sibling rivalry -- the solomon solution

Art is an odd business -- half government enterprise and half in the public realm, two sides with little in common conjoined in the same body, a revolting predicament. See the academic side has disdain for commerce and it isn’t just implied, it’s out front, proud of the fact. They think that art that won’t be sold, can’t be sold, is superior, simple as that. They endeavor to prove it with the stuff they make, the things they teach, the awards and grants they bestow, and the exhibits and competitions they curate. Artists with steady incomes, professional prestige, and a package of perks already, have no need for the public’s approval or participation. In fact it’s sorta natural they’d want to insulate their lucrative little worm garden from the rest of us, as dependent institutions of all sorts tend to do.

The public approach to art is much different, seeking insight and significance in the frame, on the wall. In this arena the objective is finding common ground with an audience, and appealing to someone enough to want to own it. This is the twin that suffers, losing nutrition and vitality to an overbearing state supported usurper, and there’s a funny reason why. Gallery owners have been trying to sell their consignments using credentials supplied by the academic side, meanwhile complaining no one buys art, like they was the victims. I’d like to sympathize, but also notice that people aren’t owning art, talking about art, or thinking about art and the stuff you’re showing isn’t helping, is it?

A man ran for president on the sole accomplishment of having separated conjoined twins, books and lectures, television interviews, and I’m here to do surgery. Gallery directors -- all those credentials you fan out are from that other side, that insular, exclusionary, copy planet called academic art, and they don’t really convince people, enough people, that the derived macaroon in front of them has value. Instead consider the ‘sunday’ painters in your midst, and cultivate a couple who are committed to depicting familiar subject matter. Two things will happen. Your clients will show more interest in owning art, and the artists will get better, rapidly. Art is a community business, could be, ought to be, and local-source galleries can be profitable doing business at face value, or will be soon.

poverty’s up side -- art’s coded rap

Who buys art and why? There are the investors, they get the press. Here’s a Rothko and a Van Gogh in the same auction estimated to bring about the same price, around twenty seven million, immediately to be re-crated and sent back to storage hoping they bring fifty the next time they see daylight. So much alike. ‘Art accrues value faster than the stock market,’ becomes the boilerplate refrain for almost any hustle chasing big discretionary bankrolls. It was housing equities before the crash of 2008, just as the dutch once went crazy for tulips, the classic case of market mania and the frenetic psychology of auction. As art appreciators the ultra-wealthy don’t count since they don’t look, only interested in outbidding their ‘friends’ and bragging about the big return, just another form of gaming to them. Pretend you ‘get it’ if you must.

Big corporations buy art to gain prestige among peers, and in an attempt to infuse some color into their cost efficient, steel and glass architecture. They favor abstraction, open-ended, non-committal, big splashy patches in the chrome and grey conference room, behind the receptionist. Existential questioning isn’t their bag, and they purchase through agencies, hire a curator, don’t really care. The large public institutions, museums and such, favor big ticket units, doing an indecent tango with the donor class as the tax burden trickles down, and they measure their success in bucks transferred.

Turns out the ones who generally like art best are poor people, those who can least afford it, an irony passing itself off as a law of the universe. Economics aside, maybe it’s life experience, the grind of physical work, learning a trade, doing home repairs that makes the common citizen receptive to art’s physical presence. Could be they can better conceive of process and practice, and what it takes to turn pure thought into a material object. It’s also possible they live in less than glamourous circumstances and feel a desire to own something of value they can see everyday, unlike their retirement fund. Might even turn out some of them are thoughtful and well read, dropouts, too skeptical of cultural politics to believe in soup cans but willing to consider actual accomplishment. Pushed aside in a rigged system, blue collars are not disinterested in art.

You can see art like them without giving away your stuff, scuffing up the hands. Art will help you -- try going back the other direction. When you look at art consider how it was made and what it tells you. You can squint at the explanation posted on the wall, or attempt to see and comprehend what’s actually in the frame, the way the less culturally sophisticated, more-grounded poor person might. You can bet the cavalier looking out at you there among the gawkers at the corner of the painting is the artist himself, just as he looked the day he delivered it, wearing that same sly smile, never to be noticed by his rich patron and finally to be seen by you this morning, he winks at you across a couple of centuries. Such as that.