feral artists -- free-range art

Today we consider ‘free-range’ art. No, not the kind that pecks a nice green lawn during the day, cozy in a coop at night. We mean ‘free-range’ -- sleeping in woodpiles, running from the foxes, not always looking your best. There are artists over at the university on salary and talented entrepreneurs who find a genre and make art for an established market, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but verily they’re doing ok.

Our concern is for the waitress, mechanic, delivery driver who aspires to one day give up the day job, and to that end spends evenings and weekends in any studio they can afford -- above a garage is sometimes available. Maybe their dream is to ‘break-through,’ suddenly blaze incandescent with glamour and limos, but most just want to paint full-time, someday. Their first goal is paying-the-bills self-sufficiency, and too much thinking about what comes after just turns out counter-productive.

Something interesting happens in a vacuum. Without the attention of the local credentialed critic, tactfully and resolutely ‘not accepted’ in area competitions, and after having cast uncounted grant applications into a black hole, the truly independent artist experiences a kind of lightness. There’s no venal agent demanding more of that stuff like you were doing before, no fawning hangers on expecting you to buy lunch, fancy openings not so often. Slightly eccentric in the eyes of neighbors might turn out to be the only recognition the independent artist receives, how else to explain making art that’s not selling?

With no outside influences, inside a bubble of indifference, the independent artist feels free to follow personal inclinations to make the best art they can. Talent, experience, and vision combine a lot of different ways, and the output of independent studios just about anywhere is more varied and more interesting than all afternoon in SoHo. Now admittedly, without a little cracked-corn occasionally, people give up and move on to something more practical, and those who persist may never reach the potential they envisioned, but if neighbors were to suddenly notice, a crew of field-wise, self-motivated artists would flock home to roost.

art pills -- smarter already

A hundred years back this country was mostly rural. People lived with animals, carried water into the house, faced trips to the outhouse in all sorts of weather. Sometimes they’d resent city folk with their paved streets, indoor conveniences, opportunities to go to high school, such as that. There arose a genre of whimsical anecdote meant to level the field a bit, an ongoing dialogue between a visiting ‘city cousin’ and the experience-wise ‘country cousin.’ 

So one day ‘city’ asks ‘country’ how come you know so much, and ‘country’ says “simple -- it’s these smart pills we find laying in the grass.” After a couple of days ‘city’ says he’s “beginning to suspect those smart pills are really just goat turds.” “See there,” says ‘country,’ “you’ve already become more intelligent.” Turns out to be a little parable about self-reliance and the tough-love foibles of wide-eyed gullibility. It could be a story about art. 

Cy Twombly’s “Untitled” 1968 sold on November 5 in Sotheby's, London for $70,530,000. (Photo: Sotheby's) - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/photos/lifestyle-gallery/record-breaking-moments-paintings-by-picasso-van-gogh-in-the-top-10-most-expensive-artworks-auctioned-in-2015/7/#sthash.hmdMe38P.dpuf

If this piece of art, “untitled,” was the size of a piece of note paper it would be adjudged by all who saw it as the daycare product of a hopelessly challenged sixty-five IQ, not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you, worldly and sophisticated, like art of similar ilk I’m not affected, but must admit it’s way over my head. Just a seventy million dollar goat turd to me. In the end it’s a matter of self-reliance, of individual judgement, even of personal expression that determines what sort of art you like, what sort of art you buy. 

Cy Twombly is out of your league, anyway, so consider something closer to home and think in terms of hundreds, maybe thousands, instead of tens of millions. Attributes which you might admire can be found in the art of individuals from somewhere in your neighborhood, and the amount you pay probably won’t be reported on the news. In this case it should be the country cousins, all of us around here, who turn out to be too smart in the first place. 

reviving the dripper -- doubling-down in Dallas

There’s a big Jackson Pollock retro in Dallas and a review caught my eye -- “Museum exhibitions don't often reverse the conventional wisdom on a major artist,” going on the suggest “a 180-degree turn.” Thinking that it would be strange indeed to remove the keystone from the entire edifice of modern art, found out it was really a reevaluation of his “failed” period, easel versions of larger drip formats, upgraded to something better. That’s a relief. He was the famous ‘icebreaker,’ and didn’t Life Magazine ask in a 1949 story, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" History questions the motive here. 

His singular accomplishment was to “unhinge line from its ancient role as the means with which to describe a figure against a ground,” and that represents a giant leap forward, don’t we all agree? In his work, “suggestions of linear figures (or fragments of figures) are self-evident — heads, eyes, birds, claws, reclining or seated nudes, ghostly specters and more,” but it was up to the viewer to find them, like faces in clouds and popcorn animals. 

The real problem with his “failed” period was not realizing the success of his drip method had largely been a matter of scale, that ten feet of anything is pretty impressive, but the same thing the size of a traditional painting not so much. In this gallant effort a large tax sucking institution down in Texas is hoping to generate a little interest in merchandize too long on the shelf. Good luck. I’m sure millions will move back and forth on paper. 

Down in Texas they like to ‘head’em up’ and ‘drive’em to market,’ not so fast. If you suddenly feel the quivering urge to “reevaluate” those failed little messes just because they say so, your herd instincts are strong but you’re not likely to find much joy in art and not much personal affirmation, that is unless you’re an emotionally deprived, ego-maniacal terminal alcoholic like Jackson. Maybe there’s a market in Texas, but that’s far from here. 

We would all like to belong, and if you’re willing to pay the dues to join the cultural elite, to invest in tokens representing your financial commitment to status ascension, buy one of these little orphan Pollock’s for an insane price and show all your friends. Should however caution those living in Kentucky that once in a while folks might suspect you’re a rube with too much money. 

ground floor -- coming up

My notion from the beginning was to keep saying the same thing over and over in different ways until it turned to taffy, and we’re almost there. The medicinal bleeding of creative energy to support non-profit institutions is about to be staunched, with artists seeking, and finding, alternative ways to display and actually sell their work. A curious public is finding its way around the dour gatekeepers of academic grant committees and credentialed curators to discover art they find relatable. In this humble blog strident heresy transmutes to maudlin cliche in about a hundred and fifty posts. 

Hasn’t completely happened yet, but the earth moves as we speak and in the right direction. The art at auction gaining national media attention, ‘pre-auction estimates in excess of millions and millions,’ is news from another planet, another galaxy, and the laws of physics are different here. We hear vegetables should come from close to home, just healthier they say, and art from around here might turn out to be more beneficial also, in several ways. We’re just getting sprouts now, but watered with a little money directly spent on art and won’t the garden grow.

