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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment