money envy -- art blindness

Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?’ artnet news -- jan 14
 
An article surveys the background of several fully emerged artists concerning privilege and wealth, something about both opportunities and points of view I think, just scanned it, who cares? It’s the audience who are actually required to be privileged and wealthy, blue-chip art like banknotes up on their walls. What are the aesthetic parameters of well-upholstered living, what insight gained from having things taken care of, little to do in life but compete against other wealthy wankers with your stuff? I’d have no idea, but I can see the art they like. The ‘artnet news’ is devoted to it.

I wouldn’t romanticize being poor, but overly-easy has drawbacks as well, and wealth’s notorious lack of empathy, while certainly understandable, becomes a distinct liability when it comes to appreciating art. Those with everything already instinctively want to buy the thing with the biggest price tag, a tendency recognized and long cherished within the industry. People who have acquired more of life’s skills through diligence and effort have a greater inclination to admire accomplishment, and with just a bit of exposure they can learn to recognize and appreciate it in art, whatever the subject, whatever the price. A taste in art -- a favorite artist, or style, or subject is strictly individual, and we all get to like what we like, but just being super expensive is an unreliable standard for art, a joke, a perversion.

On the ‘artnet news’ it’s all they ever talk about, really. It isn’t actually news, it’s just about money, the racing form with glam gossip tossed in. There are rumored compensatory considerations for favorable reviews, like buying a big fat ad, and this implicit corruption is simply known as ‘the way we do business.’ I suppose if I wanted to be like them I’d try to like their art too, but I don’t. What I do know is that if ten painters of relative proficiency were to paint the same familiar object, the result would not be ten identical copies of something, but ten individual images, each revealing something about the artist who painted it. That’s a place to start, actually a place to start over.

not enough looking -- too much talk

What does it mean to be visual, as in ‘visual art’? Means almost anything these days, no, more than that. Visual art can be anything you want it to be, and doesn’t have to look like much. About a hundred years ago give or take, the newly defined mission of the artist became simply to shock the middle class, violate accepted norms, and ride that wave of controversy to the top. The urban chic love putting artificial distance between themselves and the workaday types who contribute to their swell lifestyles, and any affront to their sensibility makes the grade, cheap, tawdry, easy, and dumb they like special. This is said with confidence, evidence abounds.

Back in the seventies Tom Wolfe asserted that the real change in art was from a visual form to a literary one, and as a fact Clement Greenberg, titan theorist of abstract expressionism, came to art after having tried literary criticism. With bunches of words you can weave some scintillating tapestries, but they’re just going to lay there on the page in rows, sucked up in linear sequence to be reconstructed by you -- pure abstraction. Visual art isn’t like that. It’s so much more ‘real.’ Looking at a picture happens all over all at once, but it enters the brain slowly, sinking in like water in a flower pot. Verifying this assertion will require the participation of the reader willing to stand in one place in the museum long enough for a painting to have its say. Walk away with your windows defogged a little.

What we have here is a traffic jam of words about art, and the road doesn’t go through, anyway. Visual art occupies a territory past the jurisdiction of words, and it can be talked about but not captured by anything said. Using visual art to illustrate a relevant, timely, important social cause is really just another form of advertising, while the art has merit, if any, solely in visual terms. This is the gauntlet -- have something interesting to say visually, or call it something else. Conceptualists, homestead new ground, blow minds and call into question over on your own lot, and leave visual artists to paint their pictures, to sing their songs in the mind’s eye.

the invisible bridge - art and life

In an article about abstract art in salon magazine, 12-18, the author suggests -- ‘And yet the general public, at least, finds abstraction and minimalism intimidating, quick to dismiss it with “oh, I could do that” or “that’s not art.”’
This is not, in a highly technical sense, what we usually think of as ‘intimidation,’ and represents a slight misreading of public sentiment due to a seriously bent point of view, make that self-serving delusion raised to an art form. They don’t want in, the six-packs, and might actually resent you and your snooty posturings, sipping pretend tea from plastic cups while the planet smolders, adoring that abstract art.

Another article quotes Trump, from his book ‘Art of the Deal,’ how on visiting an artist friend, ‘a highly successful and very well known painter,’ the artist asks Trump -- ‘how would you like to see me make twenty five thousand dollars?’ He pours out five buckets of paint, takes maybe two minutes, and says ‘I just earned twenty five thousand, let’s go to lunch.’ Instead of gasping at what an affront such sheer larceny would be to almost everyone else on the planet, the art critics amuse themselves wondering who the artist could be, a truth squad with squirting roses in their lapels.

Shame on all the arts professionals of whatever stripe who perpetrate this mythology that abstract art represents a great deal more than elaborate trademarks, bought and sold and traded around like monopoly tokens. As a business, it's seen by many as much closer to the sham Trump said it was, and he speaks for oh so many people, you wouldn't believe. Pretending they don’t exist, these little people, or don’t count, pisses them off, and sooner or later they express themselves. The mega-irony of it all is that art matters, and shallow, stupid, mercenary art leaks out into ‘real life’ in unfortunate, unfunny ways. 

Trump was not offended by the mindlessness of the artist’s non-art, he admired it in his twisted way, the way the establishment does, all about money, fame, the secular side only. Consequences be hard, but lessons are there just waiting, laying on the ground. If the art of the eighties, celebrated for being dumb and dollar-driven, in any way contributed to the real life dilemma we’re facing these days, then let’s turn the ship around and start respecting the art in front of us. Art could turn out to be the only handle we can find on a morphing group consciousness, digital x’s and o’s sucking at our toes like sand in the tide.

the prophet -- Warhol and Trump

On 12--18 the ‘artnet news’ playfully suggests, ‘You know who could take American master Andy Warhol’s lessons and turn them into gold-plated tackiness? None other than Donald J. Trump.’ 

They actually said that, maybe thought it was funny. Chances are they don’t really see the connection, refuse to acknowledge their own collusion, in the end will attempt to deny their gut-level awareness that Trump and Warhol shared the same worldview, espoused the same values, liked each other. 

true believer -- romancing the ear

Van Gogh didn’t cut off his own ear. He had a hard drinking roommate, Gauguin, who happened to own a souvenir samurai sword, and they had an argument -- not so difficult with a drunk. If Van Gogh had implicated the roommate he would have been arrested, so Vincent said he did it himself and humbly accepted the dent in his own reputation and history’s tittering ridicule, how would I know that? Spending time with an alcoholic has to be part of it, especially the wounded ego sort Gauguin must have been, don’t they rage, but mostly it has to do with what I know about Van Gogh. Poverty is a widespread human condition, not just the trial of a visionary painter, but buying art materials before beans seems to indicate a certain fervor. Then there’s the art.

The most cogent conclusion to be drawn from his infamous lack of ‘success’ was that he wasn’t doing it for the money, yet he continued to pump it out, hundreds of canvases in a year, perhaps indicative of a certain generosity of spirit. This, in modern terms, is way crazier than self mutilation, ironically something of a fad these days. What was he after, sitting in front of an easel day after day, without much, any, validation, no openings and timely reviews, no agents and buyers sniffing around? He was convinced he could communicate mind to mind by applying color to a piece of canvas, craziest idea yet. He kept trying.

There isn’t any way to consider if he was successful or not without seeing the work directly. Coffee table books and waiting room posters won’t convey his intent, and don’t even agree with each other. It’s also necessary to dial back from social media mode, put away the device and look for the eyes that see sunsets, witness the morning light out to fetch the paper, the world of actual things -- Vincent will help you. That’s his job. It’s what he didn’t get paid for. Standing and seriously considering one of his paintings causes an almost audible shifting of gears, a reverse warping of the digitized mind. Such a relief is the typical sensation. 

