soldiers' stories -- feeling alive

Returning warriors suffer readjustment of the worst kind -- everything seems dull and meaningless now that they’re home. They ruefully admit wanting to go back -- “to support my buddies” is what they say on camera. Impending mortality has a paradoxically enhancing effect on sensations of all kinds so that taking a leak on a crisp morning in the mountains while scanning grey cliffs for a minute muzzle-flash provides more intense mental acuity, more total involvement, than any possible experience back home.  

Adrenaline makes all our systems fire quicker and sharpens all our senses but obtaining a significant internal dosage requires more and more risk, and continual escalation eventually results in unfortunate consequences. Malaise and boredom has been around for a long while and civilized people have devised ways to stay interested without bodily harm. Travel helps folks to admire quaint details and scenic views they’d ignore at home, while others make the rounds of ethnic restaurants to stay interested in food. For a human, anything with a nervous system really, routine and convenience dulls the attention, takes the zest out of living and brings on the fog.

Artists make intensely interesting objects -- that’s their job. Here is an artwork so compelling and evocative that it engages and refreshes the eyes without immediate danger or the necessity of travel, and this renewed sensitivity generalizes so that its owner begins to notice more and reflect more about the familiar elements of their day. The constant possibility of immediate danger and loss isn’t really necessary to feel alive, aware of the nuances and subtleties of each moment -- a person could always buy and live with art instead.

a dumb artist talks back

When I went to school abstract art was smart and representational art was dumb. ‘I have better things to do with my time than to go around copying nature’ was a group chant taught to incoming classes in every art school for several decades. Text books, popular magazines, and foundation-sponsored periodicals all derided representational art for a lack of creativity, a deficit of imagination, and simply being unworthy of serious consideration. Representational painters were to be shunned as closed-minded reactionaries unable to accept modernity, unwilling to sit in the ‘intelligence and awareness’ section of the bleachers. Even though it makes no sense to us individually based on grade school art classes we all took, the peculiar notion that abstract painting is much more difficult and inherently more profound than producing recognizable images has been boilerplate academic dogma for several generations. 

From different quarters a cabal of self-interests converged to bend and fold art into something that couldn’t be recognized, literally, and reduced it to a blind, manipulated, indexed commodity -- we’ve been calling it modern art. The academics feel conceptually safe and comfortably secure behind abstract art’s ambiguity, and commercial interests can monetize a hyped reputation and iffy investment potential but can’t really grasp, let alone deal in aesthetic value. Behind them all, like a mountain range in the sky, are the financial overlords who suffered discomfort at the social awareness and class-consciousness art had been suggesting just before the massively subsidized ascendency of non-objective abstraction. As odd as it all sounds evidence of this cultural hl-jacking can be found everywhere.

Art, it turns out, is itself the cure. It offers each individual the possibility of seeing past the rigged consensus and directly perceiving the mind of the artist, but this insight won’t be found in text books, classes at the U, or lectures by experts. They’re all in on it. Forget them. Find yourself in art -- that’s the honest way to go about it. If thatched cottages with chimney smoke and glowing windows touches your heart it’s nobody’s business, although you might try looking at more art. Possibly in all the art produced in your area there’s an artist whose work somehow reminds you of something very personal. You can even imagine that were you to meet the artist you might become friends. Short of that it’s quite reasonable to expect that people you like and who like you will probably like the art as well. If in the end it turns out you like dumb art maybe you’ll meet a dumb artist. They’re out there.  

art and wealth -- the oddest couple

It gets shallower as it goes up. Privilege has its cost and convenience isn’t cheap. To a materialistic world this is most unwelcome news. No one wants to hear that life is more engaging and more profound with less, and that the better off not only don’t really care about art but can’t even see it, not really. Wealth insulates -- no more changing tires, making beds, cooking for yourself. Also, no agonizing over financial dilemmas, no need for personal sacrifice, and no day to day participation in the unrelenting adventure of most people’s lives. The ultra-wealthy bought their way out or had their ticket prepaid in trust, and with cool detachment they watch the trudge of humanity from box seats, concerned about cuff links and makes of car. They’d all jump at the paper Warhol, and all his friends, used to wipe their asses or was it peed on -- who cares, they’ll call it art. (google 'piss paintings') That was Andy’s attitude and he just came out and said it for anyone who’d listen -- rich people don’t listen.

