Artistic Licenses

...CM 7: Alright, alright...

...In City Hall, there were planners who believed that artists were the sort of vital force that might ring in the new order...

...No streetlights...

...Handsome guy...

...So the artists grew very bitter, and they grew pale and thin, sitting there in Vicksburg, watching the lawyers and doctors horn in on their critical mass...

...Pikus believes that as an artist-who converted the space from a putrid textile storage loft-he owes only $500...

...Worse, they were paying top dollar for the coveted spaces...

...CM 4: This resume explains everything...

...Sure the lofts were illegal dwelling places-and the artists had contended for years with hostile building inspectors-but now the artists wanted legalization...

...Ideas that “reach up to the beautiful and the good...

...But all those who have been on the committee with whom I spoke made it clear that aesthetic judgments do enter discussions...

...This documentation should reflect a body of work over a period of five years up to and including recent work...

...But aside from a few relative trifles, such as the $50,000 townhouses, the city prefers to overlook its own law...

...Pikus got an artist’s certificate to help his case, and while he’s been disappointed so far in its limited application, he has nonetheless succeeded so far in not being evicted or treated like a dentist...

...Is he a Moonie...

...The committee consists of 21 members, all artists or people involved in the arts...

...Many comments I heard suggest that the committee is edging towards this kind of calcified, even bourgeois sense of who the artist is...

...They talk, for instance, of the dilettante whose paintings are dismissed as dabblings, or of the 20-year-old art school graduate who does not show a long commitment to the work but whose slides make committee members groan with pleasure...

...Get a load of these slides...

...the committee’s requirement will influence the substance of artists’ work...

...An artist couldn’t say just what makes him an artist, couldn’t put it in a bottle-but the DCA insists on it and has come up with a list of ingredients...

...The siege had been laid and the artists were dug in and getting picked off right and left...

...include educational background, professional training, public exhibitions and/or performances, critical reviews, grants, awards or fellowships...

...They couldn’t hold out much longer, and when they looked over their shoulders they saw that big river, and beyond that...

...It’s a collective consciousness, if you will-but those are bad words...

...One concert pianist told the committee he was an artist and had to’ live in a loft...

...Every year the committee got hundreds of petitioners...

...Committee Member I (riffling papers): This guy here says he paints his thoughts...

...You can see why, too...

...You’d think artists would never fall for such calibrations...

...What is Pikus’s basic gripe...

...I was a real pussycat...

...some of the certifiers liked it, some didn’t...

...Troy Brauntuch, an artist who has made it to the point that he can afford a co-op, speaks of the terrific insecurity of “making art,” the inability to know whether the drawing he does today will mean anything in 100 years...

...Frauds can be fairly innocent-like the woman who explained she was an artist of antique Bentleys and needed a loft with a big garage to polish her craft-or black market, like the applicant who submitted beautiful slides but failed to notice that he had rented from compliant artists works in such varying modes that the committee would smell a rat immediately...

...As I’ve pointed out already, certification has little real significance in the world of Manhattan art today...

...Rousseau .thought of himself as belonging to a different century...

...The committee is sensitive on this point-it says that it is only trying to find serious artists who wish to protect their neighborhood and their calling and that it’s not trying to make aesthetic judgments...

...Doctors and lawyers believed you had to get rid of the charlatans to get quality and more money...

...Inevitably, because what really matters can’t be bottled, the list of ingredients-where the artist went to school, where he’s shown-are unrelated to art...

...Too much acid...

...It took in the inspiration of other artists at your elbow and the army surplus stores and the architecturally historic commercial buildings of Lower Manhattan Valley, that cluttered sweep of Italianate facades north of the World Trade Center and south of towering midtown...

...Even if you were not an artist you knew that Brooklyn had no critical mass...

...The fact that certification for New York City artists has hung on for I1 years despite fairly empty powers demonstrates just how pervasive the search for credentials really is...

...Call it “the bottling problem...

...The DCA knows many artists abhor the presumption embodied in certification and refuse to participate, or just hate to deal with structured institutions...

...And former committee member Dianne Talan, a painter, says that the sometimes tedious three hour meetings would break up into laughter at the presumption of someone who had never exhibited in a show but had included a hand-printed flyer from an exhibition in his bedroom...

...So it’s a little frightening to contemplate the small but real ways in which certification is defining art in the language of bureaucratic Americayes, bottling art...

