The positive thing about the 9/11 survivors is they kept heat on the authorities when no one else could for fear of seeming unpatriotic (although the commission was still a whitewash). The downside is they "own" the site and get to be art critics. I say--it's Silverstein's property, tainted by his money grubbing. Let him build his fake freedom tower and have his fake culture exhibits. Everyone in the know will know it's Soviet-style propaganda.
- tom moody 8-11-2005 8:52 pm


Bill - I said this to you in an email, but I thought I'd post it as well. I feel fairly confident that there would have been more grassroots support for the DC had they tried to coordinate it just the tiniest bit. I know when the "scandal" first broke, an awful lot of people contacted me to ask me what to do to help. I told them to contact the DC so we could all coordinate and be on the same page and follow their lead. I'm sure they had their reasons - although I don't know what they were - but the DC never responded to those people in a timely or coordinated manner, or with a list of things that we could do to help them out. I know a lot of the people who wanted to help - myself included - were worried about stepping on the DC's toes, doing anything that accidentally would make the situation worse. I personally felt pretty secure that they were going to come up with a strategy at any moment that they would inform us all of... but then they didn't.

(A perfect example of this is that I know a woman who is the director of a museum in NYC. She emailed the Drawing Center as soon as she heard about all this and asked them what she could do to help. Now, bear in mind - she's a fairly big name, I would think it would be helpful to have her as a co-signer on a letter or that sort of thing. They never responded to her email. Eventually, through mutual friends, she tracked *me* down and asked me what she should do. I recommended she write to the editors of the various papers and to send copies to Pataki et al, but I felt rather uncomfortable advising her. Did the Drawing Center want me to do this? Did they want her input, her help? I have no idea - it would seem under normal circumstances that they would, but then why would they ignore her email?)

Situations such as this one need to be handled swiftly and in an organized fashion. I absolutely expected the DC to email their entire mailing list a list of addresses to write to, protests to attend, etc, the day that the Daily News article appeared. They never did this. This leads me to believe that they didn't want grassroots support for some reason.

I know that when the NY Press wrote that awful article about me, I sent a panicked email out to a bunch of friends begging them to write to the editor and complain. About a dozen did - and you figure, this is only from an email I sent to my friends. People *wanted* to help - and they came to my defense when I asked them to. Had the DC done the same thing, I firmly believe that they would have gotten dozens, if not hundreds, of letters written on their behalf. But it's hard to stick your neck out for someone who doesn't seem to want your help.

I suspect that there was some sort of negotiations going on where the DC was assured that all of this would die down quickly and it would be better for them to not get a lot of people involved. If this is the case, in retrospect it must look like bad advice. Maybe they feared that pitting a group of artists vs. the 9/11 families would have resulted in an all out culture war, above and beyond anything we've ever seen. I don't know - and I suspect we'll never really know what was going on.

To me, the clearest indication that the DC never especially wanted our help was the fact that I first found out about the "scandal" via a friend who emailed me to alert me to it. You realize how odd that is, right? Normally when your work is written about in the press, your gallery calls you to let you know. I can't imagine showing anywhere else and having my work reproduced in two front page tabloid articles and not having the gallery pick up the phone... unless they just really wanted to pretend the story didn't exist. So, something weird was going on, and we still don't know what that is. I tend to think we'll never really know.


- amy (guest) 8-20-2005 7:20 am [add a comment]


Usually when an artist is mentioned in the press the gallery doesn't know about it and if they do, the artist is the last person they tell. My sense of the Drawing Center is that they're a typical white shoe, blue blood operation despite their "public" mission. They are part of an elite machinery, a feeder to other blue blood, white shoe galleries and musuems and with such people, it's all about not making a fuss or rocking the boat, because then wealthy patrons get nervous and start pulling support. I realize this sounds like class resentment but it's really just disgust that in our culture, elite really does mean effete. Fearing to offend or be unseemly means very little interesting happens in this sphere any more.
- tom moody 8-20-2005 7:48 am [add a comment]


thanks a million amy and tom. im a little bit worried about how GD co-opted everything is getting. i always thought that its wildly obvious that there are strings attached to nea grants compromising the work process and should therefore be avoided. in the 60's earth works implied an out side the system alternative but those folks (smithson, heizer, etc.) had mostly been historically validated in advance of their departure from the studio. amy and i were talking about how much debt the later generations of art school grads have entering the commercial fine art system. that cant be good for autonomy of thought and action following toms "not rocking the boat" line of thinking. im afraid these institutions are driven by fear of scandal which leaves them (and us if we throw in with their lot) in an incredibly vulnerable place.
- bill 8-21-2005 7:58 pm [add a comment]





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