The new hotel, 21c, and the murals above the parking lots have been accelerants thrown on a fire about to happen anyway. I didn’t predict that part, but momentum snowballs. The ground-floor of actually owning art has arrived, as local folks tentatively begin to notice, to discuss, to have favorites. There is still the possibility of catching some artist in transition from scuffling for studio rent to paying down the credit card, a good time to acquire a piece of art which will assume its true value once the habit of buying art has settled in.  

populism -- art’s part

This blog is intended as an ongoing work of art, simultaneously appearing contrarian to those invested in the current art establishment and yet positive and reassuring to everyone else. This different approach could be called ‘populism,’ and I’m heartened that Bernie won’t back off the term ‘revolution,’ because he means people have to change their minds. This won’t be easy.

Art is taught as contrarian all on its own, setting out early on to dispel whatever thoughts might naturally occur to the uninitiated about reality’s visual interpretation. Heaping ridicule has been the typical strategy for reorienting the freshman class away from what they thought they were going to study, drawing and such, to the larger world of conceptualism, illustrating big issues ironically. These days I’ve heard they also attempt to teach skills that are marketable, a revolting development all on its own leading anywhere but the independent studio. It’s been tried over and over. 

The public is not art’s enemy. They mostly willingly support all sorts of art enterprise, including the schools, faculty and facilities, public projects of all sorts, non-profits and on and on. The public is also not art’s ward, its unwashed cousin, unable to relate to more than paintings of horses in sunny paddocks and sappy little cabins without driveways. Galleries find themselves caught in the middle trying to sell phony credentials, claiming “the value of art is what someone else is willing to pay for it.” Shame on you, you deserve to lose your lease. 

Given an array of art to look at, most folks can identify quality pretty quickly, even quicker if it’s for sale and they’re paying for it. Stacks of rough plywood, arrangements of ceramic globs, such as that, featured over on campus have held the public at bay for several decades, but a contemporary museum downtown, in the form of a 21c hotel, will drain their little duck pond. Many more folks will be deciding soon perhaps the art they don’t like -- good enough, since it might be the first time they’ve really thought about it one way or the other. There’ll also be tremors up the line, when super sophisticates begin the realize the glamour and exclusivity they’ve been paying for was artificial, and that it wasn’t really warm rain on their pants leg. Millions invested in art, snug in vaults and warehouses soaking up tax liability, could evaporate the moment public sensibility opens its eyes and turns its head. 

Owned art can be empowering, as a fact it’s a main effect. Art is the part of the normal human environment we’ve been lacking, having substituted mass-produced ‘design’ instead. Modern life works wonderfully well, warm and dry, but a little breathless, sorta sterile and machine efficient. Art direct from the hand of the artist is not just an autograph to be collected, but a vital component of the average person’s daily environment, a functioning solid-state ‘oxygen generator’ for the living room. It’s a folksy notion, that art could provide a spiritual essence usually lacking in modern decor, that it would also make moving into a new space feel more familiar and comfortable right away, even that it could eventually earn a promotion to the member of the family least likely to leave home, but it’s the populist way.  

lowered expectations -- undemocratizing art

Could you, or anyone, with absolute confidence tell the difference between a painting by some olympian of modern art, say DeKooning, and one by a farm animal, or a three year old? You might guess. Once saw Corbert interviewing art aficionado Steve Martin, asking him if he could tell which uniformly green panel was the Elsworth Kelly worth millions and which was a paint chip. After hesitation Steve said the one on the left, to which Corbert said “wrong,” but even that was probably a lie.

How come we’re having this discussion? No, really. How did it come to this that art has value because of what, faith? At ‘face value’ a lot of big time art falls flat, is seriously ho hum less than interesting. There’s mystery here and major inconvenience, always turns out inconvenient when people get together to ignore the obvious. Art, after all, is humanity’s attempt to see, digest, and comprehend the remarkably pliable corner of the universe we’ve been given, and trivializing it, degrading it, forcing it to perform a silly dance for the obscenely wealthy may not be in humanity’s best interests, by and by.

Let academic friends eat a deskilled breakfast, listen to a deskilled band, take their car to a deskilled mechanic before extolling the virtue of ‘deskilled’ art, because many of the rest of us are simply unimpressed. What’s wrong with old fashioned skilled art, honest accomplishment, astute observation, and general accessibility? The inside chuckle before the big business meeting said under the breath on the elevator -- “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” seems to apply. The time for that is over.

World views collide on the evening news, and the differences between us is not in our genes but in the pictures in our heads. It’s mortally important what we see and think about, and we get to choose some part of it, not an option for other actors in the field. People who live with art seem to think they can comprehend the world more directly, see more, and bless their hearts, maybe they can. Maybe that’s why people like it, want to own it, and why it’s maybe even important.

mural amnesia -- revising history

ref. “UK will cover controversial campus mural,” HL nov 24, 15

We here at owning art don’t care for messages in our art, considering them an add-on to sheer visual impact, art’s ability to attract and hold our attention for more than nano-seconds at a time. Religious paintings from a time when wealth concentrated in grand cathedrals come down to us mainly because the eternal institution has preserved them, and the really good ones make it into museums but it isn’t because of what they say. Not many museum goers bother to identify all the heavily symbolic characters, more interested in the depiction of translucent flesh and velvet drapery than heavenly announcements.

To carry that standard forward to our time, it could still be the art itself that’s most important, and not it’s ax to grind no matter how noble. After all, advertisers learned a few generations ago that superior art draws attention to their product, whatever it may be, and they pay top dollar to some very classy professionals -- everything but true love. For that reason, even in the case of fine art it’s more reliable to consider qualities which apply to all art, historic and modern, referential and abstract. Van Gogh painted a pot of sunflowers, but no one looks at it to learn about sunflowers. They look at it because it’s the most interesting thing in the room. 

On the other hand art teaches us about the world. Every documentary about a period from about a hundred and fifty on back uses art to illustrate their story. Almost everything we know and judge about previous civilizations is in the attainment of their artists, and it’s is not for nothing that despotic regimes throughout history have sought to control the minds of their subjects by limiting their art, the worst being the most severe. Somehow this brings us to our own history, about seventy five years back, and the purge of representation from art, an event significant for art and just about everybody. During the great depression the government hired artists to paint murals in post offices and public auditoriums all across the land. What they got disturbed sensitive folks in influential high places, to them a lot of left wing crap, union meetings and strikes, average citizens buying the ‘daily worker’ on a newsstand, such as that. Few survive having made way for abstract art which don’t say nothing, and that’s on purpose. Somehow the painting in Coit Tower in San Francisco made it through neglect and sabotage, and it’s murals have finally been preserved, are even being restored. coit tower murals 

The mural in question over on campus, having drawn so little attention all these years, managed to shyly stand in a corner and so survived the great destruction of WPA sentiment almost everywhere else. It can be read a couple of different ways, and acknowledging a reality which couldn’t be spoken at the time could be seen as quietly subversive, an indictment of the status quo, a clandestine nod to all those who passed by and wanted the world the change. By our universal standards this mural isn’t a particularly strong statement, and compared with the mosaics of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal it's only mediocre, but it does preserve a truth about a time and an appeal for change, and can’t we just help but wonder if these protesters are on the wrong side. Besides, this blog doesn’t trust anyone who wants to censor or destroy art. 

the Pope on pollution -- home remedies

One of the problems with urbanization the Pope’s encyclical cites is ‘visual pollution’, and I guess we all know what he means. Mostly it’s advertising, layers on layers, each billboard plastered on top of the last, faded enticements to buy stuff moldering down to dingy, dirty streets in all directions around any major city. Boarded up fast foods, fluorescent-lit gas pumps, the tumult of ambition and failure in tawdry heaps as we drive by soaking it in -- we can’t help it any more than we can help breathing the oily air. Does it dull the senses, how could it not?