He’s gone away from us now, the minstrel of common sight and true conviction, ascended into the pantheon of immortals constantly breaking the bank somewhere, armed guards at all the exits. He was very, very good, but anyone who really tries hard, especially for no money, probably has something to say. Art, in any serious sense, isn’t about money, and it’s unwholesome to talk about it only in those terms. On the other hand, buying one of Vincent’s paintings way back then, and keeping it in the family above the mantle all these generations since, would probably bring enough to fill a bunch of houses with local stuff, help to support a few living artists, and improve the general outlook, sense of presence, and immediate awareness of just about everybody.

art so hard -- need degrees

Looking at art isn’t near as easy as it used to be. Why back when art was in its so-called ‘imitative’ phase, all a person had to do was to sidle up to a painting and think this looks like a teapot I once saw, a country lane where I walked, a person I used to know, and it’s believable or it isn’t. This ‘believable’ sometimes rises to the level of ‘truth,’ technically the evoking of lived experience from a flat surface, a mental connection that transcends the image. Now a child’s picture of a horse could be something else, a giraffe or a bear, and a bit of explanation might be necessary, perhaps a paragraph or two on the wall next to it, but the able and accomplished artist should be able to engage the viewer directly, without a lot of theory or contextual explanation.

Well we don’t look at art that way anymore. The famous and influential critic and theorist, Arthur C. Danko, wrote in ‘What Is Art’, “contemporary art puts great interpretive pressures on viewers to grasp the way the spirit of the artist undertook to present the idea” -- word for word. He and his friends in the industry mandate overtime for all you would be art lovers, do that research, bone up on the latest developments, try to keep up with the beautiful people. Still, it might be only fair to observe that on occasion the line between progressive interpretive insight and rampant dumb-hick gullibility can become obscured by a whole bunch of money, but that shouldn’t be a problem around here.

Uptown glamour and hi-jinks are sometimes exported out into the hinders where a ‘cargo-cult’ imitation occurs, exhibitions of zany ‘contemporary art’ in the non-profit galleries. Could this be the reason workaday citizens fail to relate, just unwilling to do the homework, and as a result lacking the knowledge and background to ‘get it'? Give them a break. Off in the world of retail, the boiler room driver for our swell standard of living, the product receiving little response gets switched out, but when it comes to art public money is used to prop it up, keep it on the shelf.

The common folk must be lazy. They want more than vague shapes, smeared colors, and the onerous mental burden of ‘grasping the way the spirit of the artist undertook.’ They expect an artist to come down off the porch and halfway out to meet them, would like to hear howdy, want to recognize something. Actually they’re not lazy, they just need that much respect -- what it comes down to. This is not the same thing as artistic illiteracy, even though the state’s cultural bureaucracy charges itself with their elevation, bravely plodding onward through their rustic indifference, could go on for years. 

A renaissance in visual art around here would be like a dam bursting since there have been image and style restrictions upstream, more like an engineered diversion, pollution from a corrupted payola media, with local art charities and teaching institutions taking cover behind an opaque curtain of ‘secret knowledge’ -- emerald city all over again. Consider for a moment the hundreds of miles of empty sheetrock lining all those new houses, almost anywhere, the forgotten reproductions on the walls of more mature homes, and wonder what would happen if just a few average citizens became interested in art, learned to recognize the work of local artists, bought something they liked and hung it on the wall.

'demographically speaking' -- art by questionnaire

It’s time for another reincarnation of the ‘nude show,’ the annual exhibit which almost by itself gave institutional heft to what had been a sleepy clubhouse for independent painters, seldom visited. Although wildly popular, in time the exhibit itself became deranged, body parts and sex acts, a polaroid of a bruise, breasts on a spoon, finally underwent a crisis, had a breakdown, disappeared. Now it reemerges after a soul-searching rehab as ‘Demographically Speaking, a Figurative Exhibition,’ still wearing the same blindfold it had on when it went away. Frankly, this inability to deal with art directly without an overlay of identity politics, some non-visual social agenda, reveals a failure of nerve, an unwillingness to take a stand about art itself, and I’m not the first to notice.

In order to enter their competition, along with three images, a resume and bio, there’s this ‘required’ questionnaire. Starts off ok, race, gender, and age, but then it gets sorta confusing, like do I check ‘polysexual’ -- well aren’t we all? What does any of this have to do with art? Art is democratic first of all, ought to be, because honesty, talent, and character aren’t judged by skin color, orientation, such as that, not anymore, maybe they missed that part. Their call is divisive in its diversity, bigoted in its distinctions, and not really about art is it?

What’s actually important, always, is what goes up on the wall, and it will only seem typical if they produce an exhibition with a monotone sensibility from a pc checklist of sources. It hasn’t been ethnicity or gender that has denied access to an audience to many artists who have attempted to find support here, but an academic bias favoring obscurity and innuendo, the insider kabuki of the culture mob, over straight-ahead representational art -- the sort that allows the viewer to participate out of their own experience, the kind people take home.

Van Gogh’s notebook -- forensic fantasies

Potentially worth millions if authenticated, some ‘newly found’ notebook full of sketches purports to have come from the hand of Vincent himself, and experts diligently analyze the ink, carbon date the paper. A kid could probably look and tell the difference, and almost anyone else could too, drawing technique so much harder to forge than a signature. Looking, it turns out, is a big problem for the expert however -- they’ve been taught to believe a candy wrapper could be a Rembrandt with the proper lab certifications and duly registered provenance. After years in training sorting art into air tight bins, lined up on a shelf with labels and thumbnails, by now they can name what’s in all of them -- it’s their job, but they’ve paid a terrible price for their profession, no longer able to see with human eyes. Art they come across falls through slots and grates, passes over scales, and when it comes back up there’s a numeric ranking over the image and it goes into one of the bins, never to be seen at all. How else to explain not being able to recognize on sight a famous artist’s hand?

Authentication, a spin-off profession, is a highly complex intrigue involving spectrographs and test tubes, under the table negotiations and fat fees for the ‘right’ answer, you be the judge. The artist on the corner, paint brush in hand, laments, ‘nobody wants to just look anymore,’ or even can, having listened to the experts far too long. Let’s all start over. If a particular piece requires authentication it’s going to be far too expensive for you, anyway, so avoid the litigation and use your own eyes instead. This isn’t hard, more art up everyday so easier all the time, and can even turn out to be fun, entertaining, and an extremely cheap spectator sport. Look at the piece of art enough to see what’s there, and then lean forward, look at the price. Machinery in your head, there when you were born or implanted shortly thereafter, will do the rest, don’t even have to think about it.

The price is important because it’s an indication of how seriously the artist thinks you should be taking their work, but you won’t know this without looking a fair amount before hand, enough to establish a base, to keep stats. When you back up from seeing the price, look a little harder this time, and you can judge for yourself if you think the amount is justified based on what other artists are asking, and in the case you happen to agree, maybe wind up taking home a piece of art. Don’t need no expert for that. In the long run, you and all your neighbors and friends can sort it out, decide for yourselves how much art is worth to you, and together express what you like and what you feel about living around here.

fish story -- hunting whale

Sometimes have to laugh, at myself first of all. I think I’m Ahab, in a dinky little boat after a gigantic whale, the entire art establishment post WWII. I’ll die first, but I’ll beckon even in death lashed to the harpoons lodged in its back, my friend Starbucks having had a large part to play. Getting the whale to notice me is the first challenge, but I think if I keep launching my little missives I might hit a tender spot and get a response, get others to notice, finally through subtle argument convince the whale to expire on its own, or at least leave the water.

Big art has merged with exhibitionism, not around here of course, but the most progressive among us do want to be like them, the millionaires in magazines. Taking down pants in front of the Mona Lisa, such as that, the trick being to latch onto someone else's famous work of art, in some prominent place, and cause a fuss. Cut it finer if you want, up to you. The reverence for celebrity art, which I seem to lack, results from the enormous bucks involved, but I have  immunity, apparently, and think about the art instead. What would I need to say to convince you the only difference between a Damian Hirst ‘spin painting’ and the post card size you squirt yourself on a little turntable at the county fair are size, and a whole lot of money? You could see this for yourself, if you wanted, but these days such a fact doesn’t seem all that important.

No one knows what is important -- provoking the press, amusing the ultra-jaded, hits on the internet? Art, once a flowing river, has fanned out into swampy delta, no channel more than in inch deep meandering without direction. ‘Contemporary’ is an advanced sensibility no doubt, like the ripest cheese, but not everyone gets past the aroma, or, let me emphasize, cares to. There, I harpoon for the heart, another near miss but I keep trying. The whale suffers indigestion quite independently of me, and will roll over in another generation or two, anyway. Maybe sooner.

