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.  

privileged dependence -- weaning art

Once there was a time when the royal court spoke a different language than the common folk who baked their bread and tilled their fields. The disdain that arose from this privileged dependence, a quite human compensation for knowing you're doing wrong, could be quite freely expressed since it was over the head of all but the house-servants. There have been a few such times on different parts of the planet and it's never turned out well.

The federal government in oh so many ways supports an art that involves maybe one percent of the population -- no, way less than that. Rusting culvert pipe squashing itself atop some building, who looks up, isn’t going to uplift the rest of us. We don’t speak that language. All this gigantic movement of money, bought at auction held in trust donated for tax considerations, doesn’t really trickle down to working artists and their natural constituents, those common folk who bake the bread and till the fields -- everybody else. 

To call it a gigantic money laundering racket wouldn’t be polite, although I have hinted from time to time -- see below. You decide. It’s easier to say that ‘contemporary art,’ without the NEA grants, without foundation tax shelters, without federal and state support for a remarkably dead-ended academic establishment, would evaporate -- finally a contextually relevant outcome. The ‘foreign language’ of the ephemeral installation, the half-baked deskilled assemblage, the mashup of borrowed ideas just wouldn’t be spoken around here any more.

This is not the time to increase funding for a self-chosen court of art insiders, income dependent bureaucrats all mannered and intrigued, and for an art which interests so few of us. Civic officers let your discretionary dollars flow to where they’re needed more, somewhere else, and let art -- production, distribution, appreciation and ownership, manage on its own. This will eventually happen, is happening, anyway, and your well-meaning helping hand just gets in the way. 

http://owningart.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-of-330-million-dollar-finger.html   -- and note the comment attached.

sunshine of the open mind -- casting shadows

I remember art school just out of the service -- a readjustment I guess I never made. Students in from rural high schools who had dreamt of becoming artists spent their first year bewildered, wondering why their dreams were turning out so strange. A group of them, four or five, actually came to me only because I was a vet and slightly older and asked me what was going on, and I could only say it certainly was educational -- the military having left me guarded and ironic. In the end most of these same students sanely moved on to other fields of study. I was more detached but no less chagrinned, as the graduate students, surly and dismissive, seemed to be running everything.

What they didn’t like was anybody trying to draw anything, paint anything, or make anything recognizable to anyone in favor of stuff that was just stuff, the more unrecognizable the better. Remember a bfa show in which the artist had taken ladies undergarments, soaked them in dye that didn’t take and ran them through a wringer, I’m guessing, leaving purple and blue caked in all the wrinkles, and then hung them on a line laundry style. People would stand and look and offer, “sure looks like a lot of work,” not knowing really what else to say. No one was willing to say out loud it was a total waste of time since that would have blown the whole game, turning the art building back into a warehouse, but that’s what every rational person was thinking.

That’s how they all start out, these cul-de-sacs of thought, and whether they’re religious, political, or cultural, the technique is the same. Seemingly harmless little transgressions of conscience are allowed to take over the garden, suffocating all the beneficial stuff that used to grow there. If it’s art, it’s called ‘open-mindedness,’ which means all academic/contemporary art resides in a sanctified zone where critical thought is suspended. We cheer. Mother church insisted parishioners ignore abuses by clergy all around, for the sake of the revolution patriots aren’t supposed to notice the labor camps and firing squads, and in exchange for the security of a fine career art bureaucrats embrace the notion of the ‘open mind’ -- anything goes.

Problem is it isn’t true. Met an artist once who told me the only way her representational paintings could be reviewed by the class was upside down. Academics spent a couple of generations heaping harsh disdain on any art that attempted common accessibility, and any student who dared try it anyway. Fellow academics who might occasionally attempt to appeal to the public, or just felt the need to create their own most natural art, went straight to the woodshed. That is true.

Somehow it’s the art that isn’t covered by the ‘open mind’ mantra that seems most interesting to me, since whoever makes it hasn’t been just trying to get along. It’s tricky. The genre markets are as closed-minded as the academics at an opposite extreme, wanting everything predictable and standardized, and sometimes it doesn’t seem there’s much real estate between. That’s the tricky part, that’s the independent part, and that’s where there’s a cutting edge that actually slices anything. 

A culture’s self-expression comes through in the art people support by wanting to possess it themselves, art’s most authentic and legitimate jury, and they’re open minded to a degree. Artists just have to come half way, and those nice folks will bring up their speed to meet them. I’ll say that another way -- nothing breeds sophistication quicker than spending personal out of pocket money. Once that first purchase is made, for best results might need to sacrifice a bit, suddenly an automatic process takes over, and every similar piece of art seen thereafter gets mentally compared. It just happens on its own. Given a decent array of styles and levels of accomplishment, people considering parting with part of their paycheck grow up quick. For any artist who would feel sullied by working toward such an exchange, who would rather keep their civil service position and ‘open mindedness,’ I mean no harm nor find fault.... 

The ground shakes, and winds blow. Lord aren’t we tired of moronic comic book movies, and wouldn’t it just make us all feel better, help us see farther and to think more clearly, to have some locally-sourced user-friendly art up on the wall around here?