My initial reaction to ArtRank (see below) was one of disgust—An every-day, 2k14 kind of disgust that also gets called forth when I see the ungodly short shorts of teenagers today, which are as discomfiting as they are fascinating when you think about the exact point at which an ass becomes a leg.
It seems every generation finds there’s always more cheek to show…
toxic.
wtf.
not a “oh I’m so surprised this toxic thing exists” wtf
but a “we might have to barf forever” wtfI feel like everything is starting to collapse. And I can’t believe only 4 out of 40 people on this dumb list are women.
OOOOOOHHHHMYGODDDDD YOU GUYS. THE WORLD. Culture is such a complete joke. We’re starting to run out of it because we’re using it up so fast. Remember when people had to paint because they couldn’t take photographs or watch Netflix??
If calculus is part of evolution, is this gross, viral ArtRank algorithm—and my compulsion to spread it—just part of evolution, too? What is the driving value system? The people who will be using this website already have an excess or survival. Seriously, if anyone knows what evolutionary biologists have to say about capitalism, point me to a book.
ArtRank reveals not only one of the big narratives in contemporary art, but also the reality of our economy, and how the relationship between the two gets totally jacked up (or should I say hiked up) with the trend metrics made available by the internet.
ArtRank is a stock ticker for contemporary art. It claims it “identifies prime emerging artists based on qualitatively-weighted metrics including web presence (verified social media counts, inbound links), studio capacity and output, market maker contracts and acquisitions, major collector and museum support, gallery representation and auction results.”
Yeah, you can throw up with me, too. Try to get some in my mouth so I can throw up again.
My first reaction to ArtRank was to its language: how it names abstract quantities with parsable words, while keeping the concrete meaning of such phrases a little out of reach. It is the language of expertise. It is the language of getting money. It is the language of getting money…to pay back the school that taught me those big words.
The way this particular language sounds reminds me so much of art language. Go to any gallery show, any museum show, or any student show, and you will find everyone trying to do the same expert song and dance with their words, speaking and writing with an air of distinction, though the vocabulary comes from the same pulp-intellect generator. You will find what’s said on the page is not what you see happening on the wall. At a time when most artists, art writers, curators, and historians have fallen victim to an alienating mode of art discourse, most of the general population have been taught that this disparity between what they read and what they see is simply the result of being uneducated or “not getting it.” Coupled with the myth of the artist constantly working to “carefully construct,” this is the biggest lie of the art-institutional complex. Everyone is entitled to their own experience of and opinion of art. Everyone can think and talk about art.
But this language issue goes beyond the art world. You find it in artisanal cheese shops in gentrified neighborhoods; in the precise and vague descriptions of craft beer ad campaigns; in pop-up clothing boutiques with “curated seasonal collections” and factory-direct retail websites that boast production with “radical transparency.” It’s the language that makes online articles on race, gender, and violence viral one day and forgotten the next.
Just as with the language and concept of ArtRank, our passionate reaction to almost all “content” comes just as quickly as our dismissal of it. Why? Because, (not even that) deep down, we know that 2k14 Content is flat and empty. Content: a noun that once implied something to be found inside now takes its form as an adjective to describe the complacency we have with empty information today.
The rapid flattening of our culture is evidenced in our online-optimized language—in its consistency across industries, its camera-ready tone, its shallowness of meaning, and rapid refresh rate. If the language is the means, what is the end?
1. To make an idea/brand/person/image more popular, as our current currency is hits, clicks, and likes
2. To give the illusion of choice, resistance to the mainstream, and inherent value.
The Language of Today isn’t propaganda, though; for there appears to be no agenda. If there was, that might mean the bulk of the literate population was up for thinking and therefore a viable target for persuasion. But the style of webby expertise doesn’t suggest a need to overcome anyone’s resistance. Rather, it’s simply how we operate today: sophisticated means with blind ends.
That’s the template for ArtRank, which claims to use a powerful algorithm to predict the future of the market. But without much transparency, or a competitor, there’s no difference between ArtRank and a crystal ball. If everyone follows its directives, of course its predictions will be right.
