can’t get there from here – Kroger bakes art

Kroger wants to do right by their customers, wants to give them what they want at a fair price, but they get tired – tired of people complaining about the bread. It’s refined and processed, reduced to the lowest common denominator for taste and nutrition, and has no personality at all – like cotton candy that turns to paste when you touch it to your mouth. Sick and tired of hearing it, so they decided to give those so-called art bakeries, the ones producing traditional breads with character, texture, and taste, a run for the customer’s money. Deep in stainless steel labs late into the night they tested and baked until they had an array of breads to rival any family-owned, neighborhood bakery. There were seeded tops and different shapes, all looking really diverse and wonderful, but all made from the same regular old white bread dough. All the different kinds of bread tasted the same, and not a bit better than their regular bread. They found the look, they had the technology, but they couldn’t produce a good loaf of bread.

The very process of finding and funding public art provides the look of art, the sensation of something new, but it’s a generic, one size fits all, bleached of meaning copy product – glitzy and clever on the outside, but all the same white bread on the inside. It isn’t anyone’s fault – it’s the process. Constructing cool stuff to conform to guidelines and parameters, figuring markups and materials, delivery dates and installation constraints turns artists into culture vendors and fills a city up with things that eventually rust, fade, and collect debris. Does it add to the quality of life – maybe. Mediocre in gives mediocre out – it’s like a law or something. Artists line up to receive a drop of public money, in the form of direct commissions from city or state, or the tax-deductible sponsorship of business, while myriad non-profits grow glossy. The city is left with stuff to maintain forever and ever, or until the thrill is gone.

It isn’t the art that’s the problem – it’s the backward set of priorities that puts it there on the corner, in the median. The Picasso in Chicago (see prior post, July 4), often cited as an iconic example of public art, wasn’t chosen by committee, wasn’t paid for with public money, didn’t fit anyone’s parameters.

one art

There is one art. Scholars who explain it all to the rest of us don’t see it that way. They divide art up with fences and gates, categories, periods, schools. They do this because that’s the way they’re taught – so much easier to score the tests. By the time they’re done, representational painting and abstract painting are different things, modern and contemporary are separate realms of expression, every year in SoHo has it’s own stars. Actually, the idea of making marks on a flat surface which somehow create 3D pictures in the mind stretches back thirty thousand years we know of, and it’s been going on continually since. Languages require a lot of learning and divide up humanity into regions, tribes, nationalities – the obvious source of many of our problems. Art goes in directly. Fifty percent of the brain interprets vision and eighty percent of the circuits connect in some way, according to tv documentaries. Art needs no translation.

Art has been used to pull many wagons. Early on we think it had to do with hunting, the Egyptians made it talk, the church used it to shape and condition human experience, and we sell stuff with it. Behind it all is this mysterious ability of human perception to animate line and shape on a page. Our purpose here is to deal with the pure stuff, and it doesn’t really matter which box you pull it out of. There are artists all around with something to say, and some create visual images as deep and wide as you have eyes to see.

inception

Seems like a novel idea, planting seeds in the subconscious to grow and bear fruit in the inner workings of our heads – actually, it’s happening every day, but instead of attacking us in our dreams they use art, and call it advertising. The power of art, the persuasiveness of art, and it’s all focused at getting us to buy something – toothpaste, motorcycles, ED medicines. Does it change behaviors? They sure make a lot of money claiming it does, with charts and graphs.

upside down

Just sitting thinking about people I knew, committed artists living and breathing it, who have gone other directions, given up, settled for less. A couple were landscape painters who loved the countryside, loved their brushes and tubes of paint. One had a studio down the hall – his high school buddies would fall in on Friday night from their different professions to drink beer and engage in old familiar conversations, and the other lived up the stairs. Doing other stuff these days. A ceramicist who had a studio across the hall was making free standing figures, finally clock faces and trivets – she knew all the formulas, understood the chemistry, watched the kiln all night while it slowly built up temperature, and she’s gone, too. I’m not making this up.

Their expectations weren’t that high – no one expected to be famous. Their only ambition, and mine, too, was to pay the rent, to buy the materials, to keep going. Not only did they finally find themselves defeated, the artwork they would have made in their maturity never happened. The people who might have owned their work, lived with their art, and enhanced their lives with it settled for less as well. Artists I know who struggle on have learned how to hang sheetrock, how to repair furniture, how to live with old cars, while non-profit arts groups suck up grant money, pass out favors, take home regular paychecks with medical and retirement. Art is upside down in central Kentucky.

goldfish art

Recently a posting on an art blog reported an exhibition in which goldfish were swimming in blenders and patrons were invited to push the buttons. Sounds like something severely abused children might do, unsupervised. Participation in violence isn’t going to be my favorite arts activity, and seems, in certain respects, to be bald-faced unwholesome. On this blog, in this mode of thinking, we ask that people consider taking money that could be spent on other stuff and buy art with it, instead. The major argument we have to make is about mental health, psychic well-being, individual realization, and much of contemporary art, including pureed live fish, doesn’t seem to help with that. Art has great power in the human mind, and trivializing dark impulses might be counter-productive is all I’m saying.

attention span management

Does the internet give us access to all the information while making it near impossible to think? Well, yeah, so it seems -- people have been doing research. It has to do with dwell time as much as anything. Being smart, it turns out, isn’t so much about brain power as the ability to focus what we’ve got in one place long enough to gain traction. Surfing is screwing it up. The reason print media is losing relevance is because fewer and fewer people can get to the bottom of the page. Is that bad? – probably. When slogans are seen as philosophy and sensationalism is called the news human potential starts way behind, and politics turn atavistic.

Art doesn’t cure it, but it can offer some relief. Art fortifies the attention span by expanding the moment. Instead of a flickering universal search, one teapot sits next to a cup and a lemon ever since you bought it, inherited it, were given it as a gift. On the first day a painting is seldom a match for the most modest of home entertainment centers, but it gains slowly, catching and holding our notice over days, months, and years. Owning interesting art is an investment in attention span management in coming decades, and it’s becoming a better bargain every day.

Starving dogs and public art

Most public art seems little more than quirky decoration, compared with that thing in Chicago in a square of its own, right downtown. It’s worth noting Picasso couldn’t get a visa to visit the US, and Chicago, not NY, always seemed to represent America’s brutality to European artists. Even so, when Chicago accepted it for free they didn’t bother to think it might mean something. Though they won’t admit it, they’ve come to suspect implied criticism of some sort, and have been trying to figure a way to dump it in the lake for years. I wouldn’t pretend to know what it means, either, but it has the hunched shoulders, the bare ribs and splayed pelvis of canine starvation – humanity’s own notification of serious bad times. I’ve actually seen the homeless sheltering underneath to soak up the residual heat in the steel, as if it had been intended. I don’t agree or disagree – I’m just awestruck.