“you don’t have to call a glass dirty, you just have to put a clean glass up next to it,” as Rev Farrakhan used to say, and it’s happening now. Independent artists are gaining reputations, not at national fairs, in vanity operations far away, but around here by association and word of mouth, along with a greater opportunity to exhibit their work. Tangible art that can be taken home to become part of a living environment is coming out of studios newly rented all directions, like a wave passing through. The big fish will leave the room because with each passing day the broader community expresses an appetite for a token of life’s joy and pain more substantial than ‘monday night football,’ on and on. That’s art on the wall seen everyday, and art made by a friend, or someone met, or an artist followed through a career in your hometown does it better. 

farmer and artist -- not so different

Say this person is a farmer, outdoors sixty to eighty hours a week, all sorts of weather, all times of day. He’s responsible when anything breaks, when the creek floods and the wind blows, not all his animals like him, running a fever is no excuse. So one day he goes to town to sell a  few cows, and he decides while he’s there to see some art. Map in hand he wanders into the Cressman Center for Visual Art, up in louisville, and encounters ‘Nineveh’ featuring ‘vast hanging plateaus of grass,’ cited as the sort of project threatened by the philistines over at the capital. 

Yes, it’s thought provoking, but the thoughts our farmer has won’t entirely correspond the deep philosophic nuances the arts council, the gallery director, or the media art critic have in mind. This farmer may not find a little patch of sod under grow-lights to be as impressive, as evocative of nature, as soul stirringly profound as the funding agency might have hoped. He might think ‘not worth an afternoon’s effort,’ but he’s just uninformed, right, doesn’t know a thing about art. So long as he pays his taxes when he sells his cows, he’ll contribute to this ‘art’ whether he likes it or not, and that’s all we need from him -- such a progressive state, KY.

There’s an obvious presumption here, one charity-immersed culture wags fail to recognize, can’t seem to see. Who are they, with their sugar-water degrees and ticket-punched credentials, having coffee around a conference table in the long afternoon, to decide what people seriously engaged in the unforgiving quest for daily survival should support as art, anyway? Who are they to pass out state money, attention, and prestige, to conceptualists whose airy creations are a guaranteed affront to most of those who work? Let’s remind everyone at this point the farmer came looking for art, and if he recognized in a painting something he felt about his land, or was charmed some other way, he just might take it home -- he just sold his cows. 

Losing the charity-driven, bureaucratic side of art won’t end art. I’m betting, a long term bet, art would flourish among the very folks who’ve been resisting the art council’s progressive sensibilities up until now. There’s an appetite, no, it’s actually a need for relevant and meaningful art in the lives of people under the wheel, and it’s out there. The arts council doesn’t like it, won’t reward it. Say good bye.

painting -- what it's about

Most painting isn’t about the world at all, it’s about other art. Over to the senior center there’s a bit of paint going down, but they aren’t painting the world as seen. Here’s a pleasant meadow, a meandering stream with a most improbable little waterfall gurgling in the foreground -- not someplace they’ve ever been. It’s a painting of a painting, the kind they put up in senior centers, the kind the TV painter makes in thirty minutes, the kind of painting that stands in for grandma when she’s gone. There’s a place for that.

Uptown in big galleries art crawls forward looking sideways, artists and galleries hyper-tuned to the frequency of the immediate up and down the street, proffering art that will date itself ten years down the line. They inch forward together, similar in their fashion to the repetition and general sameness of so-called ‘western art’ in Santa Fe, just with a classier grade of tourist. Then there’s the fetish market for relics from famous deceased artists, ‘collectibles’ they call them without total concern for what’s on the front, and those seeking tenure are usually content going with the flow.

With sixty inches of NFL grinding away in the den why are we even talking about painting? Then there’s that. What is it about painting that should interest any human living today -- a reasonable question. Must be some odorless, colorless emission, a pheromone which goes straight to the brain without translation, because lots of folks respond. Every morning in Amsterdam a long line of people from all over the planet wait for the opening of the Van Gogh museum, some came for just this purpose. Gnarly purple olive trees and lemon yellow suns penetrate their skulls, start realigning parameters, increasing empathy, connection with nature, ecstatic joy. Folks emerge feeling like they want to do it again in ten years, alive and aware. Maybe that’s not an answer, but could be something to think about.

Painting is even more potent these days given the digitalized, homogenized, 3-D printed nature of everything else, its magnetic field is stronger, its gross tangible ‘realness’ a presence in any setting. Being famous is no guarantee, but best possible in that moment is, and a worthy hard-fought statement by a fellow human facing the same general circumstances is a good thing to hang on the wall and to look at everyday.

Bevin’s bathwater -- saving baby

Governor Bevin has fired the director of ky arts council and artists all over the state are incensed, they register displeasure. What we have here is a microcosm of the national earthquake, overwhelming pressure along a fault line no one seemed to notice. We did. Here at ‘owning art’ it’s no surprise to see the public finally heave their well-intentioned cultural overseers over the side, a populist purge overdue.

It’s not about art, is it? It’s about state and federal support for a style of art that doesn’t stir much interest in the larger community, so they dole out this tax-deducted, charity-funded pie for those ‘deserving’ -- and they get to decide. It’s mostly cool because everybody’s got a share, or might get one someday, at least lots of folks try. Dangling that skinny carrot turns out to be a major influence, grant applications under review, and it bends toward a sort of insular, canapé munching, quasi-participation in art, neither making or owning anything significant. What are we going to do?

Guess we’ll just have to look for support in the private sector. Try to make the case, long abandoned, that the product is worthy of its place in the dialogue of daily life, can contribute to the economic well-being of the community in a positive way, and significantly enhances the lives of the people who own it, such as that. Artists, throw down your crutches and find gallery space, organize a coop and start a gallery, put your stuff up in restaurants and salons, and connect to an audience if it’s out there. Time to find out.

anticipated obsolescence -- turning tables

There’s a lot more art activity, ‘art strolls’ in all directions these days, and sooner or later it will sort itself out -- won’t need my help. The condition that has prevented local artists from finding support on their own for a generation or two, small town academic monopolies on what was presented in galleries, both on campus and in the non-profits, what was written about, what was sanctioned as serious art, is essentially over, evaporating before our eyes and there’s a reason.

Exposure, plain and simple. All citizens have a dusty, mostly unused room in their heads full of gears and levers that they seldom visit, but looking at art turns on the lights. If they think about it at all they quickly begin to realize they like some of it less, some of it more, and before long with gears and levers engaged, they start making their own decisions about art. Taking on that largely private responsibility can ripple out into other areas, more cooking at home, a refocused conviction about larger issues, a more grounded and stable sense of self, such as that, but no need to get too far ahead.

Conditions are evolving so rapidly the complaint I register here turns rancid in hand, irrelevant, pages turning brown before our eyes, and if you go way back to the beginning of this you’ll see I said it would. As art finds its way around the grant funded, peer reviewed checkpoints, seeks and finds a broader audience, art production becomes self-sustaining, and pretty soon neighbors are noticing what’s on the wall. Won’t happen all at once, but sparks and smoke say soon.

Up until just recently most folks were actually afraid of art. Here’s the erudite arm chair interviewer, reading glasses pushed up on his furrowed brow, a world-traveled expert and authority on every level of human activity, yet he proudly proclaims he knows not a thing about art, the only deficiency he’ll admit to and he doesn’t mind who knows it. Lesser humans have been too self-conscious to even try, afraid of the secret opinions of family members, friends and acquaintances, just about anyone who might ‘know’ more about art than them, a self-imposed, life-limiting straight-jacket. Unbuckle and look around, it’s a brand new day.
 

art in trumpland -- seeking its own level

This wasn’t an election of a president. Trump is there by default, could have been some other populist outsider. This friends, by plenty enough to make the difference, was a red-neck repudiation of the arrogance and condescension of progressive culture mavens and academic think tank types, and as we all reevaluate, I realize I’m right there, too. Didn’t vote for Trump but something in the glee of his victory struck a chord in me as well. They didn’t care about his programs, they just wanted to see the other side soiled for a change, and the cry-baby post-election demonstrations make them feel good all over. Too bad there’s tomorrow.

