American Hustle -- a con job of a movie

There was no hustle, just a lame sting with hidden camera to entrap some faceless politicians into taking bribes. The wife, introduced as a stay at home recluse, turns out to be a loose stupid slut, and the quick montage of hustler’s backstory wasn’t remotely plausible. I claim no special knowledge. In this movie the old gangsters at the bar are charmed by the slut, but really, why would they be with twenty three olds by the dozen just a part of the life? The authorities were children, the drunks were obviously just pretending, and the hustle didn’t make any money. This movie is much nominated for awards, the director has been fawningly interviewed by Jon Steward, yet nothing in it faithfully reflects real life experience. Out of business and bereft of bankroll our dejected hustlers wind up dealing art, sitting in front of a collection bought in a used furniture store.

Dealing art is thus identified as the lowest hustle, the fallback of the defeated conman, an enterprise as pointless and shallow as this con-job of a movie. I don’t know about dealing art, but I do know about art. There are examples, even on TV, of characters believable as people doing plausible things, even in extreme situations, and it’s by comparison that this movie is revealed as just a hustle, awards notwithstanding. Isn’t it just that way with all art?   

Vermeer and the imaginary camera -- cheating genius

So the reason Vermeer was so much better than everyone else was because he was using an opaque projector with a forty five degree angled mirror so that he could not only trace an outline but actually “trace color”. Sure, seems plausible, if he could have gotten the ‘girl with the pearl earring’ to sit like a mannequin with the same dreamy expression for hours while he traced her complexion, the iridescence of the pearl. 

There’s a movie due out any day that supports this theory, sponsored and vouched for by a couple of Las Vegas illusionists -- to them grand accomplishment has to be fake. Why they asked does Vermeer seem so much better than everyone else, and then they set out to find his trick. They've invested much money and cinematic persuasion to make it all seem true -- that the art is a lie. To anyone without eyes, it makes a certain kind of sense.

Charlie Parker had a little recording studio with synthesizers in his horn and Van Gogh was using the special effects app on his laptop, and we’ll prove that too if anyone wants to listen. Why can’t Vermeer just be good? Why would anyone want to inflict their own tortured ethical sleight-of-hands on him? The ‘view of Delft’, sunlight and shadow, was not made through a pinhole or from some desktop, modern-day projector. He was a painter with a very good eye and a transcendent sense of color who worked in a faithful medium that still looks fresh and luminous. He was just better.

it’s money that matters -- it’s a matter of form

In the case of visual art the biggest influence isn’t inspiration, it’s audience, or more specifically the party who pays. Is it really possible to identify the source of funding just by looking? Well, there are emulations and cross-overs, but major tilts can be identified by visual character alone. Art made on a salary doesn’t risk too much. If an institution pays, art tends toward the obscure and insular, mainly to avoid jostling faculty colleagues, and on the commercial side graphic flourishes reside safely within a six month window of currency.

Art bought by corporations tends to be large and abstract. They like color and action but they don’t want their art to say nothing -- no political views, no philosophy, no favoring one nationality over another or any stance on anything. They just want to stick to the story, stay in the pitch, and they don’t want to be distracted by art. They buy a lot of it.

Art sold on a large scale to the general public tends to fall within the expectations of regional convention -- the southwest favors canyons and cactus, coastal areas have sails and blowing palms, while sun-dappled paddocks prevail in horse country, and competent painters seem to make a living complying with the local code. One benefit of restricting painting to a certain subject is that direct comparisons make quality and accomplishment easier to recognize, but those subdivided genres are neutered and domesticated, a lap-dog sort of art. 

Major art centers, where big bucks flaunt, hashes them all together seasoned heavily with tawdry sensation and zany self-parody. High-roller tourists eat it up, flashing wads of cash. Here the game has to do with scarcity via branding, a manipulated and artificial exclusivity, with conniving insiders huddled behind a curtain of slightly-soiled gossip and glamorous photo-ops. The actual art can be minimal, light and frothy, monosyllabic and dumb, and it’s just good when it isn’t even an issue.

Then there’s the incipient third wave, the pull of the future, a thoughtful and receptive public who begin to reach into their own pockets for money they’ve earned to exchange it for art they intend to live with. Yes, this crowd, the general public, who have been long been alienated and forsaken by modern art’s romance with abstraction, indexing, and lock-step gullibility are going to break through. Will art change? It seems likely. 

times change and art does too.......

Times they are a’changin, and art is changing too. It isn’t changing because artists are getting better, but because the public is beginning to look, and looking begets seeing, and seeing begets better art. Art of the times reflects the mentality of the times, just as the art in a person’s home reveals their personality and values, and a new seriousness stalks the land. Those soup can labels and celebrity mugs artfully embodied the petty materialism and curdled narcissism in vogue at the time and we all paid the price for that. After all, unsubstantiated real-estate derivatives and unlimited editions of slap-dash prints do share certain attributes, and short shelf life is only one.

We face a new era chastened by the near collapse of the world economy and we’ve followed enough charlatan gurus to suspect we need to rely more on our own judgement and on our own sense of self. A new art for our time will be more intimate and accessible, and enlist the experience of viewers into real life’s retelling. When art is seen as the expression of the person who chooses it as much as the person who made it, the art speaks for them as well, what they want from life and how they see themselves. More and more it’s happening now.