Interview

O’BRIEN: Young people today probably don’t understand that moment.

CURRIN: Real embarrassments, you know?

O’BRIEN: Painting was so out. That’s why hundreds of little galleries opened up, because the mainstream art world was so aligned with minimalism and conceptualism that it would never have accepted that freedom. The museums and academia had made painting outré. The conceptualist victory was so complete that a new infrastructure had to be improvised.

CURRIN: Right, they were busy turning art into something like modern music. It exists only in your universities and only WQXR wants to play it. It’s like American Masters on Channel 13. Nobody likes it, nobody listens to it, and beyond, like, Koyaanisqatsi [1982], it doesn’t show up anywhere in culture. So those people being willing to be bad artists as well as good artists was amazing. It brought taste back into it. It brought all kinds of messiness. It sort of brought sex back into everything. I was watching Fanny and Alexander [1982] recently. The movie is in two halves, and everything’s great with the kids until they have to move in with this bishop, who is this sadistic guy. And I’m realizing, most of the art world would prefer the bishop. They would think that his house was awesome.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: They would think with that ice-cold waterfall in front of it that he has better taste than—I don’t know what they were—Catholics, and their homey
brocaded chintz house. You realize there is so much a culture of self-denial and asceticism. And it’s fine for other people, but those moments don’t last long. And maybe they’re very special because they don’t last long, but vitality never lasts long in reduction. It’s like if Savonarola was never burnt at the stake and he took over. Botticelli was
fantastic until he took up with Savonarola. I mean, he’s still great, of course, he’s a genius. But it’s so sad to see what happened to Botticelli.

O’BRIEN: After the Bonfire of the Vanities . . .

CURRIN: And people say, “So much bad art got made in the ’80s.” Well, it’s better than what would have happened if the only people willing to make embarrassing art were Judy Chicago or people like that.

O’BRIEN: Well, it was risky art. Some of it was bad, but a lot of it was great. If people had taken the safe way, nothing would have happened.

CURRIN: Not the safe way, but the way of the book.

O’BRIEN: Yeah. [Discussion of the excellence of the food at Il Buco, the restaurant where they are eating, in downtown Manhattan]

O’BRIEN: I think the financial crash sort of altered the way I see art, not in general, but in specific instances. Like walking through Art Basel in Miami, I’d find that something that looked like art the year before didn’t look so much like art anymore. Obviously the work hadn’t changed, but the lines were redrawn. It seemed like the cooling market reaffirmed more traditional values.

CURRIN: Really? I think it’s almost the opposite.

O’BRIEN: Really? Don’t you think labor intensity and talent look more important now?

CURRIN: I don’t know about labor intensity. In fact, I think, if anything, there will be a collapse in the value of labor intensity. This is a weird moment . . .

O’BRIEN: ’Cause we’ve been living in a gestural world.

CURRIN: I don’t want to sound more philosophical than I mean to, but it’s a huge thing when people realize across the culture that paper money is paper. And that there’s no fixed value—it’s all political. That all value is set by a political authority, basically.

O’BRIEN: Or systems of belief.

CURRIN: And there is, literally and figuratively, not a gold standard. That’s almost as big a problem in art as in the financial world. How do you affix a value to something that only has value because a certain number of people agree to believe in that value? Maybe ultimately that’s a spiritual question, but our lives run on it. And I’m not sure that labor intensity is gonna be determining that.

O’BRIEN: No, I just think it’s one factor. And maybe it’s more relevant to the art you’d see at SCOPE than at Basel. But now that the system of financial instruments has collapsed, gold is at an all-time high. So what’s the gold standard in the art world, you know? It’s beauty and craft and . . .

CURRIN: I wonder if it is, though. I’m too old now, but I can imagine that the person who can do the bullshittiest show now would be something. I think that would be good, if you were young.

O’BRIEN: That’s like trying to cash a really big check, though.

CURRIN: This would be a good moment for somebody to hype the most laughable check of a show that they could possibly get away with. It would be fun to see someone do. And not a wry comment on the evil corporation, not the usual kind of leftist, standoffish take on things. I think it would be interesting to make something where you didn’t know whether it was any good or not. I’ve been interested in that for a while and I haven’t been successful at it. But with the idea of bad drawing, for instance—the gold standard of no value is crummy drawing. ’Cause it’s what everybody can agree on, what they don’t like. I was trying to make things that had really terrible drawings. Not just bad drawing, not just low-quality drawing—but really, really shitty drawing, really terrible drawing. And that originally was why I got interested in pornographic images. I thought it would be interesting to do porno drawn really poorly. To sort of double disappoint. I still think it’s an interesting idea, but, again, it’s only an idea. Every time I try to make a bad drawing, either I don’t make a bad drawing or I make a bad drawing and it’s just so terrible to have a bad drawing in front of you . . . [laughs]

O’BRIEN: Well, who’s good at it? I mean, that’s the modus operandi of Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen and—

CURRIN: Kippenberger, I think, was able to make bad drawing really well. There was a criticism of—I think it was Richard Serra—about Picabia. I totally disagree with him, but in a way he had a point. He said that all Picabia proved was he could make bad paintings that stay bad. It’s an interesting idea, and, in a way, I was very hostile to him for saying that. And then I thought, But he is kind of right. There is something special about bad paintings that stay bad, like, 60 years later. Not bad because of their taste or because of a political problem, but they’re actually bad, by somebody who’s really good. It’s an aggressive and complex style as a result. Something’s
happening there.

