ART NOTES

...It was the largest show of living artists held in Washington in recent memory, attended by 1,200 in four days, and it rated a two-paragraph review tacked to the end of The Washington Post's usual roundup of activities in commercial galleries...

...Lombardo and Kuter didn't quit...

...Again, I need to note my lack of objectivity: As the husband of one of the Laundry Artists, Leslie Kuter, I became the propagandist for the ' 'movement...

...Among them, Franklin White, Joe White, and Bill Suworoff were on the Corcoran's original list...

...Such apparent disregard for material reward often leads the gullible to conclude that artists are driven by an impulse to communicate—but that, too, is missing...

...His influence on the Gallery and that of the Laundry Artists provide an instructive contrast...

...Bill Dutterer and Tom Green were NEA fellowship winners...

...A long track record of steadily increasing values offers assurance that buying and selling the object is likely to be profitable...

...The artists, devoting as much time as they can to the production of objects for the luxury trade, hope that their images will transcend money some day and enter the consciousness of the world...

...The lead in The San Diego Union's article on the Los Angeles seminar quoted artist-expert panelist Ed Moses as saying, "When an artist tries to fit into the market, he's dead...

...United Press Internationa] reported, "Government statistics show that 80 per cent of Americans who call themselves artists make very little out of their work and many of them live around the poverty line...

...Meanwhile, the artist doesn't quit his job...

...A few million dollars go from the Endowment's visual arts program for fellowships and a few public art projects by big-name artists...

...once James Surls was on the board, he organized "Fire," an exhibition that included the works of 100 artists...

...The median income of all respondents was just a tad below $20,000, it turned out, though the median from art sales was only $718...

...People came banging on my door...

...The artists' movement in the early 1970s in New York hardly fazed the established museums, but its energy, too, helped build "alternative spaces...

...It is rapidly shedding even the pretense that it involves artists...

...Hopps placed my essay in a glass case where, while it couldn't be read, as a potentially valuable art object it couldn't be stolen either...

...Since then, the Corcoran has featured the works of several artists who sell their wares at the Hammer Gallery in New York, owned by Armand's brother, or at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, owned by Armand himself...

...Thanks to Armand Hammer, the Corcoran charges no admission fee...

...The show's original design called for the work of more than eighteen artists—older and younger academic realists as well as realists who invoked whimsical imagery and surrealistic fantasy...

...Gallery dealers attract serious collectors by keeping the prices of art objects steadily rising...

...Since the Endowment never exhibits the work of fellowship winners, no one can get upset with their work...

...Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't...

...It is a forlorn hope...

...And what "Big Al" Carter lacked in credentials he made up in spirit...

...The Washington art establishment loved the Laundry Show...

...If a dealer offers ten paintings at $4,000 each and sells only one, that does not mean the price of the other nine paintings will be reduced...

...A "significant number" were " 'housewife' artists who depend entirely or primarily on the support of their husbands to practice art...

...The challenge grant campaign bore no resemblance to a public television beg-a-thon...

...From beer and wine sales the exhibitors got back six of the ten dollars each had invested...

...Why shouldn't the Laundry Artists perpetuate their list and create Laundry Show Two...

...The Soho Weekly News quoted one of his insights: "I never had to take my slides around to galleries or anything...

...The star panelist-expert at SBA-NEA's New York City seminar on "The Business of Art and the Artist" was pop-art painter James Rosenquist...

...Joan Mondale, wife of the Vice President, took a special interest in the plight of artists...

...Even Corcoran officials thought it was great...

...When government employes in New York City collected signatures on a petition asking for removal of a Richard Serra sculpture erected with government funds in a public plaza, The New York Times called Serra at his home in Nova Scotia...

...It was fun, but the art world stayed away from the second show...

...Endowment Chairman Livingston Bid die was not shy in estimating how many artists would benefit from a fullblown program: no less than a quarter million...

...Last May, Leslie Kuter from Laundry Show One, Sam Gilliam, an internationally known artist who exhibited in Laundry Show Two, Rockne Krebs, another well-known artist, and I coaxed the Corcoran into having an open meeting with artists...

...Johns gave no sign of caring...

...To rebuild the shaken Gallery, its new regime was not shy about offering art lovers appointments to the museum's board of trustees for contributions of, say, $10,000...

...It had the bad luck of elevating to the position of chief executive officer a man who was about to be exposed in The Washington Post for bilking students at his string of beauty schools...

...That's beauty as in beauty parlor, not as in truth and beauty...

...Because it has absolute and relative truth, people will pay a lot of money for it...

...In an article in The Washington Post, Corcoran Associate Director Jane Livingston explained what she thought artists asked for at that meeting: "They wanted us to present more local shows, give them more exposure, but it takes time for institutions to change...

...I first became aware of the Orend study when I received a "Dear Artist" tetter asking for my cooperation...