Each and every sign, label, flyer is trying to get your attention, and it’s a frenzy, all after the ragged remnants of the average persons ability to even notice. A suggestion of cleavage on newsprint, on a turned page in a magazine, might arouse the nervous system enough to register a deal on tires, to realize a sudden need to purchase aftershave, and the competition for the momentary glance is cutthroat. Mostly we tune it out and look for escape, music so loud it overrides the chatter, preoccupation with the hand-held, and an hour in the park, a drive by the lake seems to help.

When I was young the ohio river would leave a nasty black line along its banks every time it went down an inch or two, but now there are fish, you can see to the bottom sometimes. There’s no longer a sign nailed to every tree on a drive in the country, thank you state legislature, and neighbors make an effort to de-uglify their part of town. Still, it’s a toxic environment for our perceptual net, the interface between us and what’s out there, so says the Pope. It’s worse in the slums, where every inch is covered with the belligerent badgering of payday loans and liquor stores, but it’s all over really.

People in densely populated, industrially polluted cities of the east sometimes go out in the street wearing surgical masks to try to filter out the large chunks, and it must help some. An antidote would be handy, when you get home, and it isn’t going to be a quickly fading football game selling beer and trucks. The remedy to apply is an apartment or house full of art, stable and friendly as any environment is going to be all day, a soothing, renewing bath for battered senses. Won’t fix everything, of course, but until the world becomes as beautiful as the Pope says it ought to be, it must help some.

the emperor’s old clothes -- going casual

It’s all about comparison. Some scientists claim that’s all there is, that we ‘know’ about anything strictly and simply by comparing, and those with the broadest experience can be said, all else being equal, to have the best perspective, and are most likely to be proven right most of the time. Things aren’t equal much of the time, and most of us are just following our hearts looking for the easiest, perhaps the most rewarding, the better of the two choices in front of us constantly. Humans will eventually get into everything, go anywhere, think all sorts of stuff unless their choices are limited by some system of thought that controls them. 

Religion, not here of course, but back in the day in various places, gained traction by insisting blocks of knowledge were unthinkable and filling in the gaps with constant rounds of festivals and ceremonies. They aren’t the only ones who would try to manipulate people by limiting their choices, as regional text book controversies make clear, year to year. Keeping people in line becomes more difficult these days and uncouth dictatorships attempt to block the internet, to control the press, and to batten down on artists who are apt to think any way they want to. Balloons carrying leaflets have been tried just to import ideas that haven’t been thought on the other side before, and in the future massive drops of laptops would probably be more effective than bombs if closed-minded societies act up. Human freedom, it turns out, has to do with access to everything comparable there is. 

So who controls art, in the name of what tribe? Well, not any more. Murals on blank walls next to empty lots are becoming ‘trial’ art for cities all over, erected with private money and chosen for public impact, haven’t seen an abstract yet. They won’t last outdoors in wind and rain on caustic concrete, but that’s not the point. The muralists are moving across the world, literally, criss-crossing past each other. They’re that crown of foam at the top of an enormous wave about to crash all around us, a realization of the expressive potency of visual art, long suppressed. The few non-profit galleries featuring subsidized art which have dominated small city art scenes for decades are about to be inundated by every manner of private gallery, art in restaurants, art in offices and in houses down the street. Every person, in the end, will have a chance to decide, among all the possibilities presented, the art that expresses best the way they feel. Could turn out to be a freedom they didn’t know they had. 

to look, to see -- art’s impact

ref. ‘The Brain’, a current ket series, 10pm on wed

Something said here a while back has been technologically verified. It was a theory born of subtle observation, but now they can now show that we ‘see’ through a complicated process of cognition, and it’s a product of what’s out there, maybe only twenty percent, and the rest what’s inside already. They did it with MRI watching the information come in through the eyes, mix all around in back somewhere to produce the final version, what we see. Isn’t that interesting -- it explains a lot. 

The reason we’re all so different is because we live on slightly different planets based on our visual histories, and the amazonian forest dweller and the hipster from the city probably wouldn’t recognize anything through each other’s eyes, at least for while. Folklore has it the native people at Vera Cruz couldn’t see Cortez’s ships, so different from their prior experience, and so imagined he emerged from the sea, strange enough in himself, tall and white. “Lot’s of things are invisible, Joey -- but we don’t know it ‘cause we can’t see ‘em,” so said Dennis. 

Turns out what we see, what we’re capable of seeing, depends on those endless rows of file cabinets we maintain, somewhere in our skulls, of stuff we’ve seen before. Using technology scientists have observed it as it happens, more information flowing forward than comes in through the eyes. Seems it’s the filing system and not the apparatus that has the major influence on what we see, and cataract surgery just makes it clearer. If what we see is determined in large part by what we’ve seen before, just knowing that grants an edge, an advantage, a productive insight to the thoughtful organism. 

Of course we can’t change the world, but we do have discretion when it comes to what we look at, pay attention to, even think about. Implications abound, but the influence of significant art should be clear. Mostly mysterious to be sure, but seriously considering art, owning and living with art, is probably going to have an influence on everything else, everything seen at least. Someone could claim that’s art’s purpose and function, here in the early twenty first, and right or wrong, they’d at least be scientific.

where were you -- museum musings

ref. ‘Art museum downtown......,’ HL, oct 11, 15

For years the University of Kentucky Art Museum has been hiding under and around in back, essentially a service entrance, of a gigantic, all-brick fortress of performance, huge spaces dedicated to music and sound. Surrounded by a moat of ‘no parking available’ two or three blocks deep, with arbitrary hours, they weren’t trying to be friendly. So one day I stroll in, probably to see the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, a brilliant little painting even if you didn’t know who Washington was, and the person behind the desk calls out as I walk by. She says,”Who are you?”, just like that. I’m feeling wary at the impertinence so I offer that I’m a citizen of the fine state of Kentucky. She says that’s insufficient, and if I’m not student or faculty that’ll be eight dollars to walk around and see our stuff. I declined.

