lowered expectations -- undemocratizing art

Could you, or anyone, with absolute confidence tell the difference between a painting by some olympian of modern art, say DeKooning, and one by a farm animal, or a three year old? You might guess. Once saw Corbert interviewing art aficionado Steve Martin, asking him if he could tell which uniformly green panel was the Elsworth Kelly worth millions and which was a paint chip. After hesitation Steve said the one on the left, to which Corbert said “wrong,” but even that was probably a lie.

How come we’re having this discussion? No, really. How did it come to this that art has value because of what, faith? At ‘face value’ a lot of big time art falls flat, is seriously ho hum less than interesting. There’s mystery here and major inconvenience, always turns out inconvenient when people get together to ignore the obvious. Art, after all, is humanity’s attempt to see, digest, and comprehend the remarkably pliable corner of the universe we’ve been given, and trivializing it, degrading it, forcing it to perform a silly dance for the obscenely wealthy may not be in humanity’s best interests, by and by.

Let academic friends eat a deskilled breakfast, listen to a deskilled band, take their car to a deskilled mechanic before extolling the virtue of ‘deskilled’ art, because many of the rest of us are simply unimpressed. What’s wrong with old fashioned skilled art, honest accomplishment, astute observation, and general accessibility? The inside chuckle before the big business meeting said under the breath on the elevator -- “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” seems to apply. The time for that is over.

World views collide on the evening news, and the differences between us is not in our genes but in the pictures in our heads. It’s mortally important what we see and think about, and we get to choose some part of it, not an option for other actors in the field. People who live with art seem to think they can comprehend the world more directly, see more, and bless their hearts, maybe they can. Maybe that’s why people like it, want to own it, and why it’s maybe even important.

mural amnesia -- revising history

ref. “UK will cover controversial campus mural,” HL nov 24, 15

We here at owning art don’t care for messages in our art, considering them an add-on to sheer visual impact, art’s ability to attract and hold our attention for more than nano-seconds at a time. Religious paintings from a time when wealth concentrated in grand cathedrals come down to us mainly because the eternal institution has preserved them, and the really good ones make it into museums but it isn’t because of what they say. Not many museum goers bother to identify all the heavily symbolic characters, more interested in the depiction of translucent flesh and velvet drapery than heavenly announcements.

To carry that standard forward to our time, it could still be the art itself that’s most important, and not it’s ax to grind no matter how noble. After all, advertisers learned a few generations ago that superior art draws attention to their product, whatever it may be, and they pay top dollar to some very classy professionals -- everything but true love. For that reason, even in the case of fine art it’s more reliable to consider qualities which apply to all art, historic and modern, referential and abstract. Van Gogh painted a pot of sunflowers, but no one looks at it to learn about sunflowers. They look at it because it’s the most interesting thing in the room. 

On the other hand art teaches us about the world. Every documentary about a period from about a hundred and fifty on back uses art to illustrate their story. Almost everything we know and judge about previous civilizations is in the attainment of their artists, and it’s is not for nothing that despotic regimes throughout history have sought to control the minds of their subjects by limiting their art, the worst being the most severe. Somehow this brings us to our own history, about seventy five years back, and the purge of representation from art, an event significant for art and just about everybody. During the great depression the government hired artists to paint murals in post offices and public auditoriums all across the land. What they got disturbed sensitive folks in influential high places, to them a lot of left wing crap, union meetings and strikes, average citizens buying the ‘daily worker’ on a newsstand, such as that. Few survive having made way for abstract art which don’t say nothing, and that’s on purpose. Somehow the painting in Coit Tower in San Francisco made it through neglect and sabotage, and it’s murals have finally been preserved, are even being restored. coit tower murals 

The mural in question over on campus, having drawn so little attention all these years, managed to shyly stand in a corner and so survived the great destruction of WPA sentiment almost everywhere else. It can be read a couple of different ways, and acknowledging a reality which couldn’t be spoken at the time could be seen as quietly subversive, an indictment of the status quo, a clandestine nod to all those who passed by and wanted the world the change. By our universal standards this mural isn’t a particularly strong statement, and compared with the mosaics of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal it's only mediocre, but it does preserve a truth about a time and an appeal for change, and can’t we just help but wonder if these protesters are on the wrong side. Besides, this blog doesn’t trust anyone who wants to censor or destroy art. 

the Pope on pollution -- home remedies

One of the problems with urbanization the Pope’s encyclical cites is ‘visual pollution’, and I guess we all know what he means. Mostly it’s advertising, layers on layers, each billboard plastered on top of the last, faded enticements to buy stuff moldering down to dingy, dirty streets in all directions around any major city. Boarded up fast foods, fluorescent-lit gas pumps, the tumult of ambition and failure in tawdry heaps as we drive by soaking it in -- we can’t help it any more than we can help breathing the oily air. Does it dull the senses, how could it not?

Each and every sign, label, flyer is trying to get your attention, and it’s a frenzy, all after the ragged remnants of the average persons ability to even notice. A suggestion of cleavage on newsprint, on a turned page in a magazine, might arouse the nervous system enough to register a deal on tires, to realize a sudden need to purchase aftershave, and the competition for the momentary glance is cutthroat. Mostly we tune it out and look for escape, music so loud it overrides the chatter, preoccupation with the hand-held, and an hour in the park, a drive by the lake seems to help.

When I was young the ohio river would leave a nasty black line along its banks every time it went down an inch or two, but now there are fish, you can see to the bottom sometimes. There’s no longer a sign nailed to every tree on a drive in the country, thank you state legislature, and neighbors make an effort to de-uglify their part of town. Still, it’s a toxic environment for our perceptual net, the interface between us and what’s out there, so says the Pope. It’s worse in the slums, where every inch is covered with the belligerent badgering of payday loans and liquor stores, but it’s all over really.

People in densely populated, industrially polluted cities of the east sometimes go out in the street wearing surgical masks to try to filter out the large chunks, and it must help some. An antidote would be handy, when you get home, and it isn’t going to be a quickly fading football game selling beer and trucks. The remedy to apply is an apartment or house full of art, stable and friendly as any environment is going to be all day, a soothing, renewing bath for battered senses. Won’t fix everything, of course, but until the world becomes as beautiful as the Pope says it ought to be, it must help some.