...Which just points up the absurdity of the original contentionthe thought that you can actually distinguish a “serious” artist without forming an aesthetic judgment...

...Many of the best young artists are already in Brooklyn or New Jersey, creating their own critical mass...

...The fact that certification for artists has been established in New York and has hung on for 11 years despite fairly empty powers demonstrates just how pervasive this search for credentials really is...

...every year it decided hundreds of times, yes or no, was this fellow an artist...

...Groans from the committee...

...To be in Brooklyn was to be alienated, exiled, to feel yourself just that close to the big action, the celebrated “eyes” of Manhattan dealers...

...So one senses that, at bottom, the fear of Brooklyn is not the main reason for the whole certification process...

...And the writer on the arts who won a certificate because he had 35,000 books “essentia1”to his work, who finally convinced the committee that you can’t put 35,000 books on the coffee table...

...You can’t help thinking that Geldzahler and company ought to know better, or at least they ought to have more important things to work on...

...The stockbrokers and the dentists, the guys with money wanted in on the action, too...

...Artists wishing to live in lofts in areas zoned solely for commercial use may do so (two to a building) only if certified...

...A painting of the eviction depicts soldiers with hooded heads, swords and shields threatening a naked sprawling family...

...Some artists had a name for all these things: they said it was the “Critical Mass” of Lower Manhattan...

...A clue to why the Department of Cultural Affairs keeps up its effort anyway can be found in the way it refers to artists-as “professionals,” implying the requirements of advanced training...

...And the creative act, in the old days anyway, was something independent, individual and beyond official standards...

...These meetings can grow very heated, and in controversial cases Robert J. Vanni, the corporation counsel to the city’s department of cultural affairs, sits in to remind the members of the complex “legislative history” its deliberations have generated...

...His work was most unusual-beautifully designed and colored dream scenes, often in exotic locales...

...This episode is deceptive because it is hard to imagine that someone of Rousseau’s devotion would have wasted time even applying to the Department of Cultural Affairs...

...It is true that the artist-only zoning has been honored mostly in the breach...

...well, not quite Louisiana...

...Pitted cobbled alleys...

...It took in the museums uptown and the Pearl Paint discount house on Canal and the galleries that had moved to West Broadway in SoHo...

...Harrumph, said the music expert on the panel, you can never simulate the acoustics of the concert hall in a loft...

...There is, for instance, impatience with enthusiasm...

...Well, this fellow is applying from a mental institution, says he just cut his ear off.’(Groans from the certification committee...

...For “making art”-as they characterized their work it sounded like making love-is very lonely indeed...

...Let us take the primitivist Henri Rousseau, who in 1885 quit his job as a municipal customs inspector in Paris to satisfy the artistic longings he had until then expressed only as a Sunday painter...

...In the context of Guernica and other modernist challenges to 20th-century authority it was difficult to digest, but the artists had their own official 21-member committee that sat around a big table in a New York office building and broke pencils and ate sandwiches and drank coffee the city provided...

...they saw Brooklyn...

...And just like in real court, when an applicant has been denied, he can take his case to an appeals board...

...You don’t turn right when you’re supposed to turn right,’’ Vanni explains the certification committee’s process...

...The New York Aesthetic Club Whether sitting in judgment of an artist’s “modus operandi” fills some subconscious, long lost ambition to play commissar (from the Red Greenwich Village of the 1930s, perhaps...

...You might as well have been on another planet-or, worse, in Santa Fe...

...indeed, decades later expressionists and surrealists would learn from him...

...Art involved intangibles, didn’t it...

...This is, of course, a familiar problem of the meritocracy: the emphasis on paper qualifications and scoring that have no real bearing on someone’s work...

...artists say that New York’s future as the arts capital is threatened unless you get the charlatans out of the protected neighborhoods, hence what one artist terms the “necessary evil” of certification...

...With no agreement on the beauties of someone’s art, he says, the committee had to fall back on inarguable paper differences-education, number of shows, and so forth...

...I never would have thought people would have done that...

...It even took in the waiter’s mustache...

...it could one day control housing for artists, or even-who knows?-the ability to exhibit in important galleries...

...His landlord wants $2,000 a month for his 3,700-square-foot space (reasonable by New York standards for such a huge area), about the same as other tenants in the building pay...

