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.