Holland Cotter is writing about galleries, little galleries, not in Chelsea but on the Lower East Side, galleries which advertise as alternative. I wonder, is alternative alternative?
Seems to me, alternative is now like avant garde was to modernism: says unconventional, breaking limits, pushing boundaries—but really, isn't it all passé? Even in the toniest galleries—or museums for that matter, anything goes.
Alternative used to mean you'll find something different, something challenging to the status quo, something other than the mainstream. Something that the market won't bear. What is it now that the art market won't bear?
Seems to me the only thing that alternative can mean now is not-for-profit. Or is that what alternative really means? Is it a codeword for doesn't sell, makes no money? Well I'm alternative then, but not proud of it.
The sentimental notion that art couldn't, shouldn't make money is linked with ye olde Bohemian term avant garde. The marginalized outsider took a vow of poverty when he (yes, back then it was mostly he's) took up the standard against convention and advanced the line—that linear historical party line that demarked the boundary of accepable and subversive. Artists and gypsies pushed the boundaries of what was legitimate or desirable, and the Victorian ladies, evidently, said, Shame on you! And what artists and gypsies wanted—so goes the sentimental storyline—was to be free from the constraints of manners, rules, and obligations. The thought that followed was that market success had built-in demands: for saleable product (consumer-oriented) and always more (art that could be manufactured). Success resulted in legitimacy and stability and so it was just better to die young, avoid all pitfalls of making a capitalistic living.
Students and creative types still believe this. As Cotter says, "people still want it, and live it, and have a kind of faith in it." Whole neighborhoods exude it, a sort of sophmoric anti-establishment, self-righteousness dressed in machine-worn designer jeans and Peruvian woolen hats that says "of the people." Excuse me? And how are you different than everybody else on the block?
Being down on the street, flaneur, with the people is code for being progressive—the artist subverting commodification, or at least rankling her art-school tuition-paying parents. Art as critique, as against societal ruts and wrongs is another aspect of the avant garde breaking through to the new society—or at least breaking the limits of conceptuality and making aesthetic change (which ultimately brings about societal change). Now this is a notion of new and different that I can get behind. Seeing concepts in a new way, hearing stories I've never heard before, or the old ones told a different way in a different voice. This is a concept of new, different, alternative that is postmodern and always contemporary for it assumes always new particular ideas, views, voices—anything goes, everybody's welcome. The ultimate democracy.
So how alternative is alternative? Is it a necessary term? Seems to me, and I may be naive, but the art world seems more welcoming of radical, upside down, inside and other points of view than any world I know of. Seems to me the art world is an alternate world, a parallel universe, running on its own imaginative steam with a unique economy following a fantastical standard of its own making. It seems reduntant to say alternative art, alternative gallery. Better to be specifically descriptive: political art, feminist art, figurative, installation, found, narrative, video, conceptual, invisible. I mean, really. Alternative? Diamond encrusted skull. Now that's alternative. And I'm not joking.
