Inversion Art Interview: Kathy Battista, Author, Curator, Educator
Author and curator Kathy Battista tells us how she would identify the art stars of tomorrow and why she's bullish on the Paris art scene.
When my co-founder, Jonathan Neil, joined Inversion Art back in May of 2021, he brought an incredible network of experts along with him. One of those experts was author, curator and educator Kathy Battista, who joined the Inversion Art advisory board and has been providing us with keen insights ever since. Kathy’s academic and professional pursuits are notably centered on feminist art, with a particular emphasis on performance and body-oriented practices. She has authored influential works such as New York New Wave: The Legacy of Feminist Art in Emerging Practice and Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London.
Kathy is frequently bouncing between the US and Europe, and she has deep experience operating in London and elsewhere. In this interview, she shares her thoughts on the importance of artists maintaining an international community, which communities she’s excited about in 2024, and how she would identify the “art stars of tomorrow”.
Kathy Battista
Writer, educator, and curator specializing in feminist art and performance. Founder of Sotheby’s MA Program in Contemporary Art.
There have been studies that show that an artist's international network can have a bigger impact on their success than many other factors. As someone who has a massive presence in both Europe and the US, have you seen this play out in real world examples, and what are the best international communities of artists that you're aware of?
This is an important topic. Artists are often the best marketing for their friends and colleagues. When I go to a city that I haven’t previously visited and am working from tabula rasa, I always ask an artist for recommendations of studios to visit. These networks of artists and curators are essential.
What I have been most surprised by is how many artists are successful in their home countries and then virtually unknown in the US. Some have won major prizes and accolades, show with important galleries, and yet still don’t have a strong international presence. As a curator and through my writing I like to highlight these artists as I feel they have so much to contribute to an international dialogue.
I think the communities of artists are always in flux. For example, Beijing, Berlin, and Leipzig had great artist communities in the 1990s. Berlin has gotten more expensive, the Chinese contemporary market has corrected, and there has been increased focus on cities with developing markets such as Dakar and Mumbai. As cities ebb and flow, so do the artist communities due to cost of rent and living. Paris is a great example: it was exceptionally vibrant in the early 20th century, then World War II caused a mass emigration to the US and other parts of the world. It felt a bit sleepy for contemporary art for decades; however, recently due to Brexit and other factors it is having a major revival. Paris Plus, established in 2022, has put a new focus on the city and so many international galleries have opened spaces there. For me Paris is very exciting at the moment.
I think most fine art educators and students would agree that there isn't a sufficient amount of business training or education provided to fine art students. Do you think it's important for artists to think of their practice as a business, and have you ever seen a really intent focus on the business side of a practice create demonstrably bigger outcomes, positive OR negative?
Many art schools resist teaching the business side of the arts because they want their students to focus on developing their practice, which I believe is great in concept, but not in practical terms. One artist who has remarked on this is Titus Kaphar, a Yale MFA graduate who acknowledged his lack of professional skills upon entering the art world and established the NXTHVN artist and curator fellowship to help other graduates with this transition from school to professional life.
I believe it is important for all creative practitioners—artists, curators, writers, musicians, etc—to think of their practices as businesses or brands. For many, this is challenging as--myself included--the administration side of being in the art world is sometimes a dark science and one that is much less interesting than making art, writing, or creating. However, it is a necessity to know how the business works to be able to survive within the ecosystem.
As far as artists who have focused on business, we can go as far back as Renaissance workshops or more recently to Andy Warhol, who ran a well-oiled machine of a studio. In the past decades Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons can be considered in this realm, producing objects from toys to multi-million-dollar sculptures. However, both artists have had serious financial issues. No matter how financially successful a studio is, expanding the business carries the same risks it does in the larger economic systems, and is equally sensitive to economic and geopolitical changes.
The business side of art has also been interrogated by artists such as Hans Haacke, Christoph Buchel, Carey Young, and Sarah Meyohas. These artists, for example Haacke with his contract, or Meyohas’s Bitchcoin project, have successfully integrated financial algorithms and rules into their practices, which I find endlessly fascinating. The collision of art and business within a practice is something that should be employed more often as both are so much about the psychology of society at any given moment.
Given your role with the Architectural Association and vast knowledge of traditional fine art, do you think the business needs of fine artists and those of architects have much in common, and what kind of support systems do you think that up and coming architects need post-graduation to achieve their greatest potential?
This is a big question! There are some things that artists and architects have in common, for example the need for a working space and the expansion and contraction of teams for certain projects. While architects have the option of salaried jobs upon graduation, to run one’s own studio is immensely tenuous and often even starchitects often don’t make the kind of salaries that we think they do. Architecture, like art, is a career that one undertakes for the sheer necessity to create.
Architects need so much support upon graduation and like artists, they are dependent on patrons. I remember when Herzog de Meuron and MVRDV were young offices and the scrappiness of what they did. It’s always exciting to see these practices grow and succeed, and many times there is a partner or CFO that is taken on who can help grow the practice in a sustainable and logical way. For example, when Charles Renfro became a partner at Diller Scofidio Renfro we saw so many more built projects come to fruition.
One note to add here is that architecture has been even more male-dominated than the art world. I challenge you to name more than a handful of female architects who run their own offices. And in academic settings we are finally seeing, for example with Deborah Burke at Yale, women becoming Deans of Schools. I think it is even more difficult in architecture than art as in recent years everyone wants women artists, especially older overlooked figures.
What are some skills or knowledge that a great curator needs that a great art advisor does not, and vice versa?
A curator, in addition to a good eye and academic skills, needs to practice diplomacy. They are like artist wranglers, there as a middle woman when the gallery or museum is resistant to ideas and there to keep the artists’ ideas intact. Art advisors, like curators, need a great eye, but they don’t and really shouldn’t be working directly with artists. The great art advisors also know how to do and run a business. I think curators touch upon these aspects but don’t carry the ultimate financial responsibilities that advisors do.
If you were asked to curate a show of artists in the late-emerging and mid-career categories who you believe might be the future art stars of tomorrow, what would you look for in both their work and the person?
I always look for work that feels innovative and excites me in some way. It might be the use of material, the method of production or the concept behind the work. It is a certain je ne sais quoi that I can’t explain. It just hits you in the gut. For example, I remember seeing Firelei Baez’s tiny drawings at her degree show in NYC and really feeling strongly about them. The palette, their connection to her Caribbean heritage, etc. It’s hard to say why but I was just so moved by these tiny works.
There has been a lot of focus on figurative painting in the past decade. At present I would look for works that offer new approaches to this genre or are made in a completely different genre. For example, during COVID I got obsessed with contemporary still life, which seemed very out of fashion but exciting at that moment as a logical end result of being stuck in domestic settings for over a year.
As far as the person, I always think the best artists are those that I feel couldn’t exist in the world in any other way. If I feel that the artist must make art to stay alive, I’m always more interested in them. It’s that drive, which perhaps can also be a major detriment, that makes them so special.