art’s efficiency -- heavy value-added ratios

Art is about efficiency most of all, a business model in the extreme. Here I’m not discussing the university mode, instructors to counsel and encourage, studios to socialize in, canvas and paint supplied, nurturing galleries and student exhibitions, all of that topped off with a degree and a teaching position somewhere. Not a bad life, warm and dry, but like many forms of refuge it comes with a price, the peer group assassination of artistic potential. Argue the point if you must, but attend the annual faculty show of festering little worm-gardens, they do so support each other, and then show us the art.

There is another way, and it doesn’t involve trust funds or any form of independent wealth, more of a detriment to artistic development than a college degree. It’s much celebrated in folklore but seldom followed all the way through even though art museums are full of it, the practice of ‘subsistence-level art.’ I can’t say if it’s easier or harder these days, but a couple of generations back Johnny Mercer wrote, ‘anyplace I hang my hat is home,’ about a time when a person with practical skills could travel about, rent a room, find something to eat -- this would be more difficult these days. The old dictum that ‘the independent artist must learn to earn a living with their left hand,’ becomes more of a challenge in a world where two may not be enough.

A fair number start out on their own, some with dreams of skyrocket success, intuitively hacking the visual depravity of the super wealthy at international art fairs, but these gravitate to advertising agencies for a regular paycheck almost immediately. Along the way more drop out -- the day job becomes an occupation, the derision of in-laws and general indifference at family gatherings becomes intolerable, and there’s the lack of money. What’s left after a few years are mostly misfits and loners, fervent neurotic people addicted to creating, who find solace and healing in connecting mind and hand, driven people willing to sacrifice just to do it.

It’s also going to require herculean efficiency, and a diverse set of semi-skills having little to do with art. Can the artist unstop the drain in a cheap rental when the landlord is too busy, reattach a muffler with a wire coat hanger, do their own cooking, shop second-hand, all such as that? Studio rent is always extra, so studio time is precious with every moment devoted to making art. Materials are scrounged, adapted, and used up totally, paint tubes squeezed dry, brushes used until splayed and stiff, and nothing of value is thrown away. Bad personal habits better be few. It’s an austere, even an isolated life, with a slim chance of finding a supportive mate, and even less hope of recognition from the warm and dry. Blind luck becomes the unknown constant in every equation, and compromises can be made with everything except the art.

A romantic backstory can be intriguing, but the point of the exercise is to produce an object that jogs the perspective and stretches the perceptual radius of the people who see it everyday, perhaps each time the visit their physician’s waiting room, maybe every five years in an art museum. How is this accomplished, what value is transferred, and why do people want to look at art at all, are the first questions that come to mind. A certain portion of the answer will remain mysterious, but one thing is plain. Art on the wall is ultimately efficient, transforming materials available to anyone, cheap and ordinary, into an unique image that communicates directly, mind to mind, without words even forming. The successful work of art finds and binds people with similar aspirations and self-concept, and helps them find each other. That’s a pretty big trick for not much invested materially, and a reflection and function of a practiced, even a lived efficiency.

seeing the world -- utilizing art

So I am reading an article in a magazine, Atlantic, that’s telling me we’re all too bigoted to even perceive reality in an objective, rational way, so might as well give up knowing anything -- the impression I got. I’ll concede present conditions lend credence to such an assertion, hermetic encampments lobbing real and imagined facts like grenades back and forth, but turns out they’re just islands floating in a sea of rampant subjectivity. Let’s go back to the idea we’re not likely to know what’s real anyway, because our antennae are tuned to block certain information, and large chunks of reality just aren’t available. So why is that, and can we do anything to fix it, more to the point.

Education helps, retracing the steps of people who faced the same obstacles before we arrived is a head-start, and a broad life-experience tempered with empathy and curiosity can be effective as well, but both require significant investment of time and commitment, and we’ll all so busy. Better it would be to acknowledge there are holes in our version of reality, and narrow channels of habituation that keep us from seeing everything there is.

Believe or not, that’s art’s job, its largest responsibility. From the renaissance forward, artists have been opening eyes, inventing and suggesting new ways of seeing. Each day people from around the planet cue up in front of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum to spend a couple of hours looking directly at his work. They emerge to a parking lot full of chirping birds, wind on their face, and the sounds of passing traffic in their ears, everything that was there before, unnoticed. How long does it last, a couple of hours, the rest of a lifetime, one thing sure, each person feels braver and more independent after seeing his example, more ready to see and accept what actually is.
 
