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.
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