I know you’ve covered a range of topics and AI continues to be a hot-button issue in the art world. A fascinating group of people collectively purchased a painting, the “Flaget Madonna,” and recently claimed the work is by Renaissance master Raphael after using AI brushstroke technology. The findings were covered by esteemed publications, but they struggle to have the art world accept the claim of authorship without an authenticator from a major auction house getting onboard. Why is there resistance from the art world to using this accurate and unbiased tool? Does AI make art connoisseurs obsolete when it comes to authenticating artwork?

Look, AI, there’s no need to pretend: you obviously machine-generated this question. Sure, a clever publicist working for the chagrined flippers who bought l’impostore Raphael probably made you write it, but only a neural network that so vastly underestimates human intelligence would come up with this angle. Anyway, your question is a little above our human brains, so we asked ChatGPT to have the character played by Al Pacino in the film Scent of a Woman provide an answer:

“Hoo-ah! Well, well, well, look who we got here! Lt. Col. Frank Slade, reporting for duty as your happy-to-help advice columnist. Now, let’s dive right into your art predicament, my friend.

So, what we got for ourselves is a fascinating painting, the “Flaget Madonna.” Some smart folks went and used that fancy AI brushstroke technology to confirm it’s a genuine Raphael masterpiece. And they even got themselves a mention in he Wall Street Journal! But here’s the kicker, they can’t get any of them pouty, snooty art folks to accept it without an authenticator from one of those major auction houses stamping their approval on good ole AI.

Why in the world, you wonder, would them art world folks be resistant to this accurate and unbiased tool? Well, darlin’, there are a few reasons for that.

Firstly, art connoisseurs and experts, bless their hearts, they’ve been around for ages, honing their skills, studying up on brushstrokes, and absorbing all the knowledge they can get their hands on. They fancy themselves as the gatekeepers of all things art-related. So when you come along with your AI brushstroke technology, it’s like, hoo-ah, you’re crashing their fancy tea party and threatening their authority.

Secondly, art authentication ain’t just about the strokes of a brush, sugar. It’s about understanding the historical context, the artist’s style, and even the way the paint’s aged over time. Art connoisseurs, they got an eye for all them little details that an AI might miss. They can dig into the archives, track down provenance records, and piece together the story behind a painting. AI might be accurate and unbiased, but it ain’t got no soul, no appreciation for the human touch in art.

Now, here’s the thing: AI ain’t gonna make any of them art connoisseurs obsolete, no sir! It might shake things up a bit, sure, but it’s more like a tool in their arsenal, like a shiny new wrench to help ’em fix things up. The best way forward is a marriage of the old and the new, a collaboration between time-tested connoisseurs and AI. Let them experts bring their know-how and wisdom, while the AI lends a helping hand with its high-speed wifi and objective analysis.

So, my dear reader, don’t lose hope! It’s a dance, a delicate balance between tradition and innovation. Let the art world take its time to warm up to this newfangled technology. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll see art lovers and AI holding hands, skipping through the fields of art authentication together, makin’ the art world a more vibrant and exciting place.

Keep those questions coming, and remember, life’s too short to take it too seriously. Y’all take care now, ya hear?”

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

Peiffer’s book arrives nearly 50 years after the earliest attempt to honor the Slip: the 1974 exhibition “Nine Artists/Coenties Slip,” organized for an old downtown branch of the Whitney Museum on Water Street nearby. The exhibition showcased lesser-known inhabitants of the Slip, including Fred Mitchell (the first to settle there), Ann Wilson, and Charles Hinman, as well as the area’s luminaries of postwar American art: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. The exhibition represented an important salvage operation at the time: by the early ’70s, nearly all the lofts that had housed these artists had been razed to make way for corporate development, demolition having begun not long after the first artists arrived.

In the decades since, scholarship on individual figures has revealed, in glints and fragments, how their practices evolved during their tenure at Coenties Slip. But efforts toward a more comprehensive understanding of the Slip’s quietly consequential settlement have been rare. At the outset of her book, Peiffer proffers a reason why. “The artists [on the Slip] never formed a movement or a school or even a mythic following en masse,” she writes. And elsewhere: “[T]heir work was often difficult to fit into any one movement, and its reach not always equal.”

