two conversations at once -- differing destinations

Let’s acknowledge there’s a couple of conversations going on about art. There’s the big one in the back pages of New Yorker which involves all the intelligent, culturally aware folks eyeing the markets for underpriced crumbs from fabulous careers, and the quiet one over here. See, I don’t care about the money. I think an artist should be paid like a craftsman who gets to charge a little more per hour when they do a better than average job. I’d be content to let the quality of the product determine price and not the stratospheric crest of an imaginary wave, but that’s me.

To read in the New Yorker, “sells, at auction, for respectable six-figure sums, with the odd spike into the low millions” about an artist who made the same self-referencing statement on and on is just me eavesdropping on that other conversation. I understand fashion well enough. It’s about what other people want. Is it time-bound? -- to the year, to the season, to the day. People are always changing their minds since they don’t know what they want unless everyone else wants it. It’s a maze with no exit.

I can’t get over this messianic vision in which art, perhaps that picture on the wall by an artist in your town, transcends the cultural hammerlock that school, family, and ‘all over at the same time television’ imposes on everyone without anyone really noticing. It's true this notion of the liberating power of art has sometimes been open to question. I just find for about every third painting I see by Van Gogh I feel an almost mind-melding intimacy that comes across entirely without words, so I couldn’t explain it. It isn’t just him. Art from all over can be like that. 

After all, a consensus made of money can blow away when conditions change, and they will, but that’s not the sad part. The real shame is the low expectation on the part of people who spend millions on the colored monograms of fame only because they might go up in value. Maybe they will, but who could live with that off-handed, talent-deriding section of colored cloth up in the living room without the price tag hovering close by? Their grandiose game of liar’s poker, all hold, fold, and cold-eyed bluff gives art a bad name, and it’s also seriously beside the point.

Credentials don’t count for as much as doing the work, since each decision made once the canvas receives the first mark reveals the personality and life-experience of the person who makes it. There’s no reason to doubt when looking at a Jackson Pollock here was an alcoholic in temperament and method, and as such I’ve always found his work repulsive, but then I take him seriously. It means almost nothing to me that he was famous by proclamation or that any one of his 'painter’s drop-cloth' paintings is worth millions, respectable millions. Artists are attempting to reveal 'self', their own and everyone else’s, something that just happens automatically in the process of making art, and people see themselves in the work or they don’t. Considering the price tag first doesn't help. 

street art indoors -- the feral petting zoo

In the paper today, lex HL 9-14, a local university is presenting ‘Street Tested: Kentucky Graffiti Artists’ in their gallery. This in itself is an amusing idea, snarly defiant art insurgents participating in a sunday afternoon panel discussion, but maybe it will set some standards for fence and alley vandals in our fair city. Not that I’m not a fan. Never disappointed to be stopped at a train crossing so long as it’s composed of cars from all over. 

Somewhere in train yards, under threat of more than just justice, kids with spray cans make amazing art. They must be doing it for others like themselves because I can never figure out what it says and if I do I don’t know it means, but the color contrasts, the rhythmic balance and imagination crank very hard at fifty mph clicking past. They take these chances, train yards have private security, to send their tag out into the world and I’m looking.

Now that’s romantic and the art carries the load. Some of it’s so good and its reasons so pure, they don’t get paid, it almost justifies defacing the private property of some gigantic corporation. It can get out of hand. Chicago banned aerosol paint years ago so too bad if you want to paint a kitchen chair. Let’s face it, not everyone who wields the can has worked out the design beforehand or developed the deftness to apply spray paint, and not every blank space needs decoration.

Be careful what you sanction would be my suggestion to the progressive university, presenting semi-legal artwork “not meant to be auctioned to the the highest bidder” lest you find a heart in red spray paint on your own front steps. 

below grassroots -- politics of self

It isn’t just art about politics that’s political. It depends on how far you want to break it down. How a person feels about themselves has a lot to do with how they relate to other people -- how they treat other people, what they accept from other people, and pretty soon we’re talking politics. If you want to know how people feel about themselves look at their art.

Creating art is a human attribute and it follows us everywhere. A rigid hierarchical culture in Egypt yields the same art with minor variation for thirty five hundred years, while pre-Columbian ceramic vessels from the coast of south america reveal an individual inventiveness, ribald humor, and vivid imagination all indicating the cultural character of a long lost people. ‘Art history’ is about putting boxes in boxes, but history and art can be pretty interesting. Yes, the mentality of the renaissance was decidedly different from the preceding gothic era, and there’s a way we all know this. We see the art.

Nowadays is a free-for-all, all the influences churned together, and it’s possible to pull most anything out of the mix. In the present situation you’re on your own when deciding what sort of influences to come home to. Should you choose art that looks cool to all your friends or just what speaks to you personally? Do you choose art that reinforces your familiar view of life, or something closer to the edge? There isn’t any wrong since it’s just art, after all. If you’d like to own something of value buy original art, but no one gets to tell you of what. Decide who you are and buy the art that expresses it, or live with art you find appealing and find out who you are -- it works both ways at once.

reclaiming the pit -- flowers on slag heaps

The idea behind 'owning art' is reclamation and renewal of art’s grass-roots audience after the massive environmental degradation of abstract expressionist strip-mining, beginning about the middle of the last century. The reason this was done originally was largely political expediency in unrelated areas but as a result weeds abound in a wrecked landscape.

The forces behind the ascendancy of abstraction, in broad terms, were the extremely powerful who suffered severe discomfort at the universally understood painted criticisms made by Diego Rivera and others like him, they were legion. Abstractionists were also to benefit from a ruthless international competition in which the American government promoted abstract art as somehow more democratic and individualistic than the collectivized, state-glorifying representational art in Russia. 

Abstract art won't cause anyone in power to lose sleep at night and academics can hide their ineptitude behind it, but its riddles all seem goofy in the end. Side effects of removing the depiction of identifiable content from visual art have been devastating for the individual and society, since a most fundamental means of human communication was silenced. The marketing of art has elevated an incestuous royal line of ‘masters’, visual entrepreneurs who turned some minor conceit into a trademark, and that glamorous load in big time galleries has degenerated into monographic imbecilities in just a few generations -- google Hirst, google Koons, google them all.

Representational art, still derided as ‘illusionist’ by old-school abstractionists and their progeny, is capable of transmitting mind to mind much more information than just the time of day in a wheat field, as anyone who has admired Van Gogh will attest. The representational image engages the experience, memory, and mind of the viewer, and even more effectively of the everyday owner, and its sensibilities then participate in whatever the person sees. Did you think art was passive? For those who subscribe to the epic that has become known as ‘contemporary art’, come out from behind your tiara-snatching masquerade and join the rest of us, sighted uprights who can speak without language using pictures.