cold light of day -- art turns itself around

What do you say in the morning to people who believed the world was going to end the night before? They gave away all their stuff, told off the boss, perhaps even relinquished their dignity somehow and now in the cold light of day turns out they’d been misinformed. You want to be polite but the fact we’re all still here is going to be uncomfortable for a while.

Jackson Pollock and his Freudian mumbo-jumbo just didn’t want to attempt painting. He’d tried and found a reason to give up. He’d drink until his conscious mind passed out and let the ‘id’ do it for him. Problem is the id, when it paints at all, just makes a mess -- drips and squiggles mostly. Farm animals and pre-schoolers use some of these same techniques to achieve better or worse results, who can tell? He did have exquisite timing, although it must have seemed like blind luck to him.

Somehow his movement managed to take the art out of art and left only the signature so that major museums display the icons of modern art like national flags, treat them like blue ribbons in a trophy case, and presume reverence of all who enter -- hushed tones and reduced lighting. There they are, name them off from having seen the same artwork, or one almost exactly like it, in every museum visited, in every text book thumbed through over and over until they’re just expected to be there, an example of each.

Recent investigations seem to indicate much of the stuff you see in a museum or in an uptown gallery is probably fake. After the first fifty or so of essentially the same work of art the inspiration must fade and artists are in effect copying themselves, or paying someone else to do it, or the piece in question is completely bogus although in the end it really makes no difference. The numbers claimed at auction are all fake, backstage bids made by shills with cell phones -- they used to actually set up prop phone booths. These phony headline grabbing auctions have the effect of jacking up the price for a given brand-name artist across the board and as a grift it’s breathtakingly shallow. The gigantic cold checks they write back and forth are for tax purposes, to pump up prices, and to impress common folk via the evening news. They’re all in on it.

Is it time for an art revolution -- can’t be bothered. It’s an argument not worth winning. Ken Kesey advised ‘just walk away’ and in the end that’s what’s going to happen, anyway. It will be uncomfortable at first, like when trophy laden institutional collections begin to hiss and deflate, when academic dogma starts sounding blatantly absurd and the glitz of big international art expos is exposed as just a high-end hustle, but as more original art from regional studios reaches the public a new sensibility will arise based on individual inclination and taste, and art will turn itself around.