Summer, 2006
Few art collectors have achieved the notoriety of Bill Arnett. The subject of a controversial episode of the popular American television show 60 Minutes, and currently the focus of a sensationalized ‘non-fiction novel,’ The Last Folk Hero, Arnett has been portrayed for years by some as a dark and satanic figure, a "king of outsider art" who had taken advantage of unsuspecting folk artists and manipulated the art market. He has recently been viewed as a hero after orchestrating the wildly popular exhibition of African American quills, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend.
Central to this retreat was an attempt to deny growing class divisions and the massive immigration of peoples of non Western-European origin. Middle and upper class Americans sought refuge in a myth of cultural homogeneity, the idea of the great melting pot of democracy. Yet the model for this American democratic identity was white and Anglo Saxon, excluding people of color. This exclusionary view was reflected in American folk art. Said by museum curator Holger Cahill to be the representative art of America, folk art was made largely by Americans of Anglo Saxon descent.
As Americans became more uncomfortable about the present, they put a high value on a romanticized past, and this imaginary past became the setting for American folk art. Said by Cahill to have flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the transformations of modern American life, folk art was promoted as an emblem of a golden age when life was simpler, more meaningful and more fulfilling.
Fascination with primitivism was a third way Americans reacted to change. Viewing the lower classes of pre-industrial times with patronizing admiration, American elites eulogized them as simple, unsophisticated people who lead an ideal and carefree existence. Folk art gave value to this group. According to Cahill, American folk art was the representative art of the American nation because it was ‘primitive in the sense that it is the simple, unaffected and childlike expression of men and women who had little or no school training in art.’ [1]
Thus folk art collecting become an elitist social ritual that extolled a mythology created to avoid the complicated dilemmas of modern American life. So powerful and pervasive is this mythology that in recent years interest in other types of objects have been promoted in ways that connect them, in part, to the original folk art paradigm.
In the 1970s, ‘contemporary folk art’ and ‘outsider art’ become popular in the United States. Although different from folk art in significant ways, they nevertheless share with folk art the romanticization of the socially disempowered. And while they do not place the creation of the artifacts they venerate in a romanticized past, the advocates of both art forms often remove these objects from modern circumstances by stripping them of their original social context to view them either in terms of aesthetic qualities, or as emblems of creativity beyond the bounds of culture. And this brings us back to Bill Arnett, whose activities have disturbed and even outraged some in the folk and outsider art worlds for years.
Arnett became infamous in November of 1993 when he was featured in a segment of the television show 60 Minutes called ‘The Tin Man.’ Interviewed along with Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and other artists whom he had supported and whose work he had collected, Arnett was characterized as a ‘fanatic . . . the king of outsider art’ and it was implied that he had cheated artists and manipulated the folk art market for his own gain. The show almost ruined the lives of Arnett and Dial. Suddenly a pariah in the art world, Arnett received many threatening and menacing phone calls, and Dial’s previously ascendant career went into a tailspin, as major exhibitions of his work were cancelled in the U.S. and Europe.
Arnett’s disgrace was the result of an orchestrated art world effort. In The Last Folk Hero, Dietz shows that Arnett was targeted by a group of dealers, collectors and museum directors who told 60 Minutes that he was cheating and abusing artists. Although researchers for the TV show could find only one person, artist Bessie Harvey, who would charge Arnett with any specific wrongdoing (an accusation she would later recant and for which she would apologize), the producers and interviewer Morley Safer continued in their plan to cast Arnett as a villain.
The lynch pin for the accusations against Arnett was that he held title to Thornton Dial’s house, a fact which was presented on the show as a 60 Minutes ‘discovery’ unknown even to Dial. Yet this information was already widely known not only by Dial but by many in the community, having been published in a magazine interview with Arnett years before. It had also been mentioned by Arnett himself earlier in the 60 Minutes interview. In truth, Arnett did hold the title to Dial’s house, but only because no bank would offer Dial a mortgage, and so Arnett had refinanced his own home to come up with the money.
As badly as 60 Minutes maligned Bill Arnett, it treated Thornton Dial even more outrageously, for it presented Dial as Arnett’s toady, in stereotypical racist terms. Represented as an ignorant and simple-minded buffoon, a shuffling, grinning Sambo, Dial was presented as incapable of being a significant artist and lacking the intelligence to understand he was being abused by his white ‘handler.’ Describing his experience with 60 Minutes, Dial later commented: ‘The television person talk about me in my face like white folks used to talk about their servants in the same room, hurtful talk like they ain’t there.’ Yet the 60 Minutes presentation was no more sensationalized than the new book The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit, by Andrew Dietz, which presents the folk art art as a turbulent and exploitative melodrama full of stock characters–naive artists, shady art dealers, high rolling collectors, and corrupt museum directors The result is a story that is as much pulp fiction as art history in which Arnett, Holley and Dial struggle against the odds to finally find public acceptance and redemption. The three central characters are all stereotypes, but Arnett is presented as a foul-mouthed, paranoid zealot who swaggers through the pages spewing four-letter epithets and complaining about how people are out to get him; he is like a Frankenstein monster in which some of the original parts remain recognizable but the figure is no longer human.
However, in the end, The Last Folk Hero presents a remarkably positive view of Bill Arnett. Likening him, and his four sons who work with him, to the renowned Lomax family who discovered, documented and saved American indigenous music, Dietz recounts numerous stories of how Arnett generously supported the artists with whom he worked. After investigating the charges that Arnett had taken advantage of artists or manipulated the marketplace, Dietz offers consistent evidence to the contrary. Arnett became a scapegoat, Dietz asserts, when he worked with artists like Dial to raise the value of their artwork above what many collectors were willing to pay. Moreover, says Dietz, many collectors and dealers were infuriated when Arnett began to provide ‘outsider’ artists with archival art supplies and support their work financially. Instead, says Dietz, these collectors preferred that Dial, for example, remain a true ‘outsider’ . . . and create within his isolated, poverty-stricken conditions.’ [2]
Dietz offers testimony of only one transgression by Arnett, a story told by Atlanta collector Lucinda Bunnen regarding how Arnett allegedly once paid artist Ronald Lockett one hundred dollars in cash for a car-load of art.[3] However, on receiving an advanced copy of The Last Folk Hero, Bunnen, in a letter to Dietz, stated that the incident had not happened and asked that her comment be removed from any future editions of the book.
An important question remains. If 60 Minutes and Andrew Dietz could find nothing substantial with which to charge Arnett, why is he still a lightning rod in the art world? One answer is that in some ways Arnett is his own worst enemy. Passionately committed to the art and artists with whom he works, he constantly, and sometimes abrasively, champions them and their art. Almost obsessive in his determination, he is single-minded in his pursuit of the recognition he believes belongs to African American artists in what he insists is a legitimate field of art, and he is not shy about pointing out the value of this field to anyone who will listen. Finally, Arnett amassed an enormous and definitive collection in part by paying the artists with whom he worked a monthly sum to ensure that he was given first choice of their art, an agreement which provoked charges that he controlled the artists and the market.
Yet there are more powerful motivations For Arnett’s detractors. Arnett has challenged the power and position of many in the fine and folk art worlds by calling into question the meaning of folk art and the system of hierarchy and identity that it represents, Instead of treating the African American artists with whom he has worked as primitive folk artists whose art is a simple, childlike and naive expression, Arnett has loudly announced that this art is the qualitative, intellectual and historical equal to Anglo-European derived fine art. ‘Black vernacular art’, he says, ‘is the most important cultural phenomenon of our time, This is like the Italian Renaissance in its scope, breadth, and depth. It’s just that the people are the wrong color.’[4] And by championing an art which tells the often ignored story of African American history, Arnett has supported the presentation of a vision of the American past which is anything but idealized. Anchored in the fundamental experiences of slavery and racism, it is a view of America in which democracy and freedom are only hollow and ironic fantasies.
Arnett has challenged not only art history but American history itself, demanding a rethinking of the nature and hierarchical relationships of American art and society. This rethinking has both intellectual and political implications. For a new view of art history would upset both the folk art and established art worlds as well as undermine the social and economic position and power of those people who benefit from them. As Arnett and his adversaries recognize, what is at stake in their struggle is nothing less than who has the power to determine what is American art and who benefits from this power—ideologically, politically, and financially.
It is interesting to note that ‘The Tin Man’ was not the first time 60 Minutes had profiled the art world. A few months earlier Morley Safer had been blasted by art world cognoscenti after he aired a segment which accused the contemporary art world of defrauding the public by encouraging the belief that almost anything could be art. However, there was hardly a peep when Safer maligned Arnett and Dial, outsiders to the world of fine art who represented a threat to its hegemony. Indeed, after his first encounter with the art world, Safer was bent on resurrecting his image as a champion of the underdog by painting Arnett as villain and Dial as hapless victim.
In the end, the popular response to Bill Arnett says more about Americans as a people than it does about Arnett. Over a century ago the brilliant black intellectual and activist W.E.B. DuBois observed that the problem of the modern world is the problem of the colour line.[5] Whether we will finally rewrite our art history to fully include the art of vernacular African American artists like Thornton Dial will be a sign of whether we are willing to cross that line and begin to create a society in which democracy and freedom are available to all.
Eugene Metcalf is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University in Ohio. The author at numerous books and articles about American folk and outsider art, he is one of the editors of the recently published volume Thornton Dial in the 21st Century.
Notes:
1. Holger Cahill. ‘American Folk Art.’ In American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750-1900. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932) p.5.
2. Andrew Dietz. The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit. (Atlanta: Ellis Lane Press, 2006) p. 104.
3. Dietz. p. 138.
4. Dietz. Front cover flap.
5. W .E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk.