Robert Francis James

A new study from UBS shows that nearly half (47%) of all American art museums focus on the top 4% of contemporary artists. Commercial art galleries are less biased, with only 23% focused on the top 4%. Nonetheless, that means 96% of artists—the “emerging” ones—have little chance of seeing their work displayed in nearly half of America’s museums; and 77% have little chance of seeing their work displayed in nearly a quarter of America’s galleries. “It’s no secret that the art world caters to a select few best sellers,” Hyperallergic notes. While the statistics may seem daunting, the odds of an emerging artist getting into an art museum aren’t worse than the odds, say, of a student getting into Harvard or of a serviceperson becoming a Navy Seal. It’s lonely at the top. Getting an emerging artist’s work into a commercial art gallery is obviously easier; but galleries are quite picky, too, as they should be. In the art world, money doesn’t talk, it screams. Commercial galleries onl...

The British art critic David Sylvester asked AbEx painter Willem de Kooning in 1960 whether painted forms should be recognizable. De Kooning replied that painted forms “ought to have an emotion of a concrete experience.” Today we’d more likely say that painted forms should convey how they feel in the moment. If that seems solipsistic, it’s not; it’s realistic . If you crave something outside realism, look to advertising photography, not painting. “I am very happy to see that grass is green,” de Kooning went on to tell Sylvester. “At one time, it was very daring to make a figure red or blue. I think now it is just as daring to make it flesh-colored.” What de Kooning meant was that the world enjoys a primacy. Rightly or wrongly, we take it as the case . The world is a vast public domain, filled to the brim with identifiable content that we share. “I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it,” philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said. “But this ...