As is often said, non-fiction is stranger than fiction: Sometimes you just can’t make things up as well as life does. That is certainly the case with a press release that DIDN’T land in my email box last week. Someone had to tip me off to it.
The announcement was made by the Museum of Arts and Design, and it said that it had chosen four winners of its “FUN Fellowship,” which “was established in 2011 by the Museum of Arts and Design in recognition of the vital role nightlife practitioners play in the city’s creative community and artistic endeavors.”
The winners receive both financial and logistical support “to help them advance and realize their latest nightlife-related projects.” This year’s winners are Ladyfag, FCKNLZ, CHERYL, and Babycastles. The release continues:
The Fun Fellows were identified through a complex, competitive process. MAD invited 100 individuals from the art and nightlife communities to each nominate a candidate. From this group, 35 individuals and collaboratives were selected as semi-finalists by a collection of their peers, and the winners were chosen by a jury comprised of curators, nightlife luminaries, critics, and previous Fun Fellows. “We wanted to make sure we’re not trying to force nightlife practitioners into the fine arts sector, but rather expanding the sector to better accommodate the practice,” said Jake Yunza, MAD’s Manager of Public Programs and founder of the THE FUN fellowship.
The “fine arts sector”? And why would MAD think New York City’s nightlife needs such support? Check that press release link for the nature of these subsidized projects, which involve dance-induced euphoria, private “Dayclub” events not open to the public, video game hacking workshops, and theatrical restagings of club-kid talk show appearances.
It’s easy to poke fun at this, but there’s a serious nature to this post. When it comes to gathering public support for arts institutions — meager as it is — these kinds of programs work against the whole arts community. No one is against fun; but people are not eager to subsidize it in such difficult times.
The Museum of Arts and Design’s URL is “madmuseum.org.” In this particular case, it is mad.
BTW, I emailed MAD’s press office earlier today asking for the size of the monetary support, the source of the money and the nature of the logisitical support. If and when I receive an answer, I’ll update this post.
Ladyfag, btw, is pictured.
With respect, hang on for a moment and consider a few things. One, is the museum not entitled to spend its money, whether earned or contributed, in whatever programmatic and/or philanthropic fashion it wishes to? From a purely legal perspective, the answer must be yes, unless you’re prepared to accuse its leadership and board of professional dereliction of duty (and I know you’re not doing that). Two, all I read, over and over, on the likes of ArtsJournal and umpteen other sites, is this blogger and that expert and that marketing guru and that development director railing against, decrying and bemoaning the seemingly insurmountable and intractable problem of developing new audiences for the arts; that the arts is perpetually hamstrung by a perception of being elitist and irrelevant to the daily life of humankind, and here comes the Museum of Arts and Design with a new, albeit startling way of categorizing “fine arts,” and what do we do? We criticize, we cauterize, we castigate, we ask why creative nightclubbers “need” fellowships. Please understand: you’re entitled to think the Fellowship is frivolous or absurd. I can even see myself, thinking to myself, “Doesn’t Ladyfag simply need a stylist?” My point is one person’s frivolity is another person’s art. And in a sector—here I use the word sector more broadly, to encompass the eternal question “What is art?”—hungry for reinvention and starved for fearlessness, can we afford to pick on one museum and one set of fellowships? I haven’t been inside a nightclub in years. I think a name like “FCKNLZ” clearly has it in for e e cummings. But I feel it’s incumbent to respect the museum’s right to celebrate whatever work they deem to be work, and if it doesn’t appeal to me, maybe it appeals to someone. Isn’t that the very glory of art?
Thanks for your comment — certainly a legitimate view that’s different from mine. I am less concerned with getting new audiences in general, unless they are at art museums to see the art. Redefining art to suit the new audience, to me, harkens back to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s wonderful essay on defining deviancy down. I’m not saying these FUN artists are deviant, btw, just that the standards are being redefined in a way I don’t believe in.
It seems unnecessary to me.
The FUN, which launched in 2011, developed out of our interest in presenting the new aesthetic current known as “social practice” at MAD. As we are a museum that explores contemporary creation through the lens of materials and process, we wanted to focus on artists who were also interested in making. So who better to acknowledge for their social practice than the city’s artist/performers who devote their lives to making wild costumes and environments, and even wilder personas in the great artistic pursuit of fabricating fabulous parties? These extraordinary social interactions are what has long made New York a global center for nightlife. And so in keeping with the cheeky spirit of these creators, we named the program series “The FUN Fellowship.” While a stipend is indeed awarded, it is quite small—$2,000 a piece. That is the same sum that we pay artists selected for our four-month-long Open Studio residencies, which we run three times a year.
It may indeed seem a “mad” way to spend our truly precious funding dollars, but we are not alone in presenting social practice. Other museums have held exhibitions of artists whose work fits this category, most notably and recently, the German scientist/artist Carsten Höller at The New Museum last winter and in 2010, the British artist Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim.
Now you might argue that these are the works of actual “artists,” not club kids. But one should recall that Dada emerged in part out of the performances of a raucous, imaginative, and satirical group of troublemakers at the fabled Cabaret Voltaire in staid Zurich. Because it is much more difficult for people like Ladyfag and the other FUN honorees to survive in the New York of the 2010s than it was for people like Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, and Tristan Tzara to get by in the Zurich of the 1910s, we have provided these energetic creators with a small sum to encourage their imaginative, subversive, and yes, mad explorations. We hope some will prove as influential to art as those anti-art enfants terribles of yesteryear. If so, we won’t seem mad at all, just visionary.
Yaaada Yada Yada, sounds like spin to me Marisa. After 40 yrs in the Arts I’ve found that very little of merit comes from the party and night scenes. In fact I’ve seen several Artists of promise destroy themselves attempting to satisfy the very stereotype the museum is promoting.
We’re trying to gain new audiences for art by making art and jazz accessible for kids via online arts games, which we hope will act as a “gateway” into further investigation into the arts. Teachers across the country are using the site in schools, so we hope it’s a good start on bringing a new generation into the arts.
I think a lot of people think this is a bit over the top, but it’s the museum’s right to choose…and if people keep visiting and it attracts younger audiences, then that’s that!