“Every artist here has 5 year careers,” a dealer told me, “These galleries are plucking kids straight out of art school and forcing work out of them like a Chinese labor camp. The next thing you know: they’re not hot anymore. They reach the age of thirty and no one wants to work with them. This is why grad school got invented: to give ‘has-beens’ a thing to do.”
via Artparasites
2 Comments
Well that sucks. There goes my dream of art school.
I believe it, but it is very sad. I’d like to believe that art stands alone and lasts because it matters. Perhaps one antidote is for artists to keep creating the best work possible as an act of professionalism, of devotion, and of integrity. What else can we do? And my heart breaks for the ‘throwaways’ – the artists who are super hot for a few years and then discarded, suddenly irrelevant and cut loose. That’s cruel, whether you do it to a love interest, a friend, a colleague, a client, or one of a stable of very young artists. Who invented that work model?
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