Amy Sillman and the State of the World of Art

 In the preceding post, on Flannery O'Connor, I wrote the following:

"In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One need only read the arts pages of the New York Times in current times to see how that works."

To reinforce that notion, the lead article of the "Weekend Arts" section of the Oct. 9, 2020, NYT, about the painter Amy Sillman, contained the following observation by the author of the piece, Jason Farago:

"Yet the rolling crises of the past few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art."

Farago positions Sillman's abstractions -- full of ambiguities one might argue -- as a counterpoint to that trend. "I was thinking about looming," the artist said in response to the off-center, somewhat out-of-balance images that dominate her current show at Manhattan's Gladstone Gallery.  In other words, like the current U.S. presidential election, things that seem about to happen but haven't happened yet.

It's an evergreen notion so if you acquire one of these images, it won't get stale -- from that perspective, at any rate.  Bur there is no need to rush to buy a Stillman image, it would appear. Farago reports that Sillman has made "hundreds" of abstract paints during just the past 12 months.

The NYT piece also serves to illuminate another aspect of the art world that is far from new.  It's as much about celebrity as it is about imagery. The accompanying picture of Sillman herself is far larger than the pictures of her art and the only image on the front page of the Arts section.

While details of Sillman's personal life are scarce to non-existent in what one can easily read about her, some of her work appeared in a 1978 exhibit entitled "A Lesbian Show" that was curated by an artist named Harmony Hammond.

According to Art News, "the show was an energizing political statement about lesbian visibility, creating a community of artists who publicly identified as lesbian -- and risked professional discrimination by doing so."

Well, that was over 40 years ago and how times have changed!

To Sillman's credit, however, she is not riding that horse. Unlike a number of others in the art and entertainment worlds these days, she does not explain her paintings as images seen through "the lens" of her sexual orientation, or gender, or race, or whatever. Rather, she talks, in the NYT piece and elsewhere, rather refreshingly as to how they fit into the history of art.