...Then we'll help them market their products...

...Through Government grants and tax-deductible contributions, they are paid salaries to do little more than make and care for lists...

...The survey gave no names, but those are the four artists that most other artists probably want to meet...

...Real art is magic," Moses preached...

...How else explain the reaction of painter Jasper Johns when a museum reportedly bought an old work of his for almost $1 million and he, the creator, didn't get a cut...

...Unfortunately, I'm in no position to offer a dispassionate analysis of the results obtained by Orend and the SBA-NEA "survival" crusade...

...The artists were not merely apathetic...

...Richard Orend believed, on the basis of his previous research, that when he sent questionnaires to 2,000 artists, about 1,600 would respond—perhaps that very 80 per cent around the poverty line who were bound to have an interest in reforming their Appalachia of a profession...

...In 1978, he landed another Government contract in a field growing even faster than military research...

...ment for the Arts will be working together to help the independent artist help himself...

...In New York, representational artists in cooperation with their dealers organized an Artist's Choice Museum...

...In Houston, artists lobbied to get one of their own named to the board of the Contemporary Arts Museum...

...Only about 15 per cent of the artists in Orend's survey spent forty hours or more a week making, selling, or pondering art...

...Orend proposed to "maintain a special awareness of the Endowment's interest in identifying ways that the condition of 'professional' artists can be more carefully specified...

...One way of taking care of business is to leave it to a gallery, but Orend found that only one-third of the artists he surveyed had any affiliation with commercial art dealers...

...Joan Mondale announced a $30,000 pilot project: "For the first time, the Small Business Administration and the National EndowSo bArnebeck is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C...

...VIEWS REVIEWS ART NOTES From the bureaucratic front BY BOB ARNEBECK In the mid-1970s, sociologist Richard Orend studied "The Quality of Navy Life" for the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center...

...Most people, given their druthers, would rather see a Hammer-owned masterpiece than ponder the fresh creation of a living artist...

...And association with a gallery, while it relieves an artist of the need to shell out $10 for a seminar on magic and cash flow, does not assure him or her of a living or a reputation...

...In its application it informed the Endowment that it was virtually assured of $1.6 million in matching funds from three individuals...

...Return rates ranged from 45 per cent in Minneapolis to 49.2 per cent in San Francisco...

...The results of his study, he promised, could be used by the Endowment "to develop policies designed to improve the artists' economic situation and creative environment...

...Three months earlier I had gamely entered a thirty-page essay in an art exhibition compiled by a friend, Walter Hopps, who was then with the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Arts...

...The public is not necessarily ill-served by museums which hustle millionaires or by corporations which donate to the arts to ease their tax and image problems...

...Hopps's scam was to stay awake for thirty-six hours and hang any art proffered to him in a small downtown space called the Museum of Temporary Art...

...Dealers thrive on trading in the art of dead masters or very prominent contemporaries...

...The experience continues to color my approach to the Endowment while I cover its activities as a free-lance journalist...

...The process of elimination sent rumors flying, and angered two artists who were excluded: Bill Lombardo had been on the original list, and Leslie Kuter had expected to be in the show...

...The system does not work as well for most living artists...

...Shows are sporadic, but the game of trying to increase one's reputation goes on...

...After ten years, the new spaces hardly pose a threat to the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, or the Whitney...

...But much more help was on the way...

...When the Corcoran applied for its challenge grant in 1979, it listed exhibitions planned through 1982...

...He didn't care...

...Reporter Mary Hellman wrote that Moses and fellow artist-panelist Bob Graham "were cheered when they challenged the conference premise by stubbornly arguing that art has nothing to do with business...

...Though such efforts have helped to relieve artists' frustrations, they have done little to gain power for artists in an institutional context...

...Kuter organized the next escalation...

...But only 940 artists returned Orend's questionnaires, even after telephone calls and registered letters...

...What's more, Weaver offered help for artists from Government experts who would L'start with the basics— teaching them how to draw up a cash-flow plan and supplying them with legal and accounting advice...

...The National Endowment annually earmarks about $5 million for "challenge grants" to museums...

...And the National Endowment's partnership with the Hammers and Occidental Petroleums of this world does mightily improve the Endowment's chances of getting its appropriations through Congress...

...Assisted by a $10,000 grant from the Endowment, the Corcoran had planned an exhibit of realist artists in Washington...

...when the Endowment rejected him for a fellowship, he burned and sent back the slides of his work that the Endowment had returned with the rejection notice...

...Most of the $25 million to $30 million the Endowment gives annually to the visual arts goes to museums, and there are few complaints about that except from a handful of artists...

...They called themselves the Laundry Artists, and the issue around which they organized had nothing to do with artists' poverty, though it had everything to do with artists' powerless-ness...

