ART INVESTOR MAG, Spring 2003: THE THREE AT JEFFREY
DEITCH
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.
by Kenny Schachter