There was almost never anyone in there, anyway. I’ve heard they’d sometimes count janitors and even themselves coming back from lunch just to pretend someone was utilizing the real estate, and at eight bucks a head the true costs of the white elephant on campus must have been revealed. Well, suddenly there’s a new kid in town, in fact, there’s lots of them. The hotel is going to assume your function, the one you were too shy, too insular, to self-satisfied to fulfill. They’ll present an array of art you can’t match, set standards for achievement and currency in a profession space you’ll never get our citizens to provide for you, not now. All around the hotel the city has engineered a pedestrian friendly area in anticipation of private galleries popping up in store rooms, over bars, in any empty space with walls, all seeking a niche in the spectrum of interests and tastes of a suddenly engaged public, as well as those of world travelers passing through. 

Losing the admittance fee could be seen as a friendly gesture, although rather meek and inconsequential, an ego adjustment decidedly late, but you won’t see crowds because of it. Your space in neither user or art friendly, and your commitment to a contemporary sensibility which only a tax-adjusting foundation could love makes a move downtown into your own stainless-steel, squashed-can architectural icon just something to think about while a fly buzzes somewhere in your tall empty space. Where were you?

professional offices -- seedbeds of change

Being a mature citizen entails visits to offices, legal, medical, and various civic usually with a period of quiet time sitting in a room as part of the routine. Along with magazines they all have art, mostly as inane as the sit-com on a loop in the corner. The art was delivered in corrugated cartons leaved with foam, having been packed at the end of an assembly-line somewhere. Inside the frame are swatches of color, suggestions of landscape, maybe a few steaks of gold, almost totally like thousands of others shipped that week. 

No need for concern, this is totally adequate because at this time no one expects any more than that. Art in a waiting room is the decorating decision that comes after choosing the carpet and what kind of chairs? It’s not amazing that no one seems to notice, no one cares. It is possible to spend more and get a little nicer, sometimes featuring reproductions as familiar as the magazines, and almost on the verge of expressing something -- sailing ships at the dentist, stiff formal portraits and thoroughbreds in those 19th century-like law offices. You would think with big personal incomes they might invest in real art and maybe they do for their homes, but that’s private business in a private space, and this is about their offices, those interfaces with the public, those intersections of a diverse public’s concerns and interests, all of them with a bit of time to kill before their business gets done. Isn’t this a fertile ground for art?

So here’s what happens. Someone in charge of the office budget for maintenance and occasional upgrade sees a surplus, and suggests to the boss they buy a piece of art from some local artist, might be someone they happen to know. Well why not, and they hang it in the waiting room, behind the receptionist, somewhere everyone sees it. Chances are people will think it’s strange at first. Original art has a quirky fresh sort of feel about it that people tend to notice, however a word of caution -- it runs the out-of-the-box stuff off the wall. Instead of mutely decorating, the real thing wants attention, draws the eye, has something to say. Not everyone will like it at first, but it’s too late. 

Somebody’s going to say I drove by that guy’s studio the other day, he has a sign, and someone else chimes in, maybe later in the week, that they saw his work in a gallery, in a restaurant, in the home of a friend. Then some colleague, some associate, some competitor from across town will notice the response and buy a piece of art, maybe from some other artist in the area, and hang it in their office -- same thing again. Before long a native species has made a comeback, and area produced art will begin sprouting in offices all over town. For those unfortunate enough to visit several of these offices a week, the effect will be to make those wildlife and floral prints look lazy, the vague abstracts seem mechanical, and on the chance of finding themselves with actual art, to make their interminable waits more palatable and interesting. The eventual effect on the entire community will be the reseeding of a native interest in art and art ownership, everyone just a bit more considerate and thoughtful, more relaxed and satisfied.  

consensus cataracts -- vision restoration

The unspoken center of gravity of the art industry is ‘consensus,’ a wobbly, volatile cloud of affirmation, and uptown critical writing uses an insider’s code to manipulate it, to enforce it, to prop it up. It doesn’t have much to do with art in any traditional sense -- more informed by novelty, chutzpah, and who bought the full page ad.  As a practice it blurs what’s actually there, and that is the question in art, especially these days.

Is art just what you see, and if it is, what do you see, and why? Let’s say a signifier of truth is the ability to identify and acknowledge what’s actually there, without the miasma of fame and historical significance that can sometimes cloud the vision of the well-informed. After all, visual art is meant to be visual, and not just the illustration of airy literary constructs in those authoritative periodicals. Here’s a test. When you see a Jackson Pollock there in the museum can you identify any significant difference between it and a drop-cloth from a sign-painter’s pickup? There’s an element of genius in one and not in the other and you could tell the difference without the tags, really? Well aware one is ‘worth’ millions of times more than the other but the actual differences aren’t that large just looking, and looking, maybe seeing, is why we came.

Makes you feel like tearing up when you realize, there in the museum, that it is just what it is. You don’t have to pretend anymore. Thank you Jackson. Now you can look at art. You can enjoy yourself immensely in a museum without the patter of the recorded docent in your ear, seeing just what’s there. Scales fall from the eyes when the official version is unlearned, and as the dreary fog of forged notoriety begins to lift painters can be admired from any period for their insight and character -- it’s art, not fashion in slick magazines. Bad form to question, I’m sure, the immaculate conception or art history’s more recent matchstick edifices, but there’s liberation untold in disbelieving either. 

So much more art can be seen without the nagging questions -- am I supposed to like this, and what reputation the artist, and does this person next to me know more about it than I do -- shut up. Not much can be seen that way, and no wonder art seems opaque to some eager to understand -- for them it is. Preconceptions based on the commentary of experts, meandering statements posted on a gallery wall, the quest for that elusive and arbitrary up-to-the-moment consensus can clang down across an image like a castle gate, and being able to see past them, occasionally coming face to face with an artist through their images, represents a kind of personal honesty and confidence that broadcasts to other areas of life, other realms of perception. We have only anecdotal proof that this is happening, but there’s a ton of it. People like art when they see it directly, and learning to do it goes on like a new suit of clothes.  

art as food -- cuisine critical

Attended a workshop on writing art criticism and came away with questions. Is the art reviewer on the same level with the artist, as co-creators career-wise speaking -- seems like a goofy idea but it’s out there. See the reviewer, an expert by decree of congress, converts the art into words, predigests if you will, and prints out this verbal equivalent for avid art fans to consume. They’re going to be avid fans because other segments of the population won’t find the coded pig-latin of artspeak palatable, dense and sly, in actuality the writer’s audition for a better assignment -- so full of action phrases, evocative descriptors, such as that.

