The Devil You Know?
Yayoi Kusama left Japan and headed to New York with dollar bills sewn inside her kimono. She left at a time when women were expected to not have jobs, only find a husband and raise children. She left to pursue her art, in a faraway land, with no money and no connections.
She arrived in New York knowing very little English, and was met with a massive wall: a white male dominated art world, where even female dealers didn’t want to show women. She kept working, was terribly poor, but kept her dream alive.
In 1965, she created her first mirrored room, only to have it blatantly copied by Lucas Samaras who created his own—and got an exhibition for it at the prestigious Pace Gallery. Overcome with rejection and grief, she tried to kill herself by jumping out of her apartment window.
It was then that Kusama decided she was no longer going to be a slave to the gallery system, and decided she and she alone would decide when, where, and how to show her art.
She made the astonishing rise to where she is now using primarily social media by sharing her story. Today, she is the most successful woman artist alive, her shows have people lining up for blocks to see them. It is an unlikely tale of a 90 year old woman artist making it BIG.
Several things jump out at me about her life story. One is that she has a mythic and inspiring underdog story of triumph over tragedy. Like David and Goliath, the timeless inspiring appeal of these stories crosses every culture. This is an important story to tell, because it resonates. Two, is that she decided to carve her own path, write her own ticket, and do things differently outside of the art world “food chain”. And three, she persisted.
It’s tragically unfair that the “art world” is set up to ignore 99% of artists, and how the food chain is set up to benefit the very, very few. It’s a system that caters to the rich and the connected, and usually young, usually male and usually white artists are the prize. As broken as this established system is, artists continue to align themselves to this system, even though they know in all likelihood it will not be beneficial for them.
Yesterday I had a conversation with an “art insider”. This guy told me that my gallery was “not part of the art world food chain”. Of course I always kinda knew this, and I agree with the assessment for the most part, but it still stung. It stung to hear it spoken out loud. In my own way, I was also aligning to that established food chain, doing things “the right way” or established way. But now I realize (like I preach to artists all the time), I too must embrace new ways of doing business outside of the art world establishment, detached from that food chain in every way possible. Why? Because aligning with it isn’t working. But it seems it's what we know best.
Is it the devil we know that keeps us aligned like magnets to the established ways of the art world? At least we understand that devil, right? We know the rules, and we won’t make waves or stand out if we stick with that alignment. It’s scary after all to step outside of the box.
I’ve been seeing cracks in the established art food chain for awhile now. Social media opened our eyes to the potential for artists building their own audiences outside of the gallery system, selling directly to collectors, totally outside of the food chain. I am certain the future is artist run galleries, collectives and co-ops, online sales, and open studios in one form or another. These are new food chains outside of the establishment, where artists can determine their futures (and keep all the earnings).
What about you? Do you also hang on to these broken-but-established system? Does the idea of doing things on your own, outside of that food chain seem exciting… or scary?
