Selling Emptiness

Klein's Zone works continue to be played out long after the artist's death, albeit grotesquely. A local variation is provided by real estate agent Bob Rennie, who sells emptiness in the form of condominium apartments, along with a lifestyle that parallels that emptiness.

Rennie's version also differs from Klein's in that instead of gold he accepts money, which he collects for the developers who hire him to do their selling. In return, the developers throw a percentage of that money at him.

Like Klein, Rennie is aware of the imbalance that comes from selling emptiness. In an effort to correct that, he buys art, displays it in his home/office and throws parties to demonstrate his own sense of balance.

But Rennie has proven himself unbalanced of late, so whatever balance he is offering should be considered in that light. For those in the visual arts (artists, curators, directors, critics, collectors and audiences), Rennie has sought respect through acquisition, patronage and dealmaking, the effect of which has artists and institutions reluctant to criticize him, or to be seen supporting people and projects that he has spoken out against, like the Vancouver Art Gallery's current director and her efforts to better share with the public the gallery's massive collection.

The original mandate of the Western Front, one our city's oldest artist-run centres, is "to promote and encourage the role of the artist in determining the cultural ecology." Rennie has done the opposite: he has indentured artists by de-accessioning the work of those whom he perceives to be against him, as well as making those who would benefit from his patronage frightened to say anything that might limit their prospects. The same applies to institutions to whom he gives money.

And now Rennie is initiating a city-wide exhibition of one of our best-known, most-respected senior artists, an exhibition that will involve some of our finest public institutions, led by Rennie's private gallery.

Is this something that will benefit our cultural ecology, or will it represent a more literal expression of Rennie's administration of it? If this exhibition should come to pass, it has the potential to mark yet another turning point in our city, where artists and the institutions that serve them are less an autonomous presence than co-opted agents of emptiness, motivated not by curiosity but by its opposite: fear.

Bob Rennie and the "New Economy"

Speaking in this morning's Globe, Bob Rennie had this to say of a new stand-alone "iconic" Vancouver Art Gallery:

“…nobody is addressing what it is to spend $300- or $400-million dollars in this new economy and it is irresponsible to simply go out and say we want an iconic building," he says. “The public discussion should now be around alternative models and the tough questions that have to be asked in this new economy: Do we spend the money on art, or architecture? And how does this institution fit in with the cultural fabric of Vancouver as a whole? It cannot be talked about in isolation.”

Note the repetition of "new economy." Is it not reminiscent of an earlier Social Credit provincial government's repetition of the "New Reality" to justify draconian cuts to public sector workers in the early 1980s (what the SoCreds and their Chicago School-influenced advisors at the Fraser Institute  deployed to sell their "restraint" program)? Strategies such as these, when applied to public infrastructure, are a hallmark of the neo-liberal choir, of which Rennie is our boy soprano. 

But there are other "new economy" strategies, most notably the Depression-era New Deal that gave us the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that had the United States federal government investing in cultural production geared at employing artists (and/or distracting them from revolutionary activities) while re-paving the symbolic superstructure of a country that, compared to Europe, had yet to enter the 20th century (which, as most historians will tell you, the U.S. succeeded in owning). Rennie could have made this argument, as a concerned citizen, but chose not to. Why he chose not to speaks more to what he does not want than what he does.

Rather than dwell on what Rennie does not want, let's look instead at the rest of his comment, particularly with respect to "new models." One such model (the one he put forth in that same Globe article) is for "8 to 10" smaller VAGs. While this proposal has been thoroughly critiqued, what Rennie appears to be getting at is not so much smaller galleries but a de-emphasis on a single monolithic structure. Given the way contemporary art is changing, with much of it housed online and appearing in non-traditional public and private spaces, might the monolithic public gallery (like the monolithic public library) be headed down the same path as those increasingly defunct big box book and record stores? (An unintended irony of Moshe Safdie's Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library is that it is based on a ruin.)

Yes, there will always be public and private galleries (museums?) to display object-based work; but if in this never-ending "new economy" the growth of these structures is prohibitive, as Rennie suggests, then the contemporary art of the "new economy" can only reflect that -- if art, as we know it, will exist at all.

Strictly Coincidental

To websit readers who have complained (via email) that their comments are not sticking, I am working on it. To those who insist that the characters in John Adams's Nixon in China relate to those in Bob Rennie's world, let me say this: though you are free to make associations, it was not my intention to suggest that President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, is Patrick Painter (Bob's mentor in the art collecting business); nor is Bob's intervention in Martin Creed's talk/Q&A at Emily Carr University last year intended as a parallel to "Pat Nixon"'s interruption of the flogging scene (see yesterday's post) in Adams's opera. Any resemblance between Adams's characterizations and Bob's world is strictly coincidental.