Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz last week began a review of artist Andrea Fraser's new work by pointing out that "another critic" had asserted that the artist was "a whore."
This name calling stems from a 2004 video in which the artist created an artwork by being paid tens of thousands of dollars to have sex with an art collector on videotape, after which the collector went home with the video momento as a work of art.
Fraser's gesture and the resulting artwork aren't particularly interesting to we of Wit, as she is asserting something about both art and feminine agency that we at Wit take completely for granted.
But the way older men who are peripheral to the art world for not being either buyers or sellers (thus being cut out of Fraser's equation twice, sexually as a middle aged man, and professionally as an art world middleman) is quite interesting indeed. Read thus, Saltz's review is an extended cry of "But what about me?"
Given Jerry Saltz's long involvement in academic environments like Columbia and Yale, et al, from which nubile female artworld hopefuls spring, his hostility (although the "he said it, not me" tack in printing a forceful misogynistic assertion is rather sly) to someone who deliberately puts herself in an open position of fucking for fame (as many male and female talents great and small have throughout history) is quizzical.
Quizzical that is, until one realizes that the perhaps unconscious problem Saltz has with Fraser (he calls her "strange" and says she "crossed a line" with the above work elsewhere in his review, linked below) is not that she's peddling her ass, but that she doesn't make all masochistic (or "ladylike" as it is often called) and pretend the exchange is about something else.
Most irksome to men like Saltz, perhaps, is that Fraser doesn't have to listen to (male professor's, male critic's, male art dealer's) patronizing pillow talk about how his wife just doesn't understand, and how he has so many friends who can really, really help her...
In short, the beauty for we of Wit in Fraser's formally charmless and completely matter of fact artwork is that Fraser shows that she has the power to not have to pretend to like the guy.
In this, her work is as revolutionary as the moment when Jane Fonda as prostitute "Klute" takes a break from panting underneath some faceless male to take a glimpse at her watch.
Women are still getting fucked in the art world, it's true. But what Fraser is pointing out is that now they don't have to pretend to like it.
Link: village voice > art > Andrea Fraser Replaces Sensationalism With Adoration by Jerry Saltz.
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