They presuppose a certain familiarity with the liturgy of modern art, ‘elements of so-and-so with occasional quotes,’ and such throughout, weaving references so they reinforce each other. Sorry to tell you guys but the art stopped being interesting a while back -- polka dot paintings. There’s an omission on your business card -- no, it isn’t like a food review, and there’s a big reason why. I’m nobody special but when I read that the cheezy-mac has just the right amount of salt, actually saw this in a restaurant review once, I can go to that restaurant and try it myself. Maybe I’ll agree, maybe I won’t. 

Can’t do that with contemporary art. It takes more than just an appetite, you’ll have to acquire an OT knowledge of endless begats, the linage of kings, the litany of successive movements and personalities who finally left us here -- skinny, skinny people eating mud-pies, sorta looks like food used to look. Everybody so busy writing and reading no one looks up as art spirals down to rooms four inches deep in flour, candy wrappers and cigarette butts significantly scattered. 

I kid. I don’t care what kind of art you guys like, but do you have to pretend you’re the only game in town? Does your point of view really require a lovely new facility, paid for by all of us, just to march graduates off a cliff by teaching a style of art that can only leave the lucky ones public dependents, living on grants, public commissions, and teaching positions forever? Why are academics with ‘credentials’ the only ones qualified to write about art for publication, and who chooses the art exhibited in dark public galleries seldom visited? 

Here’s the thing -- art isn’t about words. Mostly they contend, and for some time now words have been winning. Take an evocative, meaningful work of art, a Van Gogh for example. How much can be said? Any honest reviewer will have to say, ‘I can tell you what’s in it but you’ve really got to go see it.’ A painting with no content, say a uniform monochrome, on the other hand, can be written about endlessly and the truly gifted reviewer can soar reaching counterpoints of idiocy so profound they’d baffle Irwin Corey. In the end it won’t be necessary to see the work and might not be worth the effort, anyway -- have you heard of the big rock in LA?

Art review will be more like food review when they scrutinize private businesses who depend on public approval for a lively-hood, in this case private galleries and artists’ studios, and not hothouse kinds of art, unsustainable without grants and subsidies, and when they use terms the average citizen can verify with their own eyes. If your tastes are too rarified for fellow citizens, it’s a free country, just try paying the freight for contemporary art out of your own pocket, and leave the cretins to an art which they find satisfying and sustaining. 

deal of the art -- visible politics

Art is the visible corollary to whatever’s happening in the street -- that’s its job. Bernie’s popularity represents an awakening of a new conception of self and community, an immensely apparent transformation since he’s been saying the same stuff for years and no one took him seriously, at all, until just recently. That’s the point in a lot of ways -- it wasn’t him who changed.

The corporations who provide ‘the news’ have for years attempted to make even the word ‘socialism’ unthinkable, have suggested that labor unions are obsolete, and have trivialized the notion of art behind wrinkled knowing smiles when ‘sixty minutes’ visits some art brothel for millionaires way back east somewhere. They’re not changing either, but the audience is beginning to hear the siren call of their own self interest, to want healthy choices at lunchtime, and lately to discover an interest in art which expresses what they themselves feel and think.

The notion whose time has come doesn’t rebel against the previous regime and beat it down. It bursts through it, supersedes it, and becomes the new normal, or at least bends community consciousness in a new direction. This community, and probably many like it, is on the verge of taking an interest in regionally produced visual art, as in looking, seeing, and owning, just as it also begins to reassess the meaning of citizenship -- it comes as a package is the claim we're making. 

The peer group review panel granting public funds and prestige to their own like-minded won’t go away, or maybe it will, but that’s not important. A curiosity about art that’s been around for a long time is awakening in one person after another, and suddenly galleries fill with afternoon strollers looking at art -- wondering if it’s any good, if it’s worth the price, if it might be nice to take some home. What this has to do with Bernie and his politics can only be shown with quantum formula as yet unrevealed, but that they’re related is plain to see. 

two cities -- best and worst change places

Over around the u art flourishes, lots of activity. They have galleries and events, a museum with docents, studios and support -- supplies, status, and prestige. It’s pretty good. To directly quote an emeritus from a nearby u, as said to an art professions assemblage a few years back, “it’s a pretty good racket.” They have the support of just about all of us if we pay taxes, and maybe even more if we take deductions. What about the art? Well they sure seem to like it, and are quick to vouch for each other no matter what, so long as there’s no hint of general appeal about it. They consider creating art to which the average citizen might relate outright treason --disgraceful, cheap and tawdry besides.

Somewhere in an abandoned storefront three blocks off campus, with temperamental plumbing, seasonal drafts, maybe bugs, someone sits in paint spattered clothes before an easel picking out that little gob of paint that sits in the neck of the tube after it’s been squeezed dry. Rent is a hassle, supplies come at a sacrifice, and time is stolen from both any sort of recreation and even some honest responsibilities -- a thin edge to walk along. For the work there is no outlet, no access to the public, no airhole. The writers around here all hang around the u and compete among themselves to be more obscure than the artists they extol, and beleaguered galleries just want stuff they think might sell, too desperate to care about art.

The average citizen is screwed. Contemporary art, the kind that all public institutions declare as a mission to herd folks toward, can sometimes seem sorta goofy. For people who work forty hours doing something they wouldn’t do on their own, the effort may appear minimal. To people who apply their creative talents to solving problems in the real world, the rationale for the typical community funded project, installations and such, can sound like three year olds planning an imaginary tea. For reasons like these they don’t tend to take much interest in art, except to marvel at the millions reputedly paid at auction for branded artifacts, a regular item on the evening news.

Time for a revolution, obviously, but no shots will be fired. More galleries and open studios will do the trick. They'll provide more chances to see art, more opportunity to compare and think about what artists are attempting and how well they’re doing it. Along with the pictures there are the price tags, an important part of any art exhibit, because they form the context for considering each piece -- can the price be justified and is it affordable? These questions can only be answered after seeing a fair amount of art, and that’s where more galleries come in. Interestingly enough, the more galleries there are the more there will be, an economic anomaly arising from the former distortion and the amazing range and diversity of artistic expression and taste latent in this community.

blowing up temples -- killing art

Fact is greek and roman temples have suffered over the ages. The temple complex at Delphi, with architectural representations of the ancient world’s classic civilizations, was thrown down by early christians for the same reasons that motivate the muslims of today, and can you blame them really? Illiterate, living in hovels without modern conveniences, and here they are confronted with enduring evidence of people who were smarter, more talented, and more advanced than they’ll ever be. In dumb frustration they lash out, blow stuff up just to not be reminded of what end of human existence they occupy. 

So human it’s disgusting to see and one of our less attractive characteristics, destruction becomes a sort of aggressive envy we know too well. It’s part of our basic issue and fuels petty resentments, jealousies, and vindictive little knife-fights the live-long day. It becomes visible when it comes to art. The destroyed temples didn’t represent function, their gods having moved out a couple millennia back, and without roofs they’d let in the rain that never falls. Out of the stone of the earth they were made purely as art, columns so perfect they were still standing, and the statement they made about human possibility went way beyond holding up a roof.

