The End of Gatekeeping?

      We recently watched the fascinating documentary Finding Vivian Maier which employs the always satisfying strategy of solving a mystery to explore the life of an enigmatic woman who, serving as a nanny to families from Chicago to New York to Minnesota, took literally hundreds of thousands of street photographs over the course of her life. Most were never developed or printed until some flea marketer’s kid bought a trunk of her undeveloped negatives at auction.

      While the story charts her course from family to family, uncovers her family background and shows lots of her work, it skims over a couple of troubling aspects of the story. One is what appears to be Miss Maier’s mental and emotional deterioration as experienced by her young charges. It could be a case of untreated and progressively more dangerous mental illness, but that story thread doesn’t get much juice. The other dark and, yes, unjust aspect is how the established gatekeepers of the art world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, have declined to sanctify the work of Miss Maier as Really Being Art. 

      We are mad little creative fiends from the start. All of us. But the gatekeepers are there early on as well to determine who has “talent”, who gets to keep making art. The thinning out sometimes begins even with parents who had their own creative joy starved in the service of Something Sensible. Any of us who defy these early attempts to stifle our creative impulses will sometimes find an ally. An art teacher, an English professor, someone who conspires with us to keep making art.

      Eventually, however, we find ourselves submitting our gems, our babies, our joyfully, fearfully, delightfully, carefully created art to the real gatekeepers. As a writer, the first question I get is “Really? Cool! Have you been published?” 

      And here we have it: until MoMA, The New Yorker, a literary agent, a gallery owner, an authority tasked with only letting the Real Art pass, gives us the gold star and lets us in, we are not Really Artists.

      So here is a woman who spent her entire life capturing the most beguiling, arresting, humanly fascinating images and then didn’t even try to get most of her film developed. A woman who compulsively made incredible art and who died alone in a nursing home without having even seen most of her own work. 

      Today she could have had her own blog, a page on Tumblr, her own way to share the images that grabbed her heart and eye. Are the gatekeepers on their way out? They don’t think so, obviously. MoMA rejected Vivian Maier’s work on the basis that she hadn’t printed the work herself; something that is apparently not a problem when it comes to other, earlier (and yes), male photographers. The museum, gallery, auction house cartel has a vested interest in keeping control of who is and who is not creating art worthy of their vaunted attention and money.

      But we keep at it. We scribble away and post on our blogs. We create and invent and cast spells that have to be cast or we wither into eating-sleeping-shitting-fucking things that simply keep moving from paycheck to paycheck. There will always be gatekeepers, judges, critics, crossed spears that signify that thou shalt not pass. At the end of the day, if I’m creating it with an eye on the gate, what I’m creating is a commodity, not art. Still, is it too much to ask for a world where Vivian Maier could have seen her own art?

" Value Established" 

another "portrait" of T. Remington by AleXander Hirka
click on image to enlarge