art is the measure

Art is the measure of regard one has for one’s self. Obvious for the artist, but it actually applies to everyone. It’s true for the art you look at, as well as art you might make. What else is art about – anyone with a better answer step to the front of the line. The artist makes a statement – this is the best I can do, this is what I think you want to see, this will make me famous, and it’s right out front for anyone to look at. At this point the artist is completely honest, or at least can’t hide anything, because if they’re a grant-sucking, art regurgitating camp follower, it’ll show in their work.

For everybody else it’s pretty simple, too. What art do you have on your walls -- at home, in the office, and how important is it to you? Do you see yourself in the art you choose to own, choose to look at, even to notice. Maybe not. Public money has been trivializing and demeaning art for over half a century, and by now the general population doesn’t seem to care – what a surprise. The first artists to be supported, promoted, made famous with public money, grants from foundations and public institutions, were the abstract expressionists after the second world war – art’s Taliban. Instead of firing squads they used ridicule, ending careers, driving established representational artists into menial occupations elsewhere, pissing on all of art history – the way fundamentalists tend to do. More extreme than most, they banned the depiction of anything, and it went on for years and years. You still might hear some old art professor fading into retirement absently mouthing the words –“I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature” for the million-billionth time.

Public money turns art into the idiot pet we walk twice a day and otherwise ignore, and that’s its job. Built into the distribution of public money are enough filters for mediocrity to ensure a public thirst for self-verification and redemption will have to look elsewhere – politics or religion, perhaps. The poison in the well are the decisions of self-serving bureaucrats who don’t know or care anything about art – check the walls in their houses for verification. Artists with self-respect may turn away, and find themselves turned away from, with no access to grants, commissions, and the resulting public recognition. (see previous post – 'upside down') Public institutions -- non-profits, state commissions, public university art schools all expend vast resources, the public's own money, to commandeer the public’s attention for their own benefit, not the benefit of art, the public or its culture.

It’s time to see past the vast public art enterprise, so dependently attached to the veins of our political structure, and look for independent art and artists who express, in some unspeakable way, the seriousness we have felt, or would like to feel, in our own lives, day to day.