Why James Franco Gets No Respect… in the Art World?
The recent James Franco interview with Jerry Saltz has been making the rounds in the parts of social media concerned with all things art world/industry/community. It’s a fun read, produced by two very intelligent people, that primarily concentrates on the fact that Franco keeps getting destroyed by the critics every time he steps into a gallery. Saltz, being one of the chief offenders, brings his rational to the table. The open conversation that ensues touches on some fascinating parts of Franco’s public persona and his many interests.
What the interview does NOT do, is get to the bottom of why James Franco gets no respect from the art community. This is the task that I want to undertake in the next couple of paragraphs. Quick read y’all!
First we have to look at James Franco celebrity brand and how he, and many other celebrities, have been entering the art world as of late. A good example here is Bjork’s show at MOMA, briefly mentioned and dismissed in the interview as a failure on the part of the curator. Here we see celebrity treated at best as a cultural phenomenon that we should know and interface with, a part of visual and sound culture that extends vocabulary of cultural producers who are hip enough to step out of the arts cloister, and at worst, and this is what sets off all of the alarms of the critical cultural training that most serious art folk go through, the individual’s celebrity is used to gain money and attention for the host space. Bring in the object of fame and his/her friends show up: this strategy, of course, equals sales for galleries, donors for museums and press all in one package. This pretty much breeds cynicism.
Franco’s entry points are similarly problematic. Although most (but definitely not all) artists dream of being in a roster of a mega-gallery like Pace, the megas are looked at with a lot of suspicion. As purveyors of the most overt capitalist trajectory, they are getting blasted by the left for ruining the art “community” by turning it into a “market”. We can argue the relative merits of this rhetorical position another time. Let’s just state that it is a feature of the art world and move on. The folks in the ever-thinning middle strata of the galleries, who are themselves participants in the marketplace, also don’t love the megas because as soon as any of the artists in their roster is “big enough”, a mega can come by and snatch them up. Saltz himself wrote a pretty awesome piece on the Trouble with Mega-Galleries. All this to say that any move by Pace, Gagosian, Zwirner, etc. get a ton of critical friction right out of the gate. Add the celebrity brand and it is very hard not to read the shows and performances as shrewd business decisions. In many ways reaction against Franco’s works where reactions against the business decisions of the galleries behind them.
Last, and in many ways most important point, is that it takes a long time to get really good at art (like any other practice, of course). Yes, Franco has an MFA (2012) degree from RISD. It would be pretty silly of me to assume that he has not exhibited before but… ideally one doesn’t just get thrust into the spotlight; there has to be a development period. It is kind of irresponsible for a gallery to just give a guy a solo show or a screening and see if he will sink or swim. He is getting beat up for work that is essentially two to three years out of graduate school. I don’t know anyone who has been put in this position. There is no organic growth here. There is just an expectation that since he can get the connections via his work in film, he should be able to perform at super star level. Not realistic.
