everything changes -- sudden conversions

Is everyone changing their minds all at once? Is that possible? We’re herd animals, we put our noses up to sniff the air at same time, and a new breeze is blowing. Simply put the old consensus became obsolete and tattered and a new consensus is giving people permission to express what they really felt anyway. 

William Burroughs said, “the people living on the sea shore in the middle ages knew the world was round because they saw ships disappear over the horizon everyday, but they thought the world was flat because that’s what they were told.” This desire to blend in has been used against us by everyone who ever wanted to control us or sell us something, and we all know this. Art leads out. Art is in the business of individual permissions. Sometimes it happens all at once.

Art has been co-opted in your fair city, don’t care where, to provide the raw ore of fund-raising, and the artists have become the miners with dirty faces and empty pockets. A phalanx of non-profits, including the universities, operate beautiful galleries for the display of art that subsists on public support -- it’s like a circle. They claim to represent a consensus and media backs them up but their events leave many independent artists looking in through steamy glass, and their prospective audience is discouraged as well. It’s like the natural flow has been diverted for the special benefit of people who may not love art.

And what a great time it is with the dam about to burst and all. Non-profits have begun offering artists up to fifty percent of the take at their auctions, up from the traditional zero. Gallery walks are coming to ambitious small communities that don’t even have galleries yet. Visionary entrepreneurs who use art to sell hotel rooms will introduce the notion of buying and owning art wherever they land, and it spreads. What people need is permission to pursue art they like, which is something they give to themselves, and everything changes.

owningart -- why so negative?

Just an aside about what we do here. I understand certain reverences and deferments are expected in greater society regardless of personal feelings. It’s an obnoxious atheist who questions virgin birth during lent and stuff like that. In the the more exclusive society of the artistically aware there are also articles of faith that are unquestioned. I don’t care to debate them -- I’m just trying to drive around them. Art is old. We calculate the worthiness of past cultures by how well they made art and what they made art about. The impetus to deal with the world in terms of art, making and looking, might physically be in our DNA.

Here at owning art we just don’t care about fashion. Oh sure we’d like to be presentable, but when the latest style lets in drafts or hurts our feet we take a longer view and go for comfort and function. Our premise is simple -- on the wall original art is the time-release antidote to the toxic side-effects of the digitalized, stamped and extruded treadmill we’ve inherited. Art becomes, in this present condition, the distilled essence that seasons our daily porridge, a personal anchorage in the seething mob, and an intimate conversation you can have with the artist, and all artists, over a lifetime.

Art will be regionally authentic when it becomes self-sustaining, when art is bought and hung in office or home and when independent artists can earn a living making it. Owning art is exceedingly positive, suggesting a more direct dialogue between working artists and the community they serve -- more exposure, and advocating for a direct personal relationship with art based on looking and due respect for any artist who produces to the absolute limits of their ability. 

time - it won’t hurry

Time is the magic ingredient. You can come up with the best invention, sing the most beguiling song, have the perfect body but if you’re not there at the right time, week, day, and hour the train won’t stop. Actually cool stuff is around all the time, but the public’s attention is like a flashlight in Pharaoh’s tomb and can’t take in too much all at once. If you see the beam of light swinging your direction dream of the stars, but it’s a lucky few who show up just at the right moment.

Back in the fifties a new breed of hucksters realized they could bend the public attention beam with clever advertising delivered through rapidly expanding mass media. They applied a simple formula which combined grinding repetition with an inch by inch violation of convention, and it worked for everything. It’s good for selling trucks and shampoo, burgers and art. It has the unfortunate side-effect of turning everyone into pigs. Well, it’s better to be a happy human than a dissatisfied pig, and a whole lot of people are getting that feeling now. It’s about time.

There’s not much convention left to violate. On TV barely legal, almost naked girls are orally sodomized by double cheeseburgers, they seem to love it, and visual art has been through so many ironies and appropriations it’s been reduced down to spots. At some point public attention will realize it’s been binging -- wake up in an alley, dust itself off, and go home. The new economy will belong to a more self-possessed population that understands the temporal fragility of good times and who will be less likely to be led over a cliff to make others rich.

What it means for art is hard to say, but it’s probably a better time to be an artist than it has been for a while. The public attention is scattered, but as corrupt dynasties crumble it’s free to find its own way and it just might wake up with the ravenous appetite of the finally sober drunk.

truth -- what is it good for?