Without knowing how many people use or look at ArtRank, it’s impossible to speculate about its relevancy. ArtRank may just be fodder for me to write about a host of other things–and isn’t that the beauty of this interconnected world? That from even the driest site I can extrapolate so much information about our cultural climate.
ArtRank isn’t lame mainly because it makes a clear connection between money, popularity, and cultural value: those are pre-existing and necessary relationships that ArtRank merely illustrates in their current state of evolution. Art Rank is lame because it’s an ungenerous platform that devalues the work of artists. To any user who takes this website seriously, it says that the value of artworks is purely transactional. Regardless of the quality of work being produced by the hottie hot artists on that hot list, ArtRank sets up a system in which quality doesn’t matter—for better or for worse.
The real disappointment about ArtRank is that it would actually be fun, compelling, and terrifying if it laid bare all of its privileged information in a more dynamic format. Unfortunately, it’s basically a static list of names. I requested membership, but was never approved. Pity, because I have some things I could tell them (but wouldn’t), and therein lies another flaw: the data is not comprehensive.
It’s also depressing to read the horizontal, and presumably successive progression of categories within the emerging artist fish pool, as if those are the only things that happen in the life of a successful artist:
BUY NOW <$10,000;
BUY NOW <$30,000;
BUY NOW <$100,000;
EARLY BLUE CHIP;
SELL NOW (peaking);
LIQUIDATE (down)
These nodes are what are being presented to new collectors, with considerable amounts of disposable capital, who are looking to become invested in art. Here’s a better set of categories:
BUY NOW—HAS AN ACTUAL SENSE OF SELF AND IS THINKING;
BUY NOW—PRODUCING CONSISTENTLY IMPRESSIVE WORK;
BUY NOW—WORKING ON AN INCREASINGLY CHALLENGING AND COMMITTED SCALE…STILL GIVES A FUCK;
SELL NOW—WAS JUST IN IT FOR THE FREE DRINKS…QUIT MAKING ART WHEN THE WRINKLES APPEARED;
LIQUIDATE—HAS BEEN MAKING THE SAME THING FOREVER AND IS SPENDING MOST OF HIS/HER TIME WATCHING THE SAME NETFLIX SHOWS AS YOU SO WHY BUY THEIR ART WHEN YOU COULD JUST WATCH TV TOGETHER
What’s most troubling—and messed up—about the idea of ArtRank is the prospect that the lives and careers of artists on its list might be greatly affected by obscure data points. There are no protections for artists: we aren’t unionized, or given million-dollar contracts like NFL players. We aren’t corporations with share-holders (although that might be where the real money is leading to).
If this site’s advice turns out to matter, not only could it precipitate the downturn of an artist’s livelihood and opportunities, but it could also endow certain artists with canonical importance based solely on their number of instagram followers. This would not all be ArtRank’s doing—as it is a truth of the moment—but it will become a problem if museums and other institutions say these same artists matter not because they had a huge social media following—thanks in part to hype on websites such as ArtRank—but for reasons that continue to rehash the same one-dimensional narrative of the Artist.
On its own, I don’t think ArtRank poses a heavy threat. I think it is probably a flash in the pan and will have no lasting impact (at least not until its “anonymous” creators age beyond their mid-20s).
Art, money, and media are deeply intertwined, and there’s neither any denying it, nor anything intrinsically “wrong” with that. Something ugly may come, though, if financiers completely take on the role of historians, without any respect for history, and everyone is too dumb to tell the difference or the truth. If people in powerful positions make decisions based on speculation and hype, without an eye for sustainability or quality control, the art world will render itself even more incestuous, inaccessible and opaque than it is already. Art becomes unhealthy when the sheep follow the sheep following the sheep, into a dizzying spiral of immaterial and impermanent transactional value: a fluff economy.
Let’s just hope that ArtRank is everything I’ve dismissed it as, and nothing that it could be. Let’s hope it is just another page on the Internet. Just another teenager in short shorts in the great, forgettable mass.
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WSC