Where from all this rage pundits shrug on the news, life too soft at the top to question much, and they all come to work in limos. Of rage I’ve had my share, but we use it in my trade, a reason to make that first cup of coffee -- can’t complain. They make it easy. This week on the news David Bowie’s art collection, up for grabs, was headlined by a ‘Basquiat,’ in at eight point eight million. Having to live with it would be sweet revenge for all poor people everywhere, but it’s probably destined for storage. Still, this particular artist makes the point better than anyone else in the universe so far. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s resume lists him as a graffiti artist before he met Warhol, his rocket to fame, but he wasn’t. He was just a vandal with a spray can in his hip pocket who went around defacing property, and he wasn’t much more than a vandal as a painter. That’s why we love him so much, so raw, so aching, so burned out, drugged out bored -- same old shit, his slogan. No, really.

That’s what they see out in trump-land, a carnival-grade celebrity cult siphoning off millions just to soak up the loot, to sop up the gravy, no wonder they turn their backs on art. The citizens who actually support much of this artistic endeavor work for a living, and by ‘work’ they mean engaging daily in something they don’t like doing, an unrelenting life-long effort with only incremental rewards. It isn’t that they’re offended by artists never wearing ties or fighting the morning traffic, just hanging around in studios smearing paint on canvas and getting rich like they say on the news, but the small town fact is they simply can’t relate. Some object that perfectly projects a crystalline disavowal of effort and discipline may not move them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like art.

Their vote has been suppressed, they’ve been disenfranchised, demeaned, discounted. Trump was a mistake, but the pressure has been there for something more engaging and honestly felt, closer to direct experience and daily lives. Art’s new demographic will find in art a more measured and intelligent outlet than a pent-up paroxysm of despair and resentment one time in the voting booth. Balance is a natural state, and aren’t we all together? 

winners and losers -- studio sagas

Hillary works hard her whole life, contributes, sacrifices, and gets run over by a charlatan, a poser, a braggart with nothing to show except an array of nubile women, rococo glamour, and major excessive wealth, his own private plane. What’s that like? Same sort of business happens in the studio all the time. Here a painter sweats over a canvas, I’ve known several, trying to get the sky go behind the trees, putting a single dash of ultramarine behind every fallen leaf, aligning all the highlights and shadows, and never really satisfied. After five, maybe ten years of nights and weekends diligence, with little attention except in-law derision, they give up ultimately to become disgruntled at some menial job, cranky and critical at the dinner table.

There are others who instead focus on the appetites of the audience, the way a ‘reality’ star might, a much more successful route, and so much less strain. The public wants iconic, some would say simple, mostly it wants familiar so repetition is in order, and the game is about notoriety and publicity. Common formula really. It’s a button you push down until it pays, coins shooting out all over the floor, and grad students east and west keep trying different stuff hoping to catch a nod and take the ride. With the mind-warping audacity of a Damien Hirst, somebody like that, it’s possible to break the bank.

These are two separate enterprises even though they share the same name, a source of confusion to many. Thank goodness in art it’s not winner take all, just damned close. Looking back not many people would consider Bobby Rydell or Ricky Nelson as musical geniuses, even though they had hit after hit in the fifties-sixties, but the roots of that music remains because, by the original artists, it was genuine, heartfelt and inspiring, most agree. Turns out it’s not just a matter of artists making better art, but also of more discernment and judgement on the part of the audience -- in truth they support each other, can grow together, and both will benefit.

pandering to the masses -- new markets

What do you want from a work of art, and by art we’re talking about a design of some sort on a flat surface. There are many forms, but here we’re only concerned with the remarkable human ability to translate a flat design into lived experience, to derive meaning and substance from an image in the absence of words. It’s no small talent and oh so very human, examples going back about thirty five thousand years, long before towns, or farms, or, obviously, any words written down.

Before we found those pictures in caves we weren’t sure paleolithic clans even had thoughts beyond a few grunts, but turns out they were clever, observant, and even tried animation, some now-extinct elk galloping across a stone wall with eight legs. Ever since then, in isolated cultures around the planet, people have made pictures, in each case so characteristic of their particular point of view the archeology grad should be able to tick them off, or offer a reasonable guess.

These days there’s a little more stimulation out there than flickering torch-lit images deep in a cave, and art adapts. Art remains a refuge for the human psyche, a sacred garden under threat from the constant encroachment of machines, and the drowning of critical thinking under a rising ocean of ever more vapid ‘manufactured’ life experience. There are things to admire and relate to in works of art the digital overseers will never suspect, thoughtful testaments that unlock linguistic mental gates and allow minds to wander. So, in flailing for anything that floats in the current tsunami of social media and info overload, modern times, what sort of life-saver should you grab? We would suggest owning art with a few basic considerations.

A work of art should be well-made and well-presented first of all. Well-made is an indication of commitment since mastery requires a long, romantically underpaid apprenticeship, and also because this object is supposed to last forever, at least for the rest of your life. The best test of competency for the interested layman is, ‘does it look like anything I’ve seen before, and how much?’ People who have looked at more art get better at this, and some may even graduate to admiring just the abstract qualities of paint, but this a more rarified sensibility, a connoisseur‘s acquired taste, a gigantic bluff in most cases. Applying those advanced principles to portraying common images would be more satisfying to most viewers is a pretty good bet.

Does it, and will it continue to attract your attention when you enter the room? Hung above sixty inches of multi-media surround-sound a painting might be the tortoise in the race, but over years of changing couches art becomes more real, more substantial, and more valued. Largely a product of repetition and familiarity, perhaps, but learning to recognize the authentic personal statement that can carry the weight is going to be a tremendous advantage in a market so lost plumped resumes determine value. 

I imagine with all my heart that there’s a hidden constituency of art buyers whose values and tastes have gone unrepresented, demeaned by art’s bureaucrats and ignored in the media. They’re out there, waiting to be heard, ready to make their influence felt. There’s movement. The ambitions and desires of the larger demographic are contracting and coalescing around greater value -- more nutrition in the diet, more efficiency in transportation, and better stuff around the house. You can improve the patio, replant the landscaping, but you can’t take them with you when you’re transferred folks have noticed. Instead of jet-skis sleeping above the rafters in the garage, an investment in original art that travels well and bestows increasing pleasure over time is about to seem more attractive, to make more sense, to be more interesting.

siege mentality -- the good wait

What’s it like to be on the outside, looking up at the multi-billion dollar art industry, with a religion’s ability to construct its own reality and undergirded by a vast potential for heavy-duty money laundering? It’s a big castle with a wide moat, scholars and commentators, adroit dealers and clever pitchmen manning the towers. Calling them out is delusional, so I’m reminded, but I don’t feel alone. I think I’m just waking up early.

Art has been the caged and humiliated circus animal of the wealthy and high born long enough, it breaks its chains. Art isn’t an event that happens far away at boozy expos where the wealthy piss away inheritance, or is it merchandise to be presented at bogus auctions off in NY, held for the purpose of ratcheting up prices. Art is here, in your neighborhood, seeping out of the ground. We, me and all my friends behind me here, don’t give a damn about their cavalcade of brand-name artists making fools of everyone. Down here people paint the stuff they see, not for money heavens no, but from some urge inside to express themselves, and that turns out to be the same reason people want to own it.
 
Contemporary art has stayed too long under the hothouse lamps of public and institutional support and surely won’t stand the light of day, a public that doesn’t get it and doesn’t care. Any art that engages the public mind, however, causes a change in awareness and awakens capacities most folks have had all along. Once average citizens start noticing original art up in restaurants and salons, purchased and displayed by medical facilities, that old human habit of comparing takes over, and before long they want some. When money is involved discernment sets in quickly, potential patrons self-educate, and local art gets better geometric in a decade.

