ceo search -- defining the mission

Last night attended a meeting concerning the hiring of a new director for the central funding agency for arts in our community. They’re out to find some person with superior leadership ability who is also a strategic-planning, fund-raising guru full of passion for the arts. That’s not the hard part.

What’s the mission -- we don’t know. Do we want a teacup tipper capable of casting coils of flattery and guilt around the local business community and other well-heeled ‘givers’ thereby raking in the cash, or should it be someone who knows and cares about art and artists? Could the same person do both? Actually could they please be able to do everything because we don’t know what we want.

Here’s the bureaucratic dilemma -- do we use public money to midwife self-sustaining art commerce for the economic and spiritual benefit of the community, or do we perpetuate our charity-based institutions, most of all, us? Whining for the city, the state, the federal largesse to look our way seems insensitive, just does, what with conditions on the street. Soliciting businessmen and their accountants for a little chunk of write-off in exchange for their name on a plaque isn’t going to earn their respect. This approach will however give us the power to direct which favorites put on performances, what artists succeed -- an off-the-shelf small town byzantine court of cronyism. This really isn’t an option anymore.

The world changes and the charity model is rapidly becoming obsolete. Time to contribute to the future or grind on in futility and dwindling support -- don’t we complain? Broaden the audience or get out of the way. Actively facilitate community awareness and appreciation of art instead of engineering artistic dependency by dribbling out funds -- not enough to live on, just enough to keep hope alive. This new director should be working to make his or her job less important, the institution’s influence less, and instead improve the climate for ticket sales and direct purchases for visual artists by becoming a bridge between an increasingly interested community and its creative class. 

original art and free will -- somewhere deep inside

Heard this interesting radio program claimed wiring in the ear is receptive to the familiar but doesn’t like to process the unexpected -- they say it’s brain chemistry. They cited as an example the 1913 presentation of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ which caused a riot -- folks in black tie and tiaras went berserk and these scientists surmise the cause was a flood of rejection juice in the brain brought on by the music’s massive dissonance, which they had never experienced before. Next year it was performed again and the audience loved it. The composer was carried out into the streets.

Isn’t that the way it always is, only a little quicker?  Folks just aren’t fond of new experiences because new file folders have to be named and stored somewhere, and the familiar just saves automatic. Behind all that is this chemical reaction they’ve found takes it almost out of free-will territory. Cognition itself is biased toward prior experience, and that’s just the way the machine is set up. Too bad for original anything. It takes an act of will to consider something new and a little at a time seems advisable. Stravinsky wisely ducked out the back door when the first performance turned ugly. 

This is the reason second tier emulation can be the key to success in any field of art, and that originators are sometimes passed by -- consider music. Andy Warhol seemed to intuit this modern brain breakthrough by picking only the most familiar cultural and commercial images to call art, thereby releasing that little burst of recognition oil we all find so pleasing, don’t know why. Well wouldn’t say it’s poison but it’s definitely empty calories, just responding to stuff seen before. As harsh and alien as it seems at first, original art tends to scrape away the scales and illuminate the senses, and although lab results aren’t in yet, we believe this could be reduced to a reordering of molecules in the brain that happens when a person looks at a painting done by an artist they've never seen before.

From then on when they see the artist's work they're going to get a burst of ‘oh I recognize that’ clear and pure as county air. Sorta the man inside, drugs you can do just by looking, a habit you get fixed by thoughtfully considering works of art. In a world of moral potholes why not a good addiction, one that expands your humanity, brings continuity day by day and adds a few years -- try looking at and living with original art.  

art for common folk -- illuminati pass by

If you are a member of the art establishment, an arts administrator or private gallery director, maybe a contemporary artist/educator, there isn’t much here for you. All you’ll hear is bitching, the blubbering rant of the misinformed and I can accept that. Those who are less committed and still have open questions concerning art might see it differently. I’ll take a stand as a cultural wolf-boy wandering in all objective and direct, just another philosophy major with dirty hands. 

I do get it, the zaniness most of all, and there’s a looping dialogue at ultra high frequency in contemporary art that’s very immediate, conveyed at the very top with just eyebrows and wry glances, and destined to be very dated by the time a decade rolls around. The notion of ‘fashion’ as a conceptual context is all about exclusion, and it’s sometimes necessary to go to extremes to shake off general approval even at the cost of pain and stupidity, which interestingly enough doesn’t seem visible at the time. A pickup so low it scrapes the pavement, high heels so high the ankle turns, the extremely functional baseball hat reduced to a beanie by turning the bill backward are all attempts to leave the less cool behind by being impractical, even offensive, and it’s a never-ending race.

