'entry points' -- points of view

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I went to a panel discussion hosted by a progressive hotel entitled, ‘entry points,’ a provocative name to a ragtag band of artists, all in search of a sliver of access to the ‘audience,’ a mythical population, and at this point still largely imaginary. It could have instead been called, ‘cascade of credentials,’ with an extensive listing for each panelist in the form of a handy brochure. Of the four panelists, the two artists presented radically, indeed polar forms. The first was theatrical in myopic and rigid black and white, while the other artist said nothing at all, and instead ran a rather lengthy video of free-form visual gibberish, with the disclaimer, ‘if flashing lights make you feel ill, look away.’ The other two were curators, who didn’t really have much to add. I didn’t detect a single point of entry for the creatively under-appreciated, no website, no email address, no secret door, but, to be fair, when the questions began I slipped away. The refreshments were grand and the coffee was excellent, thanks.

We here at ‘owning art’ have never had much sympathy for artists, dreamy freeloaders who think other people should value their precious expressions. The independent ones are art’s prospectors, rough and antisocial, with pick and shovel and beans for supper, they could’ve had a day job, and the dayroom directors over at the university have already schemed out their retirement. It’s the audience that’s due concern, that needs to be aroused, and it’s they who could use more information. It would be more productive to address that sleeping beast with one eye only half open, potential art consumers, nodding listlessly on the empty calories of common culture, all the while longing for something worthy and enduring they can hold on to. In its most condensed and portable form, that’s going to be art. Art is what this society lacks, and while competing ideologies thrash around, and seeds of discord sprout even in an innocent art forum, some notion of social cohesion and solidarity should also be planted.

I’m all for a campaign called, ‘entry points,’ but not for those craven opportunists who listen to music in their studios all afternoon, or on weekends, of whenever they find time to work. They’ll show up if you whistle. This progressive hotel should definitely be hosting ‘entry points’ events, but for business executives, for professional forums and associations, and for anyone in the local population who feels intimidated and discouraged by the condescending and fetishistic art they’ve been presenting, so far, in their galleries.

A program called ‘entry points’ could be designed for the local population, aimed toward developing an audience who might one day begin buying and living with art, and supporting area artists. Along with panels of local artists, their galleries could begin featuring worthy art produced in the area. These exhibits would draw more foot traffic from the community, achieving an integration with area awareness, while establishing a regional identity for a traveling public. With their acknowledgement, many artists’ careers might become self-sustaining, as the community gains the confidence to make aesthetic choices. If the home-office of this corporation, well-intentioned and commendable, can unravel its own mission statement, it might consider curating from another point of view, and redirecting their interesting and possibly branded concept, ‘entry points.’

back to the source -- pictures

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The reality we inhabit is as deep as anyone cares to go. There’s always more to see, and all that’s required is to look, but even so, the world we all inhabit has been getting shallower, until it’s mostly just surface. Maybe you haven’t noticed. Advertising cultivates lowest denominators, and that’s fine with the overlords, since the mass of human flesh concerned about what brand of beer to drink, or what sports franchise to root for, is so much easier to herd and exploit. Those dead-eyed zombies cashing in on war and famine have an ongoing beef with art, and a raging dislike for artists, mostly because they wake people up, arousing their sense of self and causing them to question their place in the world.

In totalitarian countries, they pump out their single-world view, manipulating the masses and dulling their aspirations. These terror states just throw independent artists in jail, or worse. Any art that doesn’t promote their program of control is labeled degenerate and making it becomes a crime, fairly simple, but in open-market societies the approach has been more nuanced. The state, under the guise of progressivism, devotes massive amounts of public money to promoting an art no one really cares for, until serious people begin to lose interest. As though on a sacred mission, they inundate galleries and museums with the non-objective and self-referential, a style turned out in great quantities by the salaried wing of their vast art bureaucracy. Either way the goal is similar -- reducing their fellow humans to a drone population intoxicated on festivals, parades, and sporting events, never asking where they’re headed, or who’s in charge.

Societies, at large, are just going to have to work this out. Will the essential human spirit emerge from the ashes of the twentieth century, and wizened by all the cheap lies, finally assert itself against the dumb narcotic miasma they’ve cast over the land, with sitcoms, cop shows, seven layer lotteries and overlapping rounds of season-long tournaments. It looks like a long-shot from here, but we have to live our own lives in the meantime, right? Maybe we should ask, each as individuals, what is it about visual art that has it censored and controlled in one society, and reduced to a poker chip by another? What are they afraid of, and could it be somewhere hiding in plain sight?

