In part one of this two-part interview with Renée Vara, Angela Johnson and B Crittenden discuss with her the changing arts landscape and the landmark Visual Arts Rights Act (VARA) litigation, 5Pointz v. G&M Realty, and Renée’s involvement with that case. Renée is the founder of Vara Art. She is a cultural entrepreneur, advisor, curator, and educator, and her area of research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, art economics, and creative rights. Renée recently gave a guest lecture for the College of Fine Arts and Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University about this case.
Part two can be found here.
"5Pointz" by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
"5pointz" by iamNigelMorris is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Transcript
[Musical intro, fades out]
Angela: Welcome to an interview episode brought to you by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Angela Johnson, and I'm the Podcast Producer.
B: And I'm B Crittenden, the Technology and Interactive Content Manager.
Angela: This is part one of a two-part interview with Renée Vara. Renée is the founder of Vara Art. She is a cultural entrepreneur, advisor, curator, and educator. Her area of research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, art economics, and creative rights. Renée is an art legal expert for significant cases, including the landmark VARA litigation, 5Pointz v. G&M Realty. She recently gave a guest lecture for the College of Fine Arts in Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University about this case. In this episode, part one, we discuss Renée's career, her take on the visual arts landscape, and the 5Pointz case.
Alright, so, B, you and I sat down with Renée Vara the other day to talk about the work that she does, and specifically the 5Pointz case. But before we get into that interview, we wanted to talk a little bit about what that case was just to give everyone a little bit of context.
B: Yeah, so the case revolves around a situation that took place in Long Island City in New York. And it involves a group of artists versus a real estate developer named Gerald Wolkoff. Involved in the case were 21 artists and 49 artworks. It took place at this large building. They had permission to be there and to be putting their artwork all over it. In 2013, those works were destroyed without warning or consent by the developer, Gerald Wolkoff, and they ended up taking it to court. You'll hear Renée mention Meres One. He started 5Pointz in the 1990s. He started it and managed it as an artist and a curator, and really turned it into a community center filled with aerosol art. He was also the main plaintiff in the 5Pointz case.
Angela: So when they took it to court, it took a long time. This case began in 2013, and it was ruled in favor of the artists in November of 2017.
B: And this was a jury advisory decision, which means that the jury made recommendations to the judge; Judge Block made the ruling in favor of 21 artists and 45 works of art under VARA.
Angela: The judge awarded the artists $6.75 million. Yeah, which was $150,000 for each of the 45 destroyed works of art. And this was a really significant case, especially for the Visual Artists Rights Act, or VARA, which grants visual artists certain moral rights for their work.
B: I think another important thing to mention about 5Pointz is that it attracted a lot of visitors and a lot of media coverage. And so this wasn't just a random building in the city that artists were using as a canvas of sorts, but it really became quite a gathering place. I mean, it's also worth mentioning that the artists did rent studio spaces. It's not like they were just like squatting there or anything like that. And it had all been permitted by Wolkoff until he, in the cover of night, whitewashed everything. And so you'll also hear Renée talk about how one of the main issues in the case was that they weren't given an opportunity by Wolkoff to preserve or document their work.
Angela: Yeah, there was no warning. And that was kind of the issue.
B: Yeah, yeah. We had such an interesting conversation with Renée, someone who's been in the art world for a long time wearing a lot of different hats. It was really nice to sit down and talk to her about all this.
Angela: Definitely. In fact, before our interview officially began, we had a bit of a conversation about a lot of different issues, mostly concerning the state of the art world now.
B: Yeah, especially in academia.
Angela: Mhm, in academia and entering the industry, and we thought it was really interesting. So, we will be sharing a little bit of that with you all, as well.
B: Yeah.
Angela: We had a great time having this conversation and we hope you enjoy.
[Musical interlude]
B: I've become interested in community engagement and community and economic development.
Renée: I think that's a very rich, exciting area. And I think right now, all museums are going to need to have to deal with that. I mean, I think fine art museums were showing how they're kind of imploding because there's this disconnect between communities that they service as well as their, you know, internal communities like patrons. There's a big disconnect, but they're taking money from both sources. And they're kind of not reconciling the needs of that. I mean, to me, kind of the Brooklyn Museum is doing a great job. The Queens was trying, but it's been stymied a lot by politics. You know, the Baltimore Museum--my thesis advisor, Katie Segal, is trying to do really amazing things there with kind of creating equities within the, you know, labor market at museums, which is very, very dire. And I'd like to see, you know, people, it's really exciting to see new faces and young talent because there's a lot of challenges that somebody needs to bring some creativity to the table and kind of rethink those modes and our institutions as they're operating. I think they're really outmoded, and all these problems we're having with museum management and the kind of social justice elements, they need to be reconciled. And I think that's the great challenge of your generation. I think, you know, I'm kind of a has-been.
