the emperor’s old clothes -- going casual

It’s all about comparison. Some scientists claim that’s all there is, that we ‘know’ about anything strictly and simply by comparing, and those with the broadest experience can be said, all else being equal, to have the best perspective, and are most likely to be proven right most of the time. Things aren’t equal much of the time, and most of us are just following our hearts looking for the easiest, perhaps the most rewarding, the better of the two choices in front of us constantly. Humans will eventually get into everything, go anywhere, think all sorts of stuff unless their choices are limited by some system of thought that controls them. 

Religion, not here of course, but back in the day in various places, gained traction by insisting blocks of knowledge were unthinkable and filling in the gaps with constant rounds of festivals and ceremonies. They aren’t the only ones who would try to manipulate people by limiting their choices, as regional text book controversies make clear, year to year. Keeping people in line becomes more difficult these days and uncouth dictatorships attempt to block the internet, to control the press, and to batten down on artists who are apt to think any way they want to. Balloons carrying leaflets have been tried just to import ideas that haven’t been thought on the other side before, and in the future massive drops of laptops would probably be more effective than bombs if closed-minded societies act up. Human freedom, it turns out, has to do with access to everything comparable there is. 

So who controls art, in the name of what tribe? Well, not any more. Murals on blank walls next to empty lots are becoming ‘trial’ art for cities all over, erected with private money and chosen for public impact, haven’t seen an abstract yet. They won’t last outdoors in wind and rain on caustic concrete, but that’s not the point. The muralists are moving across the world, literally, criss-crossing past each other. They’re that crown of foam at the top of an enormous wave about to crash all around us, a realization of the expressive potency of visual art, long suppressed. The few non-profit galleries featuring subsidized art which have dominated small city art scenes for decades are about to be inundated by every manner of private gallery, art in restaurants, art in offices and in houses down the street. Every person, in the end, will have a chance to decide, among all the possibilities presented, the art that expresses best the way they feel. Could turn out to be a freedom they didn’t know they had. 

to look, to see -- art’s impact

ref. ‘The Brain’, a current ket series, 10pm on wed

Something said here a while back has been technologically verified. It was a theory born of subtle observation, but now they can now show that we ‘see’ through a complicated process of cognition, and it’s a product of what’s out there, maybe only twenty percent, and the rest what’s inside already. They did it with MRI watching the information come in through the eyes, mix all around in back somewhere to produce the final version, what we see. Isn’t that interesting -- it explains a lot. 

The reason we’re all so different is because we live on slightly different planets based on our visual histories, and the amazonian forest dweller and the hipster from the city probably wouldn’t recognize anything through each other’s eyes, at least for while. Folklore has it the native people at Vera Cruz couldn’t see Cortez’s ships, so different from their prior experience, and so imagined he emerged from the sea, strange enough in himself, tall and white. “Lot’s of things are invisible, Joey -- but we don’t know it ‘cause we can’t see ‘em,” so said Dennis. 

Turns out what we see, what we’re capable of seeing, depends on those endless rows of file cabinets we maintain, somewhere in our skulls, of stuff we’ve seen before. Using technology scientists have observed it as it happens, more information flowing forward than comes in through the eyes. Seems it’s the filing system and not the apparatus that has the major influence on what we see, and cataract surgery just makes it clearer. If what we see is determined in large part by what we’ve seen before, just knowing that grants an edge, an advantage, a productive insight to the thoughtful organism. 

Of course we can’t change the world, but we do have discretion when it comes to what we look at, pay attention to, even think about. Implications abound, but the influence of significant art should be clear. Mostly mysterious to be sure, but seriously considering art, owning and living with art, is probably going to have an influence on everything else, everything seen at least. Someone could claim that’s art’s purpose and function, here in the early twenty first, and right or wrong, they’d at least be scientific.

where were you -- museum musings

ref. ‘Art museum downtown......,’ HL, oct 11, 15

For years the University of Kentucky Art Museum has been hiding under and around in back, essentially a service entrance, of a gigantic, all-brick fortress of performance, huge spaces dedicated to music and sound. Surrounded by a moat of ‘no parking available’ two or three blocks deep, with arbitrary hours, they weren’t trying to be friendly. So one day I stroll in, probably to see the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, a brilliant little painting even if you didn’t know who Washington was, and the person behind the desk calls out as I walk by. She says,”Who are you?”, just like that. I’m feeling wary at the impertinence so I offer that I’m a citizen of the fine state of Kentucky. She says that’s insufficient, and if I’m not student or faculty that’ll be eight dollars to walk around and see our stuff. I declined.

There was almost never anyone in there, anyway. I’ve heard they’d sometimes count janitors and even themselves coming back from lunch just to pretend someone was utilizing the real estate, and at eight bucks a head the true costs of the white elephant on campus must have been revealed. Well, suddenly there’s a new kid in town, in fact, there’s lots of them. The hotel is going to assume your function, the one you were too shy, too insular, to self-satisfied to fulfill. They’ll present an array of art you can’t match, set standards for achievement and currency in a profession space you’ll never get our citizens to provide for you, not now. All around the hotel the city has engineered a pedestrian friendly area in anticipation of private galleries popping up in store rooms, over bars, in any empty space with walls, all seeking a niche in the spectrum of interests and tastes of a suddenly engaged public, as well as those of world travelers passing through. 