Those among you who have become immersed in contemporary art, trending toward graffiti this season is what I hear, verily you must be born again. Old Duchamp derided representational art primarily because he wasn’t very good at it, examples exist, and from that bitter well came the headwaters for much twentieth century art. There’s a new innocence abroad, and an arbiter of taste more authentic than paternalistic panels, grant committees, and credentialed curators. In the end the high walls of high art are just going to leach away, no battles to be fought, no showdown at the gate. Once the critical threshold is reached, area art becomes self-sustaining. At that point art goes up in average homes, artists support independent studios, and a regional sensibility asserts itself.
 

single vision -- double-speak

noun: double-speak --- deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure language.
The reason the despotic entity ‘big brother‘ in ‘1984’ used ‘double-speak‘ was to intellectually cripple the population so they couldn’t resist, couldn’t question their lives, couldn’t talk or think about anything in any depth. They proclaimed ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,‘ such as that, in order to degrade the language and limit the imagination of the population.

Advertisers do it all the time, and so do football coaches, real estate developers, anyone who benefits from the client’s confusion is apt to twist language and obscure what actually is, the facts. In the current tide of word sludge from all sides, it takes a fair education and a streak of personal persistence to even begin to know what’s true, what’s important. For this reason consequential matters, contracts and such, use precise, direct language, each term carved in stone, whereas common usage is usually a little looser.

Nowhere is language as arbitrary as any two pages of an art magazine, commentary untethered to any physical coordinates anywhere. It all supports itself somehow, a veiny soap bubble of cross referencing, name-dropping word-puree subject to pop and splatter if ever the real thing comes along. Mark Rothko for the living room, really? Big, who has a wall that big, and boring, maybe not the first time, but there are hundreds of them out there, essentially monosyllabic color patches, worth millions, really?

If the ‘experts,’ in the news this week, can’t spot a fake Rembrandt, how much less likely are they to know which Warhol came from his ‘factory,’ or was just printed at the sign shop in the strip mall across the street? Actually there’s no way to tell, no authority to appeal to, and it’s sorta ugly anyway. What are we even talking about? There are no terms chiseled in stone to guide us, just this ‘anything can be art’ mosh pit, double-speak on steroids. Rich folks conveniently speak this language and so do many others who want to be like them, and finally it all boils down to what’s ‘collectible,’ a dollar amount. 

Infamous ‘artspeak,’ a specialized form, is a court language among cultural elites not shared with the beer swilling sports fans who actually pay the taxes that supports the museums and institutions who converse in it. Still, they have lives, happiness and sorrows, maybe time to notice the sunlight as it falls across the kitchen table early in the morning, the silvery light on a lake like they saw once in a painting. The antidote, it turns out, for muddy language is seeing what’s there, and it’s art’s job to help.

thought control -- orwell’s miscalculation

Orwell was right and he was wrong. Forces were emerging he didn’t anticipate, so turns out he was right about the goals but wrong about the method. Orwell, heir to the enlightenment, valued his free will and individual identity, and didn’t want to wear a number and be told what to do. In his lifetime he had seen bloody total war lead to a great depression, which led to an even bigger war, regimentation all around, breadlines, everyone dressed in somber dark clothing full of holes and patches. In a totally plausible future he thought dictatorial governments could stifle dissent, or any serious thought, by despoiling the language, all the while maintaining total control through secret police intimidation.

Communism demonstrated for all to see that the harder you squeeze down on people the more likely they are to resist, they write books, they get out. In the end it didn’t work. Instead 'commercialism' has been able to demonstrate that seduction can be much more effective than brute force at turning the population, itself, into a commodity, blissfully and unwittingly controlled from above. It’s a thing they do with language, either way, and it’s very difficult to overcome. In Orwell they used loudspeakers declaring truth was a lie, that love was hate, tangling up the language so effectively that it couldn’t be used for anything more than taking orders, doing a job.

There turns out to be a better way to corrupt the language. Here’s an example on the back cover of super literate new yorker magazine, oct 24, opposite the front cover Bob Dylan, noble winner for literature. It says, “Just because you need a four-door for everyday use, you don’t have to let your soul freeze.” The attribution simply says ‘automobile.’ This appears above a picture of a dashing red ford with four doors. It’s an esoteric message for sure, one with the manifold allure of tribal mystique for some pinpoint demographic suddenly ready to buy a car, but it really doesn’t give a damn about their soul.

Jerry Rubin, momentary hippie spokesman who later went into advertising, decried to a crowd all those years back, ‘how can I say I love you when cars love shell?’, interesting point, and it still is news. One of the reasons our politics have become so strange is because we don’t have enough good words to get out of it -- we’ve been buying and selling with the ones we have. If you think nothing’s wrong, fine, but a current candidate for the highest office can barely articulate any thoughts at all, blithering moronic superlatives without syntax. Orwell sits in the corner nodding his head.

Art was actually savaged more consciously, in a more open and documented fashion, using similar techniques. Most obviously there’s Orwell’s ‘double-speak’ style declarations, that ugliness is beauty, that permanent is temporary, that the highest achievement is ‘deskilling,’ such as that. The first overt act of art’s debasement was the destruction of the Rivera mural at Rockefeller Center, recently discussed, and by channeling rivers of money into abstract and conceptual art via foundations, grants, and government programs, the ultra rich have finally reduced art to an insider joke, a poker chip, a monopoly token. 

Painters resist, since anyone with the talent required could probably go into advertising, Jerry did, and find the going much easier. For whatever reason they’re not into the four door vs two door controversy with peculiar theological implications. They’re in the studio searching for truth in pictures, and if they find it you’ll know too. Truth, the ephemeral abstraction, for this discussion means direct communication beyond language. It's almost always a surprise.

gates of eden -- bob’s noble

Bob and I are about the same age and early on I was awestruck mostly by his sheer audacity, me feeling just a little unsteady about that time. Like Picasso, it was his fearlessness that actually carried the art, just a guitar and harp, common and accessible. His big hits could sometimes sound sorta snide and condescending, b-sides were always thoughtful and deep, but it wasn’t the words, no matter how brilliant, that won Bob the ‘noble.’

After the cultural desert of the fifties in which popular music was born in theft and exploitation, forced through the corrupting turnstiles of limited commercial outlets, and reduced to the cheap emotion and limited horizon of a beach party movie, Bob brought the rain. Simple as that. He crystalized a questioning search for identity that spread forehead to forehead across a generation. Achingly raw and defiant, still he immediately became very popular. People were especially glad to see him, it had been a long drought.

Bob’s thoughts and observations hadn’t been part of the high school vocabulary, lived experience had never been addressed so directly, and the pebble of honesty he kicked off the cliff of a vast cultural malaise became an avalanche of poetry-driven lyrics and musical innovation. His was the first shot fired in a world-wide revolution, whole populations aspiring to a common humanity beyond the low common denominator of commercialism, well you know. He deserves the prize.

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Music is currently suffering too much of a good thing, transitioning from restricted airways and major label dictatorships to way more freedom than they need, with an influence so small politicians use lyrics they like, even if the song goes against them. Visual art, by contrast, can not be broadcast, and a digital-copy no matter how accurate is just not the same. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the very characteristic that makes visual art impossible to reproduce, limits its range, and has made popularity problematic, turned out to offer the one true test of authenticity our age requires? Instead of one performer singing into a microphone miles away, frozen in time by technology, here’s a movement that happens all over all at once, painters in every town. Even working people sometimes feel compelled to make it, and anyone who engages the machinery they’ve been given can understand it.

one art -- artificial dichotomies

Who bans representational art? Various rigid religious and political systems have either suppressed the representation of gods, persons, any living thing, anything at all, or sponsored only art which supported their interpretation of life on earth, and banned everything else. Examples both ancient and modern abound, and there’s a reason why. For humans, earth is a test kitchen, and it turns out there are several ways to bake the cake. Getting along with each other and sustaining ourselves can be done myriad different ways, but in order to obtain anything like law and order it’s going to be necessary to recruit most people to one way of thinking.

Unless some very focused citizen is just loaded with charisma it’s probably going to be easiest to get them when they’re small and groom their minds for one set of rules, and that’s going to mean limiting the ideas they’re exposed to. There was a time it was thought communism harbored some sort of awful verbal virus that infected the minds of anyone it contacted, and speakers were banned from college campuses, etc. Pictures are even worse because they can be seen by about anyone, and translation from one language to another, not a problem. Even the illiterate can see.

