Public Relations isn’t so mysterious—you probably understand it a lot better than you think. Press releases, media lists, pitch letters, and cold calls don’t constitute a vast ideological conspiracy, a spin machine, or censorship. In the artworld, PR is simply a medium, a conduit between producers and consumers. The best PR gets art to its audience quickly and clearly, explaining it as much and distorting it as little as possible. Seen strictly as a profession—what publicists do for a living—PR is a simple and discreet enterprise. But if we expand the notion of PR to include everything that shapes the relations between art and its public—not just publicity as such but curation, exhibition planning, art journalism, art criticism, and art education—we get a sense of its ubiquity. The practitioners of PR aren’t just publicists; they’re us.
The stories the artworld tells about itself are subject to frequent revision as tastes and theories shift, but its self-regard remains a constant. The two abilities it most persistently admires in itself are: to discover bold new talent, and to recognize and safeguard objects of lasting importance. One doesn’t necessarily imply the other; in fact, the two pursuits require decidedly different, even contradictory, attitudes and values. Neither is satisfying on its own. Real, unmitigated newness is incredibly uncomfortable (what if you accidentally like something that turns out to be bad?), and the established offers little opportunity for growth. So the art world finds itself vacillating between discovery and security—between a reverence for perpetual, radical change, and the desire to assimilate that change instantly. We want something new, but we want it to be intelligible, and we want it to endure.
PR’s central task in the artworld is to provide a synthesis of the new and the established. Examples of this aren’t hard to find. What story is more popular in the art press than that of a new museum building designed by a star architect? The museum is well known, the architect well established, the building radically different. The same could be said of the blockbuster traveling show: the paintings are acknowledged masterpieces, the themes conventional, but the works are “seen together for the first time.”
The successful pitch contains a pleasing ratio between the new and the same. Talented, young artists can be validated by brisk sales at established galleries. But to make news, these young artists must be grouped to represent a trend, which is PR at its purest: newness and sameness in one phenomenon. On the other end of the spectrum, older artists with retrospectives have their work “rediscovered” to elaborate fanfare. Median situations naturally abound, but they fail to show up in the public record: mid-career artists who are, simply, still making art, fall easily from editorial notice; even if their work is fervently discussed among their peers, the media asks, what’s the hook? World-class museums struggle to attract press and visitor attention to their permanent collections—the media asks, why now?
Why now indeed? If the state of art journalism is any indication, PR’s synthesis leaves a lot to be desired. Its narrative organizes the visual arts by its limit cases (the up-and-coming and the recently deceased, the radical and the venerated), in order to avoid an embarrassing fact: artists making art makes a boring story. So the apparent handle PR gives us on art isn’t nearly as useful as we first think; the stories it tells us have surprisingly little to do with art itself.
The reason for this may be empirical. The artworld, with its thousands of artists and galleries and curators and exhibitions and museums, is just too big and unwieldy to yield to a traditional ideal of mastery. It’s been years since you could see all the Chelsea galleries in a day. Now, unless you’re a person of considerable leisure, it’s impossible to see everything—the museum shows, the dozens of international art fairs and biennials, the annual MFA shows and countless open studios—and read everything—the magazine reviews, blogs, scholarly essays, interviews and monographs—required to stay current with contemporary art. Given the enormous effort it takes to keep up with the objects, the makers, and the discourse, it’s not surprising that an intricate social press has sprung up around art, complete with party pictures of artists,dealers, curators, and collectors, and gossip columns written by art critics. If you can’t master the work, the texts, the history (and who could?), you can at least know the players, the events, the locales, and the scene—each of which change with the speed and narcotic dependability of a soap opera, smoothing out the disconcerting transformations of art itself.
We’re left with a body of knowledge that substitutes itself for an understanding of what we’re looking at but gets us no closer to resolving our initial problem. In the story told by PR, experiences peripheral to art-viewing stand in for art, and the qualities of those experiences supersede the qualities of the work itself. The overwhelming complexity of these experiences forces the art-viewing public to ask the question why this and not that? in a way that the artwork itself can’t answer.
All of this puts artists in an interesting bind, as we’re both limited by and reliant on PR. Our understanding of the medium influences how we make things. Given that the meaning of a work of art isn’t simply on its surface, but embedded in a host of factors (visual, social, historical, and financial), viewers need clues to find it—especially if they’re seeing something for the first time, and for a short time. Just knowing that PR will be there to explain what we do—that the theoretical claims we make for our work needn’t be manifest—allows us enormous freedom.
Whether this is a boon or a curse to art, I really can’t say—I think it encourages both ambitious thinking and complacent making. What is clear is that, as artists, we can’t extricate ourselves from the mechanisms of PR, however much we might want to. At this point, withholding a press release would be only seen as a publicity stunt. By the same token, if major newspapers stopped running trend pieces about contemporary art, a large part of our audience would quickly find other diversions. But we can’t have PR all to ourselves, either, and we should accept that we’ll always be sharing control with the network of other invested individuals—with their own relations to their own discrete publics—who comprise the artworld.
What all of us can do—makers, viewers and everyone in between—is focus on the thing PR can’t produce, which is the artwork. If it won’t respond to why now? what’s the hook? and why this and not that? then we might need to rethink those questions. In the meantime, if the omnipresence of PR in the artworld rankles, perhaps we should first admit that we don’t have time to know or care about everything. Freed up to look selectively and aggressively—surer of our own eyes but more doubtful in our judgments— we’d be in a better position to accept what PR does offer: quick access to a realm of ideas that are extra visual, and a context in which to locate the new and strange. But just as we can’t isolate and blame PR for what we think is a stagnant discourse, we shouldn’t lazily allow it to substitute for the real work of looking and thinking, hard.