B: Well, and I think the most, like, widespread national conversations about it among young people have been able to happen because of social media, or there was just literally a Google Sheet going around with everybody's salaries in the museum world, just for transparency's sake—people wanted to see what each other was making. And it's that kind of incredible, like, ability to connect with each other in such a simple way that it gives me a little bit of hope.
Renée: Well, you know, I'm an X Generation, I think we all know the inequities that existed. And, in fact, if you remember that really amazing Hyperallergic article, which pinned that the inequities of male leadership versus female leadership, that gap in pay was actually larger than the national gap. I think we've known it, you know, we just, we had a choice: do you want to work in the arts, and, you know, accept this and try to sustain yourself however you can, even when it's pretty much unsustainable for most people? And that is a big barrier to entry. And also, like, sustainability is everything in the arts. You know, we knew about it, we just didn't have much choice because we're kind of—my generation is literally the X Generation. We're smushed in between two generations. And, you know, we were trying to be the envoy and the ambassadors of change, but kind of bumping up on old rigid system, as we see in politics. So, I mean, none of that is shocking to me. I've had, you know, colleagues that worked as unpaid interns, at—I'm not going to name the institutions, but the best institutions in the world. For years, unpaid interns, but really, they were curatorial assistants. It's a really complicated system. But, I mean, I think it offers a lot of opportunity, because now, you know, it's being deconstructed. My generation is well aware that these problems have existed for a very, very long time, and quite frankly, we wanted them to change. We really did. I mean, you know, political art was the 80s. So, you know, we are regenerating all of that conversation, 3.0, maybe. Three generations, 30 years later, it feels like. And hopefully, you know, we'll get there this time.
Only now, do we have places like Yale making these really, you know, important because they're symbolic in the art history world, you know, saying we're not going to teach the canon, the Western white canon as it was. But, you know, I do interview 100, you know, maybe 100 students every summer for one internship. And I'm pretty shocked at the leading institutions that they're not either getting something beyond 1960s or 70s, or they're not getting opportunities to do honor thesis with people because most of them are visiting scholars and faculty. So, you know, the other areas, whether it be African American Studies, Material Culture, Contemporary Arts, Asian Studies, and its relationship, all that intersectional kind of scholarship that we have forged in the last decade—that's really interesting, relevant to most students—a lot of students (undergraduate) can’t engage in them because they're being executed by visiting scholars, and the professors that are there are, you know, Classic professors, Renaissance professors, and they’re kind of doing their undergraduate degrees in very, kind of, standard format. You know, some of them, you know, less kind of creative and forward-looking than I was doing 30 years ago. And I just, I just think that's a failure of the system. I mean, if it wasn't for my undergraduate honors thesis, I mean, that gave me such a leg up in graduate school. It was incredible. But I was lucky, you know, I got a mentor, and she really, you know, she's the one, but we shouldn't be looking at mentorships to change, you know, a canon. I don't think a student should come out of a top university not having a class and, you know, only studying art up to 1970. I mean, that's really, to me, irresponsible, because we know where most of the jobs exist right now. And it's not just about jobs, I mean, that's 40 years of history we're just ignoring—50 years of history we're just ignoring. The faculties have not expanded, and so the only expansion has happened through adjuncts. Adjuncts are so underpaid, and also the pay inequity of art adjuncts is tremendous versus other areas within liberal arts universities. There's a couple of studies coming out of San Francisco, actually, because the field is so competitive and people are so, you know, that's part of the reason why NYU was the first to unionize. Because adjunct professors had literally no access, no resources, no scaffolding, no extra pay for preparation or grading or anything. It was just contact hours, that's it. So, not to depress you... [laughter]
B: Renée, if you wouldn't mind sharing a brief introduction to yourself, and maybe a bit about your background and how you came to start doing what you do. I will say, you have a broad range of skills and expertise, and I'm very curious to hear how you got to assembling, sort of, this portfolio of work.
Renée: I caught the ball, actually, and I kept on catching balls that were thrown to me, because when I started, there wasn't really a track. There wasn't museum management programs, and there were a few, but they were largely focused on administrative positions and there weren't even contemporary art graduate school programs. So, I had to patch it together because I really couldn't sustain myself going to graduate school or working at a museum. That was kind of the standard way you entered into the museum industry was that you worked as an intern, largely unpaid, and I just, I didn't have those resources. So, I patched it together with a corporate job, going to graduate school at night, freelancing on the side, and also cultivating, like, you know, a community of artists that I thought were interesting. I mean, New York was a really interesting place to be before, you know, contemporary art was big business. It was really a subculture, and I loved that and it really became a lifestyle for me rather than just a job. You know, I had a unique opportunity right after I finished graduate school to pitch a new program at Chubb Insurance—where I serviced high net worth individuals called Chubb Collectors—and I pitched that to a managing director, we piloted it, and that program then went, you know, throughout the country, and that was really exciting to provide high-level collection management services to collections over $10 million. But I hit the glass ceiling corporately, because I was kind of the first person in the insurance industry doing what I was doing. And I was at a disadvantage of being the first to the plate, quite frankly. Now, there are many positions, but I really wanted to continue working with collectors and their collections, so I just kept patching it together, you know, doing appraisal work on the side, then I started teaching, and I made a big jump very early in my career. I made a big jump from Chubb and started my own practice, and I really wanted to focus on more curatorial—independent curating—which really had a great moment in the mid-2000s. So, there was a lot of fluidity at that time, and I took, you know, skills I had from different areas and kind of cobbled them together. Now we think of, you know, cultural entrepreneurship, and the truth is, that's what I've been doing for many years. You know, we used to independently produce a journal called “The Input” that allowed artists to be curators of the book medium. So, my practice has always been blended between, you know, a kind of nonprofit/community/educational focus and more traditional, kind of, art services to high net worth clients. And I feel like now the language has kind of caught up with a lot of practices, and that's probably what makes me a bit unique as an advisor and an appraiser is all the other things I do that contribute and engage with cultural literacy, artists promotion, and production, and now most actively with artists rights.
Angela: So, you were involved in this big case, in the 5Pointz case, and it's really interesting.
Renée: That's a classic example of catching the ball. You know, the history of the case is one thing, but what is more central, I think that we'll expand now and get documented, is the history of 5Pointz in and of itself. So, skipping that kind of step, the history of 5Pointz as really being a cultural, kind of, community center and Meres One being really the maestro of that and so self-enterprising. I think they really anticipated street artists and graffiti artists, like Meres, like ZIMAD, and many other participants, Jimmy C, in the actual trial, but they've been self-sustaining and self-enterprising for many, many years. And I think they have helped redefine the notion of what an artist is in America, especially because America does not have a sustainable nonprofit means to which you can sustain your practice like they may have in Europe. So, every artist is going to be confronted with, you know, being an entrepreneur and being an enterprising entrepreneur. So, they really anticipated that in many ways, I think that, you know, really lends itself for us to learn a lot from their movement in terms of museum management, community engagement. But my involvement was literally word of mouth. 5Pointz, at that point, their injunction had been lifted, the building had been whitewashed, there was an amazing cultural outcry throughout the world, but also locally in the community, in terms of, you know, what was characterized as the biggest art murder, and I was recommended by a couple of my colleagues. I wouldn't say many people thought we could pull it off, and if there were to be any one-on-one career advice, I would suggest—it's hard in the art world to fail, especially when there are so few jobs and an artist's career or creative's career could feel very fragile. But I think that's how, often, just like I jumped off the clip for my career with Chubb, and that was a, you know, I had support from colleagues that I had published with, and they were just like, "Just, you’ve got to jump. You have to jump off the cliff. You have to try." And, you know, that was, you know, a risk. And I just think a lot of advancement and innovation, if we can embrace risk and failure more, we can see amazing things happen, and 5Pointz was an example of that as a bunch of artists that got together around this idea that there's this law that's esoteric and very few people knew about it and certainly was not very clear, and it wasn't tested. And certainly in, you know, quote-unquote, "the art world," it was perceived because of the negative stereotypes often associated with street art, and these artists don't even identify necessarily as street artists. They identify more as writers, or aerosol artists, running their very successful practices, most of them working with many large scale corporations with branding campaigns. You know, these were mid-career artists and they were very professional, so they all took a risk, even within their community. As I experienced within my community, lots of people were questioning why we were doing it, whether it was worthwhile, lots of second guessing, and it took a lot of fortitude on their part to pursue it. And it took a long time and a lot of resources and a lot of pain and suffering, quite frankly, you know? So that's the non-romantic side, engaging a new five year battle against a very empowered, big-moneyed firm, that—in New York City real estate rules. I mean, art has been an enabler of real estate since SoHo, you know, SoHo, when they developed SoHo, that became a formula of gentrification, which got repeated over and over again. And 5Pointz was just a repeat of the same play. And Long Island City is now highly gentrified with large-scale, luxury buildings up and down the avenue there. I think that it's a great example of collective action. I think that makes it really iconic and relevant for many people in our country. You know, with all the social justice movements that are long incoming, questioning kind of the values and institutional structures and the way the law works, they're the one shining star. And it's hard not to be lulled into that, because at the end of the day, much of us in the art world are still, you know, pathetic romantics.