Personally I have no kick against common folk and even aspire to be one. I want something very different from art and I’ll assume it’s not just me. First I want to know what’s hard and what’s easy, so learning something about how art is made would be handy. Meeting an artist would help make a correlation between personality and the work produced, although they’re generally reclusive so just seeing several examples of an artist’s work over time may suffice. Finally I want involvement and most likely to be interested in artwork that references my own experience in some way. Can I learn which artist is extending themselves farther, accomplishing more, and asking a fair price just by looking and the answer is yes, simply by looking at a lot and buying something. At that point I’ll become an actual participant in art itself. 

tolerance for cretins -- room at the hotel

('no room for those who censor art' -- lex HL, 6-16)
Tolerance is funny stuff. You’d suppose tolerance was a general state of mind that should apply equally all around, but it isn’t. Sat in a coffeehouse one time with a citizen of a most tolerant society who told me the one thing they wouldn’t tolerate was intolerance, so don’t ever blow your horn in traffic there. Closer to home it’s the art people who are most strange when it comes to tolerance. Art people are against any censorship whatsoever, and sometimes what they do seems little more than a dare to anyone who might consider it.

There’s an attitude that would aggressively present graphic porn as personal expression in a public gallery, this actually happened in lex, but which won’t tolerate anyone who questions -- it’s worthiness as art, it’s appropriateness for presentation with tax dollars, the blatant absurdity of tawdry sensationalism pretending to be anything else. Open a window. In fact, let’s back off this notion that worthy art necessarily challenges and provokes altogether.

The new hotel, 21C, promises to present an array of art to the general public and not everyone has to like it. It doesn’t matter, they’re not trying to sell it. They sell hotel rooms. They’re exhibiting art as a sort of civic minded, extremely clever way to establish an unique identity in an overcrowded industry. Everyone’s invited to look. If they see something they don’t like they may begin to consider what they do like, and the principle will be served. It’s a good idea all around. Nothing will be presented as damaging to mind and soul as the four hours 7 to 11 on major TV networks, and if anyone really doesn’t like what they see they don't have to go back.

too many artists -- not enough audience

So here’s a problem called to our attention. Whereas there used to be almost no art at all, now we have too many artists for this small patch of audience. This complaint was posted yesterday by a musician in our town, same as your town -- it’s happening all over. They're thinking maybe if there was more money from the city, state, wherever, and maybe another commissioner in city government, an art czar, we could turn this thing around, set some priorities, maybe even keep a lot of musicians in marginal dependency by paying scale in empty venues.

Don’t know a thing about popular music but it’s art, right? Some artist or group of artists is attempting to create something fellow citizens will identify with enough to support them in their independent lifestyle. This alternative to hitching up to the corporation paycheck is so appealing there are too many enlistees. We have so many bands with rather small core constituencies the club owners can’t afford to pay them much, and don’t. How does this play out -- I wouldn’t know but it does sound like a healthy if harsh required step in evolution, and in the end the best musicians will wind up making their best music in a community that supports them, if they hang around. 

Should we intervene? Can we hasten evolution by nurturing progressive favorites, bands with consciousness-raising lyrics or proportionally diverse personnel, for example? Well, if your goal is dysfunctional mediocrity, if you want independence and creativity denied access, if you think a bureaucratic refuge for pointless degrees is something we should all pay for, go ahead. Visual art provides the template for what goes wrong. Public money should be moving traffic, providing services, making sure everyone eats, and investing in the future with what’s left.

Did anyone think art was easy? It’s a sad fact the soldiers who stormed Normandy were not the same smiling GI’s who kissed the girls in Paris, and being on the front lines of art can be gritty. At some point citizens in all similar places to where you live now will begin to recognize the work of area artists and soon after that to have favorites, all on their own. With an audience the shoot gets to blossom, the art gets a lot better, and an artist could live pretty well in the not too distant future. 

