social engineering -- utilizing art

Saw a young activist explaining to the camera how confident she was her art would have an answer to some specific social crisis, but they didn’t show the art. Must gonna be something uncompromising and highly relevant when completed one assumes. Just intense to see it and then move on, the way art is consumed these days, the assemblage down in a week, pieces in the wind headed to a landfill so poignant. 

Please, just call it something else. If art can mean anything at all, it means absolutely nothing, that’s simple math. Art as a visual medium was here first, and as a fact, that’s what ‘art’ used to mean. Art ceased being visual when literary criticism invaded, an opaque intellectual kudzu, and art was reduced to a signifier of some renowned personality, and in most cases not much to look at. Oh I’m sure the isolated Rothko, given a wall to itself in the soft lighting of a museum, might seem transcendent, but by the time you’ve seen three hundred in essentially the same configuration, the thrill is gone. By now his bus token art is just called a ‘Rothko,’ with a certain blue-book value, and no one looks further.

It don’t mean a thing if it doesn’t say something through your eyes, doesn’t commandeer your attention and cause a little clicking and whirring in your noggin, pulling it into focus. What is this, say a picture of a cow -- so how close did the artist come, have I learned something new about cows, and will I look at them differently from now on? All good questions about any piece of art and all with visual answers, whether you think them out loud to yourself or not. You’ll either like the piece of art or you won’t, an automatic sensation immediately registered without bothering to cross-reference the name of the artist or thumb through their pile of documentation. Choosing art can turn out to be a test of your innate independence, and bonafide evidence that you value what you see.

The good news is that while the ‘art world’ is distracted, attempting to dictate market value based on a wonky calculus of prior approvals and positioning on an imaginary ladder, worthy art can be had for a song all over town. While progressive media has been covering conceptual break-throughs, more and more people are beginning to paint, first as an exercise, then as a hobby, and finally as a means of expression, finding their voice. Don’t know what it means, but will predict some of them will get caught, quit their jobs and go full time, so sad when that happens, or at least it always has been, up until now. There is a critical point when the business of art exchange ignites and sustains artists and studios, and it approaches.

Social change is local first, after all, and if owning and living with art can open the mind and broaden the vision a few citizens at a time, all over all at once, the national dialogue will follow -- we ought to give it a try, or maybe just let it happen.