What if art school was sabotage? Maybe not a conscious effort to pull up the ladder, to cripple future competition, to strangle a serious voice, an authentic art, the possibility of a self-sustaining career; it would be more like an unseen institutional imperative, an inbuilt self-preservation mechanism, a poisonous coating of goo around the profession of being an artist.
How does anyone expect to learn about becoming an artist from people who have never sold art for a living, never paid for their own studios or art supplies, and have no life experience beyond the insular confines of campus? It’s sorta like going to a priest for marriage counseling. What they know about is keeping their head down and progressing, year by year, toward the department chairmanship – art is their day job.
The awful truth, kids -- Duchamp was pulling a prank, and had the dumb luck to be taken seriously. Art is about finding hidden places in common with others, and it’s not the same thing as just hiding. Everything they told you is wrong.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
abstract truth
Peter Schjeldahl, resident visual art critic for the New Yorker stated while reviewing a MOMA exhibit of Abstract Expressionists from the fifties, “They embraced abstraction as the shortest route to universal meaning and significance.” It’s a patent absurdity, one that undermines our culture, our thought, and our integrity.
Visual art, like music, has been a manifestation of human expression since the beginning, and while flutes and drums have been lost to time, paintings still survive on rock walls. Visual art preceded writing by millenia, encapsulating and conveying meaning, and representing us, one to another. It isn’t tool-making that separates us from the rest of the animals, but the making of art, and these days, it separates us from the machines, too. Only humans make art, and only humans recognize it.
Abstract art is a negation of meaning, and its early practitioners were nihilistic, disappointed because art is difficult, and because life is hard -- lessons learned at the open end of a bottle. Suicidal drunkenness ‘in’ isn’t going to yield anything pleasant coming ‘out’ – abstract expressionism is ugly. The rise of abstraction paralleled other fundamentalist reactionary movements seen since, and the destruction of the twelve hundred year old sandstone Buddha by the Taliban embodies the early abstractionist’s attitudes toward the foundations and heritage of visual art.
After a devastating purge, life usually returns chastened and different, brighter and with new vigor. Time to jettison the whole mess – the enormous state apparatus of schools and grant agencies, the celebrity status of cynical hustlers, and the gallery system with its dollar rankings based on some invisible consensus and sheer mystery. Time to wake up. Time to start over.
Visual art, like music, has been a manifestation of human expression since the beginning, and while flutes and drums have been lost to time, paintings still survive on rock walls. Visual art preceded writing by millenia, encapsulating and conveying meaning, and representing us, one to another. It isn’t tool-making that separates us from the rest of the animals, but the making of art, and these days, it separates us from the machines, too. Only humans make art, and only humans recognize it.
Abstract art is a negation of meaning, and its early practitioners were nihilistic, disappointed because art is difficult, and because life is hard -- lessons learned at the open end of a bottle. Suicidal drunkenness ‘in’ isn’t going to yield anything pleasant coming ‘out’ – abstract expressionism is ugly. The rise of abstraction paralleled other fundamentalist reactionary movements seen since, and the destruction of the twelve hundred year old sandstone Buddha by the Taliban embodies the early abstractionist’s attitudes toward the foundations and heritage of visual art.
After a devastating purge, life usually returns chastened and different, brighter and with new vigor. Time to jettison the whole mess – the enormous state apparatus of schools and grant agencies, the celebrity status of cynical hustlers, and the gallery system with its dollar rankings based on some invisible consensus and sheer mystery. Time to wake up. Time to start over.
Friday, January 14, 2011
blame art
It isn’t Rush and Sarah caused the violence – they’re just bumps on the log. The awful fact is that art is real. It shapes our perceptual net, tells us what the world’s about, and it forms the reality we share. Can anyone face the idea that it’s our entertainment that makes it seem natural to carry instant mayhem in the coat pocket, in the purse, under the front seat? Our gun laws are bald-faced irrational, and it’s because crime shows have been substituting intimidation and violence for our own natural memories, which have become seriously diminished while we’re watching crime shows. Avid TV watchers, action movie addicts, video gamers are all here to testify they don’t feel safe outside without a gun.
Why would art do that to us? It’s because this art is in bondage, sold into slavery and prostitution, destined to give us distorted visions of life because it’s being used to sell us something – spotless kitchens, the suburban pickup truck, medicine for the dreary lives we lead, unable to relate to each other while dodging phantom spies and dope dealers in every parking facility. Well, we can say we didn’t know we were poisoning ourselves, our culture, the future of the planet and everything on it, with just a little vicarious ultra violence, but the proof is in the way we pass out real guns and ammunition.
The fault is not in our stars, but in our taste for art – most popularly a pastiche of gun violence and pornography, or maybe just gun violence pornography. We don’t think art is real – we say all this gore is cathartic, an entertainment, an honest depiction of anyone's life, and we’re fooling ourselves. If you want to think better thoughts, look at better art.
Why would art do that to us? It’s because this art is in bondage, sold into slavery and prostitution, destined to give us distorted visions of life because it’s being used to sell us something – spotless kitchens, the suburban pickup truck, medicine for the dreary lives we lead, unable to relate to each other while dodging phantom spies and dope dealers in every parking facility. Well, we can say we didn’t know we were poisoning ourselves, our culture, the future of the planet and everything on it, with just a little vicarious ultra violence, but the proof is in the way we pass out real guns and ammunition.
The fault is not in our stars, but in our taste for art – most popularly a pastiche of gun violence and pornography, or maybe just gun violence pornography. We don’t think art is real – we say all this gore is cathartic, an entertainment, an honest depiction of anyone's life, and we’re fooling ourselves. If you want to think better thoughts, look at better art.
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