the welfare queens of art

At a time when municipalities are laying off firemen and cops, when legal aid is shutting down, when health and housing benefits are being withdrawn from the poor, non-profit arts organizations petition, demonstrate, and politically intimidate for more money. The cultural benefits they enumerate come from the creativity of people in the community who probably also work day jobs, while they get along quite nicely with just forty hours.

If the community is going to invest in art, more money needs to go to the artists. Instead it goes to organizations that are all overhead, doling out drabs to impose radical-chic agendas on artists seeking their recognition, any recognition, while keeping the audience at bay. Performers need community support to supplement ticket sales, but community response is part of the equation. Supporting visual art means looking at enough art to get to know the artists in your area, and buying some simple piece of original art, sometime – maybe a hand-made print or a watercolor. The money will go to a good cause, and you can keep the art.

the buy and hold collector

These are people who buy art only to put it in storage for ten years, intending to bring it out again when the price has quadrupled, prices pumped ever higher at widely publicized fake auctions, convicted and time served. These collectors don’t care what's on the front -- colors, talent, craft, or vision. What they do care about is celebrity and favor, trends and revivals, all based on the name, the trademark, the brand. Well, it can’t go on forever. Like a cartoon coyote, big-time art can only stay up in the thin air so long as it doesn’t look down, and then it’s spiraling free-fall to a little puff miles below.

New money and old envy could keep their autograph business going for a while, raw petroleum transmuted into a magazine’s fashionable living room, but they won’t produce significant art. Google Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Serra to see why. At some point society’s gaze will shift, a culture in crises reexamines, higher fuel prices will bring about a new seriousness, a deeper introspection, and a new respect for the clarity and immediacy of visual art. Sometime, in not that many years, Warhol’s entire output will suddenly appear tawdry and tattered as an abandoned carnival, all smeary posters and sloppy plagiarisms, and people won’t admit to owning any of it. One ugly auction without enough "clients" and the rest of big-time art starts to leak, hissing and sagging, turning all that warehoused ‘buy and hold’ art into rotten cantaloupes.

just art

What art expresses, first of all, is self-regard, and it applies to cultures and to individuals. In modern times artwork is an amalgam of craft and vision, and just its making, regardless of content, demonstrates the dedication and commitment of a serious person. The viewer who admires the art for its effort and accomplishment is taking them self seriously, as well. Somehow in this exchange viewer and artist acknowledge each other, although they’re separated by time – a message sent and received, both directions. That’s good enough – it’s what’s needed. Art doesn’t sell anything, not even itself, and that’s a reason to buy it. Sometimes it’s just good to get a friendly nod as you’re heading out the door – we’re all in this together.

the one thing

Computers can do everything better than we can, except for one thing. Computers can’t make art. Computers can make stuff that looks like art, but it isn’t the same. Thirty two thousand years ago somebody made pictures of the animals in their world deep in a cave. Somehow we moderns can look at the marks they made and recognize animals that no longer exist in Europe, animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands.

In the art they made to represent the world, they revealed themselves, and, as it turns out, made a statement that stands for us all. Wouldn’t phase a computer – its gut and heart wouldn’t feel a wave of deep nostalgia for such an eloquent expression of awareness from so far beyond our earliest recollections. A computer would have no clue why people stand in line to see Van Gogh, and be at a total loss to explain why they go back. Smarter, faster, harder to kill they may be, but they don’t know our history on this planet as carried in our genes, and they can’t create images which resonate in human consciousness. Only art and artists can do that.

real estate adventures –

heard this amusing story about a house showing where the owners have to be gone, and the real estate agent tells them later the clients didn’t want to buy their house, but, based on the art hanging on the walls, did say they’d like to be friends.