Capitalist Realism and Julian Schnabel’s “Self-Portraits of Others”
What purpose does the art world serve? If Julian Schnabel’s Self-Portraits of Others at The Brant Foundation (on display through December 23rd) is any evidence, it is to take any saleable concept, in this case Schnabel’s forty-plus year old idea of putting shards of ceramic into bondo on wood and painting over them, and embedding it so deeply into the context of global capital that it no longer exists as art qua art, rather as a massively valuable object of self-branding. In the realms of literature, music, or filmmaking where there is also the patina of meaning something similar can happen — like modulating the level of bathos in a biopic about a painter, in order to play to the right seats at Cannes — but nowhere else is the object so inevitably, directly tied to the dollar.
Michael H. Miller, arts editor of the New York Times’ style magazine, has now given two separate promotional interviews with Schnabel for his past two major New York shows, which find the artist returning to his breakout plates, edging towards and then beyond self-parody. 2017’s New Plate Paintings at Pace, like Self-Portraits, had its genesis in the filming of his acclaimed At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a Willem Dafoe-starring feature on the last days of Vincent Van Gogh. In the first interview, we find Miller tagging along as Schnabel hops in a car for the quick trip up to Pace from the Palazzo Chupi, his iconic West Village mansion. Schnabel’s daughter Stella is along for the six-minute ride, and the artist shows her photos on his phone of a basketball court in Arles that he’d like to paint next. The show itself works this angle on a broader scale, most centrally in the series of paintings of roses near Van Gogh’s grave.
In the second interview, four years later in COVID-weary 2021, Miller calls the artist in Montauk, and the faux-inspirational glow is off. “I needed to make paintings that looked like the actor in the movie. I mean, we’re supposed to believe he’s van Gogh,” Schnabel says, “So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll make a painting of my painting’”. Accordingly, the exhibition consists of two full stories of the Brant Foundation’s gallery (a decommissioned ConEd building in the East Village that until his death in 2013 housed the studio of Walter DeMaria) with portraits of Dafoe as Van Gogh, in the style of Van Gogh, on shatter-by-numbers Schnabel canvasses. A third floor throws in a few other remakes with famous actors, including Oscar Isaac (who played Gauguin in Gate) starring in Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Miller, whose cultural reporting on the literary scene has included valuable, valedictory profiles of profoundly countercultural figures like Steve Cannon of A Gathering of the Tribes and John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive, was put straight on finding anything deeper by Schnabel in his first profile of the artist, an Observer piece from 2013. After reeling off a list of art-world luminaries who refused to talk about Schnabel, the artist says of Miller’s attempted research “I don’t think that that really behooves you”. Lesson learned — each progressive article recedes away from any idea of journalistic inquiry, into the parasocial realm where arts writing lives today, particularly in the pages of T Magazine.
That first piece, titled “The Resurrection of Julian Schnabel” (compare it to the title of the 2017 piece — “The Controversial Artist Who Just Won’t Go Away”), finds him “returning” to the plates four years earlier (there is something both eerie and telling about these four year increments — broken up by many other exhibitions of course, all over the world). Here, though, we both have the rebuffed work on the part of Miller, more freshly out of NYU, to gather anything apart from promotional copy from anyone in the art world, and an in-studio look at Schnabel painting on plates the sons of his most powerful patron (and head of the Brant Foundation) Peter Brant, as well as a bizarre look at his then-nineteen year old son Olmo crafting “a five-foot-tall cardboard sculpture shaped like a missile” as two of the artist’s assistants watch. It ends with Schnabel reading at length from an essay by Rudi Fuchs in which Fuchs recants an earlier anti-Schnabel stance, and talks about his “favorite painting in the whole world,” The Beheading of Saint John The Baptist.
Miller is my age, from my home state of Michigan. Before the Times he was deputy editor at ARTnews during its time owned by Peter Brant. Perhaps his most-clicked article is an op-ed for the Times entitled “I Came of Age During the 2008 Financial Crisis. I’m Still Angry About It.” In it, he details how his parents re-mortgaged their home in part to help fund his education at “one of the country’s most expensive private institutions.” While journalism is, as he describes, “a profession with minimal financial returns,” he has perhaps achieved the pinnacle of what can be achieved within it as a culture writer — a staff job in a glossy enclave within the one remaining titan, the New York Times. The anger, as he describes it, of paying Citigroup an endless amount of money far greater than the hundred thousand in loans he took out in the first place, has been leavened by the knowledge, performed in his three declining pieces of Schnabelalia, that he has a valuable place in the art world now, that in return for regularly laundering the reputation (and I don’t mean of a tawdry sort — the “controversy” around Schnabel wouldn’t rouse even the most desperate wannabe Ronan Farrow) of an eminence grise in the art world, he can maintain the perch he and has parents suffered so much for, that he is beyond fortunate to have, as far as top-tier unionized arts-worker benefits, global reach, and ability to shine a spotlight on underrepresented figures like Cannon or O’Brien goes.