Can’t say what this means for musicians, but there’s the music, the collaboration, and the drive to get better. Decide what you’re worth and insist on it, play when you can. Expand your audience by demonstrating that live music is better, by speaking to the inner ear, and by being tight and responsible to the craft. Whenever it happens, it happens on its own. 

sports and art -- flipping the fan base

Not a secret many sports enthusiasts probably aren’t much interested in art, whereas art people are apt to express seething resentment about the entire sports establishment, the adulation of athletes, the piles of money. It’s an uneasy relationship. Still we’re all just people. We want the same stuff no matter what form it comes in, and it’s only in the manner of delivery where conflict lies.

Human competition, we compare all things, ranges from grisly mortal combat to slow games of chess, yet the same values pertain at all levels. We like to see fair, so rules are written and games are devised so that certain human attributes rise to the surface. From our comfortable couches we admire courage and selflessness, which are often totally separate from athletic ability. Honesty is enforced, and just this morning’s paper reports a basketball player’s pocket-change fine for feigning contact for advantage, later detected on slo-mo replay. One reason even thoughtful people follow sports is for this apparent transparency, all about a contest with the same rules they once played by, at some level, growing up. 

While newspapers seem to evaporate day by day, sports sections remain robust with three or four feature writers banging away with insight and information. These folks aren’t cheerleaders because readers would soon lose interest. They’re contentious with coaches, second guess athletic directors, and minutely analyze the mumbled interviews of the teen-age participants. Their job is to provide access and understanding for a public interested in more than just a scoreboard summary. It isn’t just about winning and the public tends to encourage an underdog. Fans are said to be fickle, mainly because they idolize an abstract ideal and not the athlete who embodies it momentarily, and it’s in these heroic terms they’d prefer to see their own lives. What’s so wrong with that?

Politics and business aren’t subject to the same objectivity and the editorial opinions in the paper can hardly can be tested by the real experience of an average reader. Where else can those tests of endurance and determination, dedication and accomplishment be documented for all the world to see besides in the championship finals of some made up sport? Art embodies all those attributes we admire with the distinct advantage of being tangible, ownable, and only gaining in significance as years roll by instead of fading into a cloud of statistics and tattered memories. It isn’t a matter of changing values. It’s about finding them in a more thoughtful mode, one that humanizes the nest and makes the business day more palatable. Learning to recognize those universal human aspirations in art takes much less effort and memorization than following the most humble sports franchise, and understanding accumulates quickly. Looking at all the art available and knowing something about how it’s made and who makes it are all it takes.    

alternative spaces -- jumping over turnstiles

Can’t sell art just anywhere. The setting has to provide enough dignity for art to be taken seriously, since the same piece of art won’t look the same in a gallery or hanging on a fence in the park. This requirement for a formal presentation becomes a bottleneck in the distribution of art, and that’s where the sharks lay wait. Gallery facilities are either public or private, paid for by all the citizens or strictly for profit and that’s about it. 

Public galleries can be spacious and inviting, well lit with sparkling conveniences, ample publicity and close-by parking, but after a perfunctory cracker and cheese opening these galleries remain mostly dark and unattended the remainder of the month. Periodically they show grade school children or sunday painting seniors, and overall the offerings of the public gallery are uneven. Private galleries ascertain the level of sophistication and the financial status of the visitor in a few moments of general patter and remain interested only if they sense the possibility of selling something. Choose old shoes from your closet and roam at will with no more than a nod, if that, coming and going. They look on art as merchandize and are more interested in resumes than whatever it looks like, and that’s they way they sell it too. If only there were some other way. 

Occasionally a business which deals directly with the public will provide wall space to some local artist and they do this for a number of reasons. Some folks like art and for just helping the artist meet their customers they can have original art on the wall for free. Others might figure they’re paying so much per foot of floor but the walls are a bonus so why not keep the place fresh and interesting for patrons with changing art. In business offices original art can lend gravity to the conference room, look progressive in reception areas, and inspire creativity all along the line.

Let’s say it caught on and friendly competition for displaying the recognizable work of regional artists reached a tipping point. Suddenly original art would appear in salons and restaurants, in business and professional offices all over town. Long suppressed, a creative surge from studios would be met by a rapidly developing taste and appreciation in the community, and art would begin to flow off alternative venue walls and into homes and personal spaces. This public access to the independent artists in their midst would yield an authenticity and level of accomplishment neither the ‘art as charity’ or ‘art as portfolio investment’ models have been able to provide.