Finding an answer to ‘what is an artist’ in Sarah Thornton’s book

Share

With the word "beauty" boldly stitched onto her fine sweater, Sarah Thornton is talking art over peppermint tea at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Thornton, who was born in Kingston and raised mostly in Montreal, became a darling chronicler of the contemporary art world with her smash bestseller Seven Days in the Art World. On a break from daily art journalism (she used to cover the art market for The Economist; she'll go back to writing for several platforms in January), Thornton, who is now based in London, has written another art world page-turner, 33 Artists in 3 Acts. Short, detail-packed scenes in three acts – Politics, Kinship and Craft – illuminate this world where artists can become celebrities and earn millions with their ideas – or not.

Marina Abramovic criticizes "art pollution," Damien Hirst alarms the art world by painting his own work, Cindy Sherman reflects on why the photos that include her image sell (much) more easily than her other work. Laurie Simmons – a respected and successful photographer now best known as Lena Dunham's mom – confides "the feeling of not being seen tips me over the edge."

It's as if Thornton takes something the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei says to her at one point and uses it as a mantra in writing the book: "You have to gather a lot of fragments to capture the reality."

Currently on a speaking tour, Thornton met with Western Arts Correspondent Marsha Lederman in Vancouver.

Who is your audience with these books? Are you trying to demystify the art world for the average person; trying to inform someone who already knows about it?

I write for both outsiders and insiders. It's really important to me to speak to a general audience and that's one of the reasons I chose these themes of politics, kinship and craft because they're universal and accessible themes and they're not typical of art criticism. But by the same token, I want to be amusing and insightful for an insider audience. There's not going to be anybody who's been behind the scenes with this entire roster before. And I think one of the things I do for people inside the art world is I say the things that are really not said. And so I become a little bit the tattle-tale for insiders and hopefully bring greater accessibility for outsiders.

You interviewed far more than 33 artists; how did you make your selections?

It was really tough to whittle down my artists. I did interview 130 artists around the world; there are some really important, interesting, even famous artists on my cutting room floor. I had a lot of different criteria for inclusion: Was the work relevant to our times? Was the work relevant to me and my themes? Was the interview high quality? So artists who were interested in my questions and really wanted to tackle them were much more likely to be included than others. I can think of one artist who had long been one of my favourites who then gave me an interview that felt overrehearsed who seemed to have a very dry slightly dead discourse. I had to cut him. It didn't matter how many years of fandom I'd had for his work; the interview was not worthy of inclusion.

Who was it?

I can't say. Because I still wish him the best and I still like his work. Although maybe not as much as I did before.

And yet Jeff Koons gives you canned answers and that becomes the whole point.

I can only have so many artists in the book giving canned answers. So he becomes the foil for the kind of honesty and openness of the rest.

No artists from Canada, eh?

I know. I really do think that is an omission; I really genuinely do. But there are also no French artists, which is probably even more scandalous to some.

The overall question you're trying to answer blossoms into these compelling scenes, but what were you trying to dig down into?

The really basic question 'what is an artist' actually opens up a huge can of worms and every worm in that can is interesting to me. So what is authenticity? What is realness? What is credibility? How is it that some artists develop cult followings and other artists are completely ignored? And sometimes artists I revisit actually shift and change their perception of what they're doing over the course of four years of [writing] the book. So Carroll Dunham is in one position and then as I revisit him and his wife Laurie Simmons, a photographer, their answers evolve.

Their lives change so much within that time frame because their daughter [Lena Dunham] became a superstar and that thrust them into the spotlight in a way they were unaccustomed to previously.

Absolutely. A lot of my questions for them were about the interdependence of their self-esteem and how they weathered the storm of one having an accolade or a lot of attention while the other was feeling in the shadows or vice-versa. And so Lena became extremely relevant to the questions I was asking them before she had even released her first feature film Tiny Furniture.

Ai Weiwei's life also changes dramatically through this period. What did you witness?

It's quite amazing. He starts off in Shanghai at a conference, but my first interactive scene with him is a high moment – the opening at [Tate Modern's] Turbine Hall with the sunflower seeds, which in my opinion is a major ambitious masterwork. He's full of conviction and the charismatic power of this presence kind of blows you away. [Later], a few weeks before I'm going to visit him in his studio in Beijing, he gets put in prison. And at that moment nobody knows where he is and I have what I think is a very poignant moment with his wife, Lu Qing, who's in a serious distress. All the computers have been confiscated, she's anxious that there are microphones [bugs] scattered through the house. Nevertheless, she gives me an open interview. And then I go back to Beijing and see him after his incarceration where his confidence had been knocked big time and he's still very much recovering. You could still feel how shaken he was, even months later. The psychological torture was pretty extreme.