Losing the admittance fee could be seen as a friendly gesture, although rather meek and inconsequential, an ego adjustment decidedly late, but you won’t see crowds because of it. Your space in neither user or art friendly, and your commitment to a contemporary sensibility which only a tax-adjusting foundation could love makes a move downtown into your own stainless-steel, squashed-can architectural icon just something to think about while a fly buzzes somewhere in your tall empty space. Where were you?

professional offices -- seedbeds of change

Being a mature citizen entails visits to offices, legal, medical, and various civic usually with a period of quiet time sitting in a room as part of the routine. Along with magazines they all have art, mostly as inane as the sit-com on a loop in the corner. The art was delivered in corrugated cartons leaved with foam, having been packed at the end of an assembly-line somewhere. Inside the frame are swatches of color, suggestions of landscape, maybe a few steaks of gold, almost totally like thousands of others shipped that week. 

No need for concern, this is totally adequate because at this time no one expects any more than that. Art in a waiting room is the decorating decision that comes after choosing the carpet and what kind of chairs? It’s not amazing that no one seems to notice, no one cares. It is possible to spend more and get a little nicer, sometimes featuring reproductions as familiar as the magazines, and almost on the verge of expressing something -- sailing ships at the dentist, stiff formal portraits and thoroughbreds in those 19th century-like law offices. You would think with big personal incomes they might invest in real art and maybe they do for their homes, but that’s private business in a private space, and this is about their offices, those interfaces with the public, those intersections of a diverse public’s concerns and interests, all of them with a bit of time to kill before their business gets done. Isn’t this a fertile ground for art?

So here’s what happens. Someone in charge of the office budget for maintenance and occasional upgrade sees a surplus, and suggests to the boss they buy a piece of art from some local artist, might be someone they happen to know. Well why not, and they hang it in the waiting room, behind the receptionist, somewhere everyone sees it. Chances are people will think it’s strange at first. Original art has a quirky fresh sort of feel about it that people tend to notice, however a word of caution -- it runs the out-of-the-box stuff off the wall. Instead of mutely decorating, the real thing wants attention, draws the eye, has something to say. Not everyone will like it at first, but it’s too late. 

Somebody’s going to say I drove by that guy’s studio the other day, he has a sign, and someone else chimes in, maybe later in the week, that they saw his work in a gallery, in a restaurant, in the home of a friend. Then some colleague, some associate, some competitor from across town will notice the response and buy a piece of art, maybe from some other artist in the area, and hang it in their office -- same thing again. Before long a native species has made a comeback, and area produced art will begin sprouting in offices all over town. For those unfortunate enough to visit several of these offices a week, the effect will be to make those wildlife and floral prints look lazy, the vague abstracts seem mechanical, and on the chance of finding themselves with actual art, to make their interminable waits more palatable and interesting. The eventual effect on the entire community will be the reseeding of a native interest in art and art ownership, everyone just a bit more considerate and thoughtful, more relaxed and satisfied.  

consensus cataracts -- vision restoration

The unspoken center of gravity of the art industry is ‘consensus,’ a wobbly, volatile cloud of affirmation, and uptown critical writing uses an insider’s code to manipulate it, to enforce it, to prop it up. It doesn’t have much to do with art in any traditional sense -- more informed by novelty, chutzpah, and who bought the full page ad.  As a practice it blurs what’s actually there, and that is the question in art, especially these days.

Is art just what you see, and if it is, what do you see, and why? Let’s say a signifier of truth is the ability to identify and acknowledge what’s actually there, without the miasma of fame and historical significance that can sometimes cloud the vision of the well-informed. After all, visual art is meant to be visual, and not just the illustration of airy literary constructs in those authoritative periodicals. Here’s a test. When you see a Jackson Pollock there in the museum can you identify any significant difference between it and a drop-cloth from a sign-painter’s pickup? There’s an element of genius in one and not in the other and you could tell the difference without the tags, really? Well aware one is ‘worth’ millions of times more than the other but the actual differences aren’t that large just looking, and looking, maybe seeing, is why we came.

Makes you feel like tearing up when you realize, there in the museum, that it is just what it is. You don’t have to pretend anymore. Thank you Jackson. Now you can look at art. You can enjoy yourself immensely in a museum without the patter of the recorded docent in your ear, seeing just what’s there. Scales fall from the eyes when the official version is unlearned, and as the dreary fog of forged notoriety begins to lift painters can be admired from any period for their insight and character -- it’s art, not fashion in slick magazines. Bad form to question, I’m sure, the immaculate conception or art history’s more recent matchstick edifices, but there’s liberation untold in disbelieving either. 

So much more art can be seen without the nagging questions -- am I supposed to like this, and what reputation the artist, and does this person next to me know more about it than I do -- shut up. Not much can be seen that way, and no wonder art seems opaque to some eager to understand -- for them it is. Preconceptions based on the commentary of experts, meandering statements posted on a gallery wall, the quest for that elusive and arbitrary up-to-the-moment consensus can clang down across an image like a castle gate, and being able to see past them, occasionally coming face to face with an artist through their images, represents a kind of personal honesty and confidence that broadcasts to other areas of life, other realms of perception. We have only anecdotal proof that this is happening, but there’s a ton of it. People like art when they see it directly, and learning to do it goes on like a new suit of clothes.