The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers PDF
Preview The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers
THE WORK OF ART CULTURE AND ECONOMIC LIFE EDITORS Frederick Wherry Jennifer C. Lena Greta Hsu EDITORIAL BOARD Gabriel Abend Michel Anteby Nina Bandelj Shyon Baumann Katherine Chen Nigel Dodd Amir Goldberg David Grazian Wendy Griswold Brayden King Charles Kirschbaum Omar Lizardo Bill Maurer Elizabeth Pontikes Gabriel Rossman Lyn Spillman Klaus Weber Christine Williams Viviana Zelizer THE WORK OF ART Value in Creative Careers ALISON GERBER STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gerber, Alison, author. Title: The work of art : value in creative careers / Alison Gerber. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Culture and economic life | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028663 (print) | LCCN 2017030513 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503604032 (electronic) | ISBN 9780804798310 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503603820 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Artists--United States--Attitudes. | Artists--United States--Economic conditions. | Art--Economic aspects--United States. Classification: LCC N6512.7 (ebook) | LCC N6512.7 .G472017 (print) | DDC 700.92--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028663 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro To Jon and Sindre Lo. W. This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix 1 Art Work? 1 2 The Work of Art 11 3 Making Cents of Art 31 4 Making Sense of Art 57 5 This Way Be Monsters 87 6 Doing Things with Words 109 7 The Audit of Venus 121 Methodological Appendix 133 Notes 145 Bibliography 159 Index 173 This page intentionally left blank Preface What happens when art becomes work? In these pages, you will learn how visual artists make sense of the things they do, and how the stories they tell about the worth of art come together to create the boundaries of legitimate practice. Through these artists and stories, this book explores the ways that all of us talk about the things we do as worthwhile—the analogies we draw, the arguments we make, the bases of value we point to when we say: what I do is worth doing. To write this book I spoke with a lot of artists in a lot of places, from those who show their work at MoMA and the Guggenheim to artists whose most important exhibition was at a church café in South Dakota. In 2012, I drove hundreds of miles a day through hurricane-season Louisiana and Mis- sissippi and sweated in a gorgeous studio built by an artist there in the years after Katrina swept his life away. He threw pots while we talked, showed me his beautiful new industrial kiln, and told me about the sculpture park he envisioned for his property. Another artist told me about getting his first gun during the storm when he went down to get his mom out of New Or- leans; now he mostly builds his own—semiautomatics and machine guns— but he can’t take them out in public, obviously. Another artist brought me to a party and we goofed around in a photo booth; a strip of those photos is still taped today to the bookshelf in my office. A couple of weeks earlier I had been in Los Angeles knocking at the door of a house built by an architect whose style even I recognized. The space was bare and immaculate; I took off my shoes and settled into a couch while the artist I had come to speak with, a visit that required the assistance of a powerful curator, got me a Pellegrino and poured it into a high-design glass. ix
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