But at what cost? Steve Cannon’s epochal writing didn’t go back into print after his 2018 profile, a year before his death, bringing to mind Jean Rhys’ quote on winning a prestigious award at the age of seventy-six — “It has come too late” — but without even the satisfaction of a Wide Sargasso Sea and critical reappraisal to point to. Visual art as a medium is the most direct example of capitalist realism, Mark Fisher’s idea that anything can be vacuumed up by the great maw of money and spit out to serve wealth, which by the very nature of its perpetuity, the Brant children it paints, reifies society as it is, our apocalyptic hellscape of natural disaster that is destroying the poor and the natural world. There is no other option, capitalist realism says. You should be happy that, in the Brant Foundation Shop, you can buy an eighty-five dollar Basquiat t-shirt, or a forty-two dollar set of socks in the manner of Keith Haring. These artists — aided of course by their untimely deaths — still gesture towards the idea of something pure, of artistic expression on the streets of an unruly city, the greatest in the world. But they now are (if they ever weren’t) the sick totems of the aesthetic overlords who dictate what is seen broadly, work made extra pliable by the absence of the author. Perhaps it is a credit to, say, Cannon’s deeply subversive — both in form and content — writing that it cannot be used as such even after his death. But even then, to the extent that his life could be used as another prop to sell pages and pages of LVMH ads curated by the fastidiously private author of a bestsellingly, slickly lurid novel of gay trauma, it was, and perhaps all the better for being without the troublesome art itself to upset the advertisers.
Schnabel and Miller show how everyday life in the circle is more banal, those who are able to serve institutions well — whether NYU or the Times — rewarded with access to those whose monumental egos mint dull new coinage for the billionaires like Brant who prefer peacocking. They share an authenticity that allows them to speak on behalf of their deceased or impoverished peers, whether in biopics or op-eds. But to what end? It’s not clear what being “still angry,” means to Miller in practice, or what the dead-end repainting of classics using the visages of stars means to Schnabel, other than another way to perpetuate themselves. It takes quite a bit of effort to stay in the picture in the culture world — it’s maybe the least efficient way to become a pawn in the global hegemony. I posit, though, that this lack of efficiency means art and writing should be nearly self-defeatingly at odds with the culture that it is being produced within, even as they tangle in the highest tiers — or else why do it? Is being a fully exchangeable bauble at the party or opening of an artistic minded billionaire worth it? Is the New York Times’ union health care worth it? Is the mansion, the house in Montauk worth it? They must feel like it.
Maybe now more than ever, anything perpetuating that culture — fluff pieces maintaining top-tier culture hierarchy writer positions in order to maintain the value of fully idea-free paintings that will serve no purpose other than stable investments for the unimaginably wealthy, in a gallery hollowed out from a real artist’s space by a billionaire, in a neighborhood hollowed out from one of the most legendary by billionaires like Jared Kushner, advertising (for the second time) a three year old prestige picture which reduces the idea of art to treacle from an artist who long ago shed any pretense of being anything other than a shrewd operator in our world of terminal capitalism, licking up to patrons and providing for his numerous scions comfortable niches in the ever-gentrifying world of the arts, perhaps one in which we are becoming used to the idea of authenticity being deeply in the past, content to hear that at least Vito, or Stella, or Lola, or Olmo’s father once had to aggressively bother Jim Harithas to give him a show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, who had to work endless hours to produce one breakthrough that is still paying him handsomely, who once associated with but ultimately just made a movie reducing Basquiat, a final layer of the idea of the proletariat at the base of what is more naturally a thing completely of the moneyed and connected, which the downwardly mobile educated can gain a little pleasure from on the weekend, that is if we don’t mind “art” signifying nothing except a dispassionately relayed souvenir of a trip to France someone took with their famous friends many years ago.
