Fuck Seth Price

When you start out as a young artist, she thought, it’s all about open doors. You have nothing, no one knows your name, no one wants you. As your career picks up steam, every new event is a miracle: your first group show, and then your first solo, your first mention in a magazine, your first sale, your first good review, your first bad review, your first show in Europe, your first show at an institution, your first high-profile biennial exhibition, your first cover story. It’s a tremendous personal high, all these avenues opening, and moreover it’s accompanied by public fanfare, because art-world people get swoony and excited about this early door-opening phase; they act like parents fussing over the parade of birthdays and bar mitzvahs and commencements and first apartments. For many this is simply the blind pursuit of the new, and for some it represents craven calculation. On the other hand, good careers usually begin with a wildly fecund period—brief, just five years or so—during which all the major themes and perversions are proposed in concentrated form, and people find it genuinely exciting to witness new concepts being willed into existence.

All this dies down. You work steadily for a while, say, ten years, and you consider yourself lucky, because you have a career and you show your work, and sometimes you make more money or less money, and people might like your current work more or less than your last efforts, but the great thing is that all the doors continue to stand open, and things are functioning. You are now a part of the machine.

Gradually, however, you become aware of encroaching problems. It’s hard to voice these concerns, since you don’t want to be an ungrateful ass, but they eat away at you. It’s not because people no longer swoon over you, although becoming a part of the scenery hurts. More worrisome is that once all of the doors have been opened, the only thing they can do is close: the collectors and curators lose interest, the quality of your work declines, or you simply run out of ideas. However, even this is not the most difficult thing. The biggest problem is that when the doors are open and you’re a part of the machine, you realize This is it, there’s nothing else.