Drawing a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, submitting a urinal to serious art competition, dismissing historical representational art as prosaic and imitative turn out to be a similar cultural vandalism, all acts of ‘anti-art’ committed by notorious egoist, Marcel Duchamp, self-aware enough to realize his own limitations. What’s left after his ‘redefining influence’ is the rubble of intellectual property, the shredded integrity of attribution, a denial of archival responsibility, along with a haughty contempt for common culture -- fragments of a worthy artistic heritage here and there poking through the soup can miasma. The good news is that art is immortal, doesn’t need a temple, and will survive the temporary distortions of market manipulation and government interferences, no matter how demeaning or exclusionary.

Authentic art which represents a community sensibility comes not from the artists, so many willing to submit their talent to any wind that blows, but from the people who in the end decide what they want, and it’s coming. Simple exposure will resurrect an interest in owning and living with art, igniting a chain-reaction of acquisition, while connecting the names of area artists to their characteristic style of expression. When enough original art is available, the machinery of commerce will crank up and average folks will self-educate, begin to have favorites, and decide what they want for the house. Artists will have the ability to survive outside the state system, and there’ll be something else to talk about at social gatherings now that the basketball team never loses.

scifi art -- organic advantages

In ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ Arthur Dent was always trying to get the food simulator on the spaceship ‘Heart of Gold’ to produce a cup of english tea, which the machine could do almost, but not quite.

Now there’s fluff this morning, they’re calling it art news, that someone has made something that looks like art using ‘algorithms’ no less -- almost but not quite. My news feed thinks I’m interested in Van Gogh, and it’s amazing what they put him through in a week -- glad he’s gone. Could a computer make a Van Gogh? More than unlikely.  

Making art turns out to be the one thing computers can’t do better than humans. Oh, they can make stuff that looks like art, as humans sometimes do, but it won’t say nothing. Computers experience neither joy or pain, have no aspirations, and don’t really care about you, or anyone. They have no DNA. Along with eye color, hair distribution, and various susceptibilities, there are vast uncharted tracts in our DNA tracing cold mountain passes, wars and deprivations -- ecstasies and triumphs, the encoded experience of thousands of generations, and if you don’t buy that then there’s the life each of us face everyday. Computers experience none of that, and they don’t make art. It would never occur to them.

art in school -- educating the audience

Art education isn’t all that important to future artists, since becoming an artist is an individual path undertaken by only an extremely small percentage of students who were going do it anyway. It’s important in a practical sense because those who do become artists are going to need an audience one day. It can be daunting to practice art when the public doesn’t know squat about it, and self-exile and isolation rarely come as a surprise. Can’t blame the public who seem to have very little grasp of history or geography as well, too bad, although some say knowing about art helps with those other subjects by increasing the ability to absorb and opening the mind. It’s a theory. 

There are impediments -- beyond the perennial lack of funding, the subject isn’t easily taught. In school art is divided up into separate realms and categories that confuse the young mind, any mind really. There’s the centuries old art in museums with religious themes and subjects no one cares or even knows about these days, and more recent art, divided into traditional art that looks like stuff and modern art that doesn’t. Good enough. A few hours on art in a school year won’t unlock every mystery, but doesn’t matter. Some percentage of students will start looking on their own and ultimately begin to think for themselves, one of art’s more common side effects. Then later, as they begin to establish themselves in life, perhaps they’ll recognize the value of owning significant works of art, significant at least to them, and carrying them along wherever life takes them.

Art should be taught in school because art is a tool every citizen is entitled to, one that provides understanding of self as well as a way to comprehend the world and other people. Art as a practice is about seeing, discerning, and understanding -- educational advantages in a world full of visual deception and false promises. 

flogging the past -- John Hunt Morgan’s last stand

Remembering the bad old days of cold war propaganda when some bad old things were said about the soviets. On weekends the paper would feature pictures of stout russian women in heavy overcoats laboring in rail yards, such as that. On a more intellectual level the communist party was accused of disappearing people when they fell out of favor, scratching their names out of books and cutting them out of old group photos. Year by year the little oval portraits from the first party congress continued to disappear leaving pale little oval blanks behind the glass. What bastards. 

Then I began to notice the tracings of people on this side officially forgotten. I was an adult before I ever heard the name Paul Robeson, a huge talent and personality shunned by american media presumably for challenging racial customs, and Rockwell Kent, once famous painter and pubic intellectual, who embraced the notion of communism and the Soviet Union, and was subsequently forgotten by general proclamation -- Rockwell who? His wide ranging illustrations, including incredible woodcuts, can still be found in books of certain vintage, a Random House edition of Moby Dick, for example.

Suddenly in my hometown, in your hometown, all over the wind has shifted, deciding to blow back the other way for a while. Overnight we want new statues of new heroes, and we’ll want to get rid of the old ones. Nocturnal graffiti artists have expressed group disapproval on their pediments, and many want them carted away, out of sight--out of mind, disappeared. Doesn’t one wonder on occasion what sense of history each human would have if each succeeding civilization wasn’t intent on destroying every symbol of the previous -- temples and libraries, gods and thought processes. 

Well they aren’t just symbols, these chunks of bronze downtown, but works of art built to outlast the fickle winds of society’s approval, and they’re still hanging around after the love has grown cold, cold. It’s bound to happen, songs are sung, but bronze is difficult to work with, lost wax, molding and pouring, and these are formidable accomplishments which might last damn near forever on their own. The one of Breckenridge just isn’t inspiring. It looks ordered from a catalogue -- go ahead, melt it down, but John Hunt Morgan on a horse, buttons on his tunic, spurs on his boots, the bogus equipment on his horse, a local whimsy, is really pretty nice. Not many artists and skilled shops could pull that off these days. 

Calling John Hunt just a lowly horse thief is sure enough silly, since we know every statue of Sherman in front of a northern courthouse is and will be safe, and he outdid John at every turn, in every way -- but that was all so long ago. Who cares, at this point, who John Hunt Morgan really was, let it rest. By now he’s just a bronze equestrian dressed up in military regalia, looking sure of himself full of youth and romance -- let him stay. 

healing arts and art -- getting better

My reality has worn spots, a patina of human usage, and leaves room for sudden shifts of purpose -- let’s go for a ride. I visit a hospital only when serious repairs are called for, but there I see a day-to-day much different from my own. Florescent lit and subterranean, endless hallways branch Escher-like behind the information desk, and me always lost after the second turn.  

Here is purpose beyond the individuals in it, each with personal lives but on time for every shift. It’s a worthy mission and an avenue toward full human potential, but there’s an environmental price to pay in all that sterile uniformity. The body thrives on vitamins and minerals but the total organism needs different levels of stimulation, and euro-style functionality and easily cleaned surfaces don’t provide much, especially everywhere all the time. 

