So where is the revolution? Did you think it was happening in the streets? Authoritarians actually like street demonstrations, did you know that? So cathartic, so ineffectual, a way to blow off steam without changing anything, maybe just making it worse. As a fact states tolerate criticism that reduces the pressure, and may even sponsor their own, silly, strident, and prone to violence.
How could art help this mess I wonder. Gigantic money so powerful, and buying a picture to hang on the wall seems so small and irrelevant. From all the evidence that’s not what they think, the guys who run stuff. The ultra rich have been bending art for a long time because, apparently, they think it matters a lot. Started way back when Diego Rivera made some paintings they didn’t like, with their own money in a studio they paid for -- seems he had stuff left over after a commission he’d done for them. On his own time he made a large painting depicting rich folks in furs and top hats in a safety deposit vault juxtaposed with long rows of iron beds in a barracks for the indigent the city had constructed out on Long Island. There were seven other paintings like that. They didn’t think this was funny.
They laid a trap, discussed elsewhere, the famous Rockefeller Center debacle, in which they sabotaged his mural, jack-hammering down the fresco it had taken months to produce without allowing a single photograph to be taken. This was merely the opening salvo. They used the enormous power of the government and the press to alter art totally, claiming the ‘cold war’ made them do it -- competition with the Soviets, Jackson Pollock vs the Bolshoi. In the early fifties the complicit national press ran the cover story about Pollock, ‘is he the greatest painter alive?’, and didn’t quite give an answer. By merely asking the question they thought they were making it so. Well, he wasn’t.
Nihilistic, alcoholic whores the lot of them, Rothko, de Kooning, Kline, Pollock -- oh I kid the post war superstars. The abstract expressionists emerged to destroy picture making and send the cultural clock back to zero, banning depictions of anything, thereby eliminating even the possibility Diego Rivera, or any of his ilk, would ever again threaten their halls of excess and privilege by expressing the common bonds of average people. Instead they’ve given us ersatz entertainment sleaze -- google Koons, Hirst, and the record shattering Basquiat, dumb art known mostly for being stupidly expensive.
Conceptual art is betraying us, cashing untold grants for daring forays into gender and racial issues so coded and convoluted the average person is left between bewilderment and revulsion. Nowhere is the sweet rotten excess of hoarded wealth so apparent as in the art they choose, the part they can’t hide, and do we want to be like them? Not really. For one thing we’d like better art, all over, all at once. That’s why buying a painting from an area artist you like, trust yourself, changes everything. Imagine, at the same time, other people like yourself all over town, all across the land, rebuking this evil enchantment, the degradation of art to just a coveted price tag, and reclaiming visual art as human and cultural currency, a prized example of the courage and autonomous self-regard that underlies healthy democracy.
How could art help this mess I wonder. Gigantic money so powerful, and buying a picture to hang on the wall seems so small and irrelevant. From all the evidence that’s not what they think, the guys who run stuff. The ultra rich have been bending art for a long time because, apparently, they think it matters a lot. Started way back when Diego Rivera made some paintings they didn’t like, with their own money in a studio they paid for -- seems he had stuff left over after a commission he’d done for them. On his own time he made a large painting depicting rich folks in furs and top hats in a safety deposit vault juxtaposed with long rows of iron beds in a barracks for the indigent the city had constructed out on Long Island. There were seven other paintings like that. They didn’t think this was funny.
They laid a trap, discussed elsewhere, the famous Rockefeller Center debacle, in which they sabotaged his mural, jack-hammering down the fresco it had taken months to produce without allowing a single photograph to be taken. This was merely the opening salvo. They used the enormous power of the government and the press to alter art totally, claiming the ‘cold war’ made them do it -- competition with the Soviets, Jackson Pollock vs the Bolshoi. In the early fifties the complicit national press ran the cover story about Pollock, ‘is he the greatest painter alive?’, and didn’t quite give an answer. By merely asking the question they thought they were making it so. Well, he wasn’t.
Nihilistic, alcoholic whores the lot of them, Rothko, de Kooning, Kline, Pollock -- oh I kid the post war superstars. The abstract expressionists emerged to destroy picture making and send the cultural clock back to zero, banning depictions of anything, thereby eliminating even the possibility Diego Rivera, or any of his ilk, would ever again threaten their halls of excess and privilege by expressing the common bonds of average people. Instead they’ve given us ersatz entertainment sleaze -- google Koons, Hirst, and the record shattering Basquiat, dumb art known mostly for being stupidly expensive.
Conceptual art is betraying us, cashing untold grants for daring forays into gender and racial issues so coded and convoluted the average person is left between bewilderment and revulsion. Nowhere is the sweet rotten excess of hoarded wealth so apparent as in the art they choose, the part they can’t hide, and do we want to be like them? Not really. For one thing we’d like better art, all over, all at once. That’s why buying a painting from an area artist you like, trust yourself, changes everything. Imagine, at the same time, other people like yourself all over town, all across the land, rebuking this evil enchantment, the degradation of art to just a coveted price tag, and reclaiming visual art as human and cultural currency, a prized example of the courage and autonomous self-regard that underlies healthy democracy.
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