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.