dark side of the moon -- shouting

It’s peculiar to be out of step. At first it seems like conversation, but when the other party just looks off there’s a tendency to talk a little louder, to use more colorful language, finally to shout. No one seems to hear. It’s sorta liberating really. 

There’s just stuff people don’t want to hear so they won’t. This can be particularly disappointing in the professionally open-minded. Bread usually comes with butter on one side and most folks lean toward self-interest before they apply logic, and so it’s always been. Art, of all fields of human endeavor, glorifies in the absolutely unfettered, uncensored freedom to say, think, or do anything -- in the studio, in the gallery, in the street. Heard such testimony on the radio from a big time artist who became famous doing the same tedious pastel protractors on and on, an essentially identical example in art museums everywhere, and one of the most austere, unrelentingly unimaginative bodies of work ever. Why am I confused?

In actuality, the consensus-driven art establishment is so astoundingly close-minded that it’s only through gossip in the trades that it’s possible to know if Norman Rockwell is legitimately going to be an artist this scholarly ten year cycle, or just a sentiment-slut magazine illustrator. It’s hard to keep up. Chunks of cash reputedly spent on the work of grad student geniuses to be warehoused until matured as even bigger bundles of bank notes, are the gas flares burning above the refinery of grossly accumulating wealth, excess cigar-lighting money. Legitimate or not, it looks like a truckload of butter on 'sixty minutes', and the office staff doesn’t want to hear it’s going rancid in front of them while the culture yearns for substance.

Independent artists can be insightful, even prophetic, largely because the economy, society, even the art establishment leaves them out, and it’s this bread without butter on either side that allows a certain objectivity. To be clear, just remaining outside is an obstinate position, a naive insistence that words and actions meet, or that they at least bend toward each other. It could be shouted or painted but until the society at large is ready to listen it won’t be heard, or seen. 

In the future works of art will be bought by people seeking their own inner expression, their own solace, and they won’t really give a damn about splendid resumes. The turnstiles of art’s academic certification will be flattened and artists will be free to seek an audience from within their own communities through numerous private galleries and alternative venues. The vast teaching establishment leading art students toward a professional cliff will be bypassed by the talented and driven, and the charity model of non-profit art dependency will dwindle down to dusty basket-weaving backwaters. The business of art will be between artists and the communities where they live, and all those who presently make a living from art without making art, buying and selling art, or even owning art, will have to go get jobs. Who has ears?