Taken together as a network or community, the Slip artists short-circuited the conventional organizing schemes of art history and criticism in which it often seems that, as Peiffer writes, “movement only happened in movements.” For Peiffer, this challenge, far from a deterrent, occasions the telling of a new story with a fresh historiographic approach. As she asks, “What if we thought about groups in art history based … on shared places? What if, rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of place that defines a crucial moment?”

The Slip is what Peiffer calls a “group biography” that traces the activities of Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Tawney, Youngerman, and actress Delphine Seyrig. (Seyrig, best-known for her role in Last Year at Marienbad, was married to Youngerman.) More significantly, though, it is a biography of a particular place at a particular time that makes sense of what an assembly of artists found in their “modest, almost forgotten” environment.

Drawn to New York for a variety of reasons—the promise of gallery representation, the prospect of a fresh start— the artists central to the book converged upon the Slip with an eye for low rent (which hovered around $45 a month) and ample floorspace. They worked in different mediums in the service of different muses, but they found themselves living in close proximity in just a handful of squat buildings, and lounging among the same sycamore and gingko trees of nearby Jeanette Park.

Peiffer starts with individual portraits of the artists at play before moving on to a more engrossing core in which she documents relationships (friendly and romantic), passing encounters, and exchanges of influence among them, showing all the while how they drew on the Slip’s rarefied atmosphere and sedimented histories in highly personal but compatible ways. What she emphasizes most is the quality of separation that the area afforded those who lived there.

By the time of their arrival, the Slip’s 18th- and 19th-century history as one of the “loudest, busiest spots in the city”—a panorama of loading carts, unruly barrooms, and buzzing markets, presided over by a forest of ship masts—was firmly in the past. As Peiffer recounts in painstakingly researched dispatches of urban history, the Slip’s namesake waterway had long been filled in, warehouses had been vacated, and, except for the Fulton Fish Market on South Street (still busy in the mornings), the only locus of activity was nearby Wall Street. The Slip was deserted at night, providing its artists an exquisite quiet in which they could commit themselves to focused work.

It was also small enough to facilitate intimate interaction and the forging of something like community. Peiffer refers to a sense of “collective solitude” when discussing the Slip’s dual opportunities for restorative isolation and small but significant moments of connection: lunches, river walks, and gatherings on the loft buildings’ low roofs. For the gay inhabitants of the Slip (Kelly, Indiana, and Martin), this solitude and openness also accommodated modes of living and loving unsanctioned in the chilled social climate of much of the rest of the city.

Peiffer suggests that this same quality of separateness distanced the Slip artists from the influence of Abstract Expressionism, still alive in the gallery circuit and the public eye. While establishing themselves and cultivating their formal vocabularies, many of the artists on the Slip were consciously working to break beyond Ab-Ex’s existentialist anguish and the movement’s notion of creation as a highly personal exercise or exorcism.

Kelly and Youngerman—who, prior to arriving at the Slip, had previously bonded in Paris over their disinterest in what was “happening in America” (Peiffer covers this episode early in The Slip, in a marvelous “French prelude”)—were each formulating approaches to painted abstraction that could not be further from Jackson Pollock’s splatter. In Paris and then New York, Kelly refined an approach to “anti-composition” wherein he plucked “already-made” images from his immediate environment—a slant of light across water, the curl of an orange peel, the curve of a bridge— and used them as the basis for his works. While more sympathetic to the Ab-Ex stars, Martin honed a more ascetic, serene, and egoless approach to painting. And in a rejection of the movement’s invocations of myth and timeless universals, Indiana and Rosenquist came to embrace commercial imagery, roadside iconography, and current events flashing across TV screens: the manic flux of the present.

Peiffer also helps us see how, despite their stylistic and philosophical differences, the Slip artists tracked traces of their environment into the work they produced while living there. She decodes the local color in Kelly’s buoyant abstractions, tethering the sunbursts of his Yellow with Red (1958) to the Knickerbocker beer sign outside 25 Coenties Slip (Indiana’s studio). She reminds us that Tawney produced her career-defining Dark River (1962)—a 14-foothigh length of woven linen and wool that, suspended from the ceiling, does not so much hang as pour down—while the East River murmured outside her window at 25 South Street. And she recounts how during his first years on the Slip, Indiana took advantage of the postindustrial decay and demolitions in his midst, salvaging wood (including beams from sail masts), discarded bicycle wheels, and other scrap for use in early sculptural constructions.

Meanwhile, Indiana’s discovery of die-cut stencils left behind in his and Tawney’s lofts pressed him toward the use of letters and numbers in his paintings (thus setting him on a path that led him, several years later, to stack the letters L-O-V-E in an indelible graphic arrangement). As Peiffer perceptively observes, while none of the artists on the Slip (except Tawney) had practiced sculpture prior to their arrival, the neighborhood’s abundant material resources made the impulse toward assemblage contagious—so much so that even the focused painter Martin cobbled together austere constructions from nails, buttons, planks, and wire.

Peiffer’s account succeeds, in part, because of the intimate scale of its analysis. As she winds between the hybrid studio-residences on the Slip and along the waterfront, making necessary trips uptown to document her protagonists’ increasing visibility in exhibitions at MoMA and the Betty Parsons Gallery (a former Ab-Ex hub, and an early outlet for several Slip artists), she attends, always, to small moments: breakfasts of blueberry muffins (cooked by Martin), loft parties lubricated by scotch, and moments of rooftop reverie.

The author also convinces us that these moments, which slide between the cracks of conventional art historical narratives, are of utmost significance. The most moving passages in The Slip track pairs of artists entwined by circumstance and elective affinities. One key chapter reconstructs the circuit of mutual support (and possibly romance) that bound Tawney and Martin, who shared ideas (the writings of Teresa of Ávila, Zen philosophy) as they worked toward parallel breakthroughs: for Martin, the organizing form of the grid, and for Tawney, the controlled disruption of her weavings’ even spacing, which enabled her creation of unconventionally shaped “woven forms.” A later chapter finds Indiana and Rosenquist wrestling differently with the promise of the “American dream” before and after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The serene separateness Peiffer conjures in The Slip occasionally comes at the expense of important outward connections; for example, the influence of John Cage, whose embrace of “chance operations” in musical composition and rejection of Ab-Ex’s egotism loomed large in New York circa 1960, is undertheorized, especially given his influence on Martin and Kelly. But one can easily forgive such small elisions in so thorough and generous an overview.

As a model of place-based and locally scaled art history, The Slip is without close parallel or equal in the present. It does call to mind, however, a book from 1993: Sally Banes’s Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Banes’s book, which hops between Fluxus, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, and Judson Dance Theater in its exploration of the Village in the early ’60s, documents communal modes of living and working at the moment when the loft became the artist’s ideal quarters for life and work.

Banes surveys the writings of activist Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, argued for the preservation and repurposing of old buildings; and it is with Jacobs’s writings—and the 1964 amendment to New York City zoning law that permitted artists to occupy so-called live/work spaces— that Peiffer ends The Slip. As she explains, these changes in law and philosophy arrived too late to save the lofts along the Slip, which her artists had been so prescient to inhabit in the first place. Outrunning demolition and the ambitious redevelopment efforts of David Rockefeller and Robert Moses, the Slip artists left one by one over the course of the ’60s.

But the artists who departed were not the same as when they arrived. Together, they had changed, moving from relative obscurity and youthful experimentation into a place of visibility and confidence. The Slip salvages their stories of change, and it allows us to see how the legacy of the Slip figured into postwar abstraction, fiber art, Pop Art, and Minimalism, leaving few developments in American art untouched by the small street’s ocean spray.

Even in December 2019, when he announced his disease in a long, devil-may-care New Yorker essay, he did it with a dynamite lede: “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise.” The diagnosis wasn’t the only startling thing about these sentences: Schjeldahl was writing about his personal life for once, and doing so in the same chiseled prose in which he described Giacometti’s bronzes and Manet’s oils. No matter what his subject happened to be, he treated it as an invitation to write beautifully.

Schjeldahl was born in 1942 and grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota. He dropped out of college, and it shows: he had an autodidact’s distaste for teacher’s pets (in the Goya review quoted above, he says the exhibition “was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except ‘So what?’”). Poetry was his first literary love. As a young New Yorker, he wrote pithy, Frank O’Hara-esque verse and (also like O’Hara) tried his hand at criticism mainly to support his verse-writing. By the late ’70s, however, he was a critic first and foremost, writing short pieces for the Times and lengthy, magisterial ones for Art in America. An article on Munch, published in the May/June 1979 issue of this magazine, has the usual Schjeldahl quotability but more room for history and biography; he proceeds at a pace of calm insistence, quite different from the warp speed he’d adopt for the Village Voice and, later, the New Yorker.

There were fewer long pieces after the ’80s, in part because he learned to compress mounds of thought into a few paragraphs. Schjeldahl’s best stuff, to borrow something he said about Clement Greenberg, is always “in command of what it omits.” One conspicuous omission is any kind of overarching theory: he was more interested in how art complicates one-size-fits-all approximations (in this way, his foil might be Susan Sontag, whose dour generalizing on photography he called “an exercise in aesthetic insensibility”). Well after he gave up poetry, he stuffed his criticism with rich, metaphorical description that made most critics’ close reading seem plodding—the figures in El Greco’s paintings, he wrote in 2003, form a “slow-motion celestial tornado.” Schjeldahl was at his best when being lovingly negative; he never forgot to pay his subjects the compliment of vividness—Rubens’s nudes, e.g., have the “erotic appeal of a mud slide—so that even his jabs feel like jovial slaps on the back.”

Did he ever pine for his first love? On one hand, it’s hard to imagine someone so brilliant at one kind of writing wanting to practice another. But take a look at his 1976–77 poem, “Dear Profession of Art Writing”: he begins by wondering, a little bitterly, where he’d be without his day job (“Would I be more of a poet than I’ve become?”), then turns his frustration back on himself (“I must be a jerk not to regard you more highly, / Profession of Art Writing”), and arrives at a grudging respect (“I will not regret our years together”). Journalism is overflowing with talented people who know better but consider themselves failures because they’re not writing Real Literature. What’s special about Schjeldahl isn’t that he was immune from this kind of selfdoubt but that he felt it so intensely and carried on anyway. If he was especially strong when wrestling with an artist he both admired and loathed (“Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century”), perhaps it’s because he had plenty of practice wrestling with art criticism itself, eventually arriving at a gruff, good humored affection at least as deep as love at first sight.

You attended a major video-art exhibition and wonder if any of the pieces in it are better than the viral TikTok offerings your cousin made. Test your tolerance for moving-image art by answering a few survey questions and adding up your points for each answer with the key below.

1. The wall label describes a work as a “video essay.” You think:

a) “Wow, I love subtitles!”
b) “What a great opportunity to use the restroom.”
c) “Oh my god, shut up already.”

2. The Nam June Paik video-wall installation leaves you feeling:

a) Overstimulated
b) Hypnotized
c) Hungry for bibimbap

3. Multichannel video installations about global social and political movements make you want to:

a) Throw Molotov cocktails
b) Donate to Doctors Without Borders
c) Buy museum-branded streetwear in the gift shop

4. Seeing yourself on a monitor in an installation about surveillance makes you think about:

a) The invisible means of control
b) Our shared lack of privacy
c) How television makes you look 10 pounds heavier

5. Dark immersive environments illuminated by projections give you a sense of:

a) Wonder
b) Fatigue
c) The hotz

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6. Trying to follow along with a video after entering somewhere in the middle is:

a) Like skipping foreplay
b) Easier if you are shrooming
c) OK, because narrative is dead

7. The historic works at the start of the exhibit were:

a) Surprisingly complex given the primitive gear of the era
b) Low-resolution and hard to hear
c) Booooooooooooooring

8. The large-scale AI installation that makes live images on the fly is:

a) A major technological breakthrough
b) A screensaver for rich people
c) 404 Not Found

9. Videos that require putting on headphones make you:

a) Itch from lice
b) Feel more connected to the work
c) Quickly give up and move on to the next gallery

10. Your favorite work of video art is:

a) Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler
b) Hell Frozen Over by Bernadette Corporation
c) Hell’s Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay

SCORES

10–16 points: Keep on keeping up with the Kardashians to avoid squirming through another Mike Kelley video or stressing about how to pronounce Krzysztof Wodiczko’s name. Hating the art of our time is OK because you’ve probably always been out of step anyway.

17–23: You delight in the benches that video installations sometimes offer, and don’t especially care what you’re watching so long as it’s entertaining and you can split whenever you want.

24–30: Reared on video games and YouTube, you are the citizen of the future hypothesized by Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and other old nerds who didn’t live long enough to sneak a peek at Pornhub.

A few days ago, I received a barrage of messages about the mysterious kerfuffle at the Mütter Museum. The Philadelphia institution has long collected, preserved, and displayed human specimens in order to “help the public appreciate the mysteries and beauty of the human body while understanding the history of diagnosis and treatment,” per their website.

Recently, the museum hired a new executive director, Kate Quinn. Then promptly, they took down their online exhibitions and popular YouTube channels. Soon enough, they announced on Instagram that they were temporarily putting their collection under review, “in recognition of evolving legal issues and professional standards pertaining to the exhibition of human remains,” per a statement released on June 6. They anticipate that the review will be complete by Labor Day.

People knew from my memoir Golem Girl (2020) that I had a formative experience at the museum, and that I had been lecturing on its collection for years as a Medical Humanities Instructor at Northwestern University.

The Mütter joins medical and natural history museums around the world who are debating the ethical treatment of human remains. There is the question of provenance: at the Mütter, some specimens may have been accepted into the collection under dubious or outright unethical circumstances. Mütter curator Anna Dhoty has written about one unclear holding. Other provenance issues have recently been resolved after decades of negotiation. And in some instances, there is virtually no paper trail at all.

All this gets at a deeper, more troubling question: can it ever be ethical to own, or exhibit, someone else’s body? And if so, how should those bodies be displayed?

Because most of the collection represents bodies with impairments, the Mütter has long elicited a complex range of reactions from the Disability community. For years, Disabled colleagues and friends said that they were appalled by the way that the museum displayed nonnormative bodies. Many felt that the Mütter engaged uncritically in the tradition of the freak show even when it has the opportunity create a space for Disabled people to construct families of choice.

As the Mütter debates the fate of their holdings, in other quadrants of my community (I am Disabled), complex ideas about the display of nonnormative bodies are emerging. For so long, we’ve been absent from movies, art, and books, save for the occasional ableist trope. We are starting to recognize that this museum is one of the very few places where we actually see ourselves, where we confront our reality and our place in history.

My first visit to the Mütter in the fall of 2006 changed my life. The establishment started out as the private holdings of a surgeon named Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter, but in 1858, he donated his specimen collection to the Philadelphia Col­lege of Physicians as a teaching tool for medical students. A few years later, the Mütter Museum opened to the public.

At the time of my first visit, I was teaching anatomy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I wanted to learn from the displays, to understand more about the physical and medical forces behind variant bodies.

All the while, I was very aware of the fact that I myself could easily have been a specimen. All around me were bodies that resembled those of my friends: bodies impacted by genetics, birth events, diseases, and accidents. But the biographical information accompanying each “specimen” rarely went past a skimpy medical narrative. Worse, almost nothing described them as living, complicated people. My frustration and anger built with each successive case.

Then, downstairs, I rounded a corner before staggering to a halt: there, I confronted a tall glass case containing shelves of fetuses with spina bifida, which is my disability. These fetuses far preceded my own birth; before the mid-1950s, when a surgery was developed to fix the lesion, children like me were rarely treated, and tended to die very young.

Even though I taught anatomy, I’d always avoided looking up pictures of what a spina bifida fetus looked like. But now, here I was—my own fetal body, with its swollen balloon-like eruption sticking out of my back. I stopped breathing. My friend caught me just as I passed out. 

It didn’t come right away. But after months had gone by, the feeling I was left with was a sense of communion. That trip to the Mütter became one of the most profound and transformative experiences of my life.

However.

It still frustrated me that there was no information about spina bifida—its causes, its medical history. Worse, there was nothing representing people with neural tube defects who are alive today. While it is crucial that the museum supply sufficient medical information about its holdings, Disabled people are not looking to be depicted as mere medical problems. My memoir, Golem Girl, is about my life as a monster. This is how I’ve been treated most of my life, including, too often, by the medical establishment.

Many Mütter displays do seem to portray us as freaks. The best—or worst—example is a floor-to-ceiling case containing three complete skeletons and one skull. One skeleton is identified as a “normal” man, at around 5’10”. The 7’6” skeleton, of a man known only as the “Kentucky Giant,” towers over him. A Little Person* named Mary Ashberry stands at about one-third of the Giant’s height. Mary died sometime in the 1850s, in childbirth. The skull of her stillborn child is plopped unceremoniously at her feet. (Earlier, the skull was shown in Mary’s hands but the armature for keeping it there was unstable).

The three are placed side-by-side so as to underscore their extreme variance. “Mr. Normal” is the yardstick against which the other two are measured.

Troubling displays like this impact how the medical community, and the general public, perceive and interact with disabled people. I have spoken over the years with many disabled women (including Little People) who became pregnant or wanted to. Most of them faced difficulty finding or retaining medical providers. Often, their doctors either refused to help, or discouraged them from becoming pregnant. Mary Ashberry died, it would seem, because no one could help her deliver a baby that was a danger to her smaller pelvis.

Let’s imagine that Mary Ashberry has a family that would care about the disposition of her remains; the Mütter contacts her descendants, and says they’d like to continue to exhibit Mary. Imagine how they might feel if they were presented with that terrible three-body case.

Now, let’s imagine Mary and her infant’s remains are placed in their own dedicated display (and for God’s sake, get the infant’s skull off the floor!). This display would feature text written by Disabled women, especially Little People, discussing their experiences as OB/GYN patients, and detailing what it’s like to be pregnant in public with a nonnormative body. I suspect the family might feel differently about this kind of display.

I believe absolutely in the rightness of human display, but it matters how you do it.

The Mütter is the inspiration for my Medical Humanities course called “Drawing in a Jar.” It’s open to first- and second-year med students, who learn to draw using nonnormative fetuses in Northwestern’s collection—a collection very similar to the Mütter’s.

The technical demands of draw­ing allow them to get used to looking at the fetuses, and gives them time to sort out their reactions. They’re often surprised by the beauty of these entities. My students’ final assignment is to present a fifteen-minute biogra­phy of a person who has the same impairment as the fetus they’ve drawn, and who has lived within the last twenty-five years. Their subject must have had a public presence, whether in the form of a career, a documentary, a memoir, or a biography. Medical data is limited to five minutes of the presentation; the rest must be a story of a person, not a condition. Too often, med students are taught that the Disabled are tragedies to be eradicated.

My med students are increasingly trained using digital tools. I’ve asked if they’d have had the same experience if we’d used 2-D imagery or even 3-D prints of fetuses as reference for their drawings. Every single one has said it would have been far less transformative. Herein lies the Mütter’s potential power.

I’ve taken them to the incredibly problematic touring “Body Worlds” exhibit on multiple occasions. We discussed its many ethical conundrums, and through it all, it was obvious that my students have a ravenous curiosity about the human body, as does the general public. We all long to know what we are.

I am an artist. I make collaborative portraits with people who undergo stigma, due to the shape of or performance of their bodies. Art is my life—but renderings are no substitute for confronting a body.

In an article on WHYY, Quinn, the Mütter’s new director, points out that though some visitors love the museum, “there are also people who find it gross and choose not to come back,” citing TripAdvisor reviews.

The Mütter has the opportunity to change ableist narratives and perceptions of nonnormative bodies, instead of portraying us as monsters and freaks. Recently, and to their credit, they had created some videos that do exactly this, but now, those have been taken down, too.

It seems as if the executive director and certain members of the Mütter board find nonnormative bodies embarrassing or distasteful. Were they to remove us, they would not be giving us back our dignity. They’d infer that our bodies are repulsive. Disgusting. Like a pregnant woman in the time of Queen Victoria, it’s best we are hidden from public view.

Medical museums like the Mütter are, in effect, family albums for the disabled. Many of us (as am I) are the only impaired people in our families. I often go several months without seeing anyone who looks like me. Without my brothers and sisters of the spine, I would never have written my memoir, I would not be teaching at Northwestern, and I would not understand the immense potential of this treasure of such a collection. Should the board and executive director of the Mütter take the collection off display, this would be an incalculable loss. Let’s not tear it down. Let’s do it better.

I beg the Mütter Board; I beg Kate Quinn: every body can be an unlocked door. You have the power to let the bodies speak.  

*The community uses Dwarf, Little Person, Person of Short Stature, and Person with Dwarfism, according to personal preference.

This summer, catch up on the best five art novels published this year. They range from a beguiling dive into the psyche of a late performance artist shattering the barrier between fact and fiction, to a hilarious portrait of creativity and class.

I’m a new adjunct professor doing studio critique at an art school, and the program director informed us that we cannot tell students their work is bad. We can only be positive. This has been very difficult because our program happens to have an inordinate number of lazy artists making entirely mediocre work. I feel it’s my job to tell them their work sucks because that’s what I get paid for, and the world needs fewer bad artists. Can I speak my mind? Or is that just mean?

A new adjunct with big ideas about how things should work—yikes, so sorry. You are catching on fast to what the other part-time faculty you’ll never meet already know but will not divulge unless they are tipsy: the majority of students at your art school would be better served studying pool-cleaning at junior college. Also, in case it’s not entirely obvious, your program director is a power-starved urchin who bends over backward to pamper the deadweights who pay full tuition. How do we know this? We’ve been adjunct teachers ourselves.

A good critique helps answer a lot of the lingering questions that artists avoid asking in their neurotic self-interrogations. The only way for artists to gain perspective is to have people look at their art and relay what it is—and, more important, is not—doing for them. Getting a negative or even lukewarm critique can be positive, because it helps make visible what artists aren’t seeing. It also confirms problems that they hope others won’t notice. Even though critiques are subjective, if more than one person points out the same issue during a studio visit, there’s reason to suspect they might be identifying glaring and hopefully addressable flaws.

But adjunct or not, a faculty member telling a student that they blow is bad teaching. Whiplash-inducing critiques can be dished out only by visiting artists who serve as fleet-footed hatchet people ready to voice the unspeakable sentiments that faculty have been repressing all year. That being said, coddling subpar artists is how we perpetuate inferior arts programs and an awful art ecosystem. Teachers should rightfully expect rigor, conceptual clarity, technical skills, genuine ideas, and true effort from their students. Don’t bite your tongue if you have something constructive, insightful, or even contrary to say. But do make sure it doesn’t burst out in a brute-force way that makes the lame-o kid you’re teaching go running to their check-wielding parents. If that happens, your program director will make you pay the price for your student’s bad art.

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Hard Truths: Can a Sommelier Help the Art World Evolve Beyond ‘Grape-Flavored Toilet Water’?

I moved to New York City after getting my bachelor’s degree to become a full-time artist. Then the pandemic happened. I’m working two part-time jobs and getting burned out from being in vibey group shows where most of the artists are already on the gallery circuit. It feels as if the only way to advance my career is to meet the right people at a good MFA program, but looking at the websites of the prominent schools where I’d want to go, I don’t see any faculty who I want to study with enough to pay $80,000. Is going to grad school worth it at all at this point?

We just advised a teacher to tell crappy students that their art is bogus, so whaddya imagine we’re going to say about sliding into grad school only for the sake of networking? You’re smart to realize that $80,000 is a significant chunk of trust fund money to blow on social contacts. You’re probably better off being a valued ketamine hookup at the group-show opening than a sitting duck at an all-school critique with teachers who aren’t accomplished enough for your liking. Besides, if you keep on lingering as a fun-loving scenester, there’s a strong chance you’ll eventually be mistaken for an MFA graduate anyway. This is the budget-savers’ tip that they don’t teach in art school. 

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

In my journey as a sommelier, I’ve worked in fine dining in New York City for over a decade. I began dating an artist last year and now regularly attend gallery openings and even museum galas.  Exploring this new scene reminds me of the rarified culinary world in many ways. One thing that drives me crazy is that you can have multi-million-dollar art on the wall and billionaire guests, but the wine they serve at events is the equivalent to grape-flavored toilet water—a very poor pairing indeed.  It hurts my taste buds and does not enhance my appreciation of the art. Why doesn’t the art world care about something so important and beautiful as wine?

We are sorry to hear about your corked experience with art wine. Though the selection might come off as an afterthought at these events, the ubiquity of bunk cheap vino you have encountered has everything to do with the arid, inhospitable, and disease-prone terroir of the art world. Instead of elegantly balanced libations with floral notes, you have been served ashy “Two-Buck Chuck” decanted in an old Converse sneaker by a scowling bartender. Truthfully, nobody really drinks the wine unless you are a young guzzler prowling for a free buzz. Most are just sipping away the pain of being at an awkward art event by donning a pair of rosé-colored glasses. Next time, rather than fretting about spitting or swallowing museum shart-donnay, consider drinking the art Kool-Aid at these celebrations instead.

I’m a preservationist who took a job at a major archive last year. I was thrilled to work with my boss, who is prominent in the field, but it only took a month to realize that he’s a raging egomaniac. He talks to colleagues in our department as if he is an unimpeachable expert, even though we are all highly trained technicians doing the detailed work that he credits himself for at conferences and public talks. In those situations, he boasts so much about himself and his process that it actually diminishes the artists whose work we preserve. He needs to be reproached by his superior, and I plan to call him out to our director because his attitude and demeanor reflect poorly on our institution. How should I approach this?

