consolidating wealth -- recognizing value

The world today is awash in competing political systems, clashing world views, and they batter against each other while we watch, times are uncertain. Where’s your money, in a bank? Good luck. History is not entirely reassuring about numbers on paper in uncertain times, and any sort of investment is risky. Wouldn’t it be convenient if wealth could be stored in an object like charge in a battery, some form with recognized value that remained fairly constant and objective, no matter how imaginary currencies fluctuated. 

These days visual art won’t work, too bad. It’s tangible enough, and when well-made should outlast its owner essentially unchanged, a unique and time-defeating asset, but no one can agree on its value, so sad. Everywhere the price of art is blatantly artificial, from the wild-west absurdities of the trophy market, to just four hundred dollars for a sweet little landscape in a gallery, it makes no sense. ‘The price of art is what someone else is willing to pay for it,’ intones the mind-reading gallery director, and that about sums it up. 

In another country, at another time, Bob says to Mike, ‘say that artist seems to be getting better, did you find that painting in a gallery?’ Mike says, ‘no, I met the artist on a studio tour and bought direct. I’m making payments.’ So then Bob says, ‘that’s a good idea. I’d like to own a painting by that artist someday, too.’ They’d both know about what to pay for a painting of that quality, no mind reading involved. This is because art for sale would be so common even ordinary people could form an opinion about whether it was good or bad, and have some idea if the price seemed fair. If people began to see the same things in art, to recognize similar signs of quality and accomplishment, then ownership of art would constitute a form of wealth, there on the wall, as well as a source of pride and inspiration, so much more rewarding than numbers on a ledger. 

Money shrinks, gets stolen, can be manipulated, it’s undependable. Real wealth lies in things that retain value no matter what the currency does, up or down, but there have to be standards, a reserve of knowledge shared by many people. Not everyone, but enough people understand the jump shot, the layup, the double dribble to make basketball a viable activity, and athletes who do it better are much admired and rewarded, like that. Art hasn’t gotten there yet, but it will if the changes happening now continue, if our ship comes back on an even keel and sails on. The value of art for the individual remains intangible, beyond calculation, but a rational market makes acquisition of art for the home plausible, means that bought art retains value, and that each individual buys with the confidence of personal knowledge, knowing what they want.

collector vs real value -- seeking price

One thing that confuses many is the difference between ‘collector value’ and ‘real value,’ since just the term ‘value’ itself has leeway. It’s also good to remember that value isn’t always the same as price, although we’d like to keep them relative. The dominant mode these days, collector value is ‘what other people are willing to pay,’ and it seems there’s someone willing to buy about anything, old and no longer produced they like special. When there’s plenty of plenty the operative component of value is rarity, how difficult it is to obtain and possess this thing. That’s about it. If it freezes in the tropics the price of bananas goes up, and since there’s only a certain number of toy firetrucks circa 1920 and earlier still around, their price goes up too. It’s a big competition out there, everyone trading up toward more and more hard to get stuff, and the eventual winner will be the one who pays most for the rarest thing of all, the Ty Cobb baseball card, the queen’s buggy whip. Well, times aren’t always good, and collecting isn’t for everyone.

In tighter times, the main measure of value is utility, and it makes the more convincing claim on how much we should want something in our lives. The whole notion of rarity in art is grossly manipulated anyway, at the top a restricted ranking of cornball trademarks. They do it in front of everybody, so there’s no reason to go through it here, but there are other terms of value they leave out. Original art in the house makes life better, improves outlook, brightens attention, just does, ask someone that owns. They’ll testify that in a world of digital fast food, original art contains mental nutrients that radiate out into the room anytime the lights are on. How is it possible to obtain this benefit, you might ask.

Any mark made on paper by someone truly trying to express themselves has more value than the mona lisa momentarily on your iphone, and it goes up from there. An expression made after years of practice and life experience is rare enough, but also comes additionally fortified with an inherent worth that gives back. A painting is not just an inanimate oddity, but becomes a contributing family member, witness and repository of memories more poignant and relivable than endless files of photos. How much should you pay for an object you may keep the rest of your life -- hard to say, but don’t listen to the dealers, for them it’s business. Instead self-educate. Buy some art, and then compare it to what you see for sale, trust yourself.

visual art resists -- witness to the revolution

Trump is not the cause, he’s merely a symptom of a hysteria no one wants to acknowledge -- I hate to tell ya. The ultra wealthy are abusing the golden goose again, and she can’t take much more. People around here approach adulthood wondering who their highest bidder will be, grooming themselves to receive a higher station, a better income. It’s a stifling system that becomes more tenuous and uncertain the further down you go, and these days vast majorities groan under the downward pressure of wealth’s rampant consolidation, everyday watching while others slide over the edge.

Nowhere is the peasant’s nose pushed deeper into the manure pile than when it comes to big international art, visible for all to see. Here the super wealthy burn off excess cash like gas flares over oil refineries, wallowing in the guilt pit of pointless extravagance, and the financial manipulators climb aboard as well, seeing a chance to cover outright theft -- I must mean perfectly legal creative accounting, and everyone can see that too. 