Art is about empathy, not some fuzzy communal sentiment, but a deep down intimate connection sometimes so immediate and unexpected people have been known to cry spontaneously in front of paintings. For this to happen there has to be some depth to plum, enough life experience for art to engage, some touch of common humanity already established. Paradoxically this means the people most likely to appreciate art are the ones who have had to make choices tempered by limited resources, not by the comfortable who can more easily afford it. Like being born too beautiful, excessive ease must be overcome, and by the craziest coincidence art can help with that, too.  

everything changes -- sudden conversions

Is everyone changing their minds all at once? Is that possible? We’re herd animals, we put our noses up to sniff the air at same time, and a new breeze is blowing. Simply put the old consensus became obsolete and tattered and a new consensus is giving people permission to express what they really felt anyway. 

William Burroughs said, “the people living on the sea shore in the middle ages knew the world was round because they saw ships disappear over the horizon everyday, but they thought the world was flat because that’s what they were told.” This desire to blend in has been used against us by everyone who ever wanted to control us or sell us something, and we all know this. Art leads out. Art is in the business of individual permissions. Sometimes it happens all at once.

Art has been co-opted in your fair city, don’t care where, to provide the raw ore of fund-raising, and the artists have become the miners with dirty faces and empty pockets. A phalanx of non-profits, including the universities, operate beautiful galleries for the display of art that subsists on public support -- it’s like a circle. They claim to represent a consensus and media backs them up but their events leave many independent artists looking in through steamy glass, and their prospective audience is discouraged as well. It’s like the natural flow has been diverted for the special benefit of people who may not love art.

And what a great time it is with the dam about to burst and all. Non-profits have begun offering artists up to fifty percent of the take at their auctions, up from the traditional zero. Gallery walks are coming to ambitious small communities that don’t even have galleries yet. Visionary entrepreneurs who use art to sell hotel rooms will introduce the notion of buying and owning art wherever they land, and it spreads. What people need is permission to pursue art they like, which is something they give to themselves, and everything changes.

owningart -- why so negative?

Just an aside about what we do here. I understand certain reverences and deferments are expected in greater society regardless of personal feelings. It’s an obnoxious atheist who questions virgin birth during lent and stuff like that. In the the more exclusive society of the artistically aware there are also articles of faith that are unquestioned. I don’t care to debate them -- I’m just trying to drive around them. Art is old. We calculate the worthiness of past cultures by how well they made art and what they made art about. The impetus to deal with the world in terms of art, making and looking, might physically be in our DNA.

Here at owning art we just don’t care about fashion. Oh sure we’d like to be presentable, but when the latest style lets in drafts or hurts our feet we take a longer view and go for comfort and function. Our premise is simple -- on the wall original art is the time-release antidote to the toxic side-effects of the digitalized, stamped and extruded treadmill we’ve inherited. Art becomes, in this present condition, the distilled essence that seasons our daily porridge, a personal anchorage in the seething mob, and an intimate conversation you can have with the artist, and all artists, over a lifetime.

Art will be regionally authentic when it becomes self-sustaining, when art is bought and hung in office or home and when independent artists can earn a living making it. Owning art is exceedingly positive, suggesting a more direct dialogue between working artists and the community they serve -- more exposure, and advocating for a direct personal relationship with art based on looking and due respect for any artist who produces to the absolute limits of their ability. 

time - it won’t hurry

Time is the magic ingredient. You can come up with the best invention, sing the most beguiling song, have the perfect body but if you’re not there at the right time, week, day, and hour the train won’t stop. Actually cool stuff is around all the time, but the public’s attention is like a flashlight in Pharaoh’s tomb and can’t take in too much all at once. If you see the beam of light swinging your direction dream of the stars, but it’s a lucky few who show up just at the right moment.

