big-eyed art -- so helpless and appealing

I haven’t seen the movie, just the trailers and read some reviews, and since I’m not usually a fan of the director I doubt I’ll get there. I know about ‘Big Eyes’ because I was once sitting on a stool wondering why these pictures of odd alien children were hanging in this bar. I understood it was a west-coast fad flowing eastward, but the peculiar side-show appeal of the images was somehow too creepy to analyze. Mammals grow into their eyes which are pretty much the right size to start with. This leaves human babies and the babies of all our furry friends with big eyes at birth. This big eye association is wired in, and sympathy, nurturing, and the desire to protect all come awake when eyes are too large for the head, even though these inborn inclinations rarely make it to a conscious level. 

So what would happen to our built-in ‘baby-sensing circuits’ if someone made a painting of a waif with really big, absolutely enormous eyes? Guess they’d scream with all their subliminal might, and folks everywhere would vaguely register some sort of emotional tug, although not consciously of course. As a hook for art this is in itself a cheap trick, but there’s darker implication. This isn’t a pleasant world for the orphans in city slums, wearing ragged little tops and looking up ‘so helpless and appealing.’ This ‘big eyes’ business isn’t just kitsch sentimental, it’s poignantly unwholesome, but it isn’t Walter’s fault he got famous. Not really.

The movie, as I understand it, is primarily about aggressive salesmanship, personal betrayal, and their frequent association, who knew, but along the way there’s also some mighty snooty disrespect for any culture which would support such tripe. So who here today, I wonder, can afford to feel superior watching “Big Eyes”? Walter Keane, that trailblazing precursor to the whole ‘Warholian Era,’ arose from the primal ooze of breezy california abstraction, as barren and unyielding as the freeways. Even if it was repetitious and mindless, at least it was a picture of something. 

The folly of fashion inevitably becomes visible just a few years down the line, but the next big thing can seem so beguiling at the time. The real issue for our purposes here has to do with the sheep-like mentality of a public that can be herded and penned by the whistles and clicks of cheap hustlers, past and present. Can anyone say 'well that was the way it was then, but it’s wonderfully different now?' The actual answer to Walter Keane and his goofy art would have been, then as now, to buy something else.

artist as genius -- it’s just a gift is all

I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of artist as genius. There have been a few over a long span of time, but auditioning for the part takes an audacity makes me uncomfortable. Not intending to brag but I’ve been out there, working for wages, unclogging drains in rentals, using the once plentiful wire coat hanger under the car. Humility is the password out in the world of physical work and hostile landlords, and it turns out a great deal of the world’s population use it regularly as a badge of recognition. 

When Fidel came to the UN and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, he and his compadres went down to the market and brought back live chickens to grill on their balcony. They refused that glorious room service, so they said. This 'performance piece' was entirely opaque to his rich hosts, but brilliantly and eloquently spoke to poor people, all over everywhere. In the more rarified world of avant-garde art, there was an italian artist who had his own excrement canned and labeled as such, and the British Museum paid six hundred thousand pounds for one a few years back. Not only a titanic sendup of elitist gullibility and inbred institutional complicity, numbered individuals from the edition have been known to explode spontaneously adding a potentially kinetic element.

I’m not talking about the humility of shuffling feet and downcast eyes. I’m suggesting that spilling wet sloppy paint on canvas and using a squeegee is fair enough, but then pretending that this sad accident of an offhand afternoon is worth two decades of a pretty good income is sorta grossly ego-maniacal insane. Did I say that out loud? I don’t know where you get off with that. It takes a bloody genius to be able turn out one masterpiece after another, each like the last, or hiring a crew somewhere else to do it. In the world of big-time brand-name art this happens all the time -- often in the open. Say what you will about the corn-syrup sensibilities of Thomas Kincade fans, what about the people who like that stuff? Are they as shallow and vacuous as the art they buy, is that possible?

Contrary to what the media has to report that isn’t all there is to art. In fact, it’s fairly irrelevant. Art is the voice of connection with other minds and you get to choose your channel, just the cool kids at the moment or the mass of human-kind, backward and forward in time like stuff in the museum, and anyone can listen in. Painting as a secular and remarkably plastic medium for direct communication transcending languages goes back six or seven centuries, and the actual examples endure -- it’s an old conversation. To take part, artists don’t need to be geniuses, just to do their best with what they have. We’ve all been there.

take the A train -- the quickest way

Jazz, once a coursing tumbling mountain river full of energy and creative purpose, has spread out into the plain of general acceptance to become ‘jazz-like’ and ‘jazz-influenced.’ The genuine product can still be found on the radio in two hour segments deep in the weekend and jazz traditionalists workshop with students to try to keep it alive, but the notion of the individual statement within a known musical form is becoming archival.

Duke Ellington introduced a body of work which he performed at every concert, and his entire book became recognized as standards, playing on the radio until everyone knew each by heart. This universal familiarity became a starting point for creation of art, the place from which both artist and listener could leave together. Within the framework of these standards, Duke himself, and all other jazz musicians thereafter, modulated and bent, embellished and extended so that their individual contribution became apparent and even personally identifiable. “Your sound is like your sweat,” so said Miles.

To participate required an advanced level of musicianship on the part of the players, not only adept at fundamentals, but able to spontaneously compose their own statements revealing character and wit, all the while maintaining adherence to the original composition. There were requirements of listeners as well, and thorough saturation with those ten or twelve songs, humming through the workday, was the first. The second was enough attention to register when their expectations were being teased and tested, seen in a mirror, driven down side streets, with elements of rage, arousal, pain and conviction all riding along on popular songs practiced by every beginner. Jazz is a thoughtful deep music full of jokes and intimacies, and it’s somewhere on the radio if you can find it.

