art for common folk -- illuminati pass by

If you are a member of the art establishment, an arts administrator or private gallery director, maybe a contemporary artist/educator, there isn’t much here for you. All you’ll hear is bitching, the blubbering rant of the misinformed and I can accept that. Those who are less committed and still have open questions concerning art might see it differently. I’ll take a stand as a cultural wolf-boy wandering in all objective and direct, just another philosophy major with dirty hands. 

I do get it, the zaniness most of all, and there’s a looping dialogue at ultra high frequency in contemporary art that’s very immediate, conveyed at the very top with just eyebrows and wry glances, and destined to be very dated by the time a decade rolls around. The notion of ‘fashion’ as a conceptual context is all about exclusion, and it’s sometimes necessary to go to extremes to shake off general approval even at the cost of pain and stupidity, which interestingly enough doesn’t seem visible at the time. A pickup so low it scrapes the pavement, high heels so high the ankle turns, the extremely functional baseball hat reduced to a beanie by turning the bill backward are all attempts to leave the less cool behind by being impractical, even offensive, and it’s a never-ending race.

Personally I have no kick against common folk and even aspire to be one. I want something very different from art and I’ll assume it’s not just me. First I want to know what’s hard and what’s easy, so learning something about how art is made would be handy. Meeting an artist would help make a correlation between personality and the work produced, although they’re generally reclusive so just seeing several examples of an artist’s work over time may suffice. Finally I want involvement and most likely to be interested in artwork that references my own experience in some way. Can I learn which artist is extending themselves farther, accomplishing more, and asking a fair price just by looking and the answer is yes, simply by looking at a lot and buying something. At that point I’ll become an actual participant in art itself.