Survey

Over the last decades, the art world has become more and more professionalized. For an online-only survey, frieze asked 16 curators, writers and artists how they thought the languages, codes, education and business methods resulting from this process are affecting creative freedom. Is the art world too professionalized – or not enough?

John Baldessari

Copyright Sidney B. Felsen 2007

John Baldessari is an artist based in Los Angeles

As both a teacher and an artist, I don’t think I’ve ever felt any conflicts of interest between the two professions. I’ve always been able to do what I wanted to do. The only conflict was an ethical one: as professors, we’re hired because we’re professional artists, but that also means we’re away a lot. I first started traveling for my own shows when I was teaching at University of California San Diego, in about 1968. That’s when I began to travel to Europe and New York. After many years, I felt there was a tipping point, and that’s when I finally left my teaching position at University of California Los Angeles. I was away so much and students were paying money to study there, but I couldn’t be there. I just didn’t think it was right. The universities were always pretty understanding and nobody ever complained, but it’s a self-monitoring system. I rapped my own knuckles.

One thing I’ve noticed in my life is that I’ve become more selfish with my time. As I become more well known as an artist, I get more and more requests: requests to contribute to magazines, requests to film me in my studio or photograph my studio, and that’s an encroachment on your time. Fortunately, I have a studio manager who’s really good at saying no. I’m too much of a softy, but she’s really vigorous. So that helps. I hardly ever go out socially to openings and events. I don’t think there’s any artist who hates his openings more than I do. I always try to find some excuse to be there only for an hour, or I hide out in the office. I figure my job is fundamentally to make art. Nobody is inviting me to these parties and events for my blue eyes – it’s because of the work I do. And if I can’t do that, what good am I? But I do feel I have to be there to see the work installed, because that’s when the work is finally born. Sometimes people ask me why I don’t just send an assistant, and I say, No, I really have to see how it looks. I’d love to do what my old friend Sol LeWitt used to do – he would have his assistants do the work, and sometimes he would come and see the installation, but he would never stay around for the opening. I would love to do that, but I’ve never been able to. At a certain age, you begin to flex your muscles and make demands. I think that’ll be the next one on my list.

I think art students’ expectations of what it means to be a professional artist are different nowadays. When I got started, the general idea was that you had a job to support yourself, and there was very little chance of ever selling anything. The big dream was showing in a gallery somewhere. The model back then was that galleries supported themselves by selling works by more established artists. But they had an ethical commitment to showing younger, un-tested artists, whose work may or may not sell. I was never able to sustain myself on the work that I sold until the mid-1980s, when I was finally able to leave my teaching job. But that’s also when the whole art market exploded.

Young MFAs today have never seen bad times, so the financial crisis is coming as a big shock to them. I’m getting more and more letters from ex-students asking me to write letters of recommendation so they can get teaching jobs. One of my own fears is that as galleries move into larger spaces, it sends a message to young artists that they have to paint bigger paintings or do bigger work. Maybe that’s just my own paranoia, but I do think students keep an eye on what is shown and what sells. So if they see that realistic painting is selling, they think, well, why don’t I do that? I know that for a while, young artists rated each other in terms of whose shows got reviewed, or whose review was longer, who had a picture with their review, or who had a color reproduction. There have always been these kind of ranking systems among artists.

I think I’m the same person now as when I started out as an artist, despite all the changes that have gone on around me. But it’s so hard to see oneself. They say that a shark is always the last one to criticize salt water. I feel the same way. When I think about what’s changed, the thing that always pops into my mind is that some of my early text and photo pieces sold for about US$100 each when I first made them. A few years back, when one of the pieces sold at an auction for four-point-something million, I thought, I didn’t change, the world changed.

Dominic Eichler

Dominic Eichler is a contributing editor of frieze

Wilson had great faith in the ideas of the young. He said to Timewell: “I really think that boy would do well in the Modern Picture department. Would you give him up?”

