and at Columbia you’ve got the two side by side very effectively.”
Murray’s role in Columbia’s art department gives him a particular bias. But with a son who attended the Rhode Island School of Design and a daughter who studied art here at Columbia, he has the ammunition to back up his bias: his son transferred out of RISD to continue his work in Manhattan while his daughter is a successful high-end mosaic maker in California. “She at a certain point [in her Columbia career] switched to a double major in art history and in-studio, and that’s just the ideal. I mean that’s just wonderful that you can do that! An ideal combination. Her career actually came out of exactly that. Right out of the Columbia experience.”
But one man’s ideal is another woman’s sore spot. Maddie Boucher, CC ’09, says Columbia’s art department was one of the big influences on her decision to come here and also one of her biggest disappointments upon arrival. With too few options for painting and drawing courses and department faculty who spoke with her about “our way of doing things”—“As if Columbia’s way of doing things was so much better than any other way,” she says—Boucher defected from the major. She adds that the visual arts major is also not well-crafted. Although its requirements appear on paper like many others at Columbia, “it’s a lot, a lot of studio time and the problem is that, because studio art classes are kind of long and in the middle of the day, it makes it really difficult to take any other academic classes.” Boucher wanted, like Murray encourages, to complement her studio art time with non-art pursuits, like courses from her current major in Middle Eastern and Asian languages and culture. But in the visual arts department, Boucher did not see the harmony of academics and studio time that Murray proclaims students receive in the art history and visual arts combined major, which falls under his department’s jurisdiction. “At this point,” Boucher concedes, “I’m a visual arts concentrator at best.”
This change of academic plans is not unique to Boucher. Before coming to college, Esther White, BC ’07, knew the art world well, due to her mother’s work in professional photography, and was certain of her own wish to be a part of it.
In her first year at Barnard, White began working with Postcrypt. She is an art history and visual arts combined major. She has peppered her Facebook page with Polaroids that betray the shutterbug gene she inherited from her photographer mother. She has interned at galleries, and one of her drawings sprawls across the welcome page of Postcrypt’s Web site. But this evidence to the contrary, after White walks the commencement stage in May, she will not embark on the life of a starving artist. Rather, she will take advantage of her unlikely minor: computer science. She will go back to the art world—for an MFA to teach art—only after four or five years of working a steady job, where her business and workplace skills will garner an income.
Those skills, she confesses, set her apart from some other artists. “I think sometimes people make the choice to become an artist because they want to and sometimes because that’s the only thing they can do.” Like professor Murray contends, White has benefited from a studying art in conjunction with another area, even if the result is not pursuing art as a career.
Aspiring visual artists at Columbia could feel outshone by our downtown neighbor, the School of Visual Arts, and perhaps steer clear of gallery-courting for fear of a cold reception. But it seems odd that the ambitious and cutthroat culture of the Ivy League would make us likely candidates to fall prey to intimidation. Something else must be in play. In spite of professor Murray’s insistence upon Columbia’s training philosophy as superior to specialized art schools, its liberal arts education inevitably encourages more diversified career paths than a place like SVA. For better or worse, the environment here of others’ potential successes can be both daunting and demanding. Around us are so many talented students that suddenly the low pay and marginal recognition of all but a few in the art world makes art careers lose their luster.
White was a cautious artist when she entered college, in that she knew she was interested in art but also had the foresight to choose a liberal arts school, in case the art plan fell through. Fix, of the arty EC suite, is another student no longer looking toward a career at a gallery, as she once was. When she ventured off campus to intern in New York City galleries, she was disenchanted. “It ended up being more sales than anything else, which is less glamorous and interesting than I’d hoped.” The business and moneymaking side of art soured her love for its creation. She now plans to take an extra year to meet medical school requirements and then go on to become a doctor.
And Fix is not an anomaly for the average artistic student at Columbia. After all, when asked if he sees many students opting to go for studio art after graduation, Murray replied: “No. No. Really not. No. What do you mean by studio art anymore, you know? Locking yourself up in a garage and painting impressionist pictures? No.”
Carolyn Ramo, director of the Chelsea-area Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, describes the youth factor as complicated. She says she sees a sort of youth obsession cropping up in other galleries right now. “There is competition for some of the artists that might be stronger coming out of art schools right now. It’s interesting, if you go to the open studios you see dealers standing next to their artist—and they’re still in school,” she laughs at the informal claim-staking ritual. She describes the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery’s approach as counter to that. “We’re a little more leery,” she says, because they don’t want to place trend above quality, possibly sacrificing their shows’ caliber. It’s about “making sure that the work is there because that’s the most important thing.”
And when the work isn’t “there” enough for the gallery’s main space, they can direct artists to what is called a “project space.” Ramo explains, “In our project space right now, we have an artist who just graduated and a few who’ve recently graduated. But the difference between someone we really take on and someone we’re experimenting with—that’s a bigger line.”
The director of Postcrypt is architecture major Valerie Nizewitz, BC ’08. She talks enthusiastically about students’ eagerness to contribute to shows and the thrill of all the fine details that go into putting together exhibitions for Postcrypt. She notes that one of her reasons for joining up with Postcrypt in the spring of her freshman year was that she took her first art history course that semester, “and I fell in love with it.” When Postcrypt members sit down and discuss whose work to take on in their space in St. Paul’s, “rarely do we turn people away. It’s not policy, but who are we ... to judge whether or not a piece of artwork is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ We do really want to provide an outlet. It’s a forum for people to showcase their artwork.” It’s easy to see why students would be so eager to have their turn on the walls of Postcrypt’s gallery, with the open attitude Nizewitz, White, and Fix describe. White adds that some Postcrypt artists “just got involved in art after coming to college, but definitely some see it as sort of a launching pad for knowing what it’s like to show their work in commercial galleries.”
But as gratifyingly real-world as a gallery like Postcrypt can feel to its artists and club members, they would still do well to remember: it’s not. Yet another example of the ways in which the college bubble can delude its inhabitants, Postcrypt members can be involved with the gallery world in the ‘art for the sake of art’ kind of way. White explains, “I guess the major difference that really does set them [Postcrypt and a commercial gallery] apart is financial because in a museum or gallery, money is the number one priority. And at Postcrypt, although we do have to worry about funding, which is sometimes a little stressful, it’s never that big of a problem.”
White recognizes the differences between her intense involvement as an artist in college and what it would be like to exist as an artist outside college. “I’m not really interested in being particularly competitive ... I don’t know if I’m a business person enough to promote myself in that way.” This is where her Barnard education comes in handy.
Postcrypt director Nizewitz will look to her liberal arts education after graduation, too. While not pursuing art full time, “I’ll probably go into a field having to do with historic preservation.” She isn’t out to lead the next pop art movement, but in her own way, Nizewitz is exploring how art can make money for her. The shameless practicality of making mass reproduced silk screens is not, after all, so far removed from the career choices of some of Columbia’s artists who seek to embody art, create art, or live in an artist’s world without hoping for success on the level of a cultural icon.