THE BEST: A Manifesto
By Joe Scanlan, Donelle Woolford and Steve Canal Jones

As artists we are often asked, "Where does your money come from?" The question usually comes in two variations. The first is largely innocent and occurs whenever our relatives or members of the nonart public, having in our presence come across an artwork we have made, genuinely wonder how it can be possible to get paid for having made it. When we explain that there are many people who like to look at artworks and compare them to other ones over time, and a few in that group who are even willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money (relative to materials and labor) for what they feel are the most interesting examples, our non-art friends squint their eyes a little and cock their heads at us, as if something nefarious was going on. When we resort by way of example to the goings-on at craft fairs or the Antiques Road Show, they brighten, because they all know someone who earns a living making handbags or whose Star Wars paraphernalia was appraised at fifty thousand dollars. After they tell us about someone who has been similarly fortunate, we nod and say, "Yeah, artçs just like that." Unfailingly, their heads straighten and their squints dissolve. They still donçt know anything about art, but at least they understand how it works, and how something works is always a more nagging question than what the same thing might mean.

The second variant of the question about our money is usually posed by graduate students and architects, and is much more angry and troubling. It is intended to undermine our authority as invited speakers or to expose a conceit we clearly have, a brickbat hurled from behind the stanchions of real-life drudgery that is the domain of graduate students and architects. That doesnçt bother us. Our veins are already coursing with the homeopathic toxins of commerce, so weçre immune to such na‰ve humiliations.

What does bother us about total strangers being concerned with our money, though, is the presumption that earning a living is not an acceptable motivation for an artist. To us, and for better or worse, all art is nothing if not a proposal for how the current situation might be altered at a profit. That that profit is often not immediately apparent to us is nothing against an artwork or its maker, and we, as a group, refuse to live in a society where skilled individuals cannot earn a living however they please. If our best chance at making a living entails patenting a recipe for synthetic dirt, or drawing snowflakes, or making Cubist paintings out of scrap wood, then we can only expect that a liberal capitalist democracy such as ours will afford a niche in which to ply our trade; otherwise, the philosophical pillars of our society would be revealed to be not as liberal or democratic as they seem.

For that reason, and that reason alone, nothing is more impressive or politically reaffirming than an artist who is gainfully self-employed.

The energies that have produced this romantic pragmatism are complex and quite unintended. Ironically enough–and as strange as it might seem to people today–such liberal, tolerant, encouraging ideals were an essential part of the founding of our country. Now, amateur scholars and paid commentators alike tend to assert that digital technology is responsible for making our atomized world of independent contractors more viable than old-fashioned, centralized workplaces. That may be true, but it doesnçt explain how such a broad appreciation for being self-employed came about in the first place. Having grown up in Niagara Falls, New York, a region of the country that is only now recovering from the recession of 1991 and embracing the infotainment casino economy, the current spate of self-reliance is in fact the natural fallout from four decades of corporate merging, downsizing, and outsourcing. The initial shock of so many people losing their jobs and having their lives disrupted has been more than offset by their bedrock mistrust of any institution or corporation that promises to look out for their well-being when profits are at stake.

During our youths, many of our parentsç friends had no choice but to capitalize on whatever they were good at as a means of making a living, turning weekend avocations like crocheting afghans or restoring cars into legitimate business enterprises. Over time, self-pity evolved into self-survival evolved into self-actualization as entrepreneur, a low-tech, self-sufficient state of mind that is ideally suited to the cottage industry that is the Internet. Current Internal Revenue Service statistics report that one in every five working Americans is self-employed, and some economists, counting people like commissioned salespersons and waitstaff who are technically employed but whose incomes are largely self-generated, put the ratio as high as one in three. Thus, the more the necessity of having a unique and profitable skill permeates our culture the more the occupation of being an artist is appreciated, and the more young people can look to John Cage or Vija Celmins when choosing a livelihood.

If you are like our relatives and non-art friends, at this point in our argument you will be completely satisfied with the legitimacy of our profession, and even go so far as to wish us well at it since, given our shared belief in the aforementioned principles, it would be unpatriotic not to be so. Of course, if you share the same chemistry as graduate students and architects, you will first need to square our philosophy with a major historical precedent in order to bring it under control. Which usually means that you will bring up Warhol.

Now, it might surprise you to learn that when we say artists are the epitome of independent contracting, we do not have Andy Warhol in mind. We admire his enterprise, it was impressive in its day and all, but there is very little about Warholçs methods or his oeuvre that is of use to independent-minded artists now. The idea of art being made in a factory might have been a radical concept in the 1960s, but we do well to remember that corporations at that time were already in the process of rendering Warhol-type factories obsolete. Factories mean overhead, and if contemporary art and being self-employed share anything it is the desire to minimize overhead costs. Even if we were to assume that Warholçs Factory was important in some absolute sense, the fact remains that Warhol still didnçt make anything of greater intrinsic interest or better quality than what could be found in the non-art world of his time. And that may have been his point. Indeed, that lack of distinction was perhaps Warholçs most important contribution to the then broad (and earnest) assault on art and life. Warhol meant to rely on the category of Art to distinguish his sameness from the sameness of the rest of the world.

Naturally, the category of Art no longer holds once we lump its practitioners in with all other people in trade–except, of course, when the activities of an artist are truly unrivaled by anyone else in the world, at which point it doesnçt matter whether that person is an artist or not. He or she is simply "the best." It is on the basis of that often highly profitable status that the value of anything rests.

Take Agnes Martin. Having worked into her nineties, she dominated the market for imperfectly ruled pencil lines on unprimed canvas, even though her materials were inexpensive and her technique could be performed by anyone with a pencil, a work surface, and a yardstick. No one did it. Martin had so thoroughly woven her endeavor into herself that, even after her death, it seems physically impossible to impede on the terrain of her invention. In fact, her paintings–stripes and grids of graphite on canvas whose interstices are sometimes filled in with thin washes of color–can be seen as poetic evocations of the absolute distinction that the work itself has come to represent, the meticulous delineation of precise points in space that cannot be confused with any other, equally precise, points. Despite her best efforts–or perhaps because of them–every line, space, and intersection Martin drew is different from every other, due to the weave of the canvas, the graphite dragged across it, and the fact that Martin herself pulsed and breathed. The sublime factual imperfection that resulted is unmatched by anyone in any field.

The lesson, of course, is that itçs much easier to be the best at doing something if as few other people as possible are also doing it. Where Warholçs thousands of imitators continue to burn money and resources slavishly mocking a mainstream culture with which they can never compete, the real growth opportunities are in obscure enterprises where competition is low and materials cheap.

Just as Marshall McLuhan observed that people didnçt know they wanted televisions until televisions were invented, how can the audience for art know what it wants until we, as artists, invent it for them? And, given that opportunity, how can any of us believe itçs in our long-range interest to go on appropriating a popular culture that our customers already know and have? In the end, and quite ironically, a "difficult" artist like Agnes Martin is a much more useful role model than her more celebrated counterpart, Warhol, could ever be. Her arcane skills and restrained production methods epitomize such concepts as personal branding, value adding and inventory velocity, state-of-the-art business innovations that she and the likes of On Kawara and David Hammons have never gotten credit for.

Until now.

The avant-garde lives! Not because itçs more meaningful or radical than any other activity, but because it fills a legitimate market niche.