“The fact Bruce was nice looking didn’t do him any harm,” says Timewell. “For quite a while he was Peter’s very blue-eyed boy.”

Interviewer: How long did it take you to become an expert on the Impressionists?

Bruce Chatwin: I should think about two days.

[Bruce Chatwin discussing his early days at Sotheby’s in the late 1950s and 1960s, from Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography Bruce Chatwin (Harvill Press, 1999) pp.88 & 95]

Professionalism is probably not a spice that you can use too much or too little of. Even though art is about productive exceptions, it seems to remain true that most artists – or art writers, for that matter – rarely think of what they do mainly in professional terms (even if for a while they looked the part: in the late 1990s and big fat early 2000s, for instance, designer dressing suggested that all the major and aspiring participants in most secure niches of their art worlds were cutting-edge yuppies. That trend gave away to a younger crop of neo-conceptual ragamuffins and our fretful times will no doubt reflect itself in something more austere soon enough). If pushed, I suspect that most artists have admitted or would admit that for them being an artist is akin to a calling or a radical life choice or the only thing they could ever or would ever really want to do (even Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons). That goes for most of the best gallerists, curators and collectors, too. Meanwhile the peddlers and purveyors of art have a difficult task of behaving in a professional manner because they have to serve the rest of the world (though not strictly professionals like, say, teachers or accountants), while not killing the thing they hopefully love. It doesn’t seem to me that this state of affairs has really changed much in the last century.

Artists used to be safe in guilds and societies, which were arguably more like trade organizations. The idea of a profession has a solidly status quo–loving middleclass ring to it, doesn’t it, though ‘acting professionally’ is often just a way of dressing up business (i.e. ‘Drop the attitude it’s just a shop’ – ABFAB) or to justify and secure tenure. Under the surface of the evergreen ‘professionalism debate’ are raw cultural politics and power relations. It’s excruciating to see or read the offerings of emerging artists or young gallerists who feel the need to couch their valuable work in some paranoid, knee-jerk conservative, phantasmal notion of ‘professional terms’ in order to be taken seriously by whatever authorities or gatekeepers they imagine are standing in judgment of their work or to make a successful or form-filling application for something. Related to growing professionalism is something equally problematic – the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the art-involved self.

Perhaps ironically, when I’ve heard an artist off-their-guard take the word ‘professional’ into their wine-lubricated mouths it’s normally in a negative sense to complain bitterly about a gallery, curator, institution or funding body: ‘They were so unprofessional.’ That complaint is actually about something else – a perceived or experienced lack of what might be better termed ethical behavior. The complaint, of course, goes the other way around, too, although the proverbial ‘difficult artist’ has the considerable cache of the avant-garde to justify nonconformist abrasions, a litany of social lapses or varying degrees of job-related megalomania.

In the still highly personal, expanding and contracting, flip-flopping, rags and riches, steeply unjust, multi-hierarchical, global landscape of contemporary art worlds, unwritten codes of good conduct between all of those involved are more important than ever. Remember, most other real professions are highly regulated by law or ought to be or are about to be. You could boil it down to simple things like respect, decency, honesty, reliability, trustworthiness, integrity and not being in it for the quick ego or financial fix. The other necessary and positive aspect of the idea of professionalism applicable to art world dealings involves commitment and thoroughness, a depth in the relation to the art in question – but that is perhaps more of an underestimated precondition.

Maybe it’s these two aspects of the generally maligned notion of professionalism that are actually the framework or armature of creative freedom – neither creativity nor freedom is worth anything in a Hobbesian or neo-liberal digitalized jungle. Then again, there is always the option of negating all behavioral expectations while miraculously being in the thick of your chosen art world (the only place negation actually works). But even aside from questions of economic viability, that doesn’t seem to be such a popular choice and is much tougher than thick art world biographies can lead you to believe.