...Lofty Motives Mario Pikus, a 38-year-old Argentinian painter, embodies the belief of many artists that they have a higher moral right to cheap Manhattan real estate than everyone else...

...There was scorn for what people planned to do,” she says...

...That holy grail of professionalized, status-anxious America was at last the artists’: they, too, had credentials...

...In 1971, the city bought in...

...Ads for lofts in these neighborhoods still keep up the pretense saying things like “Certified Artists Only” or “Perfect for an Artist’*-but $250,000 price tags make it clear that the city is looking the other way...

...Be sure to include dates and announcements...

...It reflects the continuity of dealing with cases over five years...

...And Lower Manhattan was becoming the artists’ Vicksburg...

...Did Renoir Hit 60 Homers...

...Just like Wall Street and the garment district, the artists were an industry, and the heart of that industry, the critical mass of it, was in SoHo...

...CM 3: No, just out to lunch...

...Enough...

...The true objection to the certification process has less to do with fraud or pointy-headedness than it does with the effort to bureaucratize a field one would have hoped was impregnable...

...And the woman who did artistic calligraphies but insisted they were enormous calligraphies...

...Art was supposed to be better than all this...

...And if anyone with a more claylike notion of what a city should be wanted to question that, the artists (who were, after all, largely the sons and daughters of the middle class and had a pretty good idea of how America worked) came armed with statistics: they contributed more than a billion dollars to the city’s economy, directly and indirectly...

...The seal of approval is actually more useful when the issue is not rent but simple habitation...

...What is distressing is thatabout4,000ofthemdo,and that the members of the certification committee take their work so seriously...

...Critical mass encompassed many things...

...The second was for teaching, and according to the standards of the committee, teaching is not art...

...The grand vizier of the process, who steps in when everyone else has thrown up his hands and fallen to the canvas over a disputed artist/pretender, is Henry Geldzahler, a large, florid man who radiates a wire-rimmed Zennish presence, to judge from the portraits by his friends Andy Warholand David Hockney...

...But no, it was an hour on the Dtrain if you were lucky and then, hey, what gallery owners or patrons were willing to cross the river...

...Who’s next...

...He’s got no formal training, he’s recently widowed, and he’s 41 years old...

...It meets ten times a year, behind closed doors, and seven members must be present to vote on an application...

...Yes, if you really want to know, it took in a lot of things that everyone else in Manhattan wanted too-especially the lofts, lofts full of light, with heavy sculptures and over-sized canvases...

...Worse, as the committee gains control over something artists need-housing-its applicants will cater to it more...

...Artists had been there for almost 30 years, they had fought off the Lower Manhattan expressway, they had made that spectral landscape habitable-they had given it critical mass...

...One reason the committee is so religious in its exertions is that there is, nearly everyone concedes, quite a demand for fraudulent certifications...

...CM 6: Sure, isn’t this the guy with the black beard who sleeps around...

...Baseball is better than most professions...

...So the artists had obtained official status in city affairs...

...Five judges-of the dozens Pikus says he has appeared before in the last five years are shown on an enormous canvas on their heads, their robes falling down...

...But it is painfully irrelevant to the business it is supposed to protect: people struggling to give expression to ideas and impressions, often of a highly independent character...

...We’ve gotten much tougher,” says burin Raiken, director of the arts and society program at New York University...

...The pianist was, patently, a fine artist, but the reason he needed a loft was that he had two pianos...

...Bang went the fists on the table, scribble-scribble went the coordinator, swish went the papers into the files...

...The press was enchanted...

...If you asked the artist to put his finger on why, he would jab at this and that: the exchange of ideas, the special kinetics of an industrial neighborhood, the knick-knacks you could pick up for a few dollars on Canal Street, the importance of a “support group...

...Forty-three blocks of SoHo were set aside for artists and other light manufacturers-artists made things too, right?in an out-of-the-late-sixties vision of heavy workboots and bohemian sandals treading the same polished cobblestones...

...that we try to enforce...

...But, the pianist insisted, he needed that big space in order to simulate the acoustics of a concert hall...

...The certification committee has met with city officials several times over this...

...The inescapable analogy, of course, is to other self designated professions...

...Brooklyn...

...And now the landlords were selling out the artists-selling out that critical mass...

...We are not trying to ensconce a lot of bright eyed and bushy-tailed artists,” says Vanni...

