The argument FOR artists using assistants is that artists have always done so, and that this is a new age and there is a new aesthetic in which the execution of the art is less relevant than the idea. Both these arguments are threadbare, and easy to dismantle.
First we need to make a distinction between an assistant, apprentice, and hired professional. It is convenient for those who employ highly skilled experts (such as stone carvers) to call them “assistants”, because it hides the fact that they perform a task the artist in question is incapable of doing his or herself. No, the old masters did not hire highly skilled artisans to fully create works they were artistically incapable of making themselves. This is a new thing.
In the olden days an established artist would have apprentices who would do things like help out with grinding pigment, stretching canvas, and when they were advanced enough in some cases apprentices would actually work on the master artist’s paintings themselves. Significantly, they worked in the same style as the master, under his direct supervision, and were openly acknowledged as having done so. It was not a secret that the master employed apprentices. He was proud of his protégés in the same way a Kung Fu master is proud of his top pupils winning matches using his particular style of Kung Fu. This isn’t really so objectionable. The canvases students worked on are valued less than ones fully executed by the master himself.
In the art world of today the “assistants” aren’t apprentices, but either workers who do relatively perfunctory art, such as Damien Hirst’s dot paintings, or else highly skilled professional craftsmen who are commissioned to create works in their entirety for an artist who is incapable of doing them himself. Let’s just go back to the Kung Fu analogy for a minute. Today’s version would be students who couldn’t really fight, but just went out and shoved people, or on the other extreme, hired ninjas who had fighting skills the Kung Fu master was completely incapable of, and who could easily defeat him in a fight. Both of these extremes, and probably most anything in between, are recipes for either very bland art in which the execution is easy enough for a low-skilled artisan to knock off, or highly polished but glib commissioned pieces that the artist his or herself can’t honestly take credit for.
It’s therefore no coincidence that the works of artists who use “assistants” and hired experts are drab, formulaic, and innocuous. They are to art what studio musicians are to Rock music. Damien Hirst was able to have assistants churn out at least 1,400 “dot paintings” because they followed a template and were simple to produce, like McDonald’s hamburgers. On the other end of the spectrum, Jeff Koons could only make highly polished porcelain and marble sculptures because he hired the best international artisans to execute them for him in their entirety. He has admitted that he hasn’t sculpted a thing since he was a child playing with putty.
All such works strive for a manufactured, mass-produced aesthetic, which is part absolute flawlessness, and equal parts simplistic, because only simplicity can be flawlessly executed. It is easy enough to make a perfect dot, or to hire professionals to make something in a style that has already been perfected for the marketplace, such as Koons’ porcelain kitsch figurines. The results are milquetoast, though sometimes on a scale and made up of materials that in and of themselves impress.
What is lost in this mix is the possibility of art which is the result of someone who can both conceive AND execute his or her own art, and any meaning that evolves and is infused in the process of making. It is impossible to say how much meaning is created in the process of making a work of art, but it is an extraordinary factor in the art of the Impressionists (who needed to engage in looking at light and shadow and develop felicity with rendering it), Post Impressionists (Van Gogh’s process is entirely relevant to the resulting paintings), Surrealists (the imagination unfolds along with the painting), and Abstract Expressionists (Pollock’s work evolved wholly through the process of making it and couldn’t be preconceived). The appropriationist’s art can only be preconceived, and cannot develop in the making of it.
In the case of today’s artists who have assistants make their art in its entirety, the meaning that can manifest in the making of the art itself is zero. It has to be zero, otherwise they’d have to credit those who made the art with having provided some sort of meaningful contribution, and it is the fashion to not acknowledge their contribution whatsoever. This is a crippled and benign art, no matter how much its very sterility is celebrated as visionary. How long can people convince themselves that “banality” is excitingly original, or that lack of substance is itself a superior kind of substance?
The artist who can’t make his or her own art, and only direct others to do it, is like the Kung Fu master who can’t himself fight, but is nevertheless a connoisseur of the fighting arts. Can the Kung Fu master who can’t fight really forge a new fighting style? No, because he’s an outsider to the process, and isn’t intimately involved in a way that he knows the feeling of fighting. This is why artists such as Hirst, Warhol, and Koons don’t invent new ways of physically making art, but rather use pre-existing commercial or otherwise plebeian techniques to render aesthetically neutral objects. They are like chefs for whom flavor is irrelevant.
For those who truly like art, there is precious little of it to sustain one in the vapid and flavorless works of appropriationists. From the duplicates emanating from the factory of Andrew Warhola (his real name), through the creations of Hirst and Koons, the copy-cat methodology doesn’t allow for much in the area of aesthetics. There usually is no composition to speak of, no juxtaposing or interplay of color, no arrangement of form, and no discernible subject or content. It’s like music without melody, rhythm, or harmony. When you just have a sequence of repeating beeps – the aural equivalent of a Hirst dot painting – none of those elements come into play. It is sound, but not music. And the art of the appropriationists is visual, in that it is an object set aside to be looked at, but eschews any real aesthetic considerations or appreciation. Yes, you can admire the shiny finish of a Koons’ balloon dog, but you could get as much or more of the same from looking at any car or motorbike on the street. It is a curiously anti-aesthetic art, but also must be so because the aesthetics are determined by the maker of the art, not the one who makes the telephone call to commission it.
We can’t get lost in this kind of art, or introspect, because it itself is not introspective. It’s all on the surface. It doesn’t engage or sustain the imagination. One gets the joke and moves on.
Because they are not intimately involved in the production of their own art, the appropriationists can only utter infuriatingly inane commentary on its meaning. Koons says his work is about “generosity”, and Hirst aspired to make “happy” dot paintings. Like us, they have to wait and see what meaning the art has after it is produced by someone else. Because the work is mute, only equally meaningless platitudes can be superimposed on it. The real aim of these pieces is to be large, perfect, and incredibly expensive.
There is no precedent in art history for today’s appropriation artists who hire others to make their art. How could there be? Appropriation emerged with Duchamp’s prank of exhibiting a urinal as sculpture in 1917. The appropriationists are no more artists than Don King is a fighter. To truly be able to forge a style that isn’t the style of copying mass-produced objects, one needs to be able to make art oneself, just as one needs to be able to fight to make a new fighting style. So-called “artists” such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or even Andrew Warhola, are to artists what Don King is to Bruce Lee, which is why they are so popular with CEOs and the 1%, and so unpopular with real artists who can and do make their own work.
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