Millionaires have attempted to turn art into a signifier of elitist sensibility, the market begets a branded commodity, there’s even a form of state-sponsored secular idolatry, and it would be best for the serious person to see through all of that. On the walls of caves, millennia before the dawn of history, people made marks in charcoal and ochre, and with our pampered modern eyes we see long-extinct animals as they were. Have you been taking that for granted? It’s an amazing human attribute, and it’s the crux of what they’re concerned about, pardon me boys, those mollusks in the star chamber, high above us.

Visual art enters the nervous system through a service door, at a level not accessible to intellectual thought, and responding to it is experienced more as a kind of knowing, or even better, can sometimes seem like remembering something long forgotten. If the beguiling image is only attempting to sell you a product, it’s empty promise can seem stale, no matter how talented the artist. On the other hand, an original piece of art, even if the product of only sincere and honest effort, already embodies an example of an aspiration that goes beyond a desire for money, since it’s an arduous apprenticeship, and the nervous system knows it. I may not share a meal, but I’d sit and watch the sunset with a cave-person anytime. We’d compare portfolios.

revival in the heartland -- seeing salvation

Religion isn't really about worshiping a god, that’s just a cover story. The basic mission of them all is altering reality. Civilizations located in arid climates didn’t necessarily revere the rain god, but sought to flatter it with great ceremonial displays of affection, along with the occasional sacrifice ......so it would rain. We’re modern people, and we can cut out the middlemen, even though they be legion. Instead we can talk about bending reality directly, without all the incense and chanting. 

First of all, it would be handy to decide what’s meant by ‘reality.’ Is reality just what you perceive, based on your own little bundle of life-experiences and unquestioned habits of thought, or is there something real out there independent of us, that we could all see together? The answer is ‘no, there isn’t,’ or, if there is, we can’t know it. All we have is this little machine that sorts all we see into discreet comparisons with stuff we’ve seen before, we call it thinking, and constantly discards the rest. If you’ve evolved ahead of the rest of us, and can see around corners and understand time, none of the rest of this applies to you, but for any remaining, you’re living in a box and the walls are defined by where you’ve been and what you’ve seen, perhaps along with what you’ve read and thought about, and that makes all of our realities a bit different.

Instead of religion, consider art, and it’s ability to shape and alter reality by exercising and stretching the flabby physique of the perceptual net, by tuning and calibrating personal discernment and stretching out the attention-span, and by opening up silted channels of sight and dredging out harbors of thought. Something else art does for us, has always done, and that’s to give us an island to swim toward, all of us are adrift in this sea of infinite possibility. Religions have all employed art to shape the reality they wanted, angels in clouds and demon enforcers below, but we don’t have to do it that way anymore.

Could looking at art cause rain to fall on parched crops, probably not, but no one knows how effective sacrifice at the temple is either. What art can do it is offer new possibilities to the nervous system, knocking the needle out of its well-worn groove, and the person probably won’t even know it's happening. Even so, in time they’ll begin to notice more detail in their surroundings, they'll listen better, and for some reason even good food will taste better. This is altering reality, as real as it gets. In the larger world, being more open to the array of possibilities at almost every moment should lead to better outcomes, and when the notion of irrigation arises, the rain god becomes less relevant and sacrifice goes out of style.

As identity silos become slimmer, as music becomes more fundamental, and as advertising covers every visible surface, wouldn’t now be a good time to unclog reception channels pounded shut by invasive stimuli, and utilize art for altering your own reality, tuning in to the world we all see, together?
 

art -- the only thing that floats

Two people are having a conversation. A dog enters the room. One person loves dogs, sometimes even more than people, and this dog is so friendly, wagging and saying hello. The other person doesn’t like dogs, had no animals as a child, and finds all that wagging and head bobbing disturbing and maybe threatening. Do they see the same dog? They’ll both agree they see a dog, even a brown dog, but it isn’t the same dog. If you’ll concede that through each other’s eyes the dog would be unrecognizable, consider it also applies to the room, the sky, the car one of them is so proud of, and even to each other’s faces, so different from what they see themselves in the mirror.

Politics makes it obvious, people seemingly are living on different planets while inhabiting the same space, but it's revealed in more than the alternative facts on the evening news. The most obvious difference in individual perception has to do with attention to detail, how much information is extracted from any given scene. The native american of the southwest probably sees a bit more in a desert landscape than a typical tourist, peering through tinted glass while doing seventy five across what appears to them a wasteland, but it's also true for two passengers on a bus sitting side by side. After the sensitivity has been determined, there are individual preferences concerning what to scan for. Some folks are only interested in essentials, navigating rush hour traffic and driving a hard bargain, while others tend to notice colors, highlights and shadows, the texture and mood of their surroundings. These are generally the artists and their fans.