...The mainstay of the Corcoran's hopes was Armand Hammer, chairman of the board of Occidental Petroleum...

...Artists picked other artists...

...Each of the fifteen put up $10 to finance a counter-show at a recently vacated Chinese laundry...

...The artist didn't even emit a cryptic comment that might have fortified the faithful...

...For four days, the Chinese laundry did brisk business...

...Suddenly, the Corcoran's exhibition list changed: Within months, Hammer's collection of Daumiers was shown, generously supported by the Hammer Foundation and Occidental Petroleum...

...Critics reviewed the work, and the quips of the Laundry Artists were featured in society-page coverage of the Corcoran opening...

...Serra had no comment, period...

...Other lists— the Whitney Biennial, for example—mean prestige, with financial benefits to follow...

...Shortly after that list was compiled, Hammer gave the Corcoran $1,000,000 to be distributed over nine years...

...The Laundry Artists proved that artists have no power in the art world...

...some were downright nasty...

...But in the battle of lists, the Corcoran staff has a big advantage...

...541 of them received grants of $3,000 or $10,000...

...Even in Houston, the focus of artists' efforts is no longer to achieve power in established spaces but to create new space—an artists' center...

...The Corcoran wasn't concerned with $20 pledges from 100,000 art lovers...

...Artists have had Government grants, but they haven't been taught survival skills...

...In a scene saturated with money, the artists hover on the fringes—or on the outside...

...Giving it away for a tax deduction may be profitable, too...

...This was to be no ivory tower research...

...In the winter of 1979-1980, fifteen artists in Washington, D.C., organized a protest against one list of nine artists by the Corcoran Gallery of Art...

...Orend's research staff found my name on the list of exhibitors at Hopps's show, and that's how I became an "artist" worthy of examination in the $64,000 Endowment study...

...When she lobbied within the Carter Administration to raise the Endowment's annual appropriation from $120 million to $150 million, she hoped more of the money would go to individual artists...

...Six months after the first Laundry Show, the works of 183 artists were displayed at the Artists Invitational Museum in the Beverly Court Cooperative Apartments...

...The trick is to be invited to exhibit in museum shows and to collect grant awards...

...About one-half of those made no effort to exhibit their works...

...It was crisis time...

...The art world in America is a grand economic engine full of pander and plunder...

...But when the artist gets involved in business— making art to sell—it's going to kill that magic...

...The Corcoran ran into financial hard times in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...The dealer pockets the 50 per cent commission, and if that doesn't cover costs for the three-week show, the artist will have to pay more of the up-front expenses next time around...

...The Corcoran sought $750,000, under a three-to-one matching requirement that would compel it to raise $2.25 million in three years...

...Some lists—Guggenheim and Endowment fellowship winners, for example—mean immediate money...

...Society affords the artists no leverage, and for now they can do little more than compile lists of those who support them...

...Perhaps the most fascinating finding was that four artists surveyed earned $10,000 or more from their art even though they made no effort to exhibit...

...But why begrudge famous artists a smug moment and separate the whole tribe of artists from the mass of men who live lives of quiet money-management planning...

...The Laundry Artists' effort was not unique...

...The National Endowment for the Arts wanted Orend to study the economic conditions of visual artists in Houston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC...

...Orend reported, "We know from comments that accompanied the returns that many artists who responded were hostile to the idea of doing a survey about their art-related activities...

...So the Endowment will readily dispense hundreds of thousands of dollars to "challenge" the Corcoran to cement a partnership with wealthy individuals and corporations, but has no interest in cementing a partnership with artists, who want to be represented on the Corcoran's board and to be consulted about the Corcoran's program...

...Nonetheless, Orend and his staff managed to come up with a 500-page report studded with statistics...

...At the Washington press conference called to announce that a series of SBA-NEA seminars would be held in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, SB A Administrator A, Vernon Weaver was already popping with advice: "Everyone who sells a product and grosses between $25,000 and $30,000 a year should incorporate because they will save money...

...A year later, the Corcoran showed the Armand Hammer Collection...

...Allen Appel and Linda Swick would eventually win shows at the Corcoran...

...About one-fourth of the artists had no income from art...

...But before the exhibition opened, the curator had a change of heart, and cut the list to nine artists, two of whom were not even on the original roster...

...Within a week Lombardo and Kuter gathered thirteen other talented artists...

...Lists of museum trustees provide a clue to the powerlessness of artists...

...In 1980, the Endowment did double the number of fellowships it gave to some 8,000 visual artists who applied for help...

...The meeting was held in the Corcoran's newly renovated Armand Hammer Auditorium...

...And the $10 registration fee for the seminars would be a legitimate business expense...

...So the real action for most artists is not selling art but having one's name put on lists...

...However, a name on a list confers no power to an artist, and the lists are constantly being revised...