This is a blog, isn’t it, and as such, it is meant to be full of opinions and unsolicited, questionable advice useful to someone somewhere. Here is mine to myself: be highly ‘professional’ when good behavior is not expected or forthcoming from those you are dealing with. But refuse the very notion of it with gusto and in a shamelessly Dada-esque or Fluxus-happening fashion, when it’s taken for granted that you ought to be a certain way. And finally, don’t confuse these two situations, which commonly overlap.

Ryan Gander

Ryan Gander is an artist based in London

Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon. When artists talk about professionalism, it’s probably wise to contradict yourself. It’s really hard to get it right as an artist; they don’t teach you anything you need to know at art school. We all come out totally unprepared: what good is form, shape and tone when you can’t fill in a loan form when a museum asks if they can show your work? Shaping a practice that you are interested in is relatively easy when compared to being an artist.

For me, the ‘professional’ only exists around the the physical things – nowadays it slaloms around the crates for a while and then disappears into the ether. When I wander around the city solo-chasing an invisible urban narrative, when I wake up in an artists’ residency bed-sit in Paris, when I stay in and turn the phone off so I can work on writing something I am not a professional. When making work, it’s much better to be an amateur. Professionals don’t make mistakes, whilst making mistakes is the currency of a good practice, the two clang together like a tubular bell and a pack of butter. For an artist one of the most urgent things is to be able to find people who you trust to be professional on your behalf. And then slip out the back door silently.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is an artist and has written several books and essays, including Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (2000) and Beyond Piety (1995). Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Art after Deconstruction (ed. Rex Butler) containing essays about his painting and theory by Penny Florence, Rachel Kushner and Rex Butler, and three unpublished essays by Gilbert-Rolfe, will be published later this year. Gilbert-Rolfe is Chair of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center, Pasadena, and a Visiting Tutor at the Royal Academy, London

It costs so much to make art that I don’t think it surprising that the people who make it should be eager to sell it for as much as they can get. Moreover, if there is a difference between that and choosing to make the kind of art that one thinks most likely to sell, it’s not clear to me that it would be the same kind of difference for every artist. Andy Warhol, for example, would presumably not be able to make art other than the kind that he thought would sell. It would defile his aesthetic. Someone else, on the other hand, might only be able to make a certain kind of art regardless of whether it sold or not. I hardly see that one could be said to be more professional than the other. Supposing you felt professionally obliged to be indifferent to the market, would that be a contradiction in terms and if so, why?

Personally, which in my case and many others is I think almost to say professionally, I have been disturbed by the huge increase in treating arse-kissing as an acceptable way of life that has seemed to me to be characteristic of the art world in recent years. I hope the total of collapse of the world’s economy thanks to the short-term thinking in which bankers and others were allowed to indulge will bring some sort of interruption, at least, to the worship of business and its methods that has infected civilized life for far too long. I should like to see someone make some sort of Hans Haacke meets Warhol work using all those pictures of artists and dealers standing with important collectors at openings that certain online magazines that shall be nameless have taken to running, but this time with captions telling us from what act(s) of gross financial opportunism and irresponsibility each collector had profited. You can find an historical precedent for everything from fawning to loathing, but the precedent that appeals most to me is Courbet’s, in that he sought to make sure that patrons didn’t feel that they got to patronize. I think that’s a reasonable professional attitude.

Beyond or other than that, I think the idea that a ‘market’ is synonymous with a ‘world’ is a wholly Thatcher-Reagan concept, horrific in its implications, and what goes for the larger world and market goes for the art world too: the art world isn’t the same thing as the art market. For one thing there are people (some of them artists) who hate the art market. Or, to put it in a way market fetishists will prefer, there has to be quite a lot of art that is excluded from the market so that it can be understood to trade in items valuable because of their quality. That means the market can’t encompass the whole world, but only the part it can use. There is at any given moment a huge supplement out there, unrecognized except as the unrecognized. Salesmen and women endowed with an acute sense of quality (aka ‘historical significance’) are the gatekeepers between the two. Not only the world as a present totality (thought by philosophers but not Thatcher to be inherently ungraspable as a whole) but its history are marketable. Will this idea of the world as a market fall through the floor like the larger model whence it is derived? In common with it are people who trust individuals said to be endowed with extraordinary judgment about complex matters, some of them conjured out of the air. What might happen if some of the rich people in the photos develop paranoia, suddenly struck by the thought that maybe the quality traders were doing to them what they did to others in the trade in which they made their money. Would they feel resentment or embarrassment if struck by such a (surely misguided but you know how people are) thought?