O’BRIEN: Well, what would be an example of that for you?

CURRIN: Picabia.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: And Dosso Dossi, and many older Italians, and many Germans. You know, it’s very subtle. You have to look at these things a lot to see it. I mean, Hans Baldung could draw like Dürer if he wanted to. But he could also draw like somebody you can’t believe would draw that way in a painting. Dosso Dossi is the most shocking—he’s kind of a follower of Titian, and one of my favorite artists. And he’s so awkward and so masterful simultaneously that it’s just pure magic and very, very beautiful.

O’BRIEN: What was his intention?

CURRIN: I have no idea. [laughs] I think a kind of forced poetic feeling—Rococo artists can be that way.

[Freize co-founder Amanda Sharp and Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs appear and talk about babies, etc.]

CURRIN: So an interesting question from Miami was, how on earth do you value art? Of course, in a capitalist system, things are valued by what people will pay for them. And you only get into trouble when you determine that an authority shall assign a value, which is exactly what the problem is with these securitized mortgages—that the U.S. government has to say are worth something. Nobody knows what they are worth, and that’s the problem with the banks. Nobody knows whether these banks are even banks anymore. And so, in a funny way—not in a funny way, in a terrifying way—there’s an allegory for most aspects of life, it takes place on faith in one form or another.

O’BRIEN: It’s faith and there’s an element of conspiracy to it.

CURRIN: [laughs] Well, same thing, right?

O’BRIEN: Which is why, when people say that the art market will shrivel up and die, I always say no, because the art market is the most opaque and ungovernable market that’s ever been conceived.

CURRIN: I hope it stays unregulated.

O’BRIEN: It’s the perfect market for speculation because it’s inscrutable. Governments could never figure out how it works. I mean, if they can’t understand banks . . .

CURRIN: They could just outlaw sectors of it. I hope Sauron’s Eye does not wander over to the art world.

O’BRIEN: If they can’t figure out Wall Street, they’re never gonna figure out the art market. The art market doesn’t have derivatives . . . [Currin laughs] Or does it?

CURRIN: What the hell else is a work of conceptual art but a securitized idea?

O’BRIEN: I wonder if dealers are selling futures.

CURRIN: It’s when people figure out how to sell art short that we have to be worrying. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: Isn’t that what Saatchi’s done?

CURRIN: In a way, yeah. Well, no, I don’t know if anybody has figured out how to make money off art losing value. But that seemed to be the elephant in the room at Miami—what the heck is anything worth? It’s not all worthless, you know?

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: I don’t think that there’s any way you could say that it will have to do with just simply adding value by repetitive hand motions or something like that. I hope so—that would be great for me.

O’BRIEN: I just felt like I saw more things that had this sort of primitive wow factor, like, “Wow, that must have taken a lot of people a long time.”

CURRIN: Yeah, like prison art, where it’s like, “Wow, you made that all out of toothpicks,” or something like that.

O’BRIEN: Yeah, it’s kind of like trickery . . . Well, I think that there’s still that element.

CURRIN: I think that’s just conservatism really. All I know is that I don’t wanna acknowledge it. I think my strategy is going to be to put on a happy face. [both laugh] There are these ridiculous cycles in the art world of shame and exuberance, shame and exuberance. And also embarrassment and righteousness, embarrassment and righteousness.

O’BRIEN: Yeah.

CURRIN: I suppose the good artists, the righteous artists, somehow manage to be exuberant, and the embarrassed artist has this idea that everybody has to stop being so excited, which I find so distasteful. That idea that we should recycle instead of make art or something like that . . . I don’t know. [laughs] We all have to go to a monastery now, everybody’s getting religious.

O’BRIEN: Yeah, leave the diamonds at home.

CURRIN: It must be terrible in magazines, because magazines are all about exuberance. It’s all about excitement and exuberance.

O’BRIEN: Yeah. Well, we haven’t done a shame issue.

CURRIN: And when everybody is saying, “You shouldn’t be this way at a funeral.”

O’BRIEN: The rich just aren’t in the mood to shop.

CURRIN: But that’s also a great opportunity, I guess.

O’BRIEN: I think we have to carry on as usual. Eat more pasta.

CURRIN: So instead of last man standing, it’ll be last man smiling.

Glenn O’Brien is Interview’s editorial director.