What Do Artists Know?

What Artists Know

In response to Professor Frances Whitehead’s list of the cognitive and operational virtues of artists (from the Seminar she conducted on artistic knowledge), we are presenting a more prosaic addendum, a filling in, as it were, of some abstractions. Artists do know things that nonartists don’t know, or know things that nonartists do know but in a different way. Moreover, deep down, they know that they should know things that they haven’t bothered to learn. Sometimes they’ve suppressed knowledge, for reasons ranging from feeling they have bigger fish to fry, to career convenience, to conformity with whatever part of the art world in which they’re trying to succeed. Although the items below are stated in terms of a simple, declarative “Artists know . . . , ” the statements include the variations mentioned above. Also, there are obviously many exceptions. Nothing anybody says about “artists” can conceivably apply to every artist on the face of the earth. Artists know early on that there’s something wrong with the world. “Artists are people who know at around the age of seven that there’s something wrong with the world,” a painter named Dick Overfield once said to us. Although it’s hard to predict who will become an artist, generally speaking, artists belong to the group of kids who carry some level of unhappiness or disillusionment with the way things are. They don’t emerge out of popular high school crowds consisting of kids who eventually become investment bankers, real estate developers, doctors, lawyers, and the like. Curiously, they don’t necessarily emerge out of the arty high school crowds either—too many of the kids in those groups end up with permanently fried brains and social alienation. But to be any kind of artist requires some degree of turning one’s back on the world as it is—including groups of people who are always preaching to the art choir that there’s something wrong with the world. Artists know they need a studio. An artist having a studio is like a musician having a chair or a stool on which to sit. Some artists, of course, can do without a studio. But some artists don’t maintain a studio simply because it’s the fashion to be peripatetic, to be “New York–based” or “Madrid-based” or “Chicago-based,” as if an artist is a one-person multinational corporation with branch offices all over the world. A few years ago, the painter Thomas Lawson, who’s dean of the art school at the California Institute of the Arts (aka CalArts), wrote, “More recently I’ve moved WHAT ARTISTS KNOW Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 189 9/14/12 1:18 PM what do artists know? 190 1. “GI Symposium: Painting as a New Medium,” special issue, ART&RESEARCH 1, no. 1 (2006/7). back into the studio and begun to think of the work as not exactly a private enterprise, but an enterprise that has to do with thinking consistently through a set of problems and ideas without so much concern for the public . . . the significance of having a studio or not having a studio. . . . To me it’s absolutely crucial, I don’t actually any longer understand how you work without one.”1 Artists know that looks count. Artists are acutely aware of how the world looks. They possess a gimlet eye in surveying the world around them, and see things nonartists don’t see. They might notice a small, irregular freckle on an arm, for example, or take note of the odd form of a horse chestnut that’s lying on the ground at their feet. They quietly pass visual judgment all the time—that looks great, that’s interesting, that’s ugly as all get-out—even if they’re quiet about it. Artists know that color is important. Color is really hard to understand well, and leaving serious exploration of it to the interior decoration trade, or to costumers and set designers, or to the fashion business is like leaving the serious exploration of words to the advertising industry. The problem with artists acting on this knowledge is twofold: first, the serious exploration of color has a bad holdover reputation from the power days of Clement Greenberg and color-field painting and is now considered “formalist ” and reactionary; second, much contemporary art, being ideological, has little use for color as structure. It prefers simply “using” it in rather blunt fashion for political flavoring...