Bound by Creativity

How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

Hannah Wohl

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226784724
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists' understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors' homes. Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist's ability to break new ground.Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige.

Chapter 1

Introduction:

Aesthetic Judgment in the Contemporary Art World

In the 1990s, contemporary artist Lucky DeBellevue began experimenting with pipe cleaners, weaving the fuzzy wires into globular floor sculptures and intricate webs crawling up the sides of gallery walls. Lucky’s pipe cleaner sculptures were widely exhibited in galleries and museums. He had a solo exhibition of the works in the atrium of the Whitney Museum of American Art, with a golden cobweb of pipe cleaners unfurling across the tall ceiling and spires rising from the marble floors. The exhibition’s catalog hailed the installation as “magical,” describing a “beguiling synthesis” of kitsch and high art.1

Suddenly, Lucky stopped. Years later, sitting in his studio, Lucky explained to me that after a decade of producing pipe cleaner sculptures, he could not think of any more variations of this visual element. He said, “I remember I still have one piece that I kept trying to finish, and it just wasn’t ending anymore. . . . I kept doing things to it, and it just wasn’t exciting to me.”

“Why do you think that boredom set in?” I asked.

Lucky replied, “I had already done so many permutations and so many formal ideas and referenced things—enough to where I just reached the end of it.”

After making many variations of these sculptures, such as interlacing colored pipe cleaners together to create the painterly impression of blending pigments and weaving feathers between the pipe cleaners, the idea of further pipe cleaner sculptures filled him with boredom, rather than excitement.

Over the next fifteen years, Lucky experimented with printmaking and other media, pressing painted abstract shapes onto linen canvases, pasting rows of pistachio shells on canvases, and making canvases out of reusable shopping bags. He judged the abstract shapes to be closely aligned with his distinctive identity as an artist: “I would cut out shapes that I was interested in. And I kept making those and making those and making those—a hundred or so. And I realized that at some point . . . I thought, ‘these really are my shapes. This is really my vocabulary’ . . . Kind of like my fingerprint.”

Lucky described the new works as conceptually consistent with his pipe cleaner sculptures. He viewed the media to be everyday, rather than high art, materials, and he saw the works as displaying his commitment toward the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement and the democratizing potential of art. However, to others, the pipe cleaner sculptures and the pistachio shell canvases looked like they could be the works of two different artists. Curators, dealers, and collectors wanted to exhibit and collect only his pipe cleaner sculptures. Lucky described this period in his career as “excruciating,” and he questioned whether to continue working as an artist.

Finally, in 2014, Lucky had a studio visit that did not end in polite rejection. Mark Beckman,2 an art dealer opening a new gallery on the Lower East Side, offered to represent Lucky and show Lucky’s new work in the gallery’s first solo exhibition. Lucky provided Mark with the legitimacy of a prestigious exhibition history, and Mark afforded Lucky visibility. The exhibition was not a home run, as the works went unsold for most of the exhibition, but it sparked attention. The New York Times gave the show a positive review in the final weeks of the exhibition. Mark had been present to discuss the exhibition when the critic visited the gallery, and the critic similarly discussed the elevation of everyday materials into art as a core consistency in Lucky’s work. The review attracted some sales to prominent collectors, and both Mark and Lucky were satisfied.

Mark contrasted the review to one written by Ken Johnson in the New York Times in 2000. In the gallery’s back room, he unearthed the article from a pile on his desk and stabbed his index finger at it, describing the review as “infamous” and harmful to Lucky’s career. “People say they are against branding, and then they say stuff like this,” he said. The review stated: “Mr. DeBellevue may understandably want to avoid typecasting as ‘the pipe cleaner guy,’ but these works have it all: formal rigor, inventive and intensive craft, goofy humor and poetic imagination. You wonder why, for now, at least, he bothers doing anything else.”3 Most readers would likely see this review as positive, but Mark perceived the review as portraying the aesthetic value of Lucky’s work in overly narrow terms that excluded newer works, like the pistachio shell canvases.