It could do quite a lot of harm to a market that has become identified with a world, to the world as well as to the market I dare say. Economies, after all, are driven very largely by confidence as John Maynard Keynes noted and we’ve been told a lot lately. What would be the right professional attitude to take in such a situation? Pity? It would be a change from envy and resentment I suppose but it doesn’t sound all that professional. Pity doesn’t have anything to do with quality and historical significance.

Bruce Hainley

Bruce Hainley lives in Los Angeles. His book Foul Mouth is available from 2nd Cannons

I like pros, especially when it comes to tennis and rent boys; if I can get a twofer, and the trick looks like Rafael Nadal, I’m in heaven.

Curious that the question is not about authority because, basically, Où sont les autorités d’antan, right?

Although professional, as a term and concept, doesn’t quite cover the kind of crapola currently running rampant, and while it’s super annoying when hacks run things, various nepotisms – academic, romantic, financial – govern who gets what gig or what or who’s deemed ‘serious’ (LOL); mountebank persiflage passes for smarts; narrowness as well as mediocrity not only rule but also are fabulously remunerated, a) I’m skeptical about whether any of this affects ‘creative freedom’ and b) welcome to life.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable when they could just say, ‘So what.’

Despite it all, ‘art’ somehow survives. Those who shrug their shoulders at and/or find hilarious the dominant regimes and reputations (OMG) of the ‘critical’ or ‘important’ or whatever usually play no small part in its survival.

Islington Mill Art Academy

Islington Mill Art Academy, Salford, UK is a free self-organised art school set up in 2007 by a group of art foundation students, dissatisfied with the quality of university fine art courses open to them

While researching ideas for Islington Mill Art Academy in 2007, we talked to many of the recent fine art graduates from universities in our area. Some spoke about how there had been an expectation throughout the three years of their course that graduation would signal a point of transformation, where their position would shift from ‘student’ to ‘professional artist’. Even a number of years after leaving university, many were still feeling that they needed to learn much more about how to turn their practice into a career. The professional development classes in university hadn’t made much sense under the protective wings of the institution. After university, many had found themselves drifting off completely or involved in artist led projects to create opportunities. These observations led us to some founding ideas for the group:

1. That Islington Mill Art Academy should base itself as much as possible, in the real world.
2. Our learning and development should be ongoing and continual. There should be no point of accession from student to artist.
3. That as part of this course we should gain an understanding of what it means to be an artist.

As administrators of our own art school and directors of our own educational process, we have found that a degree of competence is not only practical and useful but necessary. Contacting artists to arrange talks and critiques, organising residencies and research trips, paying for a studio space, finding materials/knowledge/skills to make art work are all things that we do regularly. Each of these tasks requires good communication skills, an amount of self-confidence, and a disciplined work ethic.

All of this probably contributes to our education and perhaps why we are given opportunities in the real world. We are not protected by an Institution and we have therefore to commit to a much wider scope of reality in order to sustain the Academy itself. Our deadlines and decisions requiring actions come thick and fast. With each one we are learning about the mechanics of the art world, and therefore maybe ultimately how to be ‘professional’ and how to be self sustaining, how to network and how to communicate who we are and what we do.

Since beginning the Academy, we have come across and in some cases worked with many ‘highly’ professional people. In some cases, artists, who have their business cards, portfolios and printed matter to hand, ready for the business of art. If this is what it means to be a ‘professional’ artist, then we do not necessarily see this as our goal. While we recognise that a basic aptitude for managing ones work is important and useful, the only artist worth striving to be is one that makes great art.

