Survey Says

So the storm that recently rocked the DMV—I'm talking about Mera Rubell's 36-hour studio-visit whirlwind through town—has been the subject of a whole lot of ink. On Isabel Manalo's (aptly named) Studio Visit page on Facebook, artists have been debating specifically some of the conclusions that Jessica Dawson arrived at in the Washington Post.

I had my own embed with Rubell and wrote down my impressions for Art in America, and you can read that here. It's not possible for me to compare my experience with Dawson's since we went at different times, saw different artists, and so on, and I don't mean to try. It's clear enough from the response that artists, some of whom didn't participate in Rubell's studio crawl, were frustrated by Dawson's comments—I imagine, specifically, these:

Yet by the end of her trip, Mera came away with some stark impressions, impressions Washington art insiders already know but are loath to discuss.

[ . . . ]

Mera's troll through Washington's art warrens was akin to Santa visiting the Island of Misfit Toys.

[ . . . ]

Not so in Washington, where no one knows who's on top and everyone is on the defensive. . . . There's a reason artists move to New York.

Dawson's conclusions are backed up by her reporting, which is, I think, important to note: She's a galleries critics and afforded a personal editorial voice, but in this regard she's writing as a reporter observing an assignment. And really, when you think about it, the assignment at the heart of the story is a cynical exercise. Here is a powerful art collector touring the city in what is being billed as an exceptional enterprise, as if she were an auditor trying to determine what's wrong with the books or a laparoscopic instrument being used to suss out a cyst in the body.

That's one way to consider it. Another way is to consider that visiting 36 randomly selected studios can't possibly give Rubell, or anybody else, an insight into the city's art scene. Thirty-six studios of some 200 applicants—of some vastly larger total number of artists and studios in the DMV area—is not a significant sample size. So if 36 randomly selected artists demonstrate some deflating combination of cynicism, introversion, and incompetence, it doesn't prove anything about the city's art scene.

If Dawson and I reported what we saw and experienced, bringing no prejudices one way or another to bear on Rubell's visits, then what we've done is report this event and its significance—and that's pretty much it. Reporting this event is not the same as writing up the result of an audit of the city's art scene, which is worth remembering in a conversation about whether a reporter brought an ax to grind for this story. A slanted judgment one way or another about Mera Rubell's experience does not say much about the city's art scene because the sample size in this case is relatively tiny.

Posted by Kriston at December 22, 2009 10:00 AM