It is unclear whether those who knew Lucky’s work remembered that specific review so many years later. What is certain is that collectors continued to strongly associate Lucky’s work with pipe cleaners. A year after the initial studio visit, Mark exhibited Lucky’s work at a prominent art fair that showcased the work of emerging artists in New York, and Mark offered to let me observe in his booth. As I helped Mark and Lucky assemble the booth before the fair’s VIP opening, during which invited collectors, curators, and reporters tour the booths, Mark discussed the “talking points” with me. Mark explained that because mid-career artists (artists over the age of forty who have achieved stable careers but not stardom) were often seen as “over the hill” by collectors, he wanted to describe Lucky, who was in his fifties, as a young artist.

He reasoned, “You can say he’s young, even if he is in his fifties, because he has been off the market for over ten years.”

I asked, “What should I say if they ask about the pipe cleaners?”

Mark replied that I should not mention it, but if collectors asked, that I should highlight the “umbrella themes” throughout the work: Lucky was dignifying nontraditional art making, his work was associated with the DIY movement, he embraced accidents in the creative process, and his work played on humor. The topic quickly proved impossible to avoid. For the next nine hours, collectors meandered into the booth, exclaiming, in surprise, “I remember when he was doing pipe cleaners.”

Peter Hort, a prominent collector, asked me, “This is Lucky? I have his pipe cleaners.”

Mark explained that Lucky was experiencing his “second life” as an artist, and he reiterated the conceptual linkages between the pipe cleaner sculptures and the newer works. Toward the end of the fair, Mark was chain-smoking outside the back door of the auditorium. Renting the booth alone for four days cost $9,000, and he was still waiting for a sale.

The story of Lucky DeBellevue’s work and career elicits many questions: Why would Lucky devote fifteen years to producing pipe cleaner sculptures, and why would he believe that pipe cleaners and pistachio shells were part of the same “language”? Why would Mark exhibit Lucky’s new work, after a critic questioned why Lucky would bother “doing anything else”? Why were the pipe cleaner sculptures, but not the pistachio shell canvases, so vividly ingrained in collectors’ minds? These questions hit upon the core nature of art.

Critics in various cultural fields have spilled much ink arguing over which works are “good” and what criteria for judging these works are legitimate. In our everyday lives, we express and debate aesthetic judgments when we talk about whether we liked a film, album, restaurant dish, or novel.4 Some cultural fields enjoy at least a minimal consensus over aesthetic value. For example, restaurant diners could debate over the merits of including cashews in a dish, but would be united in their nausea over a raw sewage soup. But all such bets are off in the contemporary art world.5 A curator can extol pipe cleaners as “magical,” a museum can exhibit works made of elephant dung and pornographic photographs,6 and a collector can purchase a formaldehyde shark for $12 million.7 In this field, aesthetic value is radically uncertain.8 Despite this uncertainty, those in the contemporary art world must commit to aesthetic decisions. Artists must decide how to produce their work, dealers and curators must select which works to exhibit, critics must choose how to interpret exhibitions, and collectors must purchase certain works for their collections.

Artists and others make aesthetic judgments by assessing “creative visions.” I define a creative vision as a bundle of recognizable and enduring consistencies within a body of work, with a body of work being the oeuvre or corpus of an individual.9 Each artist’s body of work is all of the work that the artist has produced, including preliminary works, such as sketches, and works that have never left the studio. Artists perceive nonrandom consistencies among multiple works that are rooted in their aesthetic interests and commitments. These consistencies occur in formal and conceptual elements.10 Formal elements, such as line, color, shape, form, texture, and composition, are produced by using certain media and techniques. Conceptual elements, including subject matters, themes, ideas, and emotional states, are discerned from formal elements.11 Those other than the artist, such as dealers and collectors, also have bodies of work, which are composed of the artworks that they exhibit or collect. Like artists, they view themselves as having creative visions, in that they perceive continuities among the works that they select and believe that they have certain aesthetic sensibilities that guide these choices.

Artists and others in the art world use several terms synonymously with creative vision, including language, vocabulary, and style. The terms “style” and “signature style” are sometimes used interchangeably with the term creative vision, while other times, these terms are used pejoratively to describe artists who have economically capitalized on a formally narrow “brand.”12 In contrast, the term creative vision has a generally positive and less contentious valence. In the art world, this term is used in the service of both interpretation (What elements compose an artist’s creative vision?) and evaluation (Does an artist have a true creative vision?).