The second group reaches out to the first by making art, presenting an invitation to open some of the closed doors in the skull. The first group appreciates this enough, once they've gone through a few doors, to share some of their efficiently gathered loot. For many loosely allied reasons, pubic and private, this transaction has been gaining traction recently. The human spirit doesn’t appreciate being squeezed down into brand-loyal consumer units, and a reckoning is at hand. Words are dead. The doublespeak of advertising bestows love on kitchen products, and politics has muddied the waters even more. 

Artists make pictures that anyone can see in their own way, yet to all they’re a signpost to a fuller awareness and understanding of the tangible reality we all inhabit. There's ample testimony that living with a favorite painting influences how the world is perceived. Having art around makes the evening light turn lemon yellow, more wildlife appears on drives in the country, and with greater discernment, even the news that's ‘between the lines‘ starts coming through.

Quality of life has become an issue, now that competitive efficiency has everyone stretched thin to keep up, so many anxious, feeling depleted and dissatisfied by the canned gratifications streaming up from their device. Something seems to be missing. What happened to the blue of the sky, the taste of a cooked meal, or the little burst of joy at the first crocus coming through the snow? The list goes on. In this peculiar liquid point in history, when the increasing current seems to indicate a waterfall up ahead, the art on the wall becomes a lifesaver, a flotation ring to hold on to. Spend a little money and get something nice.

ding dong twentieth century -- Dorothy waking up

The twentieth century left a peculiar art legacy, one distorted by market manipulation, cults of personality and notoriety, and massive clandestine and public government interference. The gauntlet was dropped back in nineteen thirty one when Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Diego Rivera to create a fresco mural for the ground floor of Rockefeller Center, and after six months of labor had it jackhammered down before the public had a chance to see it, or even for any photographs to be taken. The rules were enforced by armed security people.

The rich guys had spoken, ‘that’s what we think of your brotherhood of man in pictures bullshit -- now get out of our way.’ With government money they nurtured a breed of artist so corruptible they’d make nonobjective messes on a canvas and turn them in for cash, a special program for artists in new york that was more like welfare than the other NRA art programs. It was an incubator for the abstractionist movement, and many of the early ‘masters’ had this blind and generous program on their resumes. Since the second world war, government money for art schools, for grants and foundations, and massive tax breaks for art philanthropy have rewarded the abstract and conceptual, and cavalierly demeaned and excluded visual art that any working, home owning, tax paying person might like. They in fact made a point of supporting art which had no chance of commercial success, since no one would pay for it, and for several generations it was their code, their mission, and their badge of honor.

Their cover story for this massive distortion of the entire realm of visual art was the international competition with the soviet union after the war. The reds were all snooty with their ballet, their classical music, and their deep humanistic literature, so we countered with huge, highly individualistic abstract expressionist paintings, our cowboy artists fiercely proclaiming their existential freedom by splashing and dripping. Along with wall-to-wall support at home, the state department exported their gigantic works of art to a europe still destitute and devastated by war, with lavish openings and planted positive reviews. They also used tons of money, wasn’t their money, to deride as retrograde and backward any form of representational art, and art students in schools everywhere were ridiculed for even attempting it. It turns out it wasn’t really about the russians, was it?

Early in the century the mexican muralists had given mexico a national identity, helping it overcome exploitation by foreign powers by healing its social and political fragmentation, speaking eloquently to a largely illiterate population. They were even influencing the american artists hired by the WPA to paint in post offices and public buildings, and worker solidarity and farmers rights were frequent themes.

Somebody up top decided to fix the problem, this threat of social solidarity, by pulling the plug on pictorial art altogether, eliminating the vehicle of discontent right front of the whole court -- the mad king cuts out the tongue of the jester. Instead they substituted an irrational art, proclaiming it from all corners to be more profound, more insightful, and even more beautiful in its ugliness. Abstract art ascended and pictorial art of any sort was banished and condemned, seemed like from all corners, as backward and dumb, and for several generations no culturally aware person would even look at it. The mexican muralists and their movement wouldn’t be heard of again for the rest of the century.

As the twenty first century establishes itself, the corruption of the institutions of art, the money and reputation laundering, the tax evasion and transparent fraud, but mostly the elevation of vile nonsense, have tended to sully the twentieth century’s art legacy. Time to start over. We face a harsh reality in which words have robbed of meaning by the doublespeak of politics, entertainment shows up in garter straps, and as advertising creeps on to every visible surface, many humans find they ‘can’t get no relief.’ More and more they find themselves categorized as a predictable consumer unit, and their life choices limited to coke or pepsi, ford or chevy, and my team verses the rest of the league. ‘There must be some way out of here’ is what many of them are thinking.

