"I have both exploited and been exploited in the print field"
About this Quote
A confession that lands less like guilt and more like a wry ledger entry: in printmaking, nobody stays innocent for long. Red Grooms frames the “print field” as an ecosystem of transactions where appetite cuts both ways. The verb choice is the point. “Exploited” is deliberately harsh, the kind of word you expect in labor politics, not studio talk. Dropping it into the genteel language of editions and galleries punctures the romance of the artist as pure maker. Grooms is telling you that prints are art and commerce fused at the seam.
The subtext is double-sided, like the medium itself. Printmaking multiplies images, and multiplication invites markets: publishers, printers, dealers, collectors, and the machinery of promotion. An artist can “exploit” that system by leveraging editions for reach, cash flow, and visibility. But the same reproducibility makes the artist more replaceable, more easily packaged. The industry can “exploit” the artist through unfavorable splits, loss of control over proofs and distribution, or by treating the work as a product line rather than a practice.
Context matters: Grooms emerges from the postwar American art world where Pop, mass media, and spectacle blur the boundary between high art and commercial culture. His own work thrives on that blur - bright, crowded, theatrical. So the line reads like self-portraiture: he’s not posing as victim or villain. He’s mapping a realist’s understanding of the print world’s moral economy, where complicity is often the admission price for being seen.
The subtext is double-sided, like the medium itself. Printmaking multiplies images, and multiplication invites markets: publishers, printers, dealers, collectors, and the machinery of promotion. An artist can “exploit” that system by leveraging editions for reach, cash flow, and visibility. But the same reproducibility makes the artist more replaceable, more easily packaged. The industry can “exploit” the artist through unfavorable splits, loss of control over proofs and distribution, or by treating the work as a product line rather than a practice.
Context matters: Grooms emerges from the postwar American art world where Pop, mass media, and spectacle blur the boundary between high art and commercial culture. His own work thrives on that blur - bright, crowded, theatrical. So the line reads like self-portraiture: he’s not posing as victim or villain. He’s mapping a realist’s understanding of the print world’s moral economy, where complicity is often the admission price for being seen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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