Angela: I remember reading it and just—it's such a cool story. You never hear about, like, art winning against like real estate and business in America.
Renée: Right?
Angela: It never happens.
Renée: Absolutely. But, I mean, what was interesting in that case is that, actually, there was a role for art and real estate to coexist, right? A lot of the more conservative interpretations of 5Pointz suggest that art trumped real estate, but it didn't, actually. It was just that real estate tried to kill art. Judge Block, in the first injunction, upheld the real estate rights to develop. All they needed to do was a very minor act of respect, especially after Meres One had developed that property and created that real estate value through his sweat equity, quite frankly. Through his creativity, he helped develop that neighborhood, and he helped develop not just the branding, but the imprimatur or the coolness that was going to be associated with that site, right? And that was all his doing, and all the artists that participated with him. And that was a community and they were the ones to create that value to culture. And I think there was no need on a personal level for Wolkoff to have not created an open dialogue of respect with Meres One. It was not necessary. It was a really egregious act in the end of the day.
B: Kind of at the beginning of this conversation, you referred to VARA, the Visual Artists Rights Act, which uses this very vague language to qualify certain art within this law, and I wonder if you could expand a little bit on how the 5Pointz case impacted how you think VARA might be interpreted going forward.
Renée: Well, I mean, I think that’s the role of the future cases and, just like copyright law is largely established through precedence, we will see that, as well, develop, and as it develops with cases, we will see the shape and kind of the contours of the law take place. And I think the only reason it seemed vague was because there was never, you know, a case that went to trial. And now we have a significant amount of precedence to look at and opinions to look at. You know, Judge Block's opinion is extremely thorough. It's quite brilliant. It touches on all of the current debates and questions from both the defense's perspective as well as from our, as plaintiffs, side. And so the various arguments and then it went up to the Second Circuit. So you have their opinions, which are very thorough, very well thought out, and I think, very measured, and then it was taken to the Supreme Court, and under notions of constitutionally vague, and basically, the Supreme Court did not agree to hear it, which means that reasserts and reaffirms and validates Judge Block's opinions and the Second Circuit's opinions. So I think now we have the beginning. It was vague before, but now we have quite a bit.
And, you know, I get calls from different parties and artists, and sometimes attorneys, and they want to, in five minutes, try out an argument on me which, you know, I'm, you know, I mean, it's a very specific law because it revolves around an artwork, and there's no other way to find protection. But the artwork has to, as you said, meet a bar, and the law is supposed to provide some kind of gatekeeping mechanism, as Judge Block called it in several of his opinion papers. So I think now it's not as vague, quite frankly, and I think we will see a couple things played out. I do know a lot of cases are settling. It will be interesting, some recent cases, how they play out if they go to court, and I think we're starting to see the shape of it. I think the idea, which seems vague at this point, is that the law is trying to not be too specific, because it wants to be able to evolve as culture evolves. And if you get too specific, naming out particular details of what is relevant culture, and what is meaningful culture, then you're obviously going to limit, because the law is never going to be more imaginative than artists. The law is trying to recognize that creatives and artists are more imaginative, right? It's a really interesting idea, because you don't necessarily need an art expert, You could be recognized by other arts professionals, as we discussed, and you can also be recognized, you know, by a cross section of society, but you just have to defend the logic of the recognition to a level that a jury or judge perceives as meeting the threshold. So I think, actually, that's a really amazing element. That's not written in the statute, but it is written through some of the past cases, and it is now part of the methodology that we undertook. So, it will be interesting to see that.
B: Wow, yeah.
Renée: I mean, there were some very profound philosophical questions that came up.
Angela: I think it's a really interesting law, because on the one hand, it's like protecting art in so many ways, but another hand, it is the question of a group of people deciding what is and is not good art and what is and is not worth protecting in a way that I don't love.
