NOTE FROM MARIO: This piece was written collaboratively by Francess Archer Dunbar and I, we both received Rabkin Travel Grants to make the trip up to New York. The images were taken by me when I was loitering in lobbies of corporate offices and were not included in the original print version of this article.
I initially hoped to be wowed enough by the work I saw while loitering in the offices of New York’s Big Banks™ to justify a satirical review of them as the next institutional exhibition entity, thanks to their (unfortunate) positioning as semi-public exhibition spaces. Unfortunately, I was so unimpressed with what I saw at Bank of America’s gallery that I couldn't even muster the enthusiasm to ironically evaluate it. Instead, I was briskly reminded that these corporate institutional collections could not actually care less about what they exhibit, as long as it doesn’t offend. Everything on display felt like a curatorial afterthought, a lazy mishmash of art to be seen by people in slacks and dry cleaned button downs who would rather be looking at their client decks.
The entrance to JPMorgan Chase’s new behemoth midtown headquarters features a massive installation by minimalist artist and landscape architect Maya Lin, along with a plaque that notes how the work “seamlessly integrates art, architecture, and landscape, inspired by Manhattan's bedrock and Central Park's iconic rock ledges.” Inside, you can also see Gerard Richter’s “Color Chase 1” and “Color Chase 2,” along with “Wind Dance” by starchitect and noted non-artist Norman Foster — a 3D-printed flagpole with a billowing American flag. I found these works, while monumental in scale, to be aggressively anodyne, literal lobby art for an era of capital maximalism that is utterly incapable of projecting any message other than might.
Do any of these people working 100 hour weeks actually stop to look at anything here? Is it just an obstacle to move around on their way to the elevator?
In 1982, artist and environmental activist Agnes Denes sowed a field of wheat into the swampy landfill at the foot of the Financial District, in what is now known as Battery City Park. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Denes endeavoured to make Public Art in an untraditional way. Arguably, hers was the first germination of larger-scale public art in New York City. Forty years later, corporate offices overlook little but the luxury store facades of an empire in moral if not economic decline; this is reflected in our public art. Why else would one of the largest and most expensive local public art projects in recent decades require the posthumous installation of suicide glass around its perimeter? I suppose, that in a city famous for its competitiveness (and “climber” mentality), an endless swirl of staircases is an appropriate creative reflection of our common experience. Is it really any surprise that when greeted at the top by a view of Hudson Yards, the brightest among us chose to hurl themselves off the edge
In the office, the view from the escalator is even grimmer. The movement of banks collecting art institutionally began in the late 1950s, when David Rockefeller started the “Art at Work” program, ostensibly to improve morale at the JPMorgan offices. Rockefeller attempted to induce corporate utopia by purchasing art from the contemporary hotshots of the day, largely (and somewhat funnily) mostly abstract expressionists. Several decades of American financial acceleration were overseen by WWII veterans disassociating to splatters on a canvas after a two martini lunch.
The art of course, should be separated from the artist here. Who among us is above the corporate commission? To blame Julie Mehretu for making “Mural” (2009) for Goldman Sachs is to blame the craftsman whose stained glass hangs in the church where the priest abuses little boys. Aesthetically, I’m not sure if it’s worse when corporate art attempts to provide some commentary on itself and its place despite the compromises it is making to exist in that environment (common in Woke 1.0), or when it is purely decorative, meant to distract its besuited viewers from the working conditions of constant growth.
Due to conservative investment practices and the giant sunk cost fallacy which is the contemporary art market, collections like those held by banks like UBS and JPMorgan Chase have become extremely valuable. Rockefeller knew that art was a good investment, and the conservative corporate collecting practices that he championed still influence not only the paintings collected by banks but the work collected across the U.S. by private collectors, real estate companies, municipalities, and even museums.
On my tour de lobby I had initially wanted to satirize polemics around private collections of wealthy super collectors. Much ink has been spilled about oligarchs problematically positioning themselves as museums and how the unwitting public and press often accept them as such. I thought I could write a piece that extended the silliness of calling these “non-museums” museums onto the most noteworthy art collections corporate America has to offer. Could these be society's next museums, since apparently anyone who wants to call themselves a museum and has enough money is one by default? But sitting with this exhibition, I find myself thinking less about the abstract paintings in front of me and more about how its installation reminds me of how small the “great big art world” really is.
Perhaps what Rockefeller did not account for in this investment strategy is how ambivalent today's corporate suit would become towards art in any capacity — investment or otherwise. Much like the bankers at JPMorgan or BOA, the coworkers at my day job crunching revenue numbers come to work and live in a world completely removed from the grants, open calls, or residencies artists and art industry people all hold their breath for. They don't worry about who’s getting exhibition opportunities, they couldn’t even tell you whose work is in Frieze or Art Basel or what Frieze or Art Basel even are. As much as many people may have reservations about art market expert Magnus Resch, he put things into valuable perspective when he stated that the global art market generates less revenue in a year than FedEx. What artists, curators, writers, and art administrators do is meaningful, challenging work, but it happens in a microcosm which, to many people, is functionally irrelevant.
The exhibition also made me think about the eventual destiny of work collected by large corporations. In May of last year, a friend who works for a large insurance company told me she'd acquired some of the art that her company had installed in a corporate office during in-office boom times. The company was downsizing, and now a large portion of the art was being auctioned off (or simply tossed), with employees having first right to bid. Amongst the paintings and prints was a large piece by Larry Zox, an American abstract painter who had a solo exhibition at The Whitney in 1973 and passed away in 2006. My friend acquired the piece for $50 (other pieces of Zox’s work are currently available on Artsy for several thousands of dollars).
Not that we’re predicting a massive financial downturn here at the NYRF, the likes of which would cause an institutional selloff of physical assets, but I will note that near the end of the exhibition at BOA was a massive Carlos Cruz Diez work, the largest I've seen by the Venezuelan conceptual artist. This work is likely worth upwards of $2 million, and could be a staple in a museum retrospective. Currently, it’s just sitting here with no one paying any mind. Once this “exhibition” is up, it’ll likely go back to a storage unit to collect more dust indefinitely. Maybe someone will eventually acquire it for $100 on its way out of the door.
When it comes to corporate lobby art it's possible that Denes was on to something. If we agree that art's role is to provide some sort of a mirror to society, it would make sense that the most soulless contemporary work would end up in corporate offices, enlivening the hallways between cubicles on paved-over indigenous lands. The wheat field, Denes’ chosen symbol of monoculture, was the perfect vehicle for expressing the conformity of so much public art. Stalks of wheat standing in perfect unison mirroring the Financial District behind it, without a protesting outlier in sight.
