some like it flat -- the endless picture plane

Today any sort of thing can be called art and the contest seems to be just to get there first. The notion of permanence started going away when the abstract expressionists not only expressed contempt for traditional pictorial expression, but held little regard for traditional standards of craft and produced artwork destined to self-destruct due to material degradation in short decades. Since then any standard still standing has become the target, and a posse of the avant-garde has roamed the backstreets and surrounding fields to annihilate anyone’s priggish reservation about anything.  

So now I hear installation is all the rage -- the sodded gallery; the advertising festooned, found refuge, pile; the petulant puzzle complaint about something very large and far away. Not only do I find these exercises sorta uninteresting, I don’t understand the commerce side. Who pays the artists, how does the gallery pay rent, and what does anyone get to take home? If it’s institutionally supported I question. I’m not closed-minded, but if everything is art, nothing is -- look it up.

It started with the flat blank surface that’s been the same for every artist who ever stretched canvas or gessoed a wooden panel, or confronted a smooth wall in a cave. In a long human history it’s become a magical place. The artist can find the newly prepared canvas intimidating, since once they’ve achieved even basic proficiency they begin to realize anything is in there at the beginning. Every masterpiece ever produced arose from that same white surface, and something even better is possible until the first mark is made. It shouldn’t be thought about too much.

For the average person ready to appreciate art in some form, limiting the area of interest right off has its advantages. Just paintings with ducks is probably too narrow, while everything they call art these days might be too broad. Pretty average myself you understand and for me it’s the flat white panel which gives rise to both ‘big eyes’ and Van Goghs, and is the fertile ground for every image ever seen or imagined. The commerce side isn’t complicated. Would-be artists either apprentice to working artists, if there are any who can afford such, or must be willing to support themselves by other means until they can produce art compelling enough to earn the acceptance of a receptive community, if there is one. This receptive community would have original art on their walls that friends and neighbors would recognize, comment on, and which they would come to appreciate more and more as years go by.