How much can you see of world around you, and in what detail? It’s a question no one is prepared to answer, since how would anyone know? Everyone else might see the world the same way you do, but while watching the evening news it becomes pretty clear they don’t. Artists make suggestions, offer advice, and give examples of instances of time in which everything is accounted for. The photograph is recorded all at once, but in a painting every detail required attention and acknowledgement, and the craft to make it visible. In this way, the painting becomes a lens for the perception, elevating a chosen moment to full awareness, and like a laser, aligning all levels of thought and meaning into a picture of something. Some people find sensual pleasure simply in looking at art, lighting up parallel circuits, mixing memory and imagination.

Does it carry over into the everyday, and what’s the advantage? More thoughtful and more humane probably wouldn’t hurt any of us, and seeing more detail, becoming more aware of nuance and atmosphere can help to discern the truth from all the flotsam on social media, in the news, perhaps even in personal relationships. The individual or family who lives with a broad array of art is likely to be more open-minded, more ready to accept and ‘see‘ a greater portion of reality, and more equipped to appreciate each moment. Art is the renewer of a more open perception, lighting up thoughts and feelings in rooms seldom visited, an enhancer, and in the end a practical thing.  

art love -- not complicated

So, let’s talk about love, it’s a sacred thing, scary and complex, but maybe not so difficult to understand in a mechanical sense. In the overall field of our attention, love adds the element of attachment, a special sensitivity to a certain stream of information. Love makes the other person more noticeable in a crowd, easier to understand in a restaurant, and more desirable than anyone else in the room, such as that. Farmers love their land, the lay of the creek, the smell of the barn, just as almost anyone else who becomes intimately familiar with anything eventually falls in love -- it’s in the wiring, we’re born that way.

Mostly love is fleeting, and for a moment even pickup trucks can beguile, until the new model comes along. If only some way could be found to capture and hold this elusive quality, to burnish it and make it stronger. Consider the painting you bought in a pawn shop, off the wall in a restaurant, strolling the annual art fair, have you looked at it recently? This isn’t all on you, it’s the art’s job to make you notice. It has an advantage over whatever else you have on your wall just by being unique, direct from a human hand. If it’s thoughtful and deep enough, it will show you something a little different each time you look, and sooner or later, could take years, you’ll begin to experience that little burst of joyful recognition juice in your hippocampus each time you come across some detail you’d forgotten, sure feels like love.

The affection that people feel for art ‘that’s been in the family’ for years, perhaps bought to celebrate a new job or a new city long ago, has nothing to do with market value, the fame or obscurity of the painter, and is caused instead by a kind of enduring entanglement, they’ve fallen in love in a classic sense. It could be said that art is, in fact, the distillation of the humanity somehow lost in the extruded, vacuum-formed, and 3-D printed environment we inhabit day-to-day, comes in a form both portable and companionable, and as such is legitimately worthy of affection.

In this upside down version, the most important person in all of art is the citizen who buys and hangs original art in their own home, an investment made in their own future and quality of life, and an invisible constituency quite forgotten in most narratives. In their attempt to portray the world as seen, artists reveal much both personal and universal, and when the viewer recognizes their own experience, thoughts and feelings, in a work of art, it means they’ve found a new friend. Taking this new friend home means the artist can buy more paint, pay more rent, and get better. Over time, seen and lived with everyday, the painting bought becomes like family, a witness that can remind its owner years later of all the things it’s seen, more than a friend.

planetary deviations -- personal perspectives

Billionaire art collectors are a sad lot really, traversing the planet in search of ways to dispose of the loot. It’s their red wagon, their moral dilemma, their cross to bare and don’t we all sympathize? That extra large Rothko in the summer place is an impressive painting, takes up the entire wall, but mostly it just says, ‘I’m a Rothko and I cost an enormous amount of money.’ It can’t say much more than that, especially after having seen many, many just like it. If we’re being serious, no modern painting could really be worth millions of dollars, and no one should have that kind of money anyway, bad for the planet.

So what happens when polarity shifts, when gravitational fields realign and the planet’s axis tilts to a new angle? Suddenly everything looks different, and a value overlooked, really there all along, begins to become visible. It’s happening now. The body politic is undergoing a difficult and dangerous molting, and a new point of view will see things differently. Visual art can both express and even aid in this transition. All those high-end art auctions for the replicating relics of fame and notoriety will fall out of fashion, about the same time being ostentatiously wealthy becomes a social liability, in a more equitable world order. Visual art instead will provide a vehicle for the assertion of personal autonomy, and become a forum as well as for establishing community values and awareness.

Visual art has unique qualities not shared with other art forms. In this new technology musicians suffer from open access, self-published fan-fiction inundates literature, and on social media the photo-shopped president appears to be rescuing people in a rowboat. The only thing that can’t be faked or digitally simulated is a painting, each totally unique and irreplaceable, certifiably organic and made by a human. Will this simple fact imbue original art with intrinsic value, something desirable and worthy of ownership, and will the public, having seen examples of area produced art in alternative spaces, restaurants and salons, want to own some? Increasingly, yes.