Excerpts form a lecture on the Greater New York show

by Kirsten Forkert

The example I will discuss is the 2005 Greater New York exhibition, which took place at P.S.1 in New York City. The Greater New York Show takes place every five years and is supposed to present the next crop of 'up and coming' artists in the greater New York Area. The first Greater New York was in 2000, and this was the follow up. According to the exhibition's press release,

"Greater New York 2005 presents artists who have emerged since 2000. Their work explores both this specific time period, during which New York City has changed dramatically; shows vitality, energy, and exciting promise; and anticipates new artistic directions. The exhibition includes artists from New York's five boroughs, as well as nearby towns in New Jersey.

Selection Process

Greater New York 2005 was organized by a team of curators from both P.S.1 and MoMA, led by Klaus Biesenbach, the first jointly appointed curator for the affiliated institutions. The selection committee included P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss and MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Robert Nickas, P.S.1 Curator Amy Smith-Stewart, and Ann Temkin, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

The artist selection process included hundreds of visits to artists' studios and an open call issued by P.S.1, for which more than 2,000 artists submitted proposals. Recommendations from P.S.1 and MoMA curatorial departments, artists, art schools, galleries, and other art professionals generated approximately 350 additional proposals. An invitation was extended to all P.S.1 and MoMA curatorial staff to participate in a five -day review of the submissions and recommendations. Gary Garrels, Chief Curator, Department of Drawings and Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA was among a group of P.S.1 and MoMA curatorial staff members who were instrumental
in selecting work during the submission review sessions. Other participants included Dalia Azim, Feri Daftari, Claire Gilman, Jodi Hauptman, Judy Hecker, Jordan Kantor, Laurence Kardish, Sarah Kessler, Susan Kismaric, Christian Larsen, Sarah Lewis, Barbara London, Sarah Meister, Tricia Paik, Luis Perez-Oramas, Francesca Pietropaolo, Joachim Pissarro, Josh Siegel, Eva Respini, Cora Rosevear, Alexandra Schwartz, Sarah Suzuki, Lumi Tan, Lilian Tone, Gretchen Wagner, and Michelle Yun".1


The results of this selection process, which led to the 162 artists in the exhibition, were quite predictable:

-34 of the artists were graduates or current students from Columbia University -11 of the artists had participated in a Whitney Biennial -over 100 artists were already represented by commercial galleries -108 of the artists were male.

The Greater New York Show drew some criticism in the press and the local art community. Jerry Saltz, normally a conservative writer, wrote in the Village Voice that "'Greater New York' merely represents certain curators looking at certain acceptable schools and certain semi-approved artists who are coming up through certain 'correct' channels"2. The exhibition also came under fire for its lack of women artists. In response, P.S.1 curator Klaus Biesenbach told Amy Zimmer (reporter for the New York Metro newspaper) that "any discrepancy is due to the quality of the art"3, which blogger Roberta Fallon compared to Harvard president Lawrence Summer's remarks on the natural inferiority of women in the sciences.4

I will now draw attention to two interventions in response to the Greater New York Show. An anonymous artist's collective published a presss release, identitical to PS1's press release but entitled "Greater New York (TM)"5 The press release questioned the exhibition's claim to represent all art production in the five boroughs, and the hype around the exhibition, as a thinly veiled attempt to market the city and reaffirm its position as the centre of the global art world.

It created the fiction that during the selection process, the curators had decided to completely change their approach:

During the process of studio visits and meetings — reminiscent of a casting call rather than a search for contemporary art — the team found itself limited by its own parameters. "We came to understand our approach as democratic in name only," explains a spokesperson, "This was neither the right process to look at art nor the appropriate method of selection for a show of this kind."

So supposedly the curators then decided to organize the exhibition around the material conditions under which artists live and work, and to use it as a place for organizing.

The greater Greater New York™, will address the urgent aspects of life and art in the greater New York City area embodying revitalized socialist ideals. A curatorial move rarely found (if ever) in cultural institutions in the U.S., Greater New York™ will challenge the old system of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of race, gender, age and class, which has always riddled the city's art-world. In addition to offering artists an enormous public exhibition of their work, Greater New York™ will become a public space to gather and organize, open to all. Free lunches held weekly at the P.S.1 cafeteria will invite audiences to engage in a discussion around the working conditions and the financial challenges faced by many contemporary artists and cultural producers in our rapidly gentrifying city. An even bolder long-term initiative to organize an artists' union will be launched concurrently with the exhibition. The participating artists will each receive an honorarium of $750 (remember that this is the US) in addition to installation costs and a portion of the production cost of their artwork. "It is time to give back to the artists," says an organizer "While MoMA's visitors are discovering the wonders of Yoshio Taniguchi's redesign of the Museum, programs like Greater New York™ are about re-discovering the social ideas that will renew the spirit of our sibling institutions," adding with a smile, "and due to record admission and the steady stream of visitors all paying $20 per visit, money is not a problem."  Indeed a revolution is on its way!"

A performance collective entitled "The Brainstormers' Report" enacted a silent protest at the opening of the exhibition, wearing t-shirts reading "33% is not enough". On their website,the collective challenged the view that "feminism is passe"6 and described themselves as "committed to bringing the issue back to the public dialogue and challenging the current power structure to change its ways"7 The Brainstormers went on to publish a 'gallery guide' on Chelsea galleries and the low percentage of women artists exhibited there, and did a performance/'public survey' on corporate sponsorship of the arts at the Armory Show in 2006.

A political climate where social movements such as feminism are considered uncool and passe makes it easy for  ideologies of meritocracy to go unchallenged, for any criticism to be dismissed as "sour grapes". Then exclusions are not seen as political, and the authority of who does the choosing goes unquestioned. This can make it very difficult to stage an intervention, let alone a salon de refuses. But this is also why, it could be argued, it is all the more important that such interventions take place—because otherwise it can be very easy for statements such as "any discrepancy is due to the quality of the art" to go unchallenged, for the term 'quality' to be seen as neutral and uncontested, and for those who wish to challenge these terms to censor themselves out of the fear that they will not be heard, or worse, that raising such issues would be self marginalizing, or just socially and professionally damaging. Which ultimately silences debate.

1. Press Release, Greater New York Show.
http://www.ps1.org/exhibits/exhibit.php?iExhibitID=48
2. Saltz, Jerry. 'Lesser New York'. The Village Voice, March 28, 2005.
http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0513,saltz,62462,13.html
3. Artists Protest Greater New York. Artnet News, March 13, 2005.
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews3-15-05.asp
4..Fallon, Roberta. Greater Than What?. Artblog, March 2005.
http://www.fallonandrosof.com/2005/03/greater-than-what.html
5.This intervention was published in The Generals, a publication of
Art In General. http://www.artingeneral.org/Generals_2005_fall.htm
6. http://www.brainstormersreport.net.
7. Ibid.