Back in the fifties a new breed of hucksters realized they could bend the public attention beam with clever advertising delivered through rapidly expanding mass media. They applied a simple formula which combined grinding repetition with an inch by inch violation of convention, and it worked for everything. It’s good for selling trucks and shampoo, burgers and art. It has the unfortunate side-effect of turning everyone into pigs. Well, it’s better to be a happy human than a dissatisfied pig, and a whole lot of people are getting that feeling now. It’s about time.

There’s not much convention left to violate. On TV barely legal, almost naked girls are orally sodomized by double cheeseburgers, they seem to love it, and visual art has been through so many ironies and appropriations it’s been reduced down to spots. At some point public attention will realize it’s been binging -- wake up in an alley, dust itself off, and go home. The new economy will belong to a more self-possessed population that understands the temporal fragility of good times and who will be less likely to be led over a cliff to make others rich.

What it means for art is hard to say, but it’s probably a better time to be an artist than it has been for a while. The public attention is scattered, but as corrupt dynasties crumble it’s free to find its own way and it just might wake up with the ravenous appetite of the finally sober drunk.

truth -- what is it good for?

So what does truth mean in art? It doesn’t mean anything in the art is true. That’s not its job. Art is supposed to alter the perception of the viewer so the truth can be seen, and that is its job. Truth, it turns out, is everywhere all the time, but sometimes it seems invisible because no one can see it. There are examples.

Safe examples would be the ones we’ve already resolved, like smoking. The truth was always there, but it was invisible. It wasn’t a shock to anyone that tobacco was addicting, devastating to health, a poison manipulated to cause the most harm in order to obtain the biggest profit. Everyone had known all of it for a hundred years and they weren’t called ‘coffin nails’ for nothing, but the public couldn’t see it and wouldn’t acknowledge it. These days public service announcements trumpet the news that tobacco is bad, but back in 1965 during an interview John and Paul smoking cigarettes seemed perfectly natural. In fact, it only seems odd from here.

There are other truths closer to our own time we’re still not ready to look at directly, I’m guessing. If you’d like to see them, try looking at art. Think of art as similar to workout equipment for the professional athlete, not the game itself but an enhancement of the level of play. So in the museum it’s a picture of some king in armor, what’s next? -- wait. That shiny breastplate isn’t really made of metal. It’s an arrangement of colors on a flat surface cleverly telling you a lie, and if you can see the lies in art you’ll be more impressed and amused by artists, some artists, and on your way to becoming more discerning when you read the paper. If you can learn to trust your own eyes and see what’s actually there in a work of art, regardless of what experts tell you, you’re on your way to seeing through TV commercials and what politicians would like you to believe. It’s like doing exercise.

south of the border -- art and blood

At the beginning of the last century Mexico was divided by class and ethnicity and it was grinding itself down to bloody oblivion. Peasant armies, power hungry elites, and foreigners interfering had fractured society into irreconcilable polarities whose only remaining coin was death. It wasn’t the generals and politicians who finally brought them together. It was the painters.

Diego Rivera portrayed them all -- conquistadors, industrialists, farmers, and native people all standing together in big murals, solemn, dignified, and equal. Pre-conquest culture, traditionally derided by the colonialists was acknowledged and a pride in simply being Mexican began to make it possible for them to deal with each other. Other renowned painters addressed basic social issues, and their movement spread to the United States where the WPA hired out-of-work artists to muralize public buildings and post offices in the 1930’s.

The ability of these scenes from ordinary life to influence the self-image and the social concerns of average citizens was so alarming to the top percent that a new art declaring the representational image obsolete and unintelligent surged to predominance with heavy financial backing shortly thereafter. Oddly coincidental is all I’m saying. The last of the post offices are coming down about now, although most of the murals were destroyed years ago. There is a movement in San Francisco to save the murals in Coit’s tower -- worth googling.