Renée: Yeah, so, if you think about the genesis of VARA, it really was on the coattails of the Richard Serra “Tilted Arc." But if we had VARA, we wouldn't have had “Tilted Arc” be destroyed, effectively, you know, because he had really a large swath of art professionals who had opined why the piece was important. But, the general public seemed to dislike the work. And you're right, that's a tough spot, because what you're saying is, like, what happens when there's a battle of taste? And the “Tilted Arc” is an example of that. Only now, when we look at the “Tilted Arc,” you know, or general public will look at the “Tilted Arc” and be like, "Wow, that's a masterpiece. He did this in 1990,” right? You know, he was sculpting a public space through the absence rather than the presence of material, right? That's what he was doing. He was making people aware of the public space by, you know, kind of using a very, like, an intervention of sculpture that cut through it. And, I mean, I think that's why there is three kinds of layers of the beta test, because what the courts are doing are saying, "We are not supposed to be the authorities on what is relevant in culture." And there are other bodies that are more important to recognize and listen to to validate what is relevant and culture. I mean, VARA does have an emphasis on preservation. I mean, that's what was essential to 5Pointz. These artists didn't even have the opportunity, although the building was being razed and completely destroyed, to rescue any of those pieces, and many of them, not all of them, but many of them could have been rescued—some of them very easily without an extreme amount of resources, and others could have been rescued by professional conservators. But the rest could have been documented. They could have been photographed and properly documented. And the building was so large, and many of those pieces appeared in very difficult spots, which is part of the connoisseurship of street art is, you're getting up and you're getting higher and you're challenging yourself to execute something, and there's a physicality and a performative element to street art. So those pieces were not necessarily easy to photograph after they were executed. And, you know, I think many artists and I know that the kind of strongly knit community would have very proactively at least tried to find the resources to get that done properly. And I actually think some institutions would have rose to the occasion and offered help. I mean, at the time, which doesn't really come out often in a lot of the press that kind of just like kind of glosses over a lot of the details, but Meres was very proactively trying to create it into an art organization, like a nonprofit, and was working with several individuals that had institutional backgrounds, very blue chip, institutional backgrounds, and trying to do that. So, I do believe that many people would have helped to save and preserve some of that work either in whole or in part, but all of that opportunity was lost. So, you know, it's not just about opining on a quality of qualitative basis, it's also—VARA is helping to try to preserve something when maybe art history hasn't necessarily caught up to contemporary culture. You know, I mean, not that Richard Serra wasn't respected in the, you know, in 1990, for the “Tilted Arc,” but I think that he wasn't considered, you know, the mainstream master he is now. I mean, you know, he's more of a household name now, through years of very, very grueling and productive, you know, exhibitions and challenging works that he has, you know, undertaken throughout the world, so he's now a world renowned artist. But we did: we lost something major, and it was not only taken down, it was not preserved properly and decontextualized.
B: Yeah, I recall that work in particular, he created it for that space.
Renée: Yeah, I mean, it was just, I mean, to him, it was irrelevant. But many of those pieces on 5Pointz were very site specific. And, you know, the artists being up there speaking to their practice and speaking to their visions and why they did what was really important. And I think the law recognizes artists' voices and that in itself is a good legal precedent.
Angela: I think the fact that this case is what was used for VARA, I think, is really important, especially because it's like, it's, you know, graffiti. Not not in the pejorative sense. But you know…
Renée. That's why I call it street art.
Angela: Yeah, street art.
Renée: Because it's not illegal.
Angela: But being street art, and not necessarily being something that everyone unanimously agrees is, like, worth preserving, and they should have at least been given the time and the space to document and preserve. I think that's important in setting a good precedent.
Renée: The idea of graffiti being associated with only vandalism is a kind of outmoded connotation and association that most mainstream culture people don't think about anymore, seeing most fashion labels have been using and videos, and, I mean, it's just endless, how mainstream street art and the graffiti art form has been used to create, like, an aesthetic of “cool.” And you know, it's a really, really relevant art form to younger generations. So that was a very frail line we had to walk to show that this was not vandalism and the artists were not vandals in any way, shape, or form. And I think they did that beautifully.
Angela: Thanks for listening to part one of this two-part episode. You can listen to part two anywhere you find podcasts. We hope you enjoy!
Thanks for listening to the AMT Lab podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and to leave a comment. If you would like to learn more, go to amt-lab.org. That is A-M-T dash L-A-B .org. Or, you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at Tech in the Arts, or on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn at Arts Management and Technology Lab. You can find the resources that we referenced today in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
[Musical outro fades in]