bureaucratic art is to art -- art on assistance

Kids in art school pick up elitist notions. It’s only that old institutional insularity really, but they internalize it. Civil occupations are usually based on knowledge rather than performance, and the secret knowledge of the art department is what brings home their bacon. They teach some strange stuff.

One is that worthy art really didn’t begin until the ‘year one’ of the modern art era, about 1950. Before that it was just the churches that bought art and of course there were portraits of industrialists' wives and other sorts of decorations for houses and such. Art wasn’t very interesting back then, just copying nature with no imagination, so art had no support or interest from anyone until the advent of the great funding entities, governmental and private/tax-deductable -- the NEA and the foundations.

The contempt shown for representational art, and the art department’s full disapproval for any student who insisted on pursuing it, shaped institutional instruction for decades. Recall being told about a class critique where the only way a representational painting would considered was upside down. In the outside world the people who paid the freight didn’t like abstract art, never liked abstract art, but that was just their problem. ‘We have words that apply to them, philistines and sports fans, and ways we feel superior wandering between studios peeling an orange while they grind away nine-to-five to provide our income.’

Well to heck with all y'all and your demented installations trailing ribbon and tinsel like abandoned carnivals, your publicly-funded ‘board-game tokens’ around town, and your bias for a style of art only a bureaucrat could justify or support with other people’s money. That’s not art. It’s some sort of imitation of art process that qualifies for a grant but would never survive on its own outside its incubator. Believe it or not the common folk are not too dumb for art -- they’re too smart for that stuff.

The culture has shown its capacity to discern quality when a full array of options are available, although the system can be rigged to limit choices. It’s over. Once a certain amount of art is seen by the public the cloistered peer group reviews for those fat regional grants, all the public money pumped into art production will seem like just another ‘farm bill’, just a pointless giveaway to those who may not deserve it.

cash flowing backward -- art’s secret subsidies

According to my email art expos around the planet will sell booth space to anyone who pays, and competitions all charge a fee just to look at your stuff. Myriad art publications offer inclusion to artists willing to buy a quarter page of advertising, and wouldn’t one assume that’s a policy that goes all the way to the top? Seems contemporary art must be largely a vanity industry driven by dollars from behind rather than aesthetic achievement, and with a sprinkling of third-hand tales of instant fame and riches as a backdrop the desperation to be noticed becomes intense -- the perfect setup for a grift.

Early on found myself among a crew of shady door-to-door salesman, adepts at a low risk, tried-and-perfected confidence routine that could be applied to a wide range of gadgets and literary fare. It worked for a couple of generations before they finally burned down the territory. Big money was all they talked about in their expensive suits but they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay their rent, and did they lie? It was their profession. I don’t know a thing about big art, never been there you understand, but there’s this smell.

Where is art a legitimate business? The gallery owners perpetually complain about the poor economy and the general philistinism rampant in their hometown. Independent artists work at menial, unrelated enterprise while attempting any avenue to have their work at least seen, what with all the non-profit, tax supported galleries devoted to the kind of art made on a salary at the nearest university. There is no money and no actual market because the industry feeds off itself, stealing the seed corn, pretending to be a charity and key to riches and fame in the same breath, and living off the aspirations of artists rather than the exchange of legitimate value.