We don’t have the same conditions now and art that renews our tattered social fabric probably wouldn’t make it into public spaces for reasons we’ve discussed previously. Everybody gets to decide for themselves, but I’d suggest some sort of art that compensates for the constant assault on our pride and personhood streaming out of commercial media. It’s just the way they sell stuff but it takes a toll on everyone. Owning art that verifies your own experience, with qualities of merit you recognize yourself, would probably influence you in your daily life in ways you would approve of.

forging greatness -- getting even

In the courts now: if a drip-painting was actually dripped by Jackson Pollock it’s worth two million, four million, thirty million, but the exact same painting by anyone else, it’s nothing but paint flung on canvas worth less than the canvas raw. There will be forensic tests, of course, but if a clever on-his-ass artist found a bolt of canvas from the fifties and softened up a few old cans of house paint with vintage turpentine, a previously unknown Jackson Pollock will enter the catalogue, and money will appear.

There isn’t any other way to decide. No one can really say that isn’t the way Jackson made noses. The difference between the two, could be the same painting really, is that on the wall at the Museum of Modern Art and allegedly worth an unbelievable amount of money it’s epic, a transitional blah blah blah, but leaned against the wall behind the bookcase at the goodwill it looks like a drop-cloth on a stretcher. Somewhere here is a great mystery, a question that can’t be politely asked, an article of faith as sacrosanct as virgin birth -- can those who would take advantage be far behind?

Take that on-his-ass artist, not a bad person really. For years he or she attempted to interest galleries in their own work, tried to find patrons, were forced to work at other occupations, usually menial. One day after trying to fix their plumbing again or driving on bald tires they decide to fuck the system back and an unknown abstractionist masterwork from a private collection pops up at an auction. Venerable museums check your stacks, peruse your walls, and admit you wouldn’t know what was authentic even if you wanted to. They’re in on it too, of course, tending their flocks of cherished donors with tax breaks all around, and I just hope the on-his-ass artist got his or her share. I hope they all did.

meaning and significance -- behind the curtain

The resident art critic for New Yorker Magazine was just reciting dogma when asserting that mid-century abstract expressionists “realized the shortest route to meaning and significance was through abstraction”, and pretty much all of art ever since has been constructed on top of their breakthrough revelation. It’s pronounced as though it was a self-evident fundamental principal, but I’m pretty sure it’s just dumb. Farm animals and four year olds can do it, and being blind drunk was never a distraction. Maybe what he meant to say was that the early abstractionists “realized the easiest route to fame and fortune was through repetition”, a technique ruthlessly employed by each new wave of art’s pop stars ever since.

As merchandizing it’s brilliant, but as art it’s so astoundingly boring that the big guys just contract it out -- repetition gets to be like work. Consider the famous British painter who only painted stripes or the American who never used anything but white. They had robust careers and commanded lovely prices, but even they wouldn’t want to be alone with their own artwork very long. The new guy with spot paintings he doesn’t do himself says, as though serious, that no two are absolutely alike. This is art for morons. I don’t care how many millions it claims to move at auction, what morbidly compromised institutions are hip deep in it, or how many push magazines it publishes that pretend to be journalism, the art establishment is a high-milage professional trying to hock costume jewelry, for way too much money.

reason to buy art -- domicile modification

Like appliances around the house, works of art have their job to do. The painting over the mantel doesn’t just hide bare wall, it changes the character of the room. If it’s a sailing ship first painted in the eighteen nineties, scanned from a reproduction and printed in thousands, it won’t have much to contribute. Mute little bird prints down the hall and florals in the bathroom that merge with the wallpaper won’t be noticed either. This is low wattage art.

Over the mantel let’s put up a piece of real art about the same size, and real only means actually made by somebody. Could be by a professional or maybe by Bill the janitor at the high school who painted on weekends. Everyone who enters the room will notice it, and if it’s any good at all, you’ll notice it every time. If you look at it very long it will start reminding you about where you were when you bought it and how old your kids were -- art absorbs stuff like that. If it’s a really good painting people tend not to notice the worn carpet in traffic areas or rings on the coffee table. A little pastel landscape bought at a craft fair will add a enough charm to a bathroom to make old water stains seem like character. Art changes everything around it.