Marta Kuzma

Photograph: Vegard Kleven

Marta Kuzma is a curator, critic and Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo

The Union of the Imaginary (VOTI) was a short-lived online association of independent curators who in the late 1990s attempted to create agency around alternative models of cultural production, going beyond the frameworks of exhibition making, employment and networking dominant at the time. VOTI’s union aimed to instigate direct and creative dialogue among its members through the then new world wide web, and the conversation tackled from cultural topics such as the Balkan wars. In the face of a perceived increase in the institutional focus on marketing and branding, and an inflexible and unimaginative construction of audiences, VOTI tried to strike a balance between aesthetic and political intervention, and set to think about production models that escaped the constraints imposed by an increasingly bureaucratised art world.

VOTI folded, and many of its participants went on to work for established and more orthodox institutions. At the same time, the institutional adoption of a generalist and quantitative idea of public, audience and constituency went from strength to strength to become the dominant position today. Monumental, disproportionate public commissions based on a positivist approach to city space proliferated, attracting record number of visitors and leading, in an effort to meet the larger budgets for production, to formerly unconceivable financial and professional relationships. ‘Mr. Shapolsky’1 came to be celebrated rather than denounced, reflecting a new trend towards institutionalised carpet-bagging in the new millennium.

In this context, for all of us who have sat through meetings in which rhetoric about audiences and public, in the name of professionalism, has led to the annihilation of projects, the mediocritisation of any given subject and the adoption of generalist approaches, a properly professional frame of operation is desired. As one of the original thinkers around art for the people, Bogdanov, through his notion of proletkult, recognised the intrinsic contradiction between an artistic idea, its content and its treatment and its organisation for a certain community. But Alexander Bogdanov understood that in the organisation of that artistic idea into organisation of information for a specific community, the transmission required instigation rather than propaganda. Perhaps this is something we, as purported professionals in the art community, have collectively forsaken – the ability to engage in this process of transformation, and to use the current working platforms, whichever they might be, as places from which to secure a space for deviation, for the undeterminable, for the unforeseeable, and even for the cryptic. Perhaps, we have quite simply forgotten what being really professional means.

Michaela Melián

Michaela Melián, artist, musician, lives in Munich. She has recently showed at Ludlow 38, New York, Cubitt, London, and Lentos Museum, Linz

So much for professionalism: I always understood art as a profession, in the sense of a vocation. As an assignment that I can find, organise, and define myself. As a vessel that I can fill with options that I chose myself, in coalitions that I chose myself. Admittedly that’s a romantic dinosaurism; because of an increasing amount of electronic tools an increasing amount of work processes are channeled through my own system, and so the task is to circumvent the demand for busyness, to circumvent the ‘ism’: professionalism sounds like functionalism and that can’t be it.

Tom Morton

Tom Morton is a contributing editor of frieze, and curator at the Hayward Gallery, London

A useful definition is given in a 1977 report by the UK Competition Commission, entitled ‘Architects’ Services’: ‘A profession is a vocation founded upon specialised educational training, the purpose of which is to provide disinterested council and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation wholly apart from expectation of other business gain’. Looking at many people who work in the art world, even Meatloaf at his most optimistic would struggle to claim that Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.

Victoria Noorthoorn

Victoria Noorthoorn is an independent curator based in Buenos Aires. She is currently Co-Chief Curator of the 7th Mercosul Biennial, to open 26 September 2009, in Porto Alegre, Brazil

Professionalism might be a blessing or a curse, depending where you stand, both geographically and in regards to the art system. Where museums in Latin America present the degree of professionalism required by the global system, they provide the fuel for an ever-increasing production of exhibitions and projects that in turn become catalysts for production in the local artistic scenes. In other cases, where professionalism hasn’t yet filtered into old national or municipal structures, we crave its demands of egalitarian/unified criteria and efficiency, despite knowing that it might prove a double-edged sword.

