There is a reality to being an artist today that seems to be at odds with public perception. One debated area is the employment status of the artist and the other, the provenance of the work. Just what is so precious about the hand of the artist that a work instantly loses value and the artist’s credibility if its purity is sullied by assistants/artisans/help of any kind? While this debate seems rooted in contemporary art, it has pervaded thinking for centuries. One example is the debated value of a Rembrandt created by his own hand versus one executed with the help of his assistants. For Rembrandt, art was a business and essentially nothing has changed in contemporary times. Employing assistants or artisan experts is simply a necessary part of that business, there being only so many hours in the day. If you are making any money at all then you are spending time updating a website, promoting a product through social media, all of which require the third party assistance of web designers and hosting services. I for one, wouldn’t have the expertise to design and build a website. Does this lessen or redefine my status as an artist? In the eyes of a recent [amateur] critic, yes, who politely asked if I was a full-time artist before relegating me to the status of hobbyist in his mind. I think he had the peculiar idea in his head that full time meant every minute of the day. Laughable, to say the least.
There would also hardly be an artist today who doesn’t teach or work in a non-related industry but when labelled a hobbyist in the light of teaching or other means of making the money needed to make art, is surely not just outdated but a judgement based upon ignorance. When was the last time you heard of a part time teacher being labelled a hobbyist? Art today is a business. And it’s a matter of balance and separation.
The litany of artists who had help is lengthy from Michaelangelo to Henry Moore to Warhol to the 1980s sculptors sending their maquettes to a steel fabrication factory to be enlarged with Corten Steel. The factory system was not invented by Warhol although he took it to new heights. A production line portraitist of 17th century England such as Sir Godfrey Kneller, painted only the face and hands before signing his name. Having your portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller was a trend-setting privilege and every man and his dog queued up outside his studio. No wonder he had to take on multiple assistants and train them in the specialised aspects of drapery, faux wood and ornamental knickknacks. Jeff Koons does even less than Kneller and merely supervises an army of assistants before validating their efforts as his own. The assistants all get paid as artisans and are probably more than happy that Koons gets to face the media and the auction houses with all of their questions about provenance.
This sense of the precious seems to be rife in the visual art world amongst those parting with money to own examples of art to hang on a wall or store in a vault. However, a dance piece for which people willingly pay a small fortune for a theatre seat is inevitably the work of the dancers in workshop even when the choreographer gets named in the program. A play is a lot more than the words written on a sheet of paper and the versions of Shakespearean epics revisited every year on every continent come down to a lot more than the bard with his quill. Even authors, the covers of their books emblazoned with a single name, owe much to the editor, printer and cover designer. Then of course there is the fabled Lennon/McCartney combination where the duality for song writing credits was a premeditated decision [ George Martin of course created the actual sound]. And so on.
Establishing provenance is a whole industry in itself. Everyday another quest begins to establish who actually painted something and of course, musicians suing each other for supposed breaches of copyright over consecutive notes in common or similar words, continues to eat up civil court time. I can’t recall the last time two sculptors went to court to fight out stylistic similarities. In fact, part of the establishing of provenance often seems to involve the recognition of stylistic borrowings from a particular era,
When the Turner Prize devoted a year to Collectives in art there was recognition that not all art is produced by individuals locked away in garrets and studios. There are no assistants, in the sense of lesser beings, with collectives although it is not inconceivable that technical help was brought in. What is unlikely is that the 21 century equivalent of the Renaissance Man who knew everything and could do everything, even exists today.
The recent trend towards awarding art collectives goes against the whole idea of individual artist provenance however and returns us to more primitive times when groups of cave painters gathered by candlelight to draw and paint exquisite animals – for whatever reason. It has long been reasoned that these paintings were messages to other foraging bands to expect a meal on the hoof to pass by even though no suggestion of a calendar has been uncovered. The likely explanation is that the artists simply enjoyed painting animals and were good at it. Whether the blown hand prints were artistic signatures by proud artists or just children contributing as children do, is also open to question but what is not is that anyone expected to be paid for their efforts or that a team effort somehow devalued the endeavour.
Size and scale play obvious roles in how many helping hands are involved in production, but the breakneck speed at which art is both digested and sold today has many artists relying on means outside of their own skill set to execute their work
In another area of modernity, you have not just the Iphone but the whole of the digital art industry. Is it one thing to recognise the original art of a digital artist but the actual programming that allows for the tools to exist and the algorithms to work comes down to a succession of programmers before the fact. An expectation that a digital artist is going to have the time or skill to develop such tools is patently ridiculous. Painters making their own paints used to be a reality but sculptors making their own steel or mining their own marble was never a consideration.
In a final word, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, such as his porcelain urinal titled Fountain 1917, forced critics to broaden their understanding of what could be termed art. While Duchamp was squarely in the mix of the publically recognised ‘heroic’ artist, producing art, and influencing generations to come he still had to deal with galleries and conduct endless interviews as part of the business of being an artist. When he abandoned art altogether to play chess he became a hobbyist by the current definition, or even worse wasn’t a serious artist in the first place, but his reliance on artisans making urinals in a Parisian factory condemns him to obscurity in terms of provenance [to say nothing of the fact that said urinal is in fact a copy – the ‘original either being lost or broken]. Who is game to dismiss Duchamp so easily?