That’s where the art comes in. Does art promote healing, maybe, but mostly that’s a theory found on grant applications. Discomfort, debility, worry and concern are all serious distractions from the enjoyment or even the consideration of art, and the average patient just wants to go home. Original art becoming a feature of hospital environments primarily benefits those who tread the same halls, traverse the same public spaces, eat in the same food courts everyday -- the hospital staff. 

Art on the wall, that distilled essence of human experience and empathetic communion, is the static antidote for surroundings drained of character, charm, and warmth by the need for efficiency, emotional distance and organic isolation. The hospital becomes more livable with real art. It’s only a side benefit if art seen by a patient, or maybe an attendant or relative, so catches the eye that the name of the artist is written down for future reference. Art displayed in that most public place, frequented by every social class and ethnic distinction, shows respect for all and gives the entire population ‘permission’ to like the art as well, and that’s a slice of spiritual healing all around. 

losing money -- a matter of scale

‘Why do so many art galleries lose money?’ is the provocative headline in the Bloomberg News, and it’s a reasonable question since, as they point out, the billionaires are running up the score on their end snatching up everything at the art fair over six figures. What gives? 

In the first place the high end contemporary market isn’t about art -- it’s about having so much money you get points for pissing it away, so much the better if it’s pointless. Six hundred horsepower to drive down to the launderette seems excessive, big boats that never leave the dock line the lakefront, and the ultra wealthy buy art just because it’s expensive. It probably wouldn't be practical to try to emulate that here.

Art discussed in terms of auction performance and not content might not be much to look at, but given the proper trademark signature it doesn't matter. For the sake of the present discussion we’ll ignore everything over five figures as being essentially irrelevant to our original question, since few art galleries in this territory go that high, and those uptown marketing strategies, appeals to peer prestige and glamour, grow weaker out here in the provinces.

When the proprietor of a retail shop spends all day looking out the front window it’s time to freshen the offerings, upgrade the stock, sell something else. It’s sorely tiresome to hear gallery owners bitch about dumb customers, the poor economy, their crushed hopes and dreams. They’re just not going to be able to sell grad-student imitations of what the big guys get away with because they don’t have the same conspicuous-consuming customer base who don’t care how much they spend, who never sacrifice to own art. It’s a matter of scale.

Gallery director, you may be doing your best to look like downtown Chicago, but that may not be the best way to address the audience in front of you. If the fault is not in your public maybe it's your merchandise. If not enough buyers are helping you with your rent isn’t it time to acknowledge that the home-grown product is more potent, more eco-friendly, and better for the economy and state of mind of the local population than that trendy magazine-derived stuff you can’t sell, a realization which could turn failure into success. Good luck.

public and private -- art’s one-eyed jack

Art’s role in public is a grand excuse for endless debate, but mainly it comes down to we have these funds to spend and this stack of proposals, so let’s pick something unassailably consistent with current trends and clear a patch for it. I’m just guessing. I know nothing about it really, and not usually consulted, just like the most of us. There are people who make these decisions for us and I’m sure they all have swell credentials.

Art’s function in private is almost neglected territory, not written about or considered in slick periodicals. Current trends, after all, aren’t enormously important to owned art since its bound to outlast them. Owning and living with original art has a calming and broadening effect, honing perception and fortifying confidence. Art becomes a daily presence in your home powered first of all by simple uniqueness. So there it is, this framed cold-fusion reactor radiating on your wall, growing more potent through the years in its seniority and intimate familiarity. Art isn’t just a decoration but contributes to general awareness and well-being over a lifetime, and individuals invest in their future selves when they buy some. Still, there’s not much debate concerning the life-enhancing qualities of owned art. In fact, they’re hardly mentioned at all.

To really be involved with art, as with basketball for example, requires participation. The reason former athletes provide color commentary during games is because they have more credibility than the golden throated play-by-play guy who only sat in the stands. Filling the head with statistics, watching old newsreels, and interviewing the greats will only get you so far. So when it comes to art what does participating mean? Well, there’s making it, and anyone who seriously tries is in the game, but what about the experts, commentators and curators, who know so much about it? Self-sure fans is all.

Some folks look at art, sampling the box wine and crunching baby carrots -- they pause, tilt their head before an interesting use of color, and move on. This is not ‘participation’ all the way up to PhD. Buying and owning is the rest of the game, and living with art and supporting the artist completes the circle, ignites the arc, and eventually artistic expression becomes a viable board member of society’s general awareness, as well as a self-sustaining contributor to the local economy. Can’t really see the need for phalanxes of fixers and fund-raisers, or the cool coded commentary of ‘contemporary’ art reviews. 

Artists and owners, and folks who broker in good faith between them, seem to be the only essential players, the only ones with authentic credibility, and in the end, the only ones left on the floor. 

digital lies -- seeing what’s real

At this point there’s no photograph I’d believe, either by content or graphic quality. Is the flower really that color, is the waterfall really that tall, is there anywhere a human so perfect -- maybe, but you sure can’t be sure by looking at a digital image. This is an interesting point for art because there’s always been, since the advent of the camera and even before, a question of where does the value lie in a work of art? Is it in the quaint antiquity in a misty landscape, the milkmaid’s shy smile, the grandeur of snow-peaks, or is it something about the way it’s painted, whatever it is?

The abstract expressionists sought to answer the question with brutal finality. They removed content entirely so that painting itself was all there was left, and it did make the point but didn’t change the facts. It’s always been the case that quality in a work of art is in its execution and that subject is only the vehicle and not the destination. Once established and accepted all around this makes the original work of art the only visual image you’ll ever see with any claim to individual integrity and inherent value. This can be a tricky, almost esoteric notion in these days of perfect facsimiles, since the original art has value and it’s identical clone won’t ever -- there’s a reason.

So what, these days, has in itself inherent value, and just around the corner from the 3-D printed living room it’s a legitimate question. The answer, since the beginning of time, has been ‘what’s rare, hard to get, only possessed by a few,’ and in the end that will turn out to be anything made by a human hand. The better it’s made the better, because that will make it more rare still. It’s a simple equation. Original art, oddly enough, does not depreciate over time but only becomes more valuable as it becomes more rare, as notoriously in the case of the artist’s death.

It should be possible to bring the same criteria to the judging of any work of art, how well it’s made and its final impact, without considering subject at all, and what an interesting faculty to develop as the value of almost everything else dissolves in an ocean of digital open-accessibility. Knowing about art is about to become the new life-jacket in rising tides.

movies about movies -- art about art

Saw a western starring Ed Harris and it was a disappointment. Expected something pretty good after Harris’s bio of Jackson Pollock, an accurate portrayal of Pollock’s career, including a scheduled six month layoff during production to facilitate a forty pound weight gain so he could finish the movie as the artist after his successes and excesses -- a major personal effort to be true to his subject. His western, however, didn’t reflect the real world as it is or ever was. It was, as one reviewer noted, a movie about movies, and not about real life at all. 

