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But there from the wise Empress’s lips,
Like a sun’s ray, a smile has broken:
Before her stands a golden-curled youth.
Frolicking midst the throng of warriors,
First he lifts up the heavy sword,
Then takes from them the battle helmet,
Then, trembling in rapture, he attends
To the tales of grizzled warriors.
                            –lines from “A Vision” by Kondratyj Ryleev (1795-1826)

IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD BY NOW, here’s an open secret about art: As with war, art is a brutal business.

Even in the best of times—when the stock market ticker isn’t bouncing around like so many Seismic monitors on the San Andreas Fault, and vast amounts of our country’s paper wealth aren’t getting flushed down the rabbit-hole—many in the arts community struggle mightily to survive. As a result, each year more artists than can be counted simply give up the practice. And likely this number only accelerates when the Darwinian realities of an unraveling national financial system kick in. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but in the past I’ve read estimates of upwards of 80 percent of MFA grads eventually stop making art before their time. And my own unofficial survey reveals that well over 90 percent of idealistic young gallery-owners eventually throw in the towel early.

Despite these realities, in art as in war, there is ever a constant flow of “golden-curled youth” who flock to both fields of battle, full of themselves and the idea that they alone, among all their competitors and nemeses, are destined for glory. What’s different between art and war, however—besides the whole blood and bullets thing—is artists are strangely more self-absorbed than their militarized counterparts. Artists in general, unlike real warriors, pay much less—indeed, almost no—homage to the heroic deeds of those who came before them. Their main intent primarily seems to be to overthrow their predecessors, to kill them off as quickly as possible—if only to make their own looming (artistic) battles that much easier and their own careers that much more glorious. In the end, unlike what happens with old warriors, no songs get written about the battle-hardened artists and grizzled-warrior gallery owners who’ve survived through the years in the arena of art.

And make no bones, the range of committed and long-suffering arts denizens in this hardscrabble metro area of ours—without whom there’d be scant art worth celebrating today—while not terribly broad, is very deep. Just sit down and make a list, and you will see. My own list of local artistic heroes, whose grizzled tales I have often found myself drawn to, is split in two. It starts with dozens of artists who, while I don’t always love every work they make, are to be admired for surviving through thick and thin and continuing the battle. Then it moves on to those few purveyors and supporters of art—gallerians mostly—who’ve survived the wars from their front-line positions, under constant assault (mostly from needy artists) and with terribly unreliable supply lines to sustain them.

The Grizzled Artists

Thinking about how the many artists I know who have been scuffling to keep mind and body together over the years - now share their situation with the thousands of people per day who have been laid off or have lost their jobs entirely. I retired at the beginning of this year… These days - I look around my studio and wonder how long I'll be able to support my work. As an artist - I started out completely broke. It's ironic to think that this might be the case - again - as I approach the end of my career.
                            –James Michael Lawrence, 11/28/08

BELIEVE IT OR NOT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF LOCAL ARTISTS still working who’ve carried the banner from the last big art-economic bust (in the early 80s) to the present one (today). Indeed, I’ve written often about such aging and occasionally forgotten artists—for instance, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. There are several dozen other local artist-warriors and survivors who merit the same sort of interest and respect, if only I had the time and the market for such arts writing hadn’t shriveled up like everything else. To save time and space, however, I won’t list any more of the grizzled artists worth admiring in this town; instead, I’ll just focus on a recent story about one of them that provides some insight about why we may want to consider paying closer mind to our aging art warriors.

The above comment by James Michael Lawrence appeared on the forums at mnartists.org at the end of November, a horrifically bloody month of cultural battle in which the national art market finally went into free fall, a local art museum shut down, local art institutions hacked staff, and a gallery or two went belly-up. A number of art-world friends and acquaintances—curators, writers, other arts professional who have served the arts world faithfully for years—had lost their job in the months leading up to November, but it was during this month that they began, more and more desperately, to voice their frustration over their struggles to find new jobs and somehow provide for their families. With that backdrop, I wondered immediately if Lawrence’s story had any paradigmatic implications for what was happening on the ground with artists, at this time and in this economic reality.

“I'm writing to answer your question about my pondering the future of my being able to support my artistic practice,” Lawrence replied in explanation. He and his partner had recently, within the last year, retired from their day jobs, and they now lived on fixed incomes, provided by Social Security and individual pensions, that amounted to about half of their work incomes.  “We're fortunate,” he continued, “in that we addressed our priorities very early on - while planning for our retirement years - and did so with a clear understanding that some things had to be jettisoned.  My art-making is number one on our list of concerns and considerations.”

