Understanding the Museum

world game: an interview with Art

Critic Professor Lane Relyea
By Nathaniel (the insider) McLin

, Northwestern University Professor Lane Relyea who is

America's leading expert on application of System Theory
within art institutions. System Theory in its social context
is the mapping of institutions as networks of
relationships. Using the decline of art criticism as a starting
point, he articulates how the consolidation of academic and
museum networks transformed museums into highbrow
amusement parks, Artist into discursive cartographers, and
collectors and art patrons into passive consumers. For
reason of length, this is an abridged version of an extensive
interview. However, I have provided links to some of
Professor Relyea’s other articles where he explores these
issues in depth.

According to professor Relyea, In the old network, art critics,

art audiences, museums and the university operated as an
interrelated system that determined how artists succeed in
the art world and which art gets displayed. Critics do
not simply highlight particular artists. Critics like Clement
Greenberg {Abstract Expressionism} would define art
movements and were ever grooming the taste of their peer
constituencies.
Journalistic criticism provided independence legitimacy
in contrast to the mercantile interest of galleries or the
taxonomies of the museums. Critics named or promoted
most of the important movement of the twentieth century
from Cubism, Impressionism, to the Post modernism of
today. While art historians and museums, lionize artist after
an art movement was dead or safely assimilated
Museums and the university also have undertaken
strategies that would subsume the art critical function within
their academic apparatus.
With the success of the blockbusters touring shows,
museums discovered that with art audiences traveling to
the twenty international biennials and fairs, money could be
made by emphasizing spectacle, tourism, and entertainment
laced with a touch of just enough fashionable art theory to
intellectuality tantalize the masses and satisfy their trend
chasing corporate sponsors .As Barnum hunted for the
sensational exhibit, museum curators are bankrolled to
travel the world looking for new intellectually provocative
entertainments. Curators are approaching artist directly
and often adding them to their museum’s collection. These
artists are required to design mammoth works that can only
be displayed in a museum setting. So, curators are replacing
art critics as first responders and trendsetters and museums
are replacing collectors. For is not the public better served
by the museum than an inaccessible private home? 'The
argument is if collectors want to support art. They should
support the contemporary art museum as the egalitarian
component of an international entertainment network. So,
institutions are absorbing the critic's role without the
pretense of being disinterested parties. The questioner in red
is art critic Nathaniel McLin.

Do artists create art with critics and institutions in

mind?

A dominant trend among artists today is to make-work with

institutions in mind. Not with criticism in mind. Actually, the
two things might be mutually exclusive. Institutions are
where the action is right now.

What does this mean for artist?

This is both good and bad news for artists. Unlike the old-
fashioned critic and dealer, who would "stick it out to the
end" with the artists they adopted, biennials and museums
do not get into a personal pact with young artists, they treat
young artists as disposable, a content provider. (For more on
art and tourism see my review of "Universal Experience,"
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=200506.)

Has marketing specialization into competencies and

apparatuses made criticism irrelevant?

Sadly, yes. This is something I talk about in an article from a

few years back called "Allover and At Once" (http://www.x-
traonline.org/vol6_1/all_over.html).

In your opinion, has the relationship between the

collectors, museums, galleries, artists and critics
changed in the public interest or not? How can or
should an artist of color get into the "system"?

Education, as much as anything else, carves out today's

distinctions between haves and have-nots. The experience of
art is more and more touristic, superficial: audiences learn
just enough of a certain art "language" to be able to claim
value from their experiences in museums -- and their need
for that value, that cultural capital, stems more and more
from rising competition within the sphere of culture Even
Dunkin Donuts has to sell cappuccino now.

What would help is more politicizing of education, especially

higher education. The academy still hides behind an image
of idealistic pursuit of innocence, neutral knowledge, and
this has to be confronted. For example, while identity politics
and multiculturalism have receded from the art world
spotlight over the last ten years, the recruiting of minority
faculty and students is still an issue in university art
programs, and should be made more of an issue. The effect
had by someone like Kerry James Marshall here in Chicago,
or Charles Gaines at Cal Arts in L.A., is immense -- not just in
their roles as artists but as teachers at University of Illinois of
Chicago. One way to get more art and artists of color into the
system is to graduate and tenure more artists and art
historians of color. Changes in art and its discourse will
follow.

Lane Relyea is one American leading art critics with articles

appearing in Artforum, Frieze, and numerous museum
catalogs. He is also considered America's leading expert on
the application of Systems Theory (The mapping of social
and environmental events as networks of relationships)
to social systems in the visual arts world.

Nathaniel McLin has been an interviewer on 89.3 F.M. WKKC

for eighteen years and is a former board member of the Art
Institute of Chicago’s African American Urban Partners Corp.
He has been a critic fo Chicago’s largest black weekly
N’DIGO, the South Street Journal, The Chicago Community
Register, Nationally for Paint Magazine.Bronzecomn.com He
has written the artist statements for many African American
Arts organizations: The Southside Community Art Center,
The Seven Black Artist Collective, The Creative Artist
Association and was a contributing expert on African
America board volunteerism with mainstream museums for
Kerry James Marshall’s One True Thing, Meditations on Black
Aesthetics catalog.

Copyright Nathaniel McLin

©2005 all rights reserved