consummateprofessional - Tumblr blog

consummateprofessional · 27 days

Text

hey. i (disabled trans femme person) need urgent help escaping abuse.

i come to you with some very bad news and a long story, i guess. it's a story of financial abuse and years and year of my life in vain.

snippets of this were things ive talked about before, but theyve been intensifying recently to a point that i can't ignore them anymore. they dont blend into the background anymore. figurateively, im being poisoned, and im feeling it.

look below the cut for further details of what's happening. i wish i could've been more concise, but the ongoing situation is convoluted and its hard to wrap my whole head around it sometimes.

ive had my patreon for around 7 years, now. since the beginning, i wanted it to become sizable and to earn me a living eventually; it never did.

ive also released several games, which, again, didnt earn me a living. ive done a lot of work on projects under nda, which didnt earn me a living either.

none of it came together.

as a result of this, i have spent that past while being strongly supported through donations from people like you on tumblr and discord (thank you ;;) and... from my parents.

the latter is the crux of this. their control over my finances lends them a very strong influence over what i am allowed to do and what im not allowed to do in my life.

as a result of this, they have essentially kept me from pursuing the jobs and the life ive wanted to pursue for the past 7 years. anything i was able to come up with wasn't good enough. game development is an "expensive hobby". "an outcrys" nomination was a "costly adventure that didn't retain value". my art is "sad and depressing, no one wants to see it". video games are "not real, you need a second foot to stand on".

so ive been toiling away, trying to please their whims of what im "supposed to be doing", using precious time i couldve used entering the industry i actually wanted to enter learning skills i didnt want for jobs i didnt want, applying and being denied. for a brief while, between 2020 and 2023, i was allowed to do my game development thing, finally, because of covid and such. that grace period is now over.

they have also been strongly controlling my bodily autonomy as it relates to choices im allowed to make without having to suffer emotional damage from them, which has been paranoia-inducing to say the least.

at this moment, i am at a crossroads.

either, i take on a job that pays whatever my parents think is enough for a living and is the "right kind of job" (with my lack of education outside of artistic fields: close to impossible); or i find a well-paying high-profile job in the video game industry (with my qualifications and the state of the industry: close to impossible); or i enter my country's disability pay system.

i have a disability diagnosis, so this would be within reach. it would also be a good deal more money than my parents are keeping me drowning with. to succeed with my application however, id need to:

close my patreon

stop developing games (not enough resources, mental or financial)

be at the whims of this country's political situation and how it relates to welfare, which is in sharp decline

im asking you all for help choosing none of the above.

i want to be free from their financial influence. i want to be able to instantly send them back their "alimony" and know that they can no longer direct my life according to any whim they may have. i want more time to be allowed to stand on my own two feet without being emotionally hurt and financially controlled - because it is nothing short of killing me.

i've started goal on ko-fi - 6000 $. i need a buffer like that in order to be able to have a bargaining chip in this arrangement, at least for half a year.

i need that money to be able to refuse the money my parents only use to have power over me and my life choices, to be able to consistently emotionally harm me and my prospects to become independent in the way i want to.

thank you for reading. even just talking about this makes me feel a little better. please help, and donate if you are able.

599 notes · View notes

consummateprofessional · 7 months

Text

Engaging The Community Part 1

Hello "Community" I am engaging with you, have you heard? No? That's because this is my first blog post and I have spent exactly zero time attempting to build a community of any kind. Now if I said "Hello community, I am building you and engaging with you simultaneously" doesn't that make more sense? Yes? You're wrong, it still doesn't make any sense, but we'll get there soon enough. Anyway thats my "hook", to use a little bit of 5th grade, persuasive essay, bullshit. But the hook can't last forever, if I'm doing this right, I'm about to begin my "Introductory Paragraph."

Anyone invested in the gallery side of the fine arts is probably familiar with some form of the phrase "engaging with the community", it is as present in calls for entry, as it is in the entries they're calling for. It seems as though any gallery worth a damn is neurotically concerned with the amount of engagement that the community is receiving, as if this speculative community is not a group of people, but instead a large dog living in a tiny apartment, ADHD symptomatic and morbidly devoid of enrichment. It is up to the brave souls, in the field of arts administration, to help these abused dogs by any means necessary. Maybe they're capable of doing that. The question to whom are they are doing this is probably something worth speculating about, and how they're planning to do it seems just as tied to the dog's well being. Those two concerns are what I will, hopefully, be describing.

If we're going to go about setting up our 501-C3 rescue shelter masquerading as an art gallery, we should probably figure out who the dogs are to begin with. "OH GOD" I hear you shriek from your seat on the subway "He's going to cite the fucking dictionary, he's just going to give us the dictionary definition of 'community' I knew he was a hack! A conversational tone is a RED FLAG" That's right, dumbshit, get ready for a hastily googled "community definition." According to the Oxford dictionary, community is a word with 3 definitions, which are subdivided into 10 contextual definitions, very useful, let me choose one that suits my purposes as a critic. I'll just go with the first one since its applicable to most situations, the 3rd (read: 10th) is exclusively about ecology, and the 2nd (read: 7th) is somewhat applicable but excludes aspects of the definition regarding physical space-- it makes sense to use that definition here (on tumblr), or on ...twitter? (Can I still call it twitter?) But an art gallery isn't (usually) a website, and is typically seen as serving its purpose in relationship to physical space as-well-as likeminded people. Anyway, the first definition of community is "A group of people living in the same place or having particular characteristics in common"(Oxford). You'll notice that this essentially applies to everything, in what world are we not engaging either with people in physical space or with people who have things in common? It kind of seems like the word community is, by this definition, too vague to be particularly useful in any regard-- especially in relationship to a business mission statement. So that was kind of a waste of time, unless, perhaps, I'm attempting to set up a point about intentionally vague language(?) Maybe you'll find out! Maybe! Anyway, since the dictionary definition was predictably useless, maybe the galleries I'm ostensibly talking about will offer something more substantial in their mission statements, artforum is a good place to go if you want big-name galleries to be advertised to you. Let's check out Marian Goodman Gallery's mission statement. For those not in the know, Marian Goodman Gallery is actually three galleries, one in LA, one in New York City (at the time of writing, the gallery is planned to move to Tribeca by 2024), and one à Paris. They're owned by Marian Goodman, who is a "Blue Chip" art dealer, which is actually a financial term and not an art term, but here basically means that she sells very expensive works of art and the work she sells can be trusted to be resold at a higher value than it was purchased at. In other word, the galleries she runs are incredibly well respected. Her mission statement (which actually doesn't make much sense given the financial aspect of her career but whatever) reads as follows:

"Marian Goodman Gallery champions the work of artists who stand among the most influential of our time, representing over five generations of diverse thought and practice. What makes the gallery singular is its enduring and deep-rooted collaborations and understanding with the artists—a bond that is concurrent with curators, thought leaders, and art institutions worldwide. The Gallery’s exhibition program, characterized by its caliber and rigor, provides international platforms for its artists to showcase their work, foster vital dialogues with new audiences, and advance their practices within nonprofit and institutional realms." (https://www.mariangoodman.com/about-our-gallery/).

I just finished washing my mouth out with soap, so now I'm ready to talk about this. Notably absent are the words "community" and "engagement" but that doesn't mean they aren't there! It just means we gotta dig around for, like two seconds, which we'll do but only after I make an extended point about how the first sentence is completely tautological. "Marian Goodman Champions the work of artists [...] the most influential of our time [...] over five generations." Okay, duh, of course they "champion" the work-- they're selling it, this is like saying that Apple champions the iPhone, or a used car dealer champions a 1997 GM Saturn. To state that these artists are "the most influential of our time" is true but in a weird kind of way-- the gallery represents 47 artists and among them are some very impressive figures, Chantel Akerman, William Kentridge, Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter (who actually ended his representation with them in 2022, in favor of the far more famous David Zwirner, which is an obvious and predictable career move, especially for an artist vocally interested in "winding down production"(artnet)). These are not artists to turn your nose up at, they're BIG names, they were also brought into being represented by the gallery well after they had already made a name for themselves. Akerman, for instance, had come into fame during the 70s and 80s as an experimental filmmaker-- the peak of her acclaim occurring in 1975, two years before Marian Goodman Gallery came into existence. I don't want to "throw" too much "shade" at Goodman, there is a certain kind of bravery to being born rich, then advertising already famous European artists to Americans who have never heard of them. But the artists were, without a doubt, already famous. Gerhard Richter, who is probably the most important artist ever to be represented by the gallery, had already been featured in the 1972, 1980, 1984 Venice Biennales as well as Documenta V (1972) and Documenta VII (1982) before he began his representation with Marian Goodman in 1985, these are incredibly prestigious art fairs and exhibitions, a baby could have predicted Richter's rise to international fame, especially considering it had already begun. None of this is to undermine MGG as an institution, it is absolutely noteworthy that this gallery was responsible for bringing prominent European artists to the States, but much of what it gives itself credit for within its about page, is actually the work of others, and is the reason that they began representing these artists in the first place. Finally the first sentence ends with "over five generations" which is just a way of saying "we've been around for a long time" and anyone knows what MGG is, already knows that, while it is impressive for an art gallery to be around for a long time, it certainly isn't retroactively impressive that a blue chip gallery is old-- thats kind of par-for-the-course. So now MGG and I are even, its website found a verbose and irritating way of telling its audience nothing while aggrandizing itself, and I've found a verbose and irritating way of telling you that thats what they're telling you while aggrandizing myself.

end of part one, in part two I'll finish what I was talking about in regards to MGG's definition of "community" and what it means for them to imply a kind of engagement. Maybe by the end of Part 3 i'll have made my point about exactly how much this is just meaningless puff, and perhaps another point about how it positions these galleries as somehow radical. I didn't know Tumblr had a character limit, otherwise I would've put this on substack. Too late to go back now.

#fine art #art community #institutional critique #literary theory #social issues #art speak #essay #Marian Goodman Gallery #Community Engagement #Art History #Language #Meaningless #gerhard richter #david zwirner #linguistics

1 note · View note