artist-in-residence in industry

As an employer with office staff, production people, break rooms, reception areas, offices and conference rooms do you think it's possible art acquisition would be more economical, of greater investment benefit, and more fun for you and the rest of your company if you had an artist on payroll? If you’ve seen previous posts – most particularly ‘art and the private sector’ and ‘reasons to own art’, all of them really, you might consider answering ‘yes’. Yes, it would be a practical, business-wise and publically responsible decision to hire an artist to be an artist.

In terms of community benefit, the ultimate objective is to nurture a functional art market capable of sustaining dedicated area artists, and distributing original art to homes, offices, and public areas in the central KY area. The first step would be to support the development of individual artists, allowing them the studio time to find their own voices, and in a mutually beneficial exchange with the members of your very grounded, purpose-driven enterprise. This private initiative to jump start a latent art awareness in the community is necessary since years of publicly funded, non-profit efforts on behalf of art have left art weaker, less accessible, and ever more in need of public support – predictable really. By shifting the responsibility of finding, funding, and displaying art from career bureaucrats to the private sector, in this case you, an organic connection is reestablished between the artist and patron, and everything changes – most of all, the art.

The artist, as your employee, feels an urge to connect with staff and production personnel, and their art will be influenced by your support. A working artist benefits from the positive and negative feedback of a varied, unbiased audience, and would welcome the opportunity to explain their objectives in common terms, all in addition to essential time in the studio. Regular employees would have something to talk and think about directly connected with their workplace, and might soon begin to realize art’s values are something like their own. You would acquire original art, a worthy vessel of company tradition in years to come, would be presenting a progressive public image, and by way of your patronage the community you live in might become known nation-wide as a nice place to live and a good place to buy art.

art in a time of shrinking expectations

Less -- it’s the new more. Can’t go back is what they say. The pre-2008 economy was hyper-inflated, a period of reckless consumption, and more, more, more, without real assets, nothing but plastic, to back it up. It won’t come again. For one thing, consumers can’t be coaxed into maxing out for all that non-essential stuff again, another generation having learned to be more responsible, to take life more seriously, to buy just what they need.

The art market really went nuts, maybe even more than other financial systems, since its prices were pure speculation, fanned by the delirium of acquisition, the adulation of fame. A new order is taking over, with shifted priorities and new sensibilities. These days we don’t have the same money to spend on pointless stuff, and soon we’ll stop envying those who do. In times of contraction, people learn to travel light, to possess less stuff, to concentrate value. They begin to think of art in a brand new way. Ask yourself – would you rather move to a new city with eight works of art, or two vans of furniture? Would you rather tie up your assets in common possessions constantly wearing out, becoming dated and obsolete, or in a few unique objects which never change, which give constant pleasure, and which may even increase in value in the time you own them? These same questions are finding new answers these days.

art and the private sector

Business can lead the way. Let’s change things, do it differently – see if we get a different result this time. Instead of automatically giving money to the local arts fund, pushed from behind by the accountant, pulled by a sense of community obligation, let’s consider how much the same money might buy.

Suppose you were to hire an artist, put them on the payroll, keep half the art. Frankly, what you pay for is studio time, but demonstrations and office discussions are also a possibility. Art goes up in your offices, your conference room and reception areas, and, for variety, you might trade around with other companies doing the same.* Not all artists would be compatible, but you get to review, hold interviews, borrow and hang the art while decisions are being made. Employees could participate, building a sense of company identity, and inspiring pride in personal performance. The art you acquire could eventually become valuable simply because you allowed an artist to find their feet, to build a body of work, to become productive and self-sustaining on their own.

Picking your artist might be easier than you think. Many of the mature ones have had a broad work experience, and may have touched your area or something similar before. Younger artists have fervor, and talk more about art than about themselves. In any case, their real resume is in the art they produce. Do they already put in as much work on their own as you would pay an employee, with a couple of raises, to do for you? If you come up with a yes, think with your pocketbook, and learn to like the art as you get used to it.

*see prior posts, ‘art and self expression’, and ‘authenticity”

gangsters and art

When I first heard HBO was going to make movies for tv, I expected low-budget, b-grade soapers, which is what made-for-tv movies had always been on commercial driven broadcasting. This is probably because the essential ethic of advertising is that people are like sheep, and can be led by their insecurities, their longings and delusions into buying non-essential stuff. Entertainment for sheep is pretty simple – guns, confrontation, some implied intercourse and you’ve got yourself a winner, i.e., you’re going to sell lots of stuff. HBO produces the Sopranos for subscription, a different business model, and they go about it in a different way. They used all their technique, all their talent, all their artistic integrity to make something that looked like real life. Tony has trouble with his kids, gets food poisoning, tells his therapist about his mother just like a real person might. This expanded dimension allowed the viewer to use their own life experience to see into those characters, and to see a bit more of life through their eyes. People like good art – the Sopranos sold a lot of subscriptions to HBO. Not only that. Other production companies began to find support for better stories, better art, even on commercial tv. There continue to be ripples throughout the medium.

