LETTRE OUVERTE A MARC GLIMCHER / OPEN LETTER TO MARC GLIMCHER
I have always positioned myself against the art market for ethical reasons, as well as against museums, galleries and intermediaries of all kinds, which ultimately fuel the game of speculation. This is why Marc Glimcher's initiative seems to me to be in perfect DISRUPTION with the usual practices of this milieu and worthy of interest for an artist like me. An artist who has never ceased to fight for transparency and to attack the market and an economy based on speculation throughout his life. That is why I have categorically refused to sell one of my works to the Centre Pompidou, which had asked me to do so before doing my retrospective in 2017, because it should be known that although a public institution it refuses to communicate to citizens the amount of its acquisitions...
WHY IS THAT SO ? ? ?
While these citizens are, paradoxically, the donors of these works through their contribution to the nation's taxes. I've even started a series of lawsuits on this subject. Trial that I lost of course before the Conseil d'Etat in the last instance, after having won it before the Administrative Court of Paris.
But the earthen pot against the iron pot has not yet had its last word and a forthcoming news will bring you the new initiatives I am putting in place on this subject so that transparency will finally one day pass through the glass house that Piano and Rogers would have liked to create at the origin of their creation.
https://www.artnews.com/2019/08/13/pace-gallery-pacex-christy-maclear/
When Marc Glimcher, President and CEO of the Pace Gallery and President of PaceX, himself told ARTNEWS about the research works: "That such works do not generally receive support from commercial galleries, and that PaceX aims to fill this gap. "Artists reflect our time," Glimcher told ARTNEWS, mentioning artists who focus on "creating experiences, but not objects. While many are interested in working in the technology sector, where there is still no business model for art. And so the question he asks himself is: "How is the gallery model equipped to support these artists, as it supports painters and sculptors?"
This declaration, if ever followed by effects, constitutes a real REVOLUTION and the artists will not believe their eyes, so much they have waited for such an awareness for years...
This DISRUPTION in relation to market behaviour simply reveals a real revolution in attitudes.
A revolution in mentalities that is confirmed even further when Christy MacLear, the newly appointed CEO of PaceX, adds to this and declares, according to ArtNews, that she herself is passionate about her role and wants to give pioneering artists of our time projects that address concerns such as climate change or social problems, where the creations will no longer be set against yesterday's brushes and canvases, but against our cities and immersive spaces that virtual technologies can already create.
I would like to remind you that already in the indifference of the market and institutions in the 1970s in the name of sociological art, I carried out actions in urban areas, in large suburban areas or in institutions for the elderly. There, of course, it was no longer a question of making an OBJECT, but of making LIVING EXPERIENCES AND SHARING them.
Live experiences and share them!
Do these "experiences" deserve the status of works of art?
Might as well ask the question for a urinal by Marcel Duchamp, a postcard by On Kawara or Robert Barry, a choreographic piece by Tino Sehgal.....
The DISRUPTION position of Pace's leaders, at least in their very commendable intentions, comes at a time when society in a state of crisis of all kinds is seeking a meaning superior to the diktat of money, and to that of overcoming mad individualism.
Where it also seeks answers to the climatic outbursts that are becoming more and more common all over the world, to blind terrorism, to hunger in the world, to the inability to control technological advances that put tools of mass destruction in people's hands. As Rabelais already said in his time in Pantagruel: "Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul".
We are on the threshold of a change of civilization and some artists until now, neglected by the market and institutions, are the sensory seismographs whose vibrations are beginning to whistle in our ears. These vibrations alert the most sensitive and mature of us
We are on the threshold of a change of civilization and some artists until now, neglected by the market and institutions, are the sensory seismographs whose vibrations are beginning to whistle in our ears. These vibrations alert the most sensitive and mature of us.
No doubt they are by an amazing miracle that arrived in Mr. Marc Glimcher's ears on a full moon evening. Luckily, these ears are not just anyone's ears! Luck had chosen these ears according to well-defined criteria. Undoubtedly those of a sensitive man in the art world who had already fulfilled all his ambitions had nothing more to expect: neither from the glory nor from the money of his contemporaries. And therefore it was time for him to move on to the serious things in life that are before every man.
Finally, because its representativeness in international contemporary art circles, through the means at its disposal, gives meaning to its word.
In this crisis we are experiencing, we must not fall into the facilities of deleterious pessimism. On the contrary, we must positively mobilize all the resources of our intelligence to foster a healthy awareness whose shivers are beginning to keep us awake. We must fight relentlessly against inequalities, not by force, but by persuasion. If necessary, we must neutralize troublemakers (I mean criminals) if necessary, without being the victim of a stupid guilt that is often only the stigma of our own cowardice.
I conditionally encourage all artists to believe in the sincerity of Mr. Glimcher and his team to implement the renovation program they propose. Of course I can already hear the artists blinded by the current ideology, especially the Marxist psycho-rigids who make it a profession, calling me a naive reformer. Ignorant in their congruent blindness that naivety in no way excludes the most efficient lucidity. Giving yesterday's opponent a chance to pull himself together and make him a partner is always a calculation of intelligence at first, even if it means revising his judgment in the face of facts.
I say this to you from the bottom of your eyes, Mr Glimcher, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of your words or your intentions at the time I speak to you.
We will walk hand in hand to make your program succeed in order to see an ETHICAL art that is at odds with previous years and that is concerned to bring to your contemporaries an ART OF SENSE that will be innovative in every respect, both in terms of form and content.
www.fredforest.space
An art to make the world even more beautiful but also more coherent, more socially just, more relevant in the presentation of our problems, but above all MORE IMAGINATIVE, revealing and involving us so that beauty and justice can now accompany us.
Fred Forest artiste et théoricien de l'art sociologique (Doctorat d'Etat Sorbonne)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator