UPTICK: THE THREE
Why bother? Many artists toil away day after day in the solitude of their studios not with the intent of creating transcendent objects and to be immortalized by posterity as if in amber, but rather to get some good press and become another famous art star. Social climbing, globetrotting, magazine spreads, drug addled celebrity parties, Gap adverts, music video directing gigs-ah, that’s what its about, isn’t it? Tracy, Damien, Cecily, Maurizio, need I say more? The Three is an artist’s group formed over 10 years ago to perpetrate, uh, perpetuate a neo-dada action by creating art-as-media, who’s only creative act is selling signed, stamped certificates (in the time-worn conceptualist manner) of press coverage of the group. The Three are professional fashion models, models that are basically famous for being born attractive, and well, famous, who dress in austere Calvin Kleinesque minimalist attire of monochromatic white or black t-shirts, jackets and jeans. Is it a radical post-consumer art gesture or another con a la Enron?
As a comment on the tribe of artists and critics in the 00’s (prescient in the early 90’s before the thrust of the rise of mainstream media attention paid to fine artists) a nerve has definitely been tweaked in the referencing of media obsession. There is already Frida and Diego cologne, rock star curators and critics who fill their columns with self- canonization rather than explications of the art and artists they are paid to critique. Why not hang the articles on the walls and sell them as art for hundreds, and thousands, especially in light of the laughable crumbs magazine critics are paid anyway (trust me on that). Make celebrities of us all. Besides, painting, sculpture, and video are all so trite and conventional. Nowadays, artists employ press agents like studio assistants, its part and parcel of the big picture. Bypass the rank, manual-labor imbued (even fabricated work has to be made by someone), piddling middle-man that is art itself, and get right to the crux of it-the publicity. And in fact, selling promotion is exactly what The Three did in their last show at the Percy Miller Gallery in London in January 2002, briskly for $500 a pop. The Three will attempt to repeat that success for assuredly more money than the last go-round in an outing at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in May/June 2003 in New York City.
DOWNTICK: THE THREE
The venerable raconteur and art journalist about town for London’s Art Newspaper Adrian Dannatt is the inventor of the conceptual hoax that is The Three. Articles have made light of this fact and outted Dannatt as the culprit behind the trio, such as critic Barry Schwabsky in Artforum, but more often than not The Three has been analyzed as a stand alone entity, most notably Anthony Haden-Guest’s treatment in the now defunct Talk Magazine. Though fooling nonplussed Haden-Guest shouldn’t be viewed as a barometer of persuasiveness. But this is beside the point. We are well passed the age of equating the hand of the artist, or the minds of 3 artists with conferring legitimacy on a work of art. The rule of thumb to judge this enterprise should be solely: is it good art? The answer is yes and no. In a society and world of art where media saturation is equated with profundity and success, column inches can be seen as the equivalent of penis size. In this regard, Dannatt’s The Three is squarely on point as self-parody and indictment of our present wayward ways. Yet, there is a degree of pat conceit and sanctimoniousness in swearing off the act of creating art product and then selling articles with “stamped, dated, and signed certificates” the value of which is akin to a decoder ring buried in the bottom of a children’s cereal box.
The rhetoric that “we do not create anything ourselves other than interest” rings hollow when The Three offers up the Model T-like novelty of a signed, stamped and dated certificate. Why bother! Could it be that the ill-paid art journalist within wants it both ways-to send up the art world and to be conferred with the money and status (and dare I say fame) so woefully denied one on the short end of the art stick? Doesn’t critic-artist(s) stink like actor-politician (Streisand, Penn, Baldwin)? Also, the idea of the collective emanating from fashion may have been a conceptual innovation in the early 90’s supermodel heyday, but to revive this by picking 3 new models is a tad formulaic and insipid. Dannatt stated: “I styled them in simple black or white t-shirts and jeans which many years later became the Gap look.” Cassandra has peeled away more layers of our foolhardy hypocrisy and become a trend-spotter in the process. Fashion and models signify morphing cultural allusions today without the same import as they once might have enjoyed. Though the idea of The Three popping up from beyond the insular art establishment resonates with the fact that art schools are unessential to endow ability, despite the commercial galleries’ bear hugs to graduates of the most favored institutions. Would it not have made more sense to pluck the three from obscurity in the reality TV show vein to make it more pertinent to our time? In the end, this alleged media-about-media is indistinguishable from art-about-art, a wink, wink insiders game. But, to paraphrase The Three, there is no bad press, it all makes for good art (to sell); so no matter, it’s all stock in trade.