In the movie the hero lawman swaggered around all invincible, clubbing down miscreants and shooting up the town, occasionally staring off to muse about the meaning of it all. It would all have made perfect sense to someone who’s watched a lot of movies, seen a lot of TV, but might have seemed contrived and artificial to a person with a modicum of historical sense and a little more grit in their carry-on. Movies based not on life as lived but on movies previously seen tend to instill unreal expectations, to project artificial role models, and some would claim they add to the confusion.

Art about art is the special realm of scholars and experts, but inspiration loses focus after many derivations like those old xerox copies. The source, so said Picasso, is always nature and that’s idealistic, but what he really should have said was everyone’s direct perception of the world -- it’s almost the same thing and closer to what he meant really. How closely it’s rendered or how far it’s stretched is the art part, and we revere individual artists for how they say it, even though partly it comes from us -- how we see it with them. It’s this life we’re interested in, most of us, and the world around us, and some art helps us see it better, almost always the art closest to the source. 

nude reveals all -- a parable true

In a small sleepy southern city some five or six decades ago a dedicated group of painters, retired art professors and sincere amateurs, sought a place where they could present their work, mostly to each other. They lived in an area of cultural aridity with only three water-holes of common interest and conversation -- tobacco, basketball, and horses. Best place they could find to exhibit was a doctor’s waiting room, since he was also a painter, a most inconvenient marriage of convenience for both parties. Then one day the little art league got lucky and was gifted with a derelict hulk of a mansion on the parks and recreation’s endangered list.

Even in new digs, it was still a sleepy organization with one modestly paid director and every other officer a volunteer. Openings were dutifully manned by the cookies and punch committee but lightly attended otherwise. Then one year the chairman of the gallery committee declared she wanted to do a ‘nude show,’ right there in traditionalist horse, tobacco, and basketball country, at the edge of the blue-nosed south. Well, why not?

The nude is the perfect theme for an art exhibit. Everyone knows the subject super well having bodies themselves, having grown up and lived in families, and of course there’s the internet. Unlike some snow bedecked mountain crag the television painter just imagines with a flick of his wrist, everybody knows where everything goes on a nude. Along with everyone’s direct experience, the nude is also the most depicted image in the history of art and so becomes the most revealing of the times, of the artists and of their audiences.

First of all no clothes means no indicators of historical period or social status and no embellishment with satin and pearls, just a basic human the way we’ve looked for the last hundred millennia. In that way the nude becomes an universal image, a ‘magic’ two-way mirror in which artist and audience see each other. For example, some people automatically associate the nude with sexuality but that mostly reveals the repression they’ve been taking for granted all along, and seeing the actual artwork would reveal broader and deeper thoughts to consider.

Back to the story. For the first few years the ‘nude show’ was the only opening of the year to draw an outside audience and more people showed up every year -- parking on the grass. Artists applied from all over the country, some from overseas, and the quality of the art was varied and interesting. From the notoriety and response to this one exhibit the art league began to grow and blossom with paid staff and progressive exhibits, in time becoming a non-profit refuge for people with art degrees and, frankly, no profession to go to. As a result of this increasingly academic bias, the nude show began to change. Year by year it was becoming more ‘contemporary.’ 

No longer paintings of humans without clothes, each year the notion of the nude became more and more abstracted and pathologically demented. Body parts were grafted onto kitchen utensils, generative parts specifically were grotesquely parodied, and with implied and explicit sex acts sprinkled throughout the overall aspect was seriously disturbed. I don’t know why the show was finally abandoned, but as part of their recently announced ‘reorganization’ the art league is bringing it back. In this time of transition, consider the lesson of your own living parable, oh art league, and go back to the beginning.

Turns out what people like is painting. They didn’t attend those early nude shows to see nakedness. They came to see what painters had to say about other people, about themselves, about life -- and mostly to see how good they were, all there side by side so it’s easy to tell. These days there’s a more general interest in art and the nude show had its part in that, plowing the earth and sowing the seed. This time around it might find reward. A new audience is ready to come to openings if exhibits feature area artists in themed exhibits -- interiors, landscapes, people, etc., exhibits that would help to educate and entice a public ready to be interested in art and local artists, a worthy mission.

With price tags up next to each piece, a modest non-profit percentage of art sold could be retained to help supplement operating expenses as grants and subsidies shrink away. Replay the same record, your own history, from the beginning again to hear a different song this time.  

history resolves -- incentives collide

Owning art isn’t really about art, and doesn’t advocate for any style or taste. If you’re a visual sophisticate capable of appreciating the scribbles of Twombly, the eloquent blotches of Motherwell, I wouldn’t complain simply because I don’t. Spend your millions, I don’t care. What we do here is politics and what we complain about is spending other people’s money on art they’ll never give a damn about while claiming they’re too dumb, too distracted, too visually illiterate to know what’s good for them. Something wrong with that -- fundamentally. 

What we have here is a state-supported art establishment, here in our democracy, with an officially sanctioned style of art purposefully maintained to baffle and confuse the general public, over their heads and beyond their interests. Just another example of the famous “munchausen syndrome by proxy,” causing the patient to be sick in order to keep the caregiver employed. Sounds vile but there’s no reason to ferret out dark conspirators -- the incentives are in upside down is the simple mechanical problem here.

Art made on a salary is different than art made to sell. Who disputes this? Is one better than the other would be a point of view, but that the second is more likely to be an authentic reflection of the tastes and interests of the culture all around seems more like a fact. If you yourself derive sustenance in some fashion from the state system this probably sounds like disaster, but to the rest of us not so bad. Too late anyway since the dialectic cranks, and the two contradictory ideas merge, the skinny one eating the fat one, as we speak. Galleries are changing from something to do on a date with no cover to places where people go to learn about and buy art, and they proliferate. Artists will switch allegiances in droves.

Art made to be sold, purchased and taken home, will simply overwhelm the traditional small town notion of art as a medium of charity, as a campus function, and ‘fund for the arts’ will be able pay the musicians better and leave art alone. According to relevant books of divination and social science, art as a means of exchange, dollars and ideas, is about to flourish maybe for a decade or two, and that hammering sound is the ground floor being built already. More galleries will need more artists, and a greater variety of the home-grown product will reach the surface, to be seen and eventually recognized by fellow citizens. 

Quality will find its own level among a world traveled population, and art produced around here will come to represent who we are as a community and who we are to ourselves as individuals. Barring a meteor strike some part of this is bound to play out, and it’s not the worst thing.