It is notable to observe how, in the world centres, academia increasingly dictates the standards to be proven by artists, with growing disregard for creative talent, risk and visceral or intellectual irreverence; and how human resources departments in museum businesses dictate the standards to be met by curators and museum directors, to the general detriment of the effects of personal visions, the still pertinent ‘bloody good eye’, or the talent to shake and activate a specific scene. In general, the system becomes the first receptor-evaluator of whatever proposals are being created, and dangerously filters out important artistic visions and projects that seem not to meet the current trends. Academia dictates artistic form and content in such a way that it is almost impossible for a young artist to disregard a corpus of compulsive terminology or imposed ways of seeing and thinking. The result is an expansion of intellectual and terminological correctness within the arts, which only helps to dry it out and enforce the question of spectators who increasingly have the right to ask, ‘Will you please explain to me why this is so unique?’ The same applies to curators, an ever-increasing homogeneous band in which it is not always easy to maintain an individual voice. It is always refreshing to encounter people who take risks and are sceptical of must-do readings and actions, and who avoid the pitfalls of what is wanted, required or accepted.

There are, nonetheless, actors and dimensions in Latin America that offer a counterbalance to the uniformity promoted by efficiency. In some countries, such as Argentina, academic artistic education entails a bureaucratic process that propels the true young artist to look for his or her education elsewhere: in artist-run studios, where the critiques he or she receives allow him or her to acquire the needed criticality. Also, in many cases, there is the belief in the importance of the independence of local voices and productions, as well as irreverence towards what is being produced and/or said in the so-called world centres. And because collecting is still incipient and in many cases hasn’t yet given way to standardization and speculation, creative thought develops at ease and with few constraints.

All in all, professionalism is most welcome so long as it allows for independent and open spaces for thought, expression and creation to exist and challenge it. The art system would benefit from contemplating these dynamic voices; it would enrich itself from the questions that they pose, the leaps that they demand, and the actions that they may trigger.

Anne Pasternak

Courtesy Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Anne Pasternak is President and Artistic Director of Creative Time

Hmmmm…. This is an interesting question. The truth is Yes and No. The art world is both too professional and not professional enough. On the one hand, institutions have become so professional over the past ten years that many have become inflexible. That inflexibility means that they have outmoded departments that are unresponsive to artists’ needs and desires to experiment, grow and evolve. There are countless examples of this, but just look at the curatorial departments within major museums – they have curators and collections devoted to such categories as painting, film, drawing, photography, sculpture, printmaking etc. Yet most of today’s artists work in just about all these art forms and more. In fact, a single art work often incorporates all these media. So which curator gets to show or buy a work when it falls into all departments? More often then not, the art work doesn’t get shown nor collected due to obsolete and irrelevant territorial divisions. It’s as if curators are forced to put square pegs into round holes. For goodness sake, some of our museums even look like corporate office buildings!

I think the real issue behind this question of professionalism is one of financing. American institutions make programmatic decisions based on where the money is. Without a true endowment for art in the United States, for example, there is little hope for true programmatic freedom. This means there is little opportunity within institutions for artistic play, adventure, or risk. It’s not surprising that since the decline in public funding, commercial galleries have been more experimental than our alternative art spaces.

On the other hand, professionalism can and should be in support of creative freedom. The point is not to make art or artists professional, but to make the systems that support the development and presentation of art professional. For example, when I have done my job well, I have raised the financial support an artist needs to make his dreams a reality; I have received all the appropriate permissions and undertaken all the political outreach necessary to show the work; I have initiated new meaningful partnerships; I have helped attract informed media coverage to broadcast the artists’ ideas; I have connected her/his ideas with a large and diverse public on site; I have protected artist, art and audience with fire and building department inspections, insurance plans, engineer reports, onsite security, and more. Without the kind of professionalism required to meet these and other constant hurdles, many public projects fail to reach the light of day. Well intending curators and artists just don’t have the stomach to get informed and go through the myriad of steps to make sure the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. And it’s a fine balance making sure the artist has her or his freedom to invent in an increasingly complicated world. But as a presenter, I see it as my job to remove barriers and obstacles to artistic freedom and that’s done with a serious commitment to professionalism. And the better my skills, the better I serve the artist.