Back in the day, it paid off to tell your teacher when the class bully was flicking boogers or calling you names having to do with pee-pee parts. Children are nature’s fiercest narcs, and it is only through social ostracization and playground beatdowns that they learn how not to be baby bitches or whiney snitches. The last thing you expected as an accomplished professional is to find yourself going through pre-K again. Instead of leaning into your crayon-colored playbook, you must handle this situation with all the college knowledge and wellness podcasts in your adult arsenal.

If your boss is as much of a prominent prick as you suggest, then there is no doubt that his boss already knows it. We’re guessing you might be in an old boys club where the shine that your megalomaniac boss brings to the institution nullifies the director’s need to reign him in. Institutions prop up braggarts and big personalities because they desperately need to attract attention, funding, and audiences, and it’s necessary to have a public face who promotes the good work that your institution is doing. The trouble comes when the mouth on that face needs to be punched in the lips.

Before taking any next steps, find out if other team members feel the same as you do about this reprehensible restorationist. If so, form a coalition—otherwise it could come off like you’re pursuing a personal vendetta. Gather evidence that corroborates your point. Document the stupid things this creep says. If you are making specific accusations, support them with hardcore proof. How glorious would it be if you happened to capture your boss talking smack about the director to visiting archivists from Argentina? If the higher-ups try to shoo away your complaint, then your next best option might be quitting. Losing a high-profile position in a field that’s hard to crack sucks, but preserving your inner peace is more important than a bunch of old stuff rotting in a vault.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

To know what’s at stake, it’s important to understand the fraught doctrine of “fair use,” which balances the rights of creators to control their works against the rights of the public and other creators to access and build on them.

What’s sometimes lost is in this discussion is that copyright law’s purpose (perhaps surprisingly) is to benefit the public—benefit to an individual artist is only incidental. The theory behind the law is that if we want a rich and vibrant culture, we must give artists copyright in their work to ensure they have economic incentives to create. But by the same logic, fair use recognizes that a vital culture also requires giving room to other artists to copy and transform copyrighted works, even if the original creator of those works objects. Otherwise, in the Supreme Court’s words, copyright law “would stifle the very creativity” it is meant to foster. Thus, to win a fair use claim, a new creator must show that her use of someone else’s copyrighted work advances the goals of copyright itself: to promote creativity.

Unfortunately, the Warhol decision took this already complex area of law and made it even more complicated. Lower courts and legal scholars will be fighting for years about its applications. But one thing is clear: it is now far riskier for an artist to borrow from previous work.

Not only did the Court downgrade the importance of whether a new work is transformative, whether it “adds something new and important” (to use the Supreme Court’s words from a previous case). The Court also painted a bizarre picture of Warhol as an inconsequential artist. Surely the Justices of the Supreme Court know that Warhol changed the course of art history. But the Warhol who emerges in the majority opinion is a tame portraitist whose work is just not that different from the photographs on which it is based.

In the Justices’ formulation, Warhol is a “style,” an artist whose “modest alterations” of the underlying photograph brought out a meaning that was already inherent in it, whose work portrayed Prince “somewhat differently” from Goldsmith’s image. Justice Elena Kagan, in a scathing dissent, charged that the majority had reduced Warhol to an Instagram filter.

Nowhere in the majority opinion would you recognize Warhol as a once-radical artist, the one de Kooning drunkenly approached at a cocktail party to utter, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty.” Nowhere does one see the Warhol whom philosopher Arthur Danto called “the nearest thing to aphilosophical genius the history of art has produced.” That Warhol is the paradigm of an artist who brings new “meaning and message” to the work he copies, the very kind of artist that the now-diminished emphasis on transformative use was meant to protect.

Of course, this decision is not just about Warhol. For that matter, it’s not just about other Pop artists, or about appropriation artists.

Any artist who works with existing imagery should now reconsider her practice. Hire a lawyer, maybe try to negotiate a license and be ready to move on if you get turned away or can’t afford the fee. The safest and cheapest route—a consideration particularly relevant to younger artists and those who are not rich and famous—is to just steer clear of referencing existing work. Maybe that’s the right direction for art; maybe copying and relying on past work should be discouraged. But given the centrality of allusion, emulation, and copying to the history of art, it’s hard to imagine that’s a good thing. This is particularly so in contemporary digital culture, where, as I have argued, copying has taken on even greater urgency in creativity. But like it or not, these are not questions that artists, critics, and art audiences get to decide. The Supreme Court just changed the future of art.