So what does truth mean in art? It doesn’t mean anything in the art is true. That’s not its job. Art is supposed to alter the perception of the viewer so the truth can be seen, and that is its job. Truth, it turns out, is everywhere all the time, but sometimes it seems invisible because no one can see it. There are examples.

Safe examples would be the ones we’ve already resolved, like smoking. The truth was always there, but it was invisible. It wasn’t a shock to anyone that tobacco was addicting, devastating to health, a poison manipulated to cause the most harm in order to obtain the biggest profit. Everyone had known all of it for a hundred years and they weren’t called ‘coffin nails’ for nothing, but the public couldn’t see it and wouldn’t acknowledge it. These days public service announcements trumpet the news that tobacco is bad, but back in 1965 during an interview John and Paul smoking cigarettes seemed perfectly natural. In fact, it only seems odd from here.

There are other truths closer to our own time we’re still not ready to look at directly, I’m guessing. If you’d like to see them, try looking at art. Think of art as similar to workout equipment for the professional athlete, not the game itself but an enhancement of the level of play. So in the museum it’s a picture of some king in armor, what’s next? -- wait. That shiny breastplate isn’t really made of metal. It’s an arrangement of colors on a flat surface cleverly telling you a lie, and if you can see the lies in art you’ll be more impressed and amused by artists, some artists, and on your way to becoming more discerning when you read the paper. If you can learn to trust your own eyes and see what’s actually there in a work of art, regardless of what experts tell you, you’re on your way to seeing through TV commercials and what politicians would like you to believe. It’s like doing exercise.

south of the border -- art and blood

At the beginning of the last century Mexico was divided by class and ethnicity and it was grinding itself down to bloody oblivion. Peasant armies, power hungry elites, and foreigners interfering had fractured society into irreconcilable polarities whose only remaining coin was death. It wasn’t the generals and politicians who finally brought them together. It was the painters.

Diego Rivera portrayed them all -- conquistadors, industrialists, farmers, and native people all standing together in big murals, solemn, dignified, and equal. Pre-conquest culture, traditionally derided by the colonialists was acknowledged and a pride in simply being Mexican began to make it possible for them to deal with each other. Other renowned painters addressed basic social issues, and their movement spread to the United States where the WPA hired out-of-work artists to muralize public buildings and post offices in the 1930’s.

The ability of these scenes from ordinary life to influence the self-image and the social concerns of average citizens was so alarming to the top percent that a new art declaring the representational image obsolete and unintelligent surged to predominance with heavy financial backing shortly thereafter. Oddly coincidental is all I’m saying. The last of the post offices are coming down about now, although most of the murals were destroyed years ago. There is a movement in San Francisco to save the murals in Coit’s tower -- worth googling.

We don’t have the same conditions now and art that renews our tattered social fabric probably wouldn’t make it into public spaces for reasons we’ve discussed previously. Everybody gets to decide for themselves, but I’d suggest some sort of art that compensates for the constant assault on our pride and personhood streaming out of commercial media. It’s just the way they sell stuff but it takes a toll on everyone. Owning art that verifies your own experience, with qualities of merit you recognize yourself, would probably influence you in your daily life in ways you would approve of.

forging greatness -- getting even

In the courts now: if a drip-painting was actually dripped by Jackson Pollock it’s worth two million, four million, thirty million, but the exact same painting by anyone else, it’s nothing but paint flung on canvas worth less than the canvas raw. There will be forensic tests, of course, but if a clever on-his-ass artist found a bolt of canvas from the fifties and softened up a few old cans of house paint with vintage turpentine, a previously unknown Jackson Pollock will enter the catalogue, and money will appear.

There isn’t any other way to decide. No one can really say that isn’t the way Jackson made noses. The difference between the two, could be the same painting really, is that on the wall at the Museum of Modern Art and allegedly worth an unbelievable amount of money it’s epic, a transitional blah blah blah, but leaned against the wall behind the bookcase at the goodwill it looks like a drop-cloth on a stretcher. Somewhere here is a great mystery, a question that can’t be politely asked, an article of faith as sacrosanct as virgin birth -- can those who would take advantage be far behind?