It would seem there are two opposing camps in visual art, non-referential or modern art refers to the movement that broke from tradition about the middle of the last century, with earlier antecedents, and derivations still prevail in the courts of the inordinately wealthy, and this genre of non-objective art has also been generously supported by the state. Seemingly opposed is so-called ‘retinal art,’ generally the people’s choice, a term for art which seems to look like stuff, the more traditional notion. Turns out it’s all a big misunderstanding. There really is no argument here, folks, move along. It was all a trick with mirrors in the first place.

All painters take the same chance, start in the same place, and isn’t that one of the charm’s of visual art? Does it illustrate a story, is it advocating for a political idea or a commercial product, or is it speaking to the person inside with intensity and directness, doesn’t matter. Put everything up at once, lose the referees, and see what happens. One thing certain, the state -- the many tiered NEA, universities and such, shouldn’t really be taking sides, particularly against representational art, such a motley crew to fall in with. 

nelson’s remorse -- late term conversions

Multi-billionaire Nelson Rockefeller was early on involved with art, as a fact more influential than the stars he sponsored, a major patron of the abstract expressionists fifty-sixty years ago. His career is archived for the public and would print out in volumes, interests and accomplishments beyond horizons I can’t conceive, achieved with a ruthlessness one might expect from a great baron. I only know him as an artist.

He was there to deliver a groin kick to all of art in the person of Diego Rivera back in the early thirties. Rivera had become the figure-head of a movement which depicted the way things were for common people, and it made the extremely rich uncomfortable. They commissioned a fresco for the Rockefeller Center, allowed Diego and his assistants to work on it day and night for months, paid his fee and then covered the mural, allowing no photographs to be taken by anyone. Before it had been seen it was jackhammered down and hauled away in wheel barrels, and if you think you’ve seen it, it’s because Diego painted it again in Mexico. He had walked into their trap, plying his vanity and with his leftist credentials at stake, they intended this ‘cultural vandalism’ all along, the way it looks to me. They then began a campaign to disparage the representational mode of painting altogether as being too easy, too pedestrian, too commercial to possibly be interesting. ‘We have better things to do with our time than to go around copying nature,‘ became their brusque refrain.

Big abstracts went up in large banks and government buildings while Rockefeller was governor of New York, and representational art was banned from the kingdom, problem solved. The ability of progressive artists to influence common thought had been eliminated without the obvious drawbacks of direct censorship, even though the culture had lost its feelers like a lobster in a tank. But Nelson eventually got old, played with the grandkids, spent time on his boat, and he softened as he reminisced, began to feel guilty. Then he did something very strange.

He opened a gallery on 57th to sell state-of-the-art reproductions of his own collection, old masters don’t you know. Seems the the abstractionists never quite made it to over the mantel up at the old home place. One would guess he had become concerned with the drift in culture toward non-consequential things, and had the ego to feel somehow responsible. To make amends he decided to offer two centuries old dutch paintings of rich guys like himself to tourists, thinking he could restore their humanity at least a mite. The family must have nodded and smiled.

Wiki says -- In 1977 he founded Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., (NRC) an art reproduction company that produced and sold licensed reproductions of selected works from Rockefeller's collection. In the introduction to the NRC catalog he stated he was motivated by his desire to share with others "the joy of living with these beautiful objects."   

That’s all they’ll say about it, his odd aesthetic u-turn, but we can bet he didn’t do it for the money. I was surprised at the time that this great champion of living artists would open a gallery of reproductions just up the street to compete with them, but it was only his own legacy that filled his mind late.

panel on attention -- had to leave

Attention is the new commodity, the next big 'wish I had,' and in the end the holy grail of existence on the planet. The environment will get worse before it gets better, but they’re working on it and making progress, cleaner air and water some places. Water, itself, will become more valuable than oil as time goes by, so they say, but it’s possible to convert sewage into drinking water with prototype treatment systems already, so we’ll figure it out.

One thing we’ve all seemed to notice, that as our intellectual capacity extends to encompass everything that was ever written, sung, or thought about, the floor comes up. It all gets shallower, time evaporates, and all that stuff ends up pushing us down. Everyone still here? It doesn’t need explaining. Went to a panel discussion concerning “attention,’ and they all agreed it was a big conundrum, media addiction and attention erosion, outdid each other with scary typical examples, but before long everyone was checking email.

Complain if you want about it texting while driving, typing away as the microwave hums, but you’re not getting out of it, a bunny in a briar patch of scotch tape. The component that’s lacking, it would seem, is real-time actual experience, and the way events are witnessed these days some dazed bystander is there telling the cameras it was like inna movie. Could go on but the point is this -- life is becoming vicarious, sensation is becoming digitalized, and reality itself could probably be manipulated by about anyone who knows, popups and porn adulterating every dose.

Couldn’t fix it myself, but can offer a cough drop for the fever. There’s a device you can purchase that will at least slow it down, the black hole descent into a vortex of homogenized goo, digital group mind and the sugar water and caffeine diet of drones, and it’s art. Original art didn’t used to be that much different from other stuff in the living room, a rookwood lamp, the hand-woven carpet, all the woodwork installed without power tools, such as that, but times have changed. Original art, and not its indistinguishable digital reproduction, is an object with the weight of time built in, and the subject, sailing ships or bowls of fruit, is just the outfit it wears. Suffice it to say it probably took at least a few days to make it, that it embodies the the artist’s history back to their first beginnings, and once made it shouldn’t change at all until you’re gone. Sounds like a time-trap to me, an anchor for your little boat, a token to help you remember who you are. 

Art slows you down. If you don’t slow down you can’t look at it, won’t be able to see it, simple as that. Living with it pulls you back, fights for your attention, and builds its attachments with your mind through slow unchanging repetition, so different from everything else you have. That’s the pitch. Don’t really care what was in the magazines last year, or ever, and Damien Hirst is a brat, millions smillions, look him up online. Seeing art as a sort of machine, a household appliance, like an oxygen generator freshening up the climate and supplying a few nutrients, is a nutty way to think of art that might catch on as folks start eyeing the exit signs.

words vs pictures -- modes of thought

Let’s drop back in media to the days of magazines, physical pages we turned with pictures and captions.  ‘Life Magazine’ was largely full page b&w photographs with four five lines of explanation underneath, posing the ever present if unspoken question, ‘which will you believe, what you see or what you read?’ Saw a travel ad once with the caption ‘discuss the weather with a friendly native’ below the photo of one pissed amazonian with death by spear and liver eating in his eyes, a bit of dissension on the shoot no doubt. Folks went on the cruise anyway, I’m guessing.

Randomly switch all the captions, William Burroughs style, and see if anyone notices, maybe not. Visual thinking isn’t ‘thought’ at all around here, teachers intoning ‘if you can’t say it, you can’t think it,’ or is it the other way around, the point is -- we use words. We be a literate culture and there are both advantages and costs. We’ve been taught since preK that what we hear, reading is decoded through our hearing circuits, is more important than what our eyes tell us, and it hasn’t been easy for any of us, like trying to force the left handed person to eat and write with the other hand.

We teach reading, linear thinking, cause and effect because it’s so handy for building bridges and communication systems, but we also live with top-down authority structures, gender and class distinctions, and the immense weight of our biased reading of history determining a narrow, restricted future. Using the eyes, and the fifty percent of our brain devoted to sight, leads to more associative and parallel thinking, shared insights and collective understanding, would be the suggestion. 
 
Picasso said we all start out as artists and are talked out of it year by year, consider your own school experience. If there are two modes of thinking in competition, words rule for the moment, even in art. At the Art Institute of Chicago there’s a large room devoted to the work of Robert Ryman, an infant of an artist who never applied a color or made a mark, never got past the stage of forming a foundation, and yet there are three or four paragraphs there by the door that justify this use of downtown real estate for his big white squares. You might have to read it twice.

Words don’t like visual art, can’t describe it, are never going to understand it really. Art as just an analogue for cosmic thoughts and olympian insights, the fever dream of contemporary art, is often downright difficult to look at. Consider Jean Michel Basquiat, on a rocket ride of stardom that started when he met Warhol and only accelerated when he OD’d, my god is his stuff expensive. He’s also easy to google so pick out a piece you’d like for the living room, skulls and scrawls mostly, and a chorus of commentators sing his praises, all in words. Try looking instead. 

