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Wednesday, August 31, 2016

thought or thing -- art’s skitz

Conceptual thinking transformed art, but not everyone made the turn. There are still those who think of art as an object created by an artist to be bought, owned, and lived with forever. That’s them left standing on the platform as modern art left the station some hundred years back, and that’s them again first in line when the train comes around this time.

Let’s review. The acknowledged inauguration of ‘modern art,’ the famous Duchamp ‘readymade’ urinal exhibited in independent artist’s exhibit of 1917, was an act of genius only in art books, seminal only for scholars. Submitted by a less worldly and obviously superior person, he was theatrically aloof, it might have been called an adolescent prank by a mediocre artist, making the major pillar of modern art, and indeed conceptual art’s very conception, only a porcelain hood ornament on the limo of sour grapes.

After early notoriety Duchamp became more and more enigmatic, critics and scholars pretending he was Einstein and they the interpreters of relativity. Oh really? What legitimacy declares someone’s else's work your own just by signing it, the way ragtag explorers used to claim whole continents on the authority of the squirrelly little pope? Experts said sure, it’s appropriate, and a new art became sanctified, essentially the formalistic dismantling of any former pretense to art, a gigantic breakthrough to be sure but the thrill is gone.

Sol LeWitt in 1967...... “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” LeWitt wrote. “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.”

That’s thin ice. Conceiving of a great bridge across a mighty river is a heroic chunk of thinking, but just making an offhand sketch won’t get anyone across. Retrograde? immensely, but the average person thinks this way. When they become interested in art they want to see accomplishment, and are less interested in the fetish objects in art magazines, the dialogue of fashion.

Average people have been interested in art all along, curious about artists, respectful of the art, but have felt pushed aside by a smirking condescending skybox of sycophants cornering the market on sophistication. Well it’s all over now, baby blue. The calf floating in a tank of formaldehyde, four vacuum cleaners in a glass box, the chrome cartoon character twelve feet high made in a shop somewhere will all at once seem pointless, and close to worthless, once the long deprived culture begins to assert itself.

The good news is that user-friendly art is available, a balm to the disenchanted, a solace for the disenfranchised, a compensation for the less than obscenely wealthy, and the culture, all directions, is waking up to it about now. More art to be seen begets more seeing, and more seeing begets buying and owning, which is bound to make more and better art available, round and round.

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