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.