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.
|
(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 8-20-2005 7:20 am