Anselm Reyle

Photograph: Hedi Slimane

Anselm Reyle is an artist based in Berlin

For me, I see no discrepancy between professionalism and creative freedom, quite the contrary. In my case, together with a team of people, I have built a quite professional structure within my studio. As a result, I can concentrate on the things that I want to do. A certain professionalism and working with a team gives me more room for creative freedom.

Katy Siegel

Katy Siegel is associate professor of art history at Hunter College, CUNY, contributing editor to Artforum, and the editor designate of the Art Journal. Her book, Since ’45: American Art in the Age of Extremes is forthcoming (Reaktion, 2010)

In the old days, only doctors, lawyers, and priests were professionals, and everybody else just, well, worked (or didn’t, if they were lucky). Then it was special and fancy to be a professional: professionals had a secret handshake circle of peers, as well as the respect of the larger society. Post-World War II, particularly in the US, suddenly almost everyone was a professional. The latest addition to the range of possible roles in Capitalism was the person who neither made things with his hands nor owned them – he managed them, he administrated them. An important part of his distinction from the mere producers was professionalization: advanced education, jargon, meetings, etc. And even the producers began to be drawn into the magic circle, as Vance Packard wrote in 1959, with the ‘blurring of the boundary line between white and blue-collared people’. (Just recently I read a newspaper story that described the firing of Ford factory workers as ‘a mid-career change’. Everything is a career, nothing is a job.)

Avant-gardism was always an awkward fit for the American artist, who had neither a real academy to push against, nor an umbilical cord of gold siphoning money from the upper classes. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that, after the early lean years of Abstract Expressionism, it was easy for him to step into the wingtips of the man in the grey flannel suit. As Larry Rivers – one of the last heroin-shooting, jazz-playing bohemians – put it, it became apparent in the early 1960s ‘that one could go into art as a career the same as law, medicine, or government.’ The Pop artists were easy with success, even conventional success, and so was the ‘professional avant-garde’ (the term of critic William Seitz) of educators, explainers, promoters, and packagers that sprung up around them. Seitz’s 1963 description anticipates Bourdieu’s ‘artistic field’, the sociological explanation that artists are only a small part of the equation that includes their dealers, critics, curators, etc., that the artist as creator needs surrounding professionals.

Over the past ten years or so, this view of the artist has become dated. While the now standard professionalizing element of the MFA degree continues, the terms of success call for still greater professional functions. Being a success no longer means making art that someone can sell. A few ‘big’ artists (Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami) act as managers or businessmen, even taking on some of the function of their dealers (Damien Hirst, Keith Tyson, Richard Serra). There is also the imperative for artists to be their own archivists and historians, since galleries do a bad job of this, and you can’t always count on an art historian. More broadly, artists teach (as a desirable part of one’s career, not a crummy alternative that kills the creative impulse), take visiting artist gigs, give talks, speak on panels and magazine roundtables, write, play in bands, even curate shows of other artists’ work. The artist is a professional, but he also does the work of multitudes of other professionals.

The truth is that an MFA, even a hot MFA, doesn’t do it any more: there are just too many people competing. Adding all those other functions is a way to compensate for the diminishing specialness, the proliferation and devaluation of the professional. And so we come to its opposite: deprofessionalization. The majority of artists today will never achieve professional recognition or employment, and many express the feeling that they are teetering on the edge of not being a ‘real’ artist, through personal, domestic, regional or craft references. The sea of junky assemblages, medium-tech videos, and offhand abstractions is not ambitious with regard to other types of social production (such as movies or architecture), nor striving to test and expand the professional (disciplinary) understanding of art.

