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.