It is a cold winter night, Tiger and I are sitting near his work area at a gas station in the middle of New Jersey. “I was never afraid to lose everything in this life. Before boarding a plane to New York in the mid-nineties, I went to the casino and lost all my life savings in one night. When I came to the States, I only had a hundred bucks in my pocket,” he is saying, addressing the night highway. “But if there is no risk, then what the hell is this about?”

 

A decade or so later, I find myself sitting in my grad school studio in Michigan reading an article by Benjamin Buchloh. As I try to understand what Buchloh means by “the stridency of design with a delinquent mimesis and a hebephrenic semblance of disintegration and destitution,” the resulting feuilleton is nothing but a lethargic comatose. There is no way you will ever open your eyes after that type of trip. Now, imagine if I would read some of Buchloh's lines to Tiger back in Jersey. He will probably look at me, light his cigarette, and say, “I bet Benjamin was an asshole in high school.” The impotence of contemporary art criticism not saying things in any direct way cuts off all oxygen connected to the human brain. I am talking here not about our tastes or preferences. I am talking about something smarmy, deadening, and petulant. Something that disappears every day - our ability to communicate with one another. 

 

Back then, Tiger had a 2001 green Buick with light gray leather seats. He used audio tapes and smoked cigarettes one after another. He loved to drink 3L jugs of Chianti and never had medical insurance in his life. “What do you plan to do with your art? I gotta tell you - talent is cheap. But what are you willing to do in order to win? Are you ready to work like a dog without days off, live like a vagabond if you have to, and break your daddy's heart because you don’t wanna be a lawyer?” People like Tiger pay to win here and now. That is why their utterance is so insouciant. Even if they say something wrong or offensive, they could care less. Because they’ve got nothing to lose.

 

Tiger would call them “regular participants.” People would come to the store after work shifts and play the lottery for two hours straight. The regular participants were regulars. The same people who would come every day to scratch a ten-dollar lottery ticket. They were just hoping. Do they live their lives - they do, do they have passion - they do, do they ever win - they don’t. In my experience of working at that gas station, no one won more than three hundred bucks (which they probably did lose the moment after). They paid at the counter not to win hic et nunc’, but for the hope of winning.

“The whole idea,” as Tiger put it, “is not to be one of them. If you really want to win, do something irregular. Something outrageous and fucked up. Something that will blow their minds.” The professionalization of the art world gave us regular participants with academic meal tickets. And they pay their price, like the guys playing the lottery, for the hope of winning. These pretentious doctorates work for corporations and institutions that demand writing that is not belletristic. Au contraire, their writing is gaudy, soporific, and predictable. Those sanctioned professionals are nothing more than institutional scribblers and malignant pen pushers. 

 

And maybe I am wrong, the reader should not be lured but intellectually challenged. Maybe I should have a dozen footnotes to demonstrate my vehement swarm of sources that will give me an academic status (finally!). Perhaps that is the reason to get an art-related field degree these days. So you can get tenure somewhere in Iowa, discuss annuities with your fellow faculty members, and write intellectually packed reveries for Artforum. Oh my God! Mama, I am an academic. 

 

But I thought the art world was underground, and the underground is where people monomaniacally desire only one thing - to flip off the winning side. The New York Times or the denizens who write for Artforum can go to hell because they are the authority. The authoritative venues give their writers sanctions. In one case, to write in order to exclude people from the discourse and to increase the monetary value of the product. And in another case, to write intellectually insulting garbage to clog human brains. In either case, it is nothing more than to hoodwink someone, to shift them from the real problem of what is going on, of how this cornucopia overflows our cerebrum, and hence the point of communication is lost. No one assumes today that the reader is a friend, but a consumer. Thus a corollary of it is that we have different markets full of preferences for clientele to devour. This communication (aka art criticism) became a standardized sample of tenuous dissipation.  

 

So, I did my best, you know. I broke my daddy’s heart, most of the days have five hours of sleep, and continue to live marginally. That is what the life of an artist bestows. As Tiger gave me the last ride in his Buick he said, “Being the regular participant is demeaning. Everyone can come there every day and play the lottery. But can one of them empty their bank account, sell their car, buy a one-way bus ticket to Atlantic City, and bet?” A bunch of well-educated and trained professionals who went through standardization of art critical practice in schools cannot do that. As they say it in Spanish, Sin pelotas!   

 

Alex Vlasov

September 2024