Critics have described this as a new ‘lessness’ or modesty in art, and have cast it as a chapter in the narrative of failed Utopias, but the end of Modernism is rarely a young artist’s most pressing reality, despite this meaningless explanation cropping up in the occasional pretentious artist’s statement. For the most part, this unambitious, unmasterful art is not exactly anti-professional – acting out in the hopes that rebellion will bring large-scale success – but rather can be better seen as socially imposed (not play-acted) amateurism or re-proletarianization. The art of plywood, insulation, plaster and jerry-rigging, of small paintings and big, deskilled, barely-there paintings is simply the product of the artist’s accurate perception of his own personal scale in the context of a crowded art world.

Seth Siegelaub

Seth Siegelaub has been active as a plumber; art dealer, publisher and independent exhibition organizer; a researcher and publisher on left communication and culture; and a bibliographer and publisher on the history of textiles. He has lived in Europe since 1972 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam

The ‘professionalization’ of the art world is an understated euphemism for the ‘businessification’ of the art world, which has been gradually developing since the early 1970s. This process is nothing less than the expansion of the dominant values of capitalism into the domain of art production as art has shifted from a ‘small-scale’, ‘cottage’ handicraft to become an important sector of the cultural industry, alongside pop music, fashion, television, film and their related ‘star’ values.

It has changed so-called creative freedom – if it ever really existed – by changing the parameters, criticality, subject matter and the development of artistic practice under the pressures imposed by ‘success’; how art is viewed and understood by the general public; as well as how and why art is collected, valued and invested in by public institutions and individuals.

This ‘businessification’ can, and probably will, ‘advance’ even further, especially now, in a period of uncertainty and recession, as it can become an even greater source of private entertainment, retreat from reality, and a source of stability in an unstable world, as traditional film and Hollywood has been in the past.

Marc Spiegler

Co-Director of Art Basel. He has long written about the art world for publications such as The Art Newspaper, ARTnews, Monopol, Artnet.de, and New York magazine, and co-founded the online discussion forum Artworld Salon

Sorry, but we have to question the notion that professionalism directly effects creativity. That seems to equate ‘professional’ with ‘careerist’ or ‘opportunist’. Maybe it does not fit the romantic notion of the tortured artist finding inspiration amidst personal chaos, but the fact is that countless artists create their work in a disciplined and organized way. They meet deadlines, honour contracts, persevere through tough periods and conduct rigorous research. While you cannot fake or force inspiration, once it comes you also need to realize the art work, and make sure it is properly seen. And when it comes to institutions, galleries and organizers of events such as Art Basel, I always think: the more professional the better – the better for the artists presented, the better for the public seeing their shows, and the better for the collectors and curators who want to acquire or exhibit their pieces.

Adam Szymczyk

Adam Szymczyk is the director of Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and curated, together with Elena Filipovic, the Berlin Biennale 5, 2008. He was a founding director of Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

Since the 1990s, curating and managing exhibitions became a clearly distinguishable career option. Curatorial studies were established as part of university education or embedded as part of the programme of art institutions in many countries – predominantly, if not exclusively, in Europe and the US. A steady stream of young international curators is produced by various schools and courses every year. This is certainly a different model of becoming curator than in the previous era, when curatorial mavericks of diverse academic and artistic backgrounds made their names by doing shows, speaking and writing about art, and not by getting degrees in curating. That was the ‘authorial’ model of curating, based on specific knowledge, while curating now is a more accountable trade – a common language that enables institutions to smoothly process art works and deliver people to shows.

The market for contemporary art grew immensely during the last ten years but it did not make it less vulnerable to speculative moves, just the contrary. Galleries seem to be no longer bound to physical sites where meanings could be made in exhibitions. They turned into enterprises managing complex international operations simultaneously in different places.

Global phenomena affect the art world. Artist’s freedom is a good joke. It is not true but it at least makes you laugh. Otherwise what’s left is mainly creative industries.1 Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971)