Artists like Ai Weiwei or Jeff Koons employ people to actually make the work; the artists conceive it, someone else carries it out. This is not new to anyone who follows the art world, but does that play into dismissive attitudes from the my-kid-could-have-done-that crowd?

The problem for modern art was my kid could have done it; the problem for contemporary art is but he didn't make it himself. One of my messages for the general public is why should that matter? An artist today is an ideas person who's the architect of an oeuvre. You don't expect an architect to lay every brick; why would you expect an artist to do so as well? Artists are more like film directors; they rely on a team of craftsmen to create an end effect, be it an object or a performance or an installation or whatever. I think the key thing for artists who don't make their own work is to have an ethical relationship with those who do make the work. And when Ai Weiwei had his Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation, the sunflower seeds, it was important to him that there was videotape online on the Tate Modern website showing the craft that went into the work. So he's pro-craft actually. And I think a lot of artists are pro-craft. They really care about the execution of the work but it doesn't mean they're the ones manually doing it.

When Damien Hirst begins painting with his own hand, that scandalizes the art world.

My theory about that is that Damien kind of had a midlife crisis and a crisis in belief in his own work. And he went from a kind of working in a Duchampian mode, working as an overseer of his work, working with ready-mades, working with assistants, and I think actually making some quite important work over the years – perhaps too much of it – to making less than competent do-it-yourself paintings. Damien and I happen to be exactly the same age, we're born in the same year, and I kind of did think at the time well it would be kind of like me turning 40 and going wow I think I'm going to be a ballet dancer – good luck. Painting is one of those things that you cannot just pick up in your mid-40s.

He and Jeff Koons are both huge success stories in terms of fame and money. Can success actually be detrimental to your practice?

Success can be great for your practice and detrimental to your practice; if an artist loses focus on their work, if they become so distracted by their relationships with collectors and dealers and their market and their prices, I think it can be definitely detrimental. No success is a real drag for people's practice. There are many ways in which success is great for artists. I think actually success is generally good for people because that attention then leads them to try to step up their game and perhaps think of addressing a wider audience. I do think there are many ways in which success has not been terrific for Damien Hirst's work, but it's really complicated. And I also think artists target audiences with their work. And certain artists will target the billionaire collector classes with their work and maybe their work then loses salience for the rest of us.

Hirst is having a show in Doha toward the end of the book. How important has oil money become in this landscape?

Money that comes from natural resources is a huge factor with Russian and Arab collecting and they are buying at very high levels both privately and also at auction and that liquidity they bring to the art world affects the whole art world to some extent. The prices shoot up and also the collector who bought something for a few thousand dollars 20 years ago can re-sell for many million. And if they're an American they can reinvest in art and it's tax beneficial. So there's a lot of reinvestment in art based on sales to those people form those countries.

In contrast to Koons and Hirst, Andrea Fraser comes off as so genuine, and much more concerned with the art than the money or success. Martha Rosler too. It's too simplistic an analysis to say this is a gender issue but is there a different approach?

I hate to generalize about gender, but I do think that men are more likely to be interested in the money than women. And actually there are statistics that show male artists are more likely to earn a living through sales of their work than female artists. There are obviously exceptions: Yayoi Kusama, Cady Noland, Cindy Sherman. But I think it is less likely to be a goal for women. Women are perhaps more interested in other kinds of recognition.

Rosler says she doesn't believe that an artwork can be completely apolitical. What do you think?

I agree 100 per cent. People were initially very surprised that I put Jeff Koons in an act called Politics. They were like Koons has a politics? I was like yeah; let's tease that out here. I don't tell anyone; I just show it. In general I'm keen to show and let the reader be the judge and not be too mouthy or opinionated or judgmental. But it's all there.

Are we at a turning point in the art market?

It is so hard to tell. I hate to make predictions because it is fundamentally unpredictable. Who would have thought that during the last economic crisis that art would be the first thing to emerge gangbusters? And that all of a sudden financial advisers would be recommending to their high net worth clients that they invest in art as a hedge against currency fluctuations and financial market decline and all of that kind of thing? I remember being at the Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris in Feburary 2009 when the crisis raged on and it was all doom and gloom, and seeing I don't know like 20 record prices for Mondrians and Brancusis and Duchamps. So I hate to make predictions. I just like to be as accurate as I can about the now.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Sarah Thornton appears at the Ottawa International Writers Festival Wed. at 8:30 pm, and at the ROM Theatre in Toronto on Thursday at 7 pm.