In the absence of objective criteria or reliable metrics for aesthetic judgment, perceptions of creative visions are central to how those in the contemporary art world interpret and evaluate works of art. Lucky DeBellevue was guided by these perceptions when he chose to spend years making pipe cleaner sculptures and when he decided to switch to pistachio shell canvases. Perceptions of creative visions also underlay critic Ken Johnson’s assertation that Lucky should continue to produce pipe cleaner sculptures, dealer Mark Beckman’s narrative about how the pipe cleaner sculptures and pistachio shell canvases were conceptually related, and collector Peter Hort’s strong association of the pipe cleaner sculptures with Lucky’s body of work. Perceptions of creative visions are important because those in the art world rely upon them to make aesthetic choices and regularly invoke them to account for their decisions. These perceptions influence expectations of how bodies of work should develop over time, understandings of the core elements within specific bodies of work, and beliefs about which bodies of work share significant commonalities.

This book explores how perceptions of creative visions shape aesthetic judgments. Addressing this question entails examining much more than the work and career of Lucky DeBellevue. It requires taking a bird’s-eye view that includes, under a single gaze, artists’ often solitary work in their studios as well as their interactions with others in studio visits, exhibition installations, gallery exhibition openings, art fairs, and parties. Together, in these moments of solitude and sociality, artists make creative choices, communicate aesthetic meaning, and receive artistic critiques that they carry back into their studios. It is here, within the contemporary art world as a whole organism, that the creative process occurs and can be understood.

Theorizing Aesthetic Judgments and Creative Visions

Most people have a favorite song. When they hear it, they experience a surge of emotion: joy, sadness, melancholia. They might feel their heart thumping rhythmically and be moved to dance. They might recall a poignant memory. They might ponder the score or a particular line, drawing out a life lesson, which may take on new meanings as they replay the song. They might play the song intentionally to evoke a particular mood or reaction, such as the cathartic recognition of a broken heart. The song might serendipitously play in their presence, inducing an unexpected change of emotion. Perhaps the song is a guilty pleasure. They might bashfully admit to enjoying it, apprehensive of the potential social sanction. In each of these moments, the aesthetic experience of hearing the song does something to the person, eliciting feelings, thoughts, movements, and actions. These moments are shaped by previous social experiences, such as memories and associations, and influence how individuals interact in the world.

Aesthetic judgment is the process by which individuals perceive and evaluate sensory experiences.13 Because each creative work is, by definition, unique, it cannot be evaluated on a common metric. Furthermore, as the maxim “It’s a matter of taste” suggests, aesthetic value is not objective. Creative works have no utilitarian function. We appreciate a song, novel, or painting because it feels pleasurable, evokes emotions, or captures ideas. Given that we can, and often do, disagree in our aesthetic judgments, how do we judge a work of art as good and how do we negotiate these judgments with others?

The seemingly mundane experience of listening to a song or observing a work of art has captivated scholars for centuries.14 Philosophers have long recognized aesthetic judgment as central to our cognitive understandings of reality. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we perceive things as specific through sensuous perception, before we interpret them as concepts, or as part of a class of objects.15 Only by forming aesthetic judgments, such as “this is beautiful,” can we make sense of the objects in our surroundings.16 Kant believed that we expect others to agree with our aesthetic judgments, and that, when we discover disagreements in aesthetic judgment, we feel justified in defending our views. Two centuries later, political theorist Hannah Arendt extended Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment by arguing that, through aesthetic judgments, individuals not only communicate their evaluations of objects, such as artworks, but also disclose what kind of person he or she is and within which kinds of social groups he or she belongs.17 When we discover that someone else dislikes our favorite song, it chips away at our feelings of commonality with that person.18 Alternatively, when we learn that a colleague with whom we thought we had little in common frequents the same hole-in-the-wall restaurant, we feel a sudden kindling of companionship.

While philosophers largely examine aesthetic judgments through theoretical arguments, social scientists often seek to understand how the social world shapes aesthetic judgments through empirical studies of specif...