Recently, while sorting through an old box in my garage, I came across a list of ’94 studio allotment at a prestigious grad school; out of twenty-four students, thirteen of us currently are or have been represented by major galleries. The mid-90’s posse was an interesting group, and it included, but was not limited to many art stars. As it so happened, a couple of current bright art stars had just graduated right before I arrived.  Who else? Who knows? The art grad-school to six-figure income success formula developed out of the wavering flux of unmentionable nouveau-rich collectors’ taste that was being completely consumed by a shop-till-you-drop and get-the-next-big-artist-first mantra. The LA Art institutions’ stamp of approval formula to art stardom is permanently in place now. It is even outsourced, and can easily be (l)earned at many graduate M.F.A. programs nationally; but you’d better have a trust fund.

Back in the 90’s, some prominent graduate programs accepted students who were basically hobby artists; they were richy-pants pseudo-intellectuals from elite educational institutions, who had earned bachelor’s degrees in a variety of different disciplines like anthropology, biology, English, political science, and the like.  It is to this day like it was back in the day; some grad school faculty would bring in students with a historically exhausted aesthetic.  They would make sure that each student knew as much as possible about any other artist in art history who had ever worked in a similar manner, with a similar strategy; and then they’d encourage them to synthesize ideas with one or two adjacent aesthetics. The faculty made sure that the students exhaustively read and catalogued every image of the work of the artists that their work looked similar to. Then they had the students re-evaluate the intentions behind the work within the historical context of their personal sub-cultural artsy aesthetics.  The graduate advisors didn’t really care what your work looked like, how it related to prior historical sources, so long as you could state your artistic intentions in a completely different way from the original sources.   Most important to the LA institutional art stamp-of-approval factory-formula for success-thing was the critical language attached to your work.  For the written thesis, the students would chart a path backwards, showing all antecedents of their work; even though there might be visual similarities, the important thing was that their intentions were completely different.

This approach to teaching art making is just re-codifying tropes; it is not breakthrough innovation.  Art History of the last century surely has many overlaps and simultaneous successes of different styles and meanings; but for all intents and purposes it was a series of merit-based artists who bonded together, had each other’s backs, and made democratically distinguishable movements.  We are still stuck in a Neo-Dadaistic fin-for-yourself, feeding frenzy that is predicated on who you know, and what parties you attend. The saddest story here is that the system has no vehicle to save all those tens of thousands of grad degree artists, there’ just not enough quality work and only a few good galleries to boot.

Basically, the art school industry in Southern California is the fuel that fires the economic furnace of the galleries and auction houses in New York and abroad. LA’s dilemma is the success of a few generations of artists trained here and then became legendary elsewhere.  LA is a victim of its own success. How did this happen?  Most LA folks don’t really give it a second thought, and just go with the le-chic status-flow, happily picking up their 50% at our local LA Gallery.  LA’s success happened by accident at first; basically the planets lined up…  but now, that little success story has been abused and misused, and is now the underlying mechanism for all the monkey wrenches being thrown into the renewed potential for true success of LA art. No, it’s not for the gloriousness of Great art; but oh contraire, it’s in favor of most predictable profit and success. Cha-ching! LA is fueled by the taste of a few at the expense of the majority, who are coordinating with one another in cigar filled back rooms. This humble writer hopes that someday soon hardcore LA collectors will finally wake up and start to focus on innovation and not repackaged history.  The world doesn’t need any more geometric over-sized color swatches.  However, if there is still someone willing to pay 6 figures for one of those ones, then you’re going to continue to see this video on replay.