MY VIEW
Charles Clough: Boost artists, region at Hallwalls Auction
Regarding Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art’s upcoming Benefit Auction: I am an artist from Buffalo living in New York City and Westerly, R. I. I attended School 68, Hutch Tech, followed my transplanted Art & Design program to McKinley from which I graduated, studied at the University at Buffalo and Buffalo State and was a resident at the Griffis Family’s Ashford Hollow Foundation on Essex Street where, with others, I founded Hallwalls. My identity as a Buffalonian is secondary only to that of being an artist.
Four days before Hallwalls’ Benefit Auction, “The Pictures Generation 1974-1984” closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after three months on view. The exhibition’s curator, Douglas Eklund, wrote: “The ‘Pictures’ group constituted the last movement in contemporary art to date [2009].” The artists included represented California Institute for the Arts graduates of the 1970s, a group with diverse educations that coalesced in New York and the founders of Hallwalls.
My pride in being so included is augmented by a special kind of political action taking place through this recognition: Guernica, and all muck-raking art notwithstanding, I believe that culture is politically most effective in terms of “tourist attraction”—that as much as we go to the south of France for natural beauty, we go to be where Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse made art. This “political action” accrues at a glacial pace, but at a certain point this cultural identity becomes as unshakable as it is beneficial to the region so associated. That Hallwalls and its artists have gained international attention adds to and compounds the importance of the Albright-Knox, Burchfield Penney, Castellani, UB/Anderson, CEPA, Eastman House and other groups in gaining attention for Buffalo.
Since Hallwalls was founded in 1974 in Buffalo, certain other national or municipally based art movements have significantly shaped the art world: the Italian “trans-avant-gardia,” the German neo-expressionists, the Chinese and, most revealingly, the YBAs (Young British Artists), who were promoted by Charles Saatchi in the early 1990s. He did so by buying their work, showing it and gaining press attention for it. And then he sold it for much more than he paid for it. By way of this he also made London into a major contemporary art center. Recently the Liepzig School has come to international attention.
In 1977 anyone walking into Hallwalls could have bought Cindy Sherman photos for $25 that are now worth hundreds of thousands. Hallwalls became distinguished in the “Pictures” show against a vast backdrop of more likely sources of artistic foment including Yale, Columbia, the Art Institute of Chicago — literally hundreds of other schools, and Hallwalls wasn’t even a school, not to mention that it was founded by a bunch of twenty-somethings.
Even after the economic meltdown, recent auctions have shown that art holds its value. Now, as the old paradigms are being realigned, it is a good time to assert Buffalo’s cultural ascendancy by bidding up the prices at the Hallwalls Benefit Auction. Too often these events become missed opportunities to get attention for Buffalo, Hallwalls and its artists by establishing headline prices. If you have the means, both acquire a piece of history and make history by establishing strong prices for the works being auctioned. Those with a deep concern for the future of the region will realize that what has developed over the past 35 years is a huge and bankable story that has and will continue to create the character of the place.
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