Lawrence works with digital imagery, and he acknowledged that keeping up on technology is very costly. “Right now, we're able to shoulder those costs relatively easily.  However, this will change when I turn 65 in two years.” A big part of the problem is, when Lawrence took early retirement, he ensured that in two years the work-coverage for continued life insurance, medical insurance, dental insurance would evaporate.  “At that point, our ability to continue funding my art (if I want to continue using my media of choice) will weaken.  That's the primary challenge [we] are facing.”

Ensuring continuity—both for individual artists and among the arts community—is what concerns me the most when I think about how the art community treats its aging artists, forgetting them at the twilight of their career. I can only imagine what it might feel like to work creatively for an adult lifetime, to survive while holding down multiple jobs, perhaps a mortgage, and all the attendant worries involved with being a modern American—only to meet up with a immoveable brick wall just when you finally have time to take on all the creative projects (during retirement) that you someday wanted to get to. Is it possible that any of the golden-curled young artists emerging now, so stuck in their own internal battles to make it big on the scene, have any ability at all to learn the lessons from the grizzled artists who came before them? Is it possible they even care?

The Grizzled Gallerians

Artists and art community members, meanwhile, should not forget there’s another entire class of art warriors who struggle day-in day-out for little thanks or reward, who often suffer much more than most of us in these times of economic implosion. The fact that we take for granted these grizzled warriors—people like Martin Weinstein, Thomas Barry, and Doug Flanders who share, between them, nearly a century-worth of support of local art—is indicative of the problems we in the arts community make for ourselves (how much we’re our own worst enemies). Without support from sympathetic individuals—from art lovers and collectors and artists and anyone at all interested in art—these galleries cease to exist. And without these galleries, well, there is no place for art to be seen. It's a, pardon the expression, vicious circle.

Indeed, the oldest of these three grizzled warriors’ artistic enterprises, the Flanders Gallery, currently doesn’t exist, having in the past few months closed its space on Lyndale Avenue to search for another (likely less expensive) space. And while it’d be easy to shrug, as many young art folk do, and say “nothing lasts forever,” and “well, they never were interested in my work anyway,” keep this in mind: This gallery, which was founded back in 1972, has shown hundreds upon hundreds of artist in its 38-year history, and has provided opportunity for numerous local artists to establish their careers here. It could have been just such a place for your own work in a few short years; it could have been, except it might well be no longer.

The same is also true of Thomas Barry Fine Arts, which has been existence, with occasional breaks, since 1984. Barry is known for his willingness to take a chance on and support local and regional artists—to give them real gallery representation and put them into excellent and elegant group and solo shows. When word came to me recently through the grizzled scenester grapevine (of which I am a recent inductee) that Barry was struggling now, and he was wondering aloud how much longer he’d be able to continue running a gallery after nearly 25 years of surviving at it—that’s when I knew we were perhaps becoming witness to the end of an era, perhaps seing the final battle in a long campaign.

I haven’t heard how Martin Weinstein, the youngest of the three grizzled gallerians—at least in terms of gallery operations is concerned—is doing at present. His gallery was founded in 1997, though before that time Weinstein for years was involved with growing the photography collection at the MIA while he kept a lucrative practice of law. And while Weinstein’s taste is not on the cuttingest edge (he became a dealer for Alec Soth, for instance, well after the young Minneapolis artist made a splash at the 2004 Whitney Biennial), Weinstein’s show are the real deal. The gallery—glorious lights, bright pristine walls, impeccably hung shows—could be at home in Chelsea. My guess, though, is that Weinstein too, despite the excellence of what he does, is likely suffering too in this current economy.

Coda

WHAT COMES TO MIND after surveying the battle scene that is our arts community is all the poetry, verse, and song that has been written through the years in honor of grizzled warriors. Certainly, warriors are deserving of our remembrance, but so, too, is anyone who survives in this cutthroat culture of ours. It wouldn't take too great an imaginative leap to see that poems such as McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” and A.E. Housman’s “Grenadier,” while memorializing the victims of battle, could have been written as much any grizzled veteran of any sort of battle. And Wilfred Owens, in his "Dulce et Decorum Est," could well have been imagining the struggles of grizzled artists instead of soldiers during the First World War when he wrote:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

In the end, to paraphrase Owens’ conclusion about the grizzled warriors who fought for country and honor in that great and horrific war, we might well say of those artists and others who are slowly (or not so slowly) falling away from our own art scene: “Dulce et Decorum est pro arte mori” (It is sweet and right to die for art).