Argument: Artist as Businessman

ARGUMENTThe twin principles ARGUMENT of modernism and marketing: seeing fresh promise in -0 mi ia thing Artist as Businessman f Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall ARGUMENT (New York City, 1978) is an 85 minute, 16mm, color/sound film by Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall. Fashion photographs are used as a starting point for a political investigation of news, advertising, and images of masculinity in the mass media. The film attempts to define the ideological function of avantgarde artists/filmmakers and their work, and raises crucial questions of radical film practice. ARGUMENT explicitly examines problems of the film text aid its reading: relationships between sound/Iiext/image and filmmaker/critic/audience. The film is part of a project which includes the publication of a 30 page book ofwriting and photographs, and structured discussions following screenings. 22 The Fiscal Background The 1976 Internal Revenue Service ruling that art (not including motion pictures] is an appreciable asset, created possibilities for the financing of art that never existed before. It meant that instead of capital being invested in the commodity of the art-work, it was now profitable to invest capital in the "artist as commodity ." This mechanism operates by making the artist into a corporation. The artist is therefore personally responsible as president of that corporation, for success in the art world, and in addition, is accountable to shareholders (investors] ultimately to see a profit in the joint venture by paying dividends. This difference makes investment in the artist a lower risk than investment in the art-work, since previously in investment in the art-work, profitability depended on the taste of the investor; now the onus for success rests on the artist, who must respond to market forces-" success" being defined as what sells, what can be marketed. The Transition from SelfEmployed Artisan Modernism has been founded on a tradition of "constant revolution. " This is a formal not a political description, which elevates the importance of "a work challenging previous work" in an art historical continuum, and defining itself in terms of its differences from work done previously. This constant revolution encourages the creation of diverse or pluralistic forms-for instance, minimalism, mytho-poeticism, conceptualism [theoretical, narrative, performance, political, etc.] These forms legitimize the creation and interpretation of art-work in terms of discrete traditions , thus allowing the most militant political materialist work to stand side by side with mytho-poetic romanticism, all part of the avantgarde spectacle. This has two main effects: first, to defuse the impact of the political work in any terms except that of its own tradition; second , it gives the impression of a fully stocked art store which caters to a wide range of tastes. Whatever type of work is in this art store, all types have one thing in common: namely their market-an exclusive world of privilege and wealth, defined by the museum/gallery/university circuit. At present this market is located around an intermediary -the gallery. The gallery is responsible for recognizing saleable trends, individuals, and work, and then marketing them (exhibition, distribution and publicity). At the same time the gallery exerts some influence over the artist's practice to make his work more marketable. Thus the gallery makes the artist more accountable to market forces than under the earlier 'patronage' system of financing, whereby the patron would pick an artist appropriate to his taste and desire for prestige and fund that individual under his direction. The gallery system may prove to be a transitional phase in the artist's relationship to capital, a movement that may have been accelerated by the 1976 IRS ruling. The introduction of venture capital into the art world by directly financing the artist as an on-going business, would make artists , by their responsibility to return dividends to their investors, more susceptible to market forces. While these pressures would not necessarily force all artists to make their work conform to a dominant aesthetic (since, as seen earlier, formal pluralism is encouraged), they would determine the audience-in a very simple way: the audience is those able to afford to buy the work, namely the rich. Although the rich have always been the market for art, the introduction of...