...In the end, the aspiring come to believe that to succeed as artists they must have bottled qualifications...

...The application required by the DCA might be familiar to those who have been sifted through bureaucracies (“Include a professional resume pertinent to your fine arts work...

...Artists who applied to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development last year to buy one of 120 artist-only townhouses the city was creating from burnt-out shells on the Lower East Side for $50,000 a shot a good deal for any shelter in Manhattan-also had to be certified...

...The first, for practicing his art, he could have kept in a regular apartment...

...I ask you, why does every Sunday painter with a mid-life crisis have to have his own loft...

...The same lofts one saw on the front page of the 7Ime.s Home section, with glass brick walls and butcher block tables and a stockbroker leaning back on tubular chrome furniture...

...It is too tempting not to imagine how the committee would have considered a great-and needful-artist who defied such categorization...

...It had as much to do with the credentialed way of getting ahead in America as, to paraphrase that old radical feminist line, a fish has to do with a bicycle...

...So DCA staffers speak of their constituency as both certified artists and “certifiable” ones...

...Pikus’s life has been so dominated by his fight to stay in his breath-taking loft on the edge of the TriBeCa section that even his art now revolves around the legal battles...

...But it has a toehold...

...It would be like going through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection and telling people what to look at by hanging a 95 next to Manet’s Woman with a Parrot and a 67 next to Cezanne’s The Card Players...

...But the pull of quantification is strong even here...

...CM 5: Yeah, I’ve seen this guy...

...Doctors and lawyers also responded-100 years ago-to a feeling that their fields were too open and that quality service would be compromised unless they set up some standards...

...There was something so geographically intimidating about a river...

...Think of the baseball player, he says, with what sounds like envy in his voice-if he hits a certain number of home runs in a season he can, indubitably, become the best hitter in baseball...

...to take out a knife and scrape off white-out from slides to see the counterfeiting...

...Only in a few egregious cases has the Buildings Department insisted that people moving into the specially protected zones of SoHo and NoHo actually have certification, as the law requires...

...The committee began to understand this when it got applications with impeccable slides from the address of a law firm or real estate office, when it heard that real estate agents were assuring rich clients that certification was a small hurdle in getting a loft, when artists reported being asked to rent their art works to stock brokers...

...Bruce Kushnick, a composer and a committee member, explains it this way: Many artists’ work caused violent disagreements over aesthetics...

...Yes, it numbs the mind to think that people would be willing to sell it all out for a piece of paper-a piece of paper, by the way, that will be issued this year on more official-looking stock, requiring a notary seal...

...The peculiar American habit of turning every personal or professional matter into a federal case is on display at every meeting...

...After all, SoHo and NoHo had been your classic urban blight before the artists came along...

...Then there was the writer of screenplays who needed space to be away from her boyfriend’s drums...

...It’s not like a driver’s test...

...CM I: Well, this fellow is applying from a mental institution...

...or simply means even artists are bureaucrats at heart nowadays, the certification committee attracts well-known figures on the New York art scene...

...They would get certificates from the Department of Cultural Affairs, and only artists with certificates could move in to SoHo (the smaller NoHo district would be added in 1976...

...He had a couple of paintings in one show, and they were so bad somebody slashed them...

...Life magazine made SoHo seem like underground luxury: bare shoulders, bare walls...

...In a way, he says, he wishes there were standards that would tell you whether you were a real artist or not...

...It was 1970 then, and there was glamor in being an artist underdog taking on the system...

...Says he just cut his ear off...

...Artists had dragged in the bathtubs and the copper pipes under the noses of their see-nothing landlords...

...So it is not surprising that most New York artists don’t bother with the procedure...

...But it doesn’t take much to know that neither of these models has even the vaguest application to art...

...Abandoned commercial lofts thick with half a century of industrial grease, ink, and rags...

...The artists, bless them, were not going down without a fight...

...Certification is a bit like going through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection and telling people what to look at by hanging a 95’next to Manet’s Woman with a Parrot and a ‘67’next to Cezanne’s The Card Players...

...CM 2: Huh, sounds religious...

...At least you get judged on what you actually do, rather than how many years you’ve gone to school and how you’ve scored on tests...

...I had to wait for my friend...

...Sometimes he plays the violin for money in the park...

...An m.o...

...And that was the problem...