Jury Spotlight: An Interview with Peter Frank
Each fair stARTup gathers six of the art world’s industry leaders to ensure that each fair is fresh and unique, with the highest level of exhibitors from the contemporary art scene.
In preparation for our Los Angeles fair in February, we called upon the talent of both local and international critics, curators, and artists to make up our LA 2020 Selection Committee. Artists should note that artist applications are open through November 10th.
As the application deadline nears, we talked to one of our jurors, Peter Frank, LA art critic and curator, about the differences between art writing and criticism, a critic’s place in today’s art world, and where LA fits in today’s contemporary scene.
How did you get into the art world? What is your background?
I'm a NYC native, grew up in the Jersey 'burbs, and came back into Manhattan to attend college and establish myself as a professional critic (and, as it turned out, curator). Already passionate about music (classical, then avant garde) as a pre-teen, the art class I was assigned in 7th grade turned from a chore to a revelation when it introduced me to modern artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, and Miro. "I'm looking at what I've been listening to," it occurred to me. I started going to NY museums and then commercial galleries — at a peak time for cultural ferment in New York. I never much wanted to make art so much as look at and write about it (coming from a family of journalists and librarians). But my early interest in Fluxus and then conceptual art — and the NY poetry scene — made words artistic elements for me. Already known to NY galleries by time I moved back into the city, I wrote reviews for various Columbia University newspapers.
Leonardo Baldissara / @ilbaldii on Unsplash
By time I got my MA in art history I was (the first) art critic for the SoHo Weekly News, and wrote later for the Village Voice, also contributing to Art News, Art in America, and various other art publications. Throughout the 70s, I covered the waterfront, which made me curatorially useful to Documenta in Germany, for instance. Then, at age 30, I got to curate a survey show of contemporary American art for the Guggenheim Museum. Tiring of the commercialization of the art world — and indeed life — in NY during the 80s, I moved to LA at the end of 1987, where I've lived and worked since.
19 Artists — Emergent Americans: 1981 Exxon National Exhibition, by Peter Frank
How do you see the role of a critic in today's art market?
Critics function first and foremost as articulators of engaged response, that is, as the mouthpiece(s) for an audience committed to the practice, discourse, and display of art. We can also impact broader public taste (influencing, for instance, exhibition attendance) and even market trends, but our raison d'être is to expand and leaven awareness among those professionally and/or passionately involved with art. It's not necessarily an elite readership, but it is a self-selected one: our readers need to be with and know about art.
Kaitlyn Baker / @kaitlynbaker on Unsplash
What's the difference between an art writer and a critic?
An art writer writes about art news, most particularly about the ways the world of art interacts with and impacts the wider world. A critic writes about art itself. The influence of a museum board on that museum's programming is the purview of an art writer; the shows that result are the subject(s) of the critic. Many art writers, certainly for daily papers, are also critics, but they go to great pains not to mix the two tasks.
Chris Barbalis / @cbarbalis on Unsplash
How do you feel the Los Angeles art world stacks up against other art cities — New York, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.?
For better or worse, LA has become recognized as a world art center, a locus for the production and (to a lesser extent) dissemination and discussion of art that gets seen around the globe. The Bay Area, Chicago, and Houston, for three, arguably merit similar recognition, but the art world has room for only one upstart per country at this point. New York is now a center of the art market; indeed, the only real center of the art world per se is “centeroftheartworld dot com. “
Richard Hirajeta / @rockyhirajeta on Unsplash
Furthermore, New York is as American an art center as Berlin is a German one; such international nexuses are crossroads more than they are wellsprings. LA is still a source for art, and can still claim a genius loci, a range of production modes that are local or regional in spirit. This is being diluted by recent international attention being paid LA, but not stanched.
More from our blog: What Makes stARTup Art Fair So Different Anyway? and Announcing the stARTup LA 2020 Selection Committee
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Q&A by Fair Director Ray Beldner and Content Curator Mica England