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Mitchell Johnson is an artist
Mitchell Johnson
Every few months or so, I discover that another friend of mine has picked up a stray copy of the New York Times Magazine. I know this because they always text me the same photo, which, as far as I can tell, appears in every issue of the magazine: a colorful, two-dimensional painting, overlaid with my own name. Mitchell Johnson.
It’s an advertisement. In fine print, it says you can go to his website or request a full catalog of paintings via email. I looked at his website, which says some very impressive things, including that his paintings have “appeared in” the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Artforum. It’s a fun way of saying he buys advertisements in all these publications; I could not find reviews, profiles, or actual editorial content about him in any of them. The ads often give dates of future exhibitions, usually in his hometown of Menlo Park, CA, and they always include his Instagram handle: mitchell_johnson_artist.
The Instagram handle, I’d argue, is a perfect metonym for MJ. Let me explain: the word “artist” hanging off the end does exactly the same thing as Joe Biden’s campaign signs. You know, the ones that read, “Joe Biden. President,” in thick type. The word “president” appears underneath his name like it’s a simple statement of fact, and not an obvious plea. If he were actually the president, he wouldn’t need a sign.
I’m not saying MJ’s not an “artist” (far be it from me to gate-keep this). What I’m saying is that Mitchell Johnson clearly wants to be an artist, and the fact that he chooses to say he’s an artist every week in the New York Times Magazine comes off as a bit heavy handed. Telling people that you’re an artist is sort of like telling people you have a girlfriend—it’s still telling, which is worse than showing (so I’ve been told). But then again, this seems to have worked well enough for Joe Biden, so all in all it’s probably not a bad strategy.
Art by Carrie Klein
You know that book, Just Kids, by Patti Smith? What no one mentions about it is that it’s incredibly annoying. I picked it up a couple years ago and had to stop reading after the first 50 pages, because she kept going on about how she just knew she was different from the others, she knew, deep down, that she was an artist. While Mapplethorpe was realizing he was gay, she was coming to grips with the fact that working a regular 9-to-5 was just not what she was cut out for, and she just had to go make experimental videos down by the East River or whatever. Give me a break!
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I’m no more bothered by MJ’s assertion that he’s an artist than Patti Smith’s assertion that she’s an artist, it’s only more noticeable because he’s lesser known. Statements about what is and isn’t art, and who is or isn’t an artist, tend also to be statements on the quality of said art. i.e. only good art is truly art, only good artists are truly artists. But beyond questions of quality, it seems to me that this investment in the identity of an “artist” (good or bad) is conceited at best, and exclusionary at worst. But we still believe in this distinction, and that’s why it feels like a bad look when MJ—who is objectively, factually, an artist—decides to market himself as such.
I went on MJ’s Instagram and looked at his paintings. They’re bright and blocky, and the paint has a pleasantly rough and smeared-over look, like jam on toast. Were he to be reviewed in the New York Times, his subject matter might be described as provincial. Nice little streets, a lifeguard’s chair, a picnic table (painted in several color-combos), a straight-up white picket fence, the shingled roofs of houses cascading toward the ocean. He seems preoccupied with painting the outsides of houses. His paintings are mostly of California or Truro, MA, the two places where he spends most of his time. Some are of Italy. All locations that seem to lend themselves to the quaint, sun-washed style he’s cultivated.
He uses light well; the outside of one house casts a shadow onto the outside of another house in just the right shade of blue, which complements the line of the ocean in the background.
I wish I could say that it was obvious, to me, why Mitchell Johnson is a minor artist and not a major one, why he advertises in Artforum but has not, to my knowledge, been reviewed. My hunch is that it is because his paintings—even the cityscapes—feel uncritically suburban, and that the elite art world prizes work that is more shocking, more unnerving, even if equally uncritical.
But it’s harder to sell paintings if they’re not nice to look at, and I can only assume that for Mitchell, if he can afford to purchase weekly ads in the New York Times Magazine et al, if he has a house in California and another in Truro, he’s selling quite a few. He’s probably selling them at high prices, to wealthy people. His paintings of New York City are the ones in which his market feels the most obvious. Something in their sunny, clean pleasantness makes it a little too easy to picture them in a stark, newly-renovated apartment in the Lower East Side, MJ’s luxury pastel rendering of the city a perfect fit for some optimistic gentrifier.
And yet MJ’s art goes un-critiqued, as does, for the most part, the market in which it circulates. For all the criticism levied at the super high-end art market, where a Basquiat can sell for millions of dollars to some hedge-fund manager or oil exec, much less attention is paid to the art a couple steps down, the kind of art that ends up selling to dentists in Beverly Hills or divorce lawyers in Newton, the kind of art that gets advertised to readers of the New York Times Magazine.
But the kind of art MJ’s making is a much larger part of the economy, saturating much more of our everyday lives. And this market is a buyer’s one. Whereas the really elite, Basquiat-type artists are allowed to drive the economy of taste, artists like MJ are stuck in the backseat, offering suggestions. Art chases after money.
I’ve Googled my name before. The other notable Mitchell Johnsons I’ve encountered are a pretty good Australian cricket player and a school shooter from the 90s. In this group, I must admit I have the most affinity with the painter Mitchell Johnson. As I write this, in my third month of unemployment, as I doggedly attempt to get a job in a “creative” industry, I’m aware of the irony of critiquing this artist’s self-promotion.
To attempt to carve out a livelihood from artistic work is to constantly negotiate with capital. Sometimes I can’t help but feel like Good Art is simply what we call the art that ignores this fact, and Bad Art is only that which makes the mistake of feeling a little too honest. The mistake of stating, with simple confidence, here I am. I look nice on a wall. What more could you ask for?
I’ve been to Truro; it’s beautiful. The sunsets do, in fact, gleam off the sides of the white houses, turning them gold, casting blue shadows on the yard. In the distance, the sea is solid and flat.