Art is starting over as a grassroots movement across the land, you must have noticed. Several factors contribute to a new awareness of visual art, but the spirit that animates them all is simply appetite, a desire to emerge from the consumer cell of mind constricting algorithms to become again fully human, empathetically linked with others through the expression of art, a fundamental human capacity they managed to block with interference for a while. Much comes across in original pictorial art that advertising bleaches out, conveying messages that are felt rather than thought, providing insights and observations that aren’t trying to get you to buy something. You should get aboard, the train’s leaving, real art in people’s houses is about to start happening, and more art is being seen in public everyday. When people look up and begin to notice, the product will get better quick since comparison is what we do, and after all that constriction art’s future contribution to community life is bound to be joyful.

planned obsolescence -- a barnyard turnaround

I wrote this blog for a number of years to express frustration at an art world which had rejected me, it was mutual. A less obsessive sort would probably have moved on, found some semi-creative niche in the big world of commerce and concentrated on comfort, but I took on the challenge of moving the mountain. Partly heroic, I liked the idea, but I didn’t have much choice. Family issues had shuffled my priorities and reconnection to others and to physical reality, itself, would shape how I came to conceive of art. This was, in fact, the way I found myself standing on the wrong side of the fence, when more exclusionary and non-objective forms were receiving support and recognition.

Occasionally along the way, I’ve offered the aside that what I was saying would become obsolete when the art world began to move on to the new reality, which would be about now, really. So let’s keep score. I said a new generation of DA’s would go after the money laundering and tax evasion among major art donors, and that at some point a run of deaccession by major museums would deflate the market for ‘masters’ and collapse all speculative investing. At this point it could be said to be teetering.

I also suggested that a grass-roots reawakening in hometowns would reestablish representational art as a forum for thoughtful expression, and a lattice for connection, empathy, and trust among neighbors. Of all the many forces pulling and twisting present day society, the rise of studios and galleries from underachieving rental properties, outdoor painting events, and murals on blank walls all indicate an interest in representational art within communities is being renewed.

I even predicted that the very facts of origin and duration would make original works of art inherently valuable in a world of swirling images and ephemeral facts, each of us standing in digital quicksand. The fact that one person made it and it’s the only one there is, will have increasing potency, and if some element of humanity comes across, inhabitants of a one-use world may value it instinctively, without knowing why.

It was my outside hope to connect with other rebels, undercover jedi knights working regular jobs, painting on weekends and waiting to be seen, or people looking at art and seeking a doorway, but I know they’re out there. My squeak just doesn’t carry very far, like whispering into a hollow log, but I haven’t been entirely wrong so far. Words have been discredited lately, Orwell predicted, but pictures supersede languages, and a painting can be a nod back and forth among many, as well as a verification of self, and an individual’s anchor against the tide.

who really pays -- real art thieves

A new generation of prosecutors promises pursue the tax manipulation going on in major art transactions, such as art bought at a bogus auction for an absurd price, and then donated to a museum for a write-off right away, black ties and limos. These are essentially thefts by very wealthy people from those who contribute to their opulent lifestyles with actual sweat, occupational stress, and physical effort, and the brandname artworks they use for collateral mean no more to them than squares of colored cloth. That’s awful and needs to be fixed, but there’s a more insidious crime going down. They also stole the art.

It’s up for debate -- are common folk too dumb to appreciate art, or are they too smart to pretend to like something they don’t? It’s going to be difficult to argue that rich people are more intelligent when you look at their art. The emotional charge of a color field painting made by an artist weeping into their whiskey is undeniable, until you consider there might be a thousand of them out there, maybe more, no one knows. Present these paintings any way you like, but in the end any one looks like all the others.

People who earn their livings forty hours at a time don’t dream of acquiring such rarified markers of genius, they’re too smart. Working people aren’t charmed by the notion that an afternoon of clever and audacious paint application can be worth more than their lifetime total income, and tend to find themselves unmoved when they see the results. Oddly enough, the one thing that’s out of bounds for serious art these days is any possible appeal to common taste. This dictum exists so rich people can feel smart and it makes the market manageable, but what happened to the art that used to hang in homes, and where are the artists who made it?

Turns out it’s one of art’s first lessons, learned when any particular person shakes themselves free of the mythology of modern art, its celebrity movements and sensational breakthroughs, and just starts looking at art for themselves. Art is about self-discovery first of all, and sooner or later realizing the ultimate decision about what you like is yours to make.