If you step up and buy significant art you can cut way back on household keeping up. A throw over a couch and a good painting is a much better choice, especially when you move and the couch stays and the painting goes with you. Artwork is so much easier to carry and the new place is so much more like home when it gets hung again. It’s a real thing, this art, and it contributes to the comfort of the thoughtful and nurturing refuge we call home.

reason not to buy art -- the way it's sold

The gallery director moans -- we’re not taking on any new artists, the market’s gone soft and we’re packing it in after thirty five years paying uptown rent. People just aren’t buying art these days because of the uncertain economy or because pro football and beer commercials have coarsened everyone’s taste. It couldn’t be because the merchants of art burned down the territory with outlandish systems of value, so busy establishing a bluebook rating for every sanctioned artist that somehow the art drained away.

Frankly nobody cares what sort of kickback shenanigan got the artist into a big corporate collection, or how they arranged for the unreadable writeup by a college friend, or that their ticket-punching career got them all the way here. Art world affirmation used to be enough to sell almost anything, but they don’t seem to be buying it anymore. The rational person purchasing art, just as when buying anything else, has two questions. First, is the particular piece of art in question worthy of the price, and second, will paying that price improve my life by at least an equal amount over the years that I own it?

If this might be you there’s homework. Knowing if a piece of art is worth the asking price requires visiting galleries whenever possible, a completely free, informative, and amusing pastime. Nod and smile, and say “just looking”, and you’ll be left alone. Spend some time in front of any painting you find appealing and then bend forward to read the price tag next to it on the wall. Knowledge comes quickly and not only will you be finding out how much to pay, you’ll be discovering what you like. In time you’ll recognize a good piece at a fair price and if you think you might like it even more if you see it everyday, you’ve found a good reason to buy art.

in the end -- what's real

Is your new pickup real? Seems real now. Ten years from now some teenager will be tearing it up, some fast food worker won’t be able to afford oil changes, it’ll be recycled into toasters -- you won’t have it. On down the road how about your couch, your house, your tattoo that you’ll still have but won’t look the same somehow? Lives churn -- jobs, friends, financial conditions move up and down come and go. What doesn’t change, anything?

There’s that little painting you saw a long time ago in a gallery, in a studio, in a restaurant for sale, and it seemed expensive at the time but you liked it. Over the years it’s occupied different walls in different cities, heard happy and sad conversations, seen your family grow and all that while it’s become more familiar, more intimate, and an anytime tunnel back to all those places.

In whatever decades you have left invest in art now, money spent on your own future, and chances are you’ll never check to see if the price has gone up. No scientific studies have been done, but antidotal evidence, uncounted testimonials, and a world dissolving into digital makes the case that art is real, or will be the only thing real someday.

the wave is on its way -- Hopper in Paris

Hopper outdraws Picasso in his own hometown, people standing in line in the rain in front of the Grand Palais in the middle of the night, and big crowds too all around Europe. Now isn’t that strange? Hopper isn’t new. Before Warhol there was Hopper, but he was regarded as retrograde and obsolete by modern abstractionists, the conceptualists, all those who think of novelty as the highest achievement in visual art and its ultimate goal. Hopper’s art hasn’t changed -- what has?

The mentality of an age can be discussed and written about endlessly but it’s quite visible for all to see in the art. The personality-cult commercialism of Warhol stands as emblematic of the greed and derision of personal integrity which collapsed the world’s financial markets, and maybe one didn’t cause the other but they reflect the same values. In fact we’ve fought through thickets of theory, splashes and stripes and deconstructions, all looking for something, what, ourselves? It takes so much faith, and energy, to find significance and meaning in the accidental, in the sneering offhand gesture, in the fat ginned-up resume.

No need to work that hard in front of a Hopper -- he takes you there. Blowing curtains evoke a rush of warm air on a summer evening before air conditioning, last light, damp smells and faint echoes, all sorts of things that don’t come through with a photograph, that thinnest slice of reality. People find themselves and their own experience verified in Hopper, and he pulls at them to stretch as well, to see more, to feel more, the reason people love art. Suddenly there’s many more who like Hopper. These people seek something more substantial than fashion, something more enduring and thoughtful than soup cans. Art is going to change.

big hotel

The bridges between representational art and the public are down, blown up by advancing abstractionist forces back in the nineteen fifties, and traffic has been rerouted through the gift shop. Spot and spin paintings bring in millions, self-serving non-profits have co-opted art as a charity, and comfortable homes full of books and smart furnishings have decorator prints on the walls. Still independent artists, ragged partisans of a populist art insurrection, in temporary studios and in and out of other employment, are making art about what we all see, think about, relate to and understand. Although many feel themselves cutoff and surrounded, isolated and alone, relief is on the way. As if dropped from the sky a big hotel that takes art seriously suddenly appears bringing rain to a previously parched landscape. As a greater array of art gains exposure, a more aware public will begin to make their own choices, and the playing field will level up for everyone.

without art the world collapses --

Without art we would all fall back into immediacy without the ability to imagine what lies beyond our senses. Humans discovered this long, long ago, and have been making art ever since -- art that created the singular realities each culture shared. Monumental and sacred art of the past were less poetic expression and more about creating a reality that favored the few who hired the artists. These days nothing’s changed. First you have to accept that most every surface you see is some application of art -- menus, cars, clothes, as well as the oil-slick advertising which spreads to cover every surface. Movies and TV shape lives by example, and we’re wired to incorporate all of it as though it was real. We can’t help it -- the art around us determines our world.

Stone lions won’t make us fear the king and floating cherubs don’t have us believing in heaven -- anymore. The present crew of media manipulators have been hired just to get our money, and they bend reality so we’ll spend freely. It works but there’s a downside. We all know this. Occasionally serious and dedicated artists seize the controls and produce movies and other kinds of art that present broader possibilities, and we call it art mostly because it was made for some other reason. It’s a discernible quality. What’s left for the individual is to decide what art to have around.

original vs reproduction -- it’s all the same, isn’t it?

To believe original art is somehow better than its digital-perfect clone requires a shamanistic view of art, or is it Marxian? Either would work and both are about work. When those on the production-line combine their labor with raw material they own some part of the thing created, and focusing intense concentration, chanting and ritual, on a physical object imbues it with an indwelling presence. By either point of view, primitive or progressive, putting effort into manipulating inert material instills a value that remains. Digital reproductions, identical and one dimensional, are facades without backsides, airy spooks with no value as art. It becomes problematic when a new one, or a thousand, pops out with only the momentary pressure of a finger. Negligible effort inserts a fat zero into either equation.

Marx was chiefly concerned with fair compensation for individual effort and many artists would settle for that, but in the older view the original object is sum of the artist’s thought and effort up until that point which will perpetually radiate into any room. The difference between original and reproduction is the difference between having a musician come to dinner with you and your family and then play in your living room, and listening to the digital replay later on the finest system available. The sound is all there, probably better, but it isn’t the same, not even close. Original art is more than the image -- by almost any system of value, even if it’s simple rarity, one-of-a-kind from the hand of an artist has inherent worth no picture of it could ever have.

representational art -- just the smallest slice

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
Edgar Degas

Art is the biggest word in the world. It has industrial meanings, legal meanings, advertising and entertainment meanings, all aside from the many kinds of visual expression it covers. Representational art is just the smallest slice -- art that lies in the tension between believably real and yet obviously made. It isn’t our eyes that decide what’s real. A lifetime of distilled experience is constantly interpreting what goes on in front of us, and representational art slips in through the back door while it’s being decided. No one reaches for a wine glass in a still life, and yet feeling the convincing presence of a wine glass broaches an age-old, inborn question, and it doesn’t go away. In the difference between the actual thing and its painted representation there’s a lot of room to get to know the artist and to listen in on a conversation that’s been going on a long time. If the artist, in person, has a sense of humor, suffers compulsions, is given to dreamy nostalgia or searing intensity, all that shows up when they paint -- a flower, a truck, or a portrait. These qualities are not consciously intended by the artist but appear automatically as they paint the world around them, and that’s how their work reads back when it becomes a part of a daily environment.