The age of aquarius, we’ve been waiting, is going to be more visual, more open to parallel thinking, and we’re going to need more art. We’ll still be able to build bridges, but a bit more balance in our lives, in our thinking, could prove helpful. Sorry if that sounds indefinite, in words, but since words won’t go the places paintings take you, writing has to stop. If you want to go there yourself, you have to exercise your forgotten left handedness, your ability to think visually, and you do this by looking at art -- in large part that’s it’s job. Art speaks in its own language, with its own voice, when you ignore the explanations posted on the wall, the muttering in your ear buds, not because they’re wrong but because they’re words.           

changing lanes -- choosing highways

Art can change overnight. Consider movies in the thirties, an era of individual deprivation and amazing collective endeavors, roads, parks, and great monuments. Plots of popular movies were inane, preadolescent adult romance somehow meshed with visually spectacular, manically-drilled dance numbers culminating in overhead kaleidoscope abstractions featuring actual arms and legs. Entertaining no doubt, as well as worthy accomplishments considering the special effects were all staged, lit and performed on the spot.

There was a great war, a subsequent reevaluation, and people almost overnight saw themselves and thought of their lives differently. Gritty reality broke through on stage, later to become movies -- ‘long day’s journey,’ ‘streetcar,’ and ‘death of a salesman,’ a play about feeling used up and discarded by a corrupt and demeaning commercialism, such as that. Did art suddenly get better is the pretty good question, and from the outside it’s just a point of view, but at the time, in that moment, the answer was definitely ‘yes, tell us more about life as it’s lived. We don’t care about robotic showgirls anymore.’

When evaluating art, ‘good or bad’ is often not as good a question as is it appropriate for its time, and times change, tremors all around at the moment. How art changes is only conjecture at this point, just like every other thought about the future, but one thing sure, the whole ballpark is going to change shape, new lines, new scoreboard. Redefinition of the self will find reflection in what art goes on the walls, and lordy there’s room for almost anything up there now. The fifteen percent of us who ‘care’ about the arts have been using everybody’s money for their own pet projects, leaving walls in our community mostly blank, scattered posters, wildlife prints, and mall abstracts, just place-holders for original art, maybe someday.

Enigmatic contemporary art may just be a passing fancy, along with its public funding, and a better bet for actual community support would be the product of area studios, appropriate to this time and place, and it’s happening all around everywhere, or just emerging. There’s a reevaluation going on in politics, in personal identity, and the desire to own and live with art might turn out to be part of its expression, the way rock was for hippies, or words and jazz were for the beats. All the components are lining up like that’s what’s about to happen, galleries popping up in broom closets and art for sale on the walls of restaurants and salons. 

This isn’t about bringing in a new set of turnstiles, more about taking back the ability to see and judge art independently, individually. Who can doubt that more art up in houses and public spaces would contribute to a general prosperity of the spirit, a greater sense of well being and confidence all around? If this happens, if a broader portion of your neighbors take an interest in owning art, the character of art changes, its purpose and role in the community, and in individual lives, becomes more significant, and the transition will be transparent for all to see.

the conceptual art of the deal -- art’s politics

Trump doesn’t act like a politician, everyone agrees. He foments bullshit and then gets headlines across the board when he renounces it. He puffs imaginary mole-hills into luminous clouds, and goes up in polls. His ripe idiocy is dissected and scrutinized, made substantial by the sheer volume of attention it receives. I’m beginning to suspect he’s really a contemporary artist, Christo bow down.

Dada, the art movement, produced a wave of irreverent irrationality that has finally seeped out into the everyday, and many of Trump’s supporters know full well he could never run the country. Like the people who rig their diesel pickups to put out extra black smoke, a vote for Trump is a big ‘fuck you’ to common interests -- just as the soup cans were to everyone who thought they liked art about a generation back. This gleeful welcoming of the apocalypse, popular culture leaping for a sinking raft, reeks of decadence and dead-ends don’t you think?

Consider the politician you’d prefer, you can use your imagination, and then try to figure out what that would look like as art, consider rational and accessible, competent yet visionary. Whatever art you wind up with will be a reflection of your own character and aspiration, reassuring to yourself and a quiet declaration to others who see it. Politics and art are not disconnected, spokes on the same wheel actually, and it may be time to get serious about what we look at every day.

power objects -- user manual

Back on april 14 this year we discussed power objects, ‘power objects -- modern methods,’ about how artists taking on their role as community shaman had found new ways to apply ancient principles, imbuing inanimate objects with potency, charging them up like renewable batteries. Didn’t say much about how to use your power object, that’s personal and subjective, but general do’s and don’ts apply.

Buying a piece of original art for decoration is an extravagant choice really. To acquire the nugget formed in the crucible of another person’s life experience, just to add a little red, to maintain a theme, is rich indeed, like insisting your socks be hand-woven by a princess. Every image ever recorded, protected or not, is available on the net for a one-off, and you can have it billboard size if you want. Why bother with, and why pay for original art if you’re just going for a ‘certain look?’

More likely would be to buy original art for social affirmation, the way it’s sometimes sold. This is squishy territory, anticipating what the neighbors will think when you have them over for drinks, the boss, the in-laws. In effect this line of thinking nullifies individual opinion, an abdication really, and gives gallery personnel the green light to tout just about anything on hand. On the up side, people who also buy their art this way will recognize the pointlessness of your expenditures, connection made.

Best would be to purchase significant art at some personal sacrifice, giving up something else just to own it, justified because of the difference it’s going to make in the quality of life from here on out. Obviously wealthier folks have to stretch a little further. Let me explain. Original art has qualities other stuff doesn’t, and you can get all mystical about it or stick to facts, comes out the same. Let’s do facts. First of all, this thing, being made by hand, is rare, and becoming rarer, people 3-D printing chess pieces while they’re making toast. That in itself has value and it only gets better with age. There’s also consciousness. 

If it looks like a pot of flowers, a sunset, anything like your uncle bob you can pretty well bet it wasn’t the artist’s first try, even the second. The image you’re seeing is witness to long practice and a stubborn insistence on communication, sharing their vision, since it’s so much easier to gain acceptance doing abstract/accidental these days. In this respect this object exhibits an extra dimension, the accumulated effort and intention of years behind it, constructing a dense and manifold image, as well as a testimonial to the interests and character of the mind that made it. This level of perception isn’t the least mystical, but a basic human attribute located in a seldom visited sector of every citizen’s personal bandwidth. Access is gained by looking at all original art with interest. This lights up the circuits, the way just knowing a lot won’t and doesn’t. After a certain amount of looking some piece of art will wind up in your home, a mystical advantage, it turns out, in a computer logical universe.

artless living -- just a house

So reading the sunday paper see the home section where someone’s house is celebrated, what a view, great fireplace, kitchen enough to feed the field hands. Seldom, week after week, is there any art on the wall. In the kitchen we see a framed graphic, ‘hot java’ in plaid. Why is this?

Designers don’t much like art except maybe as an accent, something from a catalogue that picks up the metallic thread in the upholstery, but unique pieces of art get out of here. Chrome and glass, leather and tile, find something unobtrusive to blend in, but no distracting, soul-searing renderings, please, messes up the flow, constantly attracting the eye and expanding the consciousness. Fun to try, take your modest little collection of art, say four or five originals, and ask your designer to incorporate them -- such a look you’ll get.

We’re in the business of selling furnishings, not art, and we don’t want individuals expressing their own tastes in our swell design, that’s what they’d say. They want to give your rooms that movie set look so impersonal and difficult to live with, pajamas in a heap the whole room untidy. For those who feather their nest more eclectically, there’s good news. Your collection of art will coordinate and tie together those disparate antiques, odd chairs and yard sale lamps into a cozy little home, one that will be remarked on and remembered by those who visit, and which will prove easier to come back to as years slide by.