Visual art doesn’t need the radio since our eyes register the world around us all the time. Even so, the actual world has in recent years been discredited as a source for painting -- ‘copying nature’ it’s been called. With jazz fading as a cultural influence, perhaps some other form of art, perhaps some inclusive style of painting will convey what our language is too dumb to talk about. As in jazz, representational art empowers the viewer to compare new artwork with the cross-indexed library of their own direct experience and come to their own conclusions about the artist’s level of accomplishment, and beyond that the thoughtfulness of their interpretation. Within that conversation they may come to understand the artist and to recognize themselves. Even the less advantaged, poorly educated but observant citizen can do this.

what’s good -- the side by side test

How do we know anything about anything? A team of scientists conclude the human mind‘s basic function is comparison and that’s how we think, how we see the world, how we navigate our lives. Most folks know pretty quickly what’s the best quality for the most reasonable price but they’ll need at least two examples. We tumble through life picking up points of reference -- an exceptional sunset, the correctly fried egg, an epic performance, and whatever comes after rates on that scale. It seems almost mechanical and some say it is. 

For art the question about 'how good' is usually avoided altogether these days, and other ancillary facts and statistics are cited, usually a long list of past affirmations. Consensus replaces looking altogether. The new director of the local university’s art museum landed an artist who’s shown previously at ‘MoMA’ and the ‘Hirshhorn’, “and so deserves a giant show” without mentioning medium, content, or making any reference to the art at all. It’s just not relevant in the scheme of things. Straight up comparison, that most fundamental process for determining quality, has been largely ignored in favor of press clippings and proclamations.

Read once about a nervous Picasso before a national exhibit one on one with another famous spanish painter, Goya. Different styles from different eras, it didn’t matter -- Picasso was afraid of being blown off the wall. He reportedly came out of the exhibit much relieved because he thought his stuff held up. For Picasso, comparison side by side was the ultimate test of any art, and it doesn’t take a scholar to know the difference. Average people making day to day comparisons will eventually come to support the best BBQ in the district, are going to be drawn toward the most well designed automobile, and will be able to tell which piece of art is more compelling when looking at two pieces side by side. It’s all based on the way we think, what we know, and how we make decisions.

Ideally an art museum in the area would provide a context for what contemporary artists are doing, exhibiting objects that have endured unchanged for centuries, each recording the prevailing mentality of their age. Although representing many different forms, together they provide a standard of accomplishment for gaging the work of artists living in the surrounding area. Big cities do it best. Here, if we were lucky, a crew of profit-driven capitalists would import a lot of contemporary art just to sell hotel rooms, and anyone curious could go look. In the end ‘it’s all the same’ -- that’s what Picasso said. Just looking at art engages the machinery and leads down the path to liking some art more than other art.

one and a quarter seconds per -- museum marathons

Listening to a ‘great conversation’ on the public tv station between the urbane critic from the times and a newly-retired museum director renowned for spending copious amounts of someone else’s money acquiring trophy art for ever more prestigious institutions, a brilliant career. Some of the stuff they said I liked and any serious friend of Velasquez can’t be all bad, but museums like full parking lots and the bored attendance counters at the front desk and returns from the gift shop may not be the best judges of art for posterity.

The museum guy was lamenting the fact that the average museum goer’s average time in front of any particular work of art timed out at about one and a quarter seconds, really not enough time to comprehend what’s there. Well, there’s just an awful lot to see all accompanied by little tags of learned explanation, and it might be too much information for just one afternoon. The former director with his weeks, months, and years wandering the world’s major museums has had time to gaze at many illustrious works of art and so can speak with authority, but his day job is acquisition, funding, and revving up attendance.

Museums hoard all the great art available and ambitious directors take a chair in an ongoing game of monopoly -- rolling the dice, upping the ante, betting real money. They amass a big pile of really good art in big buildings on expensive real estate and they justify it all with projected attendance figures in great footstep-echoing halls. Their actual function is to serve as a reference library displaying what’s been achieved elsewhere, and raising the bar for the population in the surrounding vicinity, if the sports besotted six-packs would just show up. Well, with a bit of sympathy for the common man, everything all at once might not be the best way to experience art.

Paintings take time and physical effort to produce and they don’t give back much in one and quarter seconds. Try sitting on a park bench and see how long it takes to begin to hear the birds, to notice children playing, to consider the light and shadows under the trees. It doesn’t all enter consciousness right away. In fact, unless you’re distracted staring at your devise, there’s more to be aware of fifteen minutes in than when you first sit down. Paintings also require looking. Every feature was consciously put there to contribute to the final image, and new information, even a kind of unspoken understanding, will float to the surface if you can manage to look for more than a moment.

An easier approach than making the museum guards twitch while you sway on your feet trying to absorb some great work of art all at once, would be to buy something worthy and live with it day to day. Doesn’t have to be reproduced in books and worth millions. It just has to be the product of the commitment and practice it takes to become an artist, and engaging enough to you in the long term to spend money in the moment. Time at the museum might help you make such a choice. Instead of squinting for a second and a quarter at masterpiece after masterpiece pushed along by blockbuster crowds or simply hurrying to take in as much as possible in one afternoon, just live with four or five significant works of art, perhaps purchased over decades, for the rest of your life.