Walter Robinson’s big question: What do they want?

Walter Robinson played an important role in the New York art scene for over five decades, and on Sunday, February 9, he passed away at his New York home. A piece in Artnet reported that the cause was liver cancer. Walter loved artists and the art world, and he believed that anyone could have a piece of it. You want to be a writer? Go ahead and write. You want to make a TV show? Get a camera. You want to be a painter? Just paint. He was a hub of that world and never seemed to lose interest in the wild schemes and crazy machinations that emerged from it. At press previews, openings, and of course on Instagram, he invariably had something amusing to say. Sure, he was witty, but his words also carried weight, penetrating the zeitgeist. In a 2014 Artspace interview he talked about the freedom of being a critic in contrast to the limitations of being an artist. “A critic talks about everything and anything, but an artist can talk only about one thing: him- or herself. A critic, especially one who works for a website that posts daily, can have their say every single day. Most artists work alone in their studios and are able to show their art infrequently, maybe once or twice a year.” In remembrance of Walter, we are reprising this article from September 5, 2024, which recounts a memorable visit I had with him in his Long Island City studio. It is meant as a tribute to Walter and his legacy and a reminder of the enduring impact he had on those who knew him. –SB

Contributed by Sharon Butler / What happened to all the conceptual painters? I’m thinking of artists, like On Kawara, who were more interested in ideas and process than in developing traditional painterly chops, for whom painting was about more than basic human emotion and formalist exploration of color, line, and shape. By the 1990s, many of the painting-thinkers had stopped painting and moved into other disciplines – relational aesthetics, screen-based work, photography, and installation projects. For the relatively few who continued to paint, the starting point remained a proposition rather than a vague if compelling exploration of the subconscious. Walter Robinson, though disguised as a figurative painter, is one.

Like several painters I admire, Robinson is also a noted art writer and editor, having been news editor of Art in America and founding editor of Artnet, so it was a twofold pleasure to visit him this past week in his LIC studio. Over the past sixty years, desire has been his subject and he thinks a lot about classic distillations of that impulse, rendering images from the covers of dime-store romance novels, cigarette packs, whiskey bottles (though he’s been sober for years), cheeseburgers, teenage bathing-suit models from mail-order catalogs, images from sex-worker ads, and more. The lurid, 1950s pulp-fiction style manages to be both self-conscious and self-mocking.  

With decades at the canvas under his belt, his painting skill is estimable. Whether in large-scale paintings or small studies on paper, his work has a lively, effortless quality. He’s deft and easy with a brush and correspondingly prolific – his studio is full of new stuff. One of his key criteria for choosing imagery is simply whether it’s funny, which yields an abundant and improbable mix of people, objects, and art historical references. For the past two years, he has been composing prompts for AI to generate images. Some he paints, some he prints straight to canvas via inkjet, and others he sends overseas to be hand-painted by Chinese artists.

To a writer, starting with a written prompt seems perfectly rational. Lately, I’ve seen artists’ statements that they used AI to write, and my first thought was, why not feed it back into AI to make an image and see if it resembles their paintings. In a recent New Yorker article titled “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art,” Ted Chiang makes a case that AI couldn’t produce art because it could never have the experience of being a unique human being with a set of experiences unique to them. Robinson disagrees. Most people have no idea precisely what goes into making a painting, but it is clear that conceptualization is involved in the process – and writing a prompt for AI is certainly a conceptual undertaking. Think of Sol Lewitt’s enormous wall paintings, based on short written directions licensed by organizations that are then allowed to hire artists approved by the Lewitt Estate to make temporary murals under their supervision. Robinson concedes that AI has crude practical utility insofar as it saves time. But for him it also generates unexpected metaphors and uncanny image combinations.

Circling back to the notion of desire, Robinson, as an under-recognized Pictures Generation artist, may have once used a nostalgic style to lampoon (rather than explore) yearning itself. But currently he seems to be thinking a bit more earnestly not about yearning, but about what other people want. This strikes me as a novel direction for a conceptual artist. Except, of course, for “People’s Choice,” in which Russian-born American conceptualist artists Komar and Melamid created paintings based on public opinion polls, conceptual artists have been famously indifferent to sentimentality, nostalgia, or traditional forms of beauty deployed to seduce audiences. Over the years, popular ideas of beauty and desire have shifted as viewers and artists alike have found it in basic materials like rusted steel and knotty plywood and processes like pouring and burning. For Robinson, this flux makes the subject all the more alluring.

He is particularly interested in desire as it relates to painters as commercial actors and, in turn, their collectors. He no longer contributes regularly to art magazines or online journals, but he does indulge – and is known for – pithy squibs about art that he publishes on Instagram. At the end of each short blast, he lists the prices of the work under consideration. This practice runs counter to an old taboo in the art world: back in the day, no one talked about money or making work that people wanted to buy. But, as Robinson recognizes, attitudes have changed, with money now unabashedly front-and-center. From his standpoint, that is not necessarily bad, for it is an economist’s truism that sale prices signal the degree of desire that buyers have felt toward the artists’ work in the past. They also provide rich fodder for Robinson’s ongoing effort to probe the phenomenon as it has evolved among artists and their audiences.

He currently has several bodies of work under way at once. The most intriguing to me is a series of portraits of artists in their studios. We have all seen this type of image, usually in the form of professionally produced photographs posted by galleries on Instagram for artists’ exhibitions or perhaps their birthdays. They embed a heartbreakingly ambivalent cliché. Some of Robinson’s AI-derived images feature sexy babes holding brushes in weird, unlikely ways. They are uncomplicatedly funny and, on a deeper level, socially telling. Two of the larger paintings feature AI images of old white male artists, with white hair and long beards, wearing painting-spattered clothes, one in front of a wall full of smaller portraits, the other in front of salad paintings that resemble work Robinson himself has made. These are more straightforward, using a vernacular style lacking the dramatic light of the overtly pulpy images, but they still flirt with notions of faux authenticity, stereotypes, expectations, and role playing.

As we looked through piles of paintings on paper, I fell for a small one of a woman who was painting blobs, and whose shirt was covered with blobs as well. I asked Robinson how much it cost, and he wouldn’t tell me, which was sort of curious for someone who posts everyone else’s prices. I suppose the mere fact that I wanted to buy it might have been enough – he could add that data point to his mental record.

Just before I left the studio, I asked him if he was going to the art fairs this week. He said, yes, that he’d been given tickets.

“Maybe I’ll be able to crack the great mystery of the art world,” he said, chuckling.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The secret of success.”

About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.