Even expensive art is cheap pro-rated over the rest of a lifetime. It can pay back several times over just by making the furniture you have now seem fine for a few more years, and, by the way, questioning your perception, cleaning your windows, providing an anchor for your little boat in a swirling digital sea, such as that. Your neighbors may not get to see your house in the paper, nor will you, but you’ll probably wind up skipping that section anyway.

yellow brick lessons -- no place like home

It’s been an interesting transformation, and it’s hard to say if it was blind market forces or society itself gazing too intently in the mirror that did it, made the artist more important than the art. Picasso was the first superstar, an artist who painted in several styles over seven or so decades and yet all his works are simply known as ‘Picassos.’ Nowadays Rothkos and Pollocks come up for bids and no one really gives a damn what’s on them, same stuff we’ve all seen before and that’s what makes them so easy to trade around don’t you see?

Anything a genius touches is bound to be valuable, that’s the ticket, and art schools across the land turn them out, subtle thinkers capable of assembling selected refuge with hot glue and making more of a living than you, you workaday busting your hump drone. It’s little wonder that you may not always see the point, and might even feel a slow burn when you read about the glamorous doings the art world slyly alludes to, sipping wine and having sex in the long afternoons.

Don’t care if it’s true or not, they’re turning out art could have only been created by geniuses, so inbred and self-referential that serious, accomplished, educated, and worldly people would rather buy a ski-boat than to try to untangle it. Here’s a suggestion -- shred those cascading accounts of approval and acceptance, and just for a moment forget who did it. Slide the million dollar painting in with ten others, a couple from the ‘good will,’ a couple by recent grads, a couple from serious working artists in your own community, all lined up against the wall and pick the one you’d most like to live with.

Let’s just forget the artist, humble and unassuming, working away on those long afternoons. They’re speaking to you and the world through this thing they’ve made, please consider it. That other examples of this same artist’s work have been purchased in hollywood, toured with the ‘stones,’ and received the adulation of the queen won’t make it any better. Probably will affect the price, but that’s a separate negotiation. 

We’ve undergone some sort of awful inversion, got the cart before the horse, the dog was wagged, but now it’s time to flip it back over, to put the art back in art. Does this thing in a frame hold your attention? That’s a test, and there are add-ons -- is the content appealing, does it physically appear well-made, any personal responses unique to yourself and possibly the artist, such as that. This readjustment comes with looking instead of trying to see what isn't really there, believing your eyes and not the wizard of oz explaining that the pile of plywood thus arranged on the floor in front of you deserves your respect, even admiration. Seeing through establishment orthodoxy is a liberating thing to do, and a way to find a real heart, brain, and courage, there all along.

thought or thing -- art’s skitz

Conceptual thinking transformed art, but not everyone made the turn. There are still those who think of art as an object created by an artist to be bought, owned, and lived with forever. That’s them left standing on the platform as modern art left the station some hundred years back, and that’s them again first in line when the train comes around this time.

Let’s review. The acknowledged inauguration of ‘modern art,’ the famous Duchamp ‘readymade’ urinal exhibited in independent artist’s exhibit of 1917, was an act of genius only in art books, seminal only for scholars. Submitted by a less worldly and obviously superior person, he was theatrically aloof, it might have been called an adolescent prank by a mediocre artist, making the major pillar of modern art, and indeed conceptual art’s very conception, only a porcelain hood ornament on the limo of sour grapes.

After early notoriety Duchamp became more and more enigmatic, critics and scholars pretending he was Einstein and they the interpreters of relativity. Oh really? What legitimacy declares someone’s else's work your own just by signing it, the way ragtag explorers used to claim whole continents on the authority of the squirrelly little pope? Experts said sure, it’s appropriate, and a new art became sanctified, essentially the formalistic dismantling of any former pretense to art, a gigantic breakthrough to be sure but the thrill is gone.

Sol LeWitt in 1967...... “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” LeWitt wrote. “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.”

That’s thin ice. Conceiving of a great bridge across a mighty river is a heroic chunk of thinking, but just making an offhand sketch won’t get anyone across. Retrograde? immensely, but the average person thinks this way. When they become interested in art they want to see accomplishment, and are less interested in the fetish objects in art magazines, the dialogue of fashion.

Average people have been interested in art all along, curious about artists, respectful of the art, but have felt pushed aside by a smirking condescending skybox of sycophants cornering the market on sophistication. Well it’s all over now, baby blue. The calf floating in a tank of formaldehyde, four vacuum cleaners in a glass box, the chrome cartoon character twelve feet high made in a shop somewhere will all at once seem pointless, and close to worthless, once the long deprived culture begins to assert itself.

The good news is that user-friendly art is available, a balm to the disenchanted, a solace for the disenfranchised, a compensation for the less than obscenely wealthy, and the culture, all directions, is waking up to it about now. More art to be seen begets more seeing, and more seeing begets buying and owning, which is bound to make more and better art available, round and round.

unlearning history -- forgetting art

lexington herald-leader aug 11 -- New 21c public artwork addresses race, Confederate statue debate
The history of the civil war and its aftermath are good to know, but removing statues won’t change it, won’t turn it back or wash out a line. As a fact, erasing history for the sake of psychic comfort can have unfortunate consequences, such as leaving folks defenseless when it comes around again, but manipulating civic symbols isn’t our beat.

For the purposes of art, I’ve forgotten who John Hunt Morgan was, some rich kid with a feather in his hat. His daddy bought him a uniform and a few extra muskets, and he and his boys raided around the edges of a the civil war without affecting the outcome. Long gone, still I’ve seen him sitting on his horse pretty much every day for more than three decades. It’s a tidy piece of work, his statue, a big casting with all those cuts, all that detail, and would be a handsome accomplishment even today done with modern equipment, pushbutton hoists and electric furnaces.

Maybe you see a symbol of racial oppression, but I see six months in a studio working everyday, all day and into the night, hand-forming not just the likeness of John’s face, but his tunic with buttons, his holster and livery, everything correct, and this ain’t no ‘cut and paste‘ operation. After that I see a black smoky foundry with a crew of thick muscular men with black fingernails, burn scars on their arms and chests, working within inches of truly horrible death pouring the molten metal, filling the voids, temperature and speed and years of experience, and feel with them the pride when the mold was broken and pulled away, shoulder slaps and handshakes -- a piece of metal worthy of lasting a thousand years. They didn’t give a damn about John Hunt either. 

Turns out the symbol, the meaning, even the subject matter whatever it is, was never the main event anyway. We judge ancient peoples by their artwork almost entirely, the symbolic meanings lost in time, and don’t seem to have much problem agreeing on which were the more advanced. In those terms John doesn’t rank up with the Parthenon, but he’s way too good to be thrown away.

whistling in the wind -- unrequited commentaries

Is there an audience for this point of view? I don’t know. Owning art is unscientific, unverified, a leap of faith since none of its theories have to date been clinically tested. OA stands in opposition to the current art establishment as exclusionary and aloof, with velvet rope access, and shoulder to shoulder with a lot of people who have never thought much about art, didn’t think it applied to them, and who don’t much seem to care. It’s an awkward place to start.

Still society is in dynamic turmoil, tooling around on a revolutionary roundabout, and no one sure what street we drive out on. The economic calamity about a decade back had its sobering effect on the ‘just give me more’ mentality, and engendered reevaluations all around. Increasingly our lives are populated by robots replicated by other robots, turns out almost everything is soluble in digital, and cars are going to drive themselves. We be at a crossroads.

There’s a pile of humanity in art. As a fact it’s a refuge. In most other areas there’s nothing you can do a bot can’t do better. They can drive a train better than a sleepy engineer, prepare dinner without burning anything, even let you win at chess, but they can’t make art. They were manufactured, have no life experience, and it would never occur to them to make art. Now it is the case that a computer can be programed to make stuff that looks like art, just as occasionally humans will do this just to make money, but creating actual art is not among their vast capabilities.

So, let’s suppose ordinary folks somehow start being curious about art, perhaps as a result of huge shifts in societal perspective beyond their awareness the way they sometimes do. If they once discover the potency of art to alter and aerate their low-oxygen living spaces, see in it a magnet for memories and a unique signifier of home, and come to think of art a stable and enduring object worthy of respect, something singular from a living hand, then maybe they’ll want to buy some and take it home. They are the phantom audience, the potential avid readers of my encouragement and exhortations but not quite ready, behind a partition, although in the end it won’t matter. Art will change as people change their minds, and it will be art that helps them think those new thoughts.