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.