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.
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.
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