It isn’t necessary to call a glass dirty, goes an old bit of rhetoric, but only to put a clean glass up next to it. Someone has to have a clean glass, along with the means to get it on the same shelf, something that wasn’t possible in broadcast drama until HBO came along. Still, it’s clear we have an appetite for something better when it’s available. We need a new business model, one where the private side of our economy takes responsibility for finding, displaying, and promoting local art, and then we may actually begin to realize all those benefits the non-profits claim when fund raising, but never quite seem to find. If business people took responsibility for the art hanging in their own offices, for finding and becoming patrons of area artists whose work they admire, and for making art a part of the conversation at social gatherings, they would find life and business more rewarding, more productive, more profitable, and, in ripples, so would everybody else.

do you have too much money for art?

Could write a novel to hint at it, wealthy insensitives on horseback chasing foxes through peasant crops, but we see it in the news everyday. Might construct a pithy poem, record an insightful song, do a little dance, but let’s just say it out. If you haven’t stood on the edge of a two lane highway late at night in front of the only gas station in miles with seventeen cents in your pocket and one direction as good as another, you’re probably not ready for art. It’s a place you might get to from several directions, and it may not always look just like that, but if you’ve been there you know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean to sound heroic. We’re born into a stormy sea, most of us, and parental expectations, cultural norms, and our own natural limitations are the bare and jagged rocks we cling to. It takes some adjustment, and art helps with that.

Wealth, in this or any time, is about frolicking in warm sunny pools. Royal lines declined without the constant tempering of war because only the immense cost and the strategic realities of battle could penetrate the cocoon of convenience and comfort their wealth provided. Without the strife of daily living – changing tires, making beds, stretching paychecks, several rooms in our personal attic are never occupied. Artists who make art for the ultra wealthy understand their overriding emotion is boredom, having never gone upstairs at all, and they connive to amuse and distract them with giant chrome puppies, diamond encrusted skulls, and such. They’re not like you and me.

We work hard for the money, and with unemployment up around ten percent, we all probably work a little harder. Before we take some of that money and spend it on art, it has to mean something to us. What would that be like? Maybe we like the image, and maybe we like the color, and maybe we like the way our expectation is always fooled when we look at it. Maybe we’ve met the artist, and are following their career as they sell art to friends and neighbors, and we get to see other examples of their work when we visit. Maybe we see in a sincere work of art an old friend in the making, an image and its attendant memories that will always be there, unchanged, wherever life takes us. Whatever it might be, really rich folks won’t get it. They think art is about collecting famous names on stuff -- there are very expensive ink blobs for them.

art is the measure

Art is the measure of regard one has for one’s self. Obvious for the artist, but it actually applies to everyone. It’s true for the art you look at, as well as art you might make. What else is art about – anyone with a better answer step to the front of the line. The artist makes a statement – this is the best I can do, this is what I think you want to see, this will make me famous, and it’s right out front for anyone to look at. At this point the artist is completely honest, or at least can’t hide anything, because if they’re a grant-sucking, art regurgitating camp follower, it’ll show in their work.

For everybody else it’s pretty simple, too. What art do you have on your walls -- at home, in the office, and how important is it to you? Do you see yourself in the art you choose to own, choose to look at, even to notice. Maybe not. Public money has been trivializing and demeaning art for over half a century, and by now the general population doesn’t seem to care – what a surprise. The first artists to be supported, promoted, made famous with public money, grants from foundations and public institutions, were the abstract expressionists after the second world war – art’s Taliban. Instead of firing squads they used ridicule, ending careers, driving established representational artists into menial occupations elsewhere, pissing on all of art history – the way fundamentalists tend to do. More extreme than most, they banned the depiction of anything, and it went on for years and years. You still might hear some old art professor fading into retirement absently mouthing the words –“I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature” for the million-billionth time.

Public money turns art into the idiot pet we walk twice a day and otherwise ignore, and that’s its job. Built into the distribution of public money are enough filters for mediocrity to ensure a public thirst for self-verification and redemption will have to look elsewhere – politics or religion, perhaps. The poison in the well are the decisions of self-serving bureaucrats who don’t know or care anything about art – check the walls in their houses for verification. Artists with self-respect may turn away, and find themselves turned away from, with no access to grants, commissions, and the resulting public recognition. (see previous post – 'upside down') Public institutions -- non-profits, state commissions, public university art schools all expend vast resources, the public's own money, to commandeer the public’s attention for their own benefit, not the benefit of art, the public or its culture.

It’s time to see past the vast public art enterprise, so dependently attached to the veins of our political structure, and look for independent art and artists who express, in some unspeakable way, the seriousness we have felt, or would like to feel, in our own lives, day to day.