Day Fifty-two: Artists are narcissists.

Artists are narcissists. They just are. I don’t intend to sound critical or judgmental. I include myself in this statement.

nar·cis·sism [nahr-suh-siz-em] noun

1.

inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. Synonyms: self-centeredness, smugness, egocentrism.

2.

Psychoanalysis . erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development.

Ugh, maybe I should take that back. I believe it, but am also hesitant to place such a label on a pursuit that I believe so wholeheartedly in. I have to say it though. To make art, you must wholly believe in the lens through which you see the world, and believe in that perspective’s rightness so completely that you depict that vision in a way that the world can share it. It is kind of obnoxious. It is also valuable.

Leaders are narcissistic. Politicians are narcissistic. Teachers are narcissistic. Athletes are narcissistic. Doctors, Lawyers, pretty much every role our culture venerates has a mandatory narcissistic aspect. Artists also just make good scapegoats. There is no direct altruism inherent in art. Except that whole recording culture for the understanding of the future thing.

This article highlights that narcissism without stepping back from the individual. I’m not a critic, but I think the role of the critic is to step back from individual artists and into the big picture and to articulate that big picture clearly and objectively. Contemporary culture is not unlike this mass of consumable abstractions and individual cool artist stories. Darlings of the art world are the same as darlings of politics, of tv, of music. They are the loudest and brightest. They have the most engaging story. It rarely has to do with what they make.

The work Saltz highlights in this article was done by the following artists.

Leo Gabin – Collective of 3 Belgian artists who started working together in 2002

John Bauer – 42 years old, BA from UCSB

Josh Smith – 37 years old from Tennesee

Angel Otero – 32, got his MFA at SAIC at 24, Puerto Rican

Jamie Sneider – SVA MFA 2012, lives in Brooklyn

Rosy Keyser – 39, MFA SAIC

Helene Appel – 37, German

David Ostrowski – 32, studied with Albert Oehlen

Sergej Jensen – 40, born in Denmark, live in NY

Scott Lyall – 49, MFA Cal Arts

James Krone – 38, Berlin, BFA SAIC

Nick Darmstaedter - 25

Mark Flood – 57, Houston

Israel Lund – 33, MFA PNCA

Parker Ito – 27, Los Angeles

Jay Heikes – 38, Minneapolis, MFA Yale

Oscar Murillo – 27, MFA Royal College of Art 2012

Ryan Sullivan – 31, BFA RISD

Antonia Gurkovska – 30, Chicago and Bulgaria, 2011 MFA SAIC

Gardar Eide Einarsson – 37, Whitney Independent Study program

Nathan Hylden – 35, Los Angeles, MFA Art Center 2006

Louis Eisner – 26, BA Columbia

Joe Bradley – 38, BFA RISD

Charline von Heyl – 54, Brooklyn, contemporary of Laura Owens, Amy Sillman

Ned Vena – 32, BFA SMFA

Hugh Scott-Douglas – 26, BFA Pratt, OCAD 2010

R.H. Quaytman – 53, father was respected NY artist

Sam Moyer – 31, Brooklyn, MFA Yale 2007

Dan Colen – 35, BFA RISD

Lucien Smith – 25, BFA Cooper Union 2011

Markus Amm – 45, London

Stef Driesen – 48, Belgium

Sam Falls – 30, San Diego

Tauba Auerbach – 33, BA Stanford 2003

David Keating – 36, Berlin

I don’t think Stef Dreisen belongs in this group, but she and Marlene Dumas could totally be BFFs. It’s funny looking at all of this online. Looking at their lives and who they might be, because the work mostly looks the same. This really is quite the educated group. Pretty much the same demographic of ages as any MFA program 3-4 years later. I say to them the same thing I said in my grad school crits: Make me care. Show me something interesting.

Something I’m very interested in, but am still trying to find a way to articulate, is the line between wealth and money. This painting is important right now because it is worth a lot of money to collectors. It does not represent wealth, but some of them are trying.

Somewhere along the way we as a people forgot where to draw the line. I think part of that has to do with time. It took Julia Child EIGHT YEARS to make a cookbook that changed the way the world thinks about cuisine. If we are to make an art that truly reflects the world, it needs to be more than this. We aren’t giving it enough time.