Take that on-his-ass artist, not a bad person really. For years he or she attempted to interest galleries in their own work, tried to find patrons, were forced to work at other occupations, usually menial. One day after trying to fix their plumbing again or driving on bald tires they decide to fuck the system back and an unknown abstractionist masterwork from a private collection pops up at an auction. Venerable museums check your stacks, peruse your walls, and admit you wouldn’t know what was authentic even if you wanted to. They’re in on it too, of course, tending their flocks of cherished donors with tax breaks all around, and I just hope the on-his-ass artist got his or her share. I hope they all did.

meaning and significance -- behind the curtain

The resident art critic for New Yorker Magazine was just reciting dogma when asserting that mid-century abstract expressionists “realized the shortest route to meaning and significance was through abstraction”, and pretty much all of art ever since has been constructed on top of their breakthrough revelation. It’s pronounced as though it was a self-evident fundamental principal, but I’m pretty sure it’s just dumb. Farm animals and four year olds can do it, and being blind drunk was never a distraction. Maybe what he meant to say was that the early abstractionists “realized the easiest route to fame and fortune was through repetition”, a technique ruthlessly employed by each new wave of art’s pop stars ever since.

As merchandizing it’s brilliant, but as art it’s so astoundingly boring that the big guys just contract it out -- repetition gets to be like work. Consider the famous British painter who only painted stripes or the American who never used anything but white. They had robust careers and commanded lovely prices, but even they wouldn’t want to be alone with their own artwork very long. The new guy with spot paintings he doesn’t do himself says, as though serious, that no two are absolutely alike. This is art for morons. I don’t care how many millions it claims to move at auction, what morbidly compromised institutions are hip deep in it, or how many push magazines it publishes that pretend to be journalism, the art establishment is a high-milage professional trying to hock costume jewelry, for way too much money.

reason to buy art -- domicile modification

Like appliances around the house, works of art have their job to do. The painting over the mantel doesn’t just hide bare wall, it changes the character of the room. If it’s a sailing ship first painted in the eighteen nineties, scanned from a reproduction and printed in thousands, it won’t have much to contribute. Mute little bird prints down the hall and florals in the bathroom that merge with the wallpaper won’t be noticed either. This is low wattage art.

Over the mantel let’s put up a piece of real art about the same size, and real only means actually made by somebody. Could be by a professional or maybe by Bill the janitor at the high school who painted on weekends. Everyone who enters the room will notice it, and if it’s any good at all, you’ll notice it every time. If you look at it very long it will start reminding you about where you were when you bought it and how old your kids were -- art absorbs stuff like that. If it’s a really good painting people tend not to notice the worn carpet in traffic areas or rings on the coffee table. A little pastel landscape bought at a craft fair will add a enough charm to a bathroom to make old water stains seem like character. Art changes everything around it.

If you step up and buy significant art you can cut way back on household keeping up. A throw over a couch and a good painting is a much better choice, especially when you move and the couch stays and the painting goes with you. Artwork is so much easier to carry and the new place is so much more like home when it gets hung again. It’s a real thing, this art, and it contributes to the comfort of the thoughtful and nurturing refuge we call home.

reason not to buy art -- the way it's sold

The gallery director moans -- we’re not taking on any new artists, the market’s gone soft and we’re packing it in after thirty five years paying uptown rent. People just aren’t buying art these days because of the uncertain economy or because pro football and beer commercials have coarsened everyone’s taste. It couldn’t be because the merchants of art burned down the territory with outlandish systems of value, so busy establishing a bluebook rating for every sanctioned artist that somehow the art drained away.

Frankly nobody cares what sort of kickback shenanigan got the artist into a big corporate collection, or how they arranged for the unreadable writeup by a college friend, or that their ticket-punching career got them all the way here. Art world affirmation used to be enough to sell almost anything, but they don’t seem to be buying it anymore. The rational person purchasing art, just as when buying anything else, has two questions. First, is the particular piece of art in question worthy of the price, and second, will paying that price improve my life by at least an equal amount over the years that I own it?

If this might be you there’s homework. Knowing if a piece of art is worth the asking price requires visiting galleries whenever possible, a completely free, informative, and amusing pastime. Nod and smile, and say “just looking”, and you’ll be left alone. Spend some time in front of any painting you find appealing and then bend forward to read the price tag next to it on the wall. Knowledge comes quickly and not only will you be finding out how much to pay, you’ll be discovering what you like. In time you’ll recognize a good piece at a fair price and if you think you might like it even more if you see it everyday, you’ve found a good reason to buy art.