Maybe I’m just sick of all the obfuscation, double-speak, propaganda, and algorithms, but can we make artist statements more human again?
Sure, institutions need to wrap your work in an understandable, convincing and/or justifying bow. Marketing runs the world right now, and people want to know about your work quickly. But it goes further than explaining your work and process. In artist statements today, you must also answer subtext:
- What’s your “angle”? Identity?
- Is your work marketable and sellable?
So you take all these emotions and intense creative experiences and condense them into a few mandatory marketable words. And the resulting statement may or may not even make sense. But it doesn’t matter. Say things enough, and some people will believe you. If you don’t realize that in 2026, I don’t know what to tell you.
OK, I’m off the soapbox!
I wanted to dig into why modern artist statements likely formed in the postwar United States because I couldn’t find a concrete answer when writing my own. This series dives into artist statements and their history. But they end up as a lens to discuss something else: how capitalism has seeped into language itself, turning art and artistic spaces into another grindstone for selling oneself. By examining this perennial friction between the establishment and artist, which morphs with new ideologies and technologies, we can learn lessons for the present. And for whatever is next.
Along the way, we’ll:
- Encounter some sweet, sweet William Blake shit talking
- How a receipt from an Isamu Noguchi sale perhaps became the artist statement turning point into loftiness
- Argue that a mostly forgotten woman created the modern artist statement (and became your favorite artist’s favorite curator)
- How a destroyed Diego Rivera mural split the New York art scene
- Explore a short-lived Abstract Expressionism magazine that thumbed its nose at viewers’ standards
- Look at the evolving language around Basquiat
I’ve split this into manageable posts and will link here when the rest are published.
- Mid-Century Individualism: Birth of the Modern Artist Statement
- A Destroyed Diego Rivera and an Ideological Cementation
First, let’s go back a few centuries.
Manifestos: Precursor to Artist Statements
Henri Matisse once declared, “Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.”
So, how did we arrive at a point where an artist’s tongue is as important as their hand (or mouth, or foot, or other device)? That, in addition to creating art, they also need to be able to speak about and justify it. To the point that in 2008, 90% of North American art schools and programs taught writing artist statements as part of their curriculum.
People have tried to retroactively apply artist statements to established historic artists, but it’s artists talking about their work. There is a difference between artist statements written for PR, exhibitions, or marketing purposes and an artist elaborating on their craft in personal journals, letters, or public interviews.
However, I think manifestos hold a kernel of what the artist statement became in the mid-twentieth century.
A Realist Manifesto – 1855
Gustave Courbet, forever shocking the world to this day, wrote his Realist Manifesto in 1855. In it, Courbet states:
The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary.
[…]
I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of art for art’s sake. No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.
Fiercely independent, Courbet’s manifesto stands out as a nascent stab at artistic individuality. He states his goal, his methods, and, importantly, his uniqueness. Courbet opposes systematic pigeonholing and, throughout his life, resisted the academy and institutions.
Traditional Neo-Classical Discourse
Such a manifesto must have been shocking to the art world. Institutional leaders favored traditionalism, not individualism
Compare Rousseau’s thoughts to those of Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy in England.
Reynolds, after much royal ass-kissery, states in 1769 in his first Discourse on Art:
I would chiefly recommend that an implicit obedience to the rules of art, as established by the great masters, should be exacted from the young students. That those models, which have passed through the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and infallible guides as subjects for their imitation, not their criticism.
Follow the rules! Tradition! Academy or bust.
I had to choose this example of an institution because the image of William Blake scribbling bitchy thoughts in the margins of Discourse on Art is just too good: “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.”
Blake takes aim and absolutely fires:
Having spent the Vigour of my Youth and Genius under the Oppression of Sir Joshua and his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment and as much as could possibly be Without Bread, The Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation and Resentment.
We love a colorful rebel.
20th Century: Manifestos Galore
Fast forward to the early twentieth century, and Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists, the Bauhaus movement, and other artist and literary collective groups have established manifestos with rules, goals, and even calls for revolution.
Have a guess who is who. Answers below the next image:
- We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
- Architects, sculptors, painters – we all must return to craftsmanship!
- To impose your ABC is a natural thing—hence deplorable.
- Within the limits where they operate (or are thought to operate) dreams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization.
I could dig more into 20th-century manifestos. But with just those four alone, a clear shaping of artistic identity through language surfaces. But it’s still a collective, not individual. And, all of these manifestos are declarations against the status quo. Well into today. Artist statements today, on the other hand, are frequently very much part of the status quo. They weren’t always.
Answers: 1. Futurists 2. Bauhaus 3. Dada 4. Surrealist
Next, the first modern artist statements explored through an Isamu Noguchi piece. Like the piece, it’s a twisty tale.