It’s a trifle, you’re likely to say. Surely job insecurity, fear of losing identity against competing ethnicities, and a shattering of traditional norms of behavior are all more important than what’s hanging on the wall. Maybe. On the other hand, a diet of fast food and the mental mayhem of action entertainment squanders human potential, who wants to disagree? If your tribe is warm and dry for a little longer, ignore these deficiencies while you can, but we float above a caldera of seething resentment, wasted talent, and stunted dreams, and that brings us back to art.

A sports poster on the wall isn’t a sufficient reflection of a fully formed adult personality, just isn’t. People could use a little affirmation of their own uniqueness, as well as a creative connection to the human condition. Why come to think of it, if we didn’t live in a culture starving for meaning, gasping for equitable distribution, and longing for an adequate education, we wouldn’t be in this fix, now would we? How much can we change by tomorrow?

None of it, but we can watch the system heal itself. The transformation will be expressed through art, harbinger of a general awakening. As a sign of this change, art would start going up on city walls all around the planet, a broad enough array for people to begin understand the power and potency of visual expression, and to find themselves in art. Leading businesses would endeavor to project a progressive yet mature image by owning and displaying worthy art, and a hotel chain might even arise requiring a premium price just to sleep in the same room with original art. Sounds like fantasy SF, or surely would have a couple of decades back, but seems a fairly safe bet by now, since it’s all happening already.

What change in mentality -- what new politics, morality, and self concept, both individually and collectively, would a renewed interest in visual art represent? More independence and self-reliance, along with a more humane and open relationship with other people would seem reasonable, and maybe even a path to self-realization and fulfillment would present itself. All in all, it suggests a future just a bit brighter than being reduced to the paranoid, shrunken, back-biting drones the oligarchs would prefer, inmates of a mind-control ant farm. They’ve used their money to elect Trump, to degrade us, to make us dumb -- resist with art.

art’s efficiency -- simple means

Making art is about efficiency -- making simple means go farthest. These days it’s possible to digitalize and manipulate images, change color with a stroke, borrow from anywhere, print on anything, so why is the Mona Lisa still a thing? Why would modern people bother with painting at all?

Painting is caveman basic. Ground minerals suspended in oil are applied to stretched fabric, light and portable. It’s meant to be hung on a wall, perhaps embellished with a frame, and a discreet source of light would be helpful. There is no alien technology filched from a crashed saucer, actually there’s nothing new at all. It’s a system largely unchanged for thirty five thousand years we know of, the application of pigment to a flat surface representing the world in two dimensions.

The implements used have largely remained the same as well, animal hair at the end of a stick being the most common, and mediums have improved but still serve the same function, beguiling the eye. Primitive maybe, but not a bad place to begin if accomplishment is measured in sheer distance from start to finish, from materials utilized to statement made. It’s about efficiency, the guiding principle of an artist's life, anyway. Will concede the popular image from movies and such is one of cocaine and limos, artists rich like their patrons, but it’s a sad fact that the artistic community waited a couple of decades longer to take hot showers than everyone else, and it hasn’t changed that much. Independent artists live on the edge, and don’t waste nothing.

Technology, it turns out, is a six dimensional crutch, the kind of kinetic assist that leaves the body weak and wasted, statements posted on endlessly updating platforms, as unsuited for significant art as scratching love letters in the sand. It’s so much easier, in the long run, to start further back up the road where’s there’s less traffic, more miles to roam. Visual art made on an easel already represents a different time-scale, a concentration of effort and attention on an instant, a momentary glance otherwise destined to be lost in the flow of a day’s passing. By convincingly portraying actual experience, the painting establishes a portal on memory that widens each time it’s seen, an enduring image that seems to expand with familiarity, to reveal more with time. That’s old school. 

Vision and talent make the job easier, but diligence and effort crank the process over, condensing a moment’s observation into a tangible, visible chunk you can hold in your hand, hang on your wall. What make it good? A simple answer is miles down the road, how much depth of feeling and sense of presence can be wrung from simple stuff. This becomes the greatest efficiency of all, producing an object of significance and value almost from thin air.

cultivated blindness -- simple sight

Here’s the thing -- brand new, truly original art couldn’t even be seen. We’re just not technically equipped to see totally new stuff. The alien standing next to you taking notes won’t impinge on your senses because you’ve never seen one before, and your mind can’t define him, her, or it. Folk lore has it that new world natives couldn’t see Cortez’s ships in the bay at Vera Cruz, and thought he had emerged from the sea. After a lot of diligent looking the shaman began to see them, like wooden houses with poles extending upward, and he explained to the rest what to look for. 

It has to do with the act of seeing, itself, the search for similar templates throughout the endless file cabinets of memories and experiences we have in our heads already, starting from when we first arrived. It happens instantaneously most of the time, but sometimes a crumpled bag on the lawn tries to be a squirrel for just a split-second, just enough lapse to be confusing, to glimpse the process in action. This collaboration of sensation and memory, altered by personal biases this way and that, produces what we see, probably at least slightly different for everyone.

Here we come to a basic premise of art, long left out of the conversation. Is the source for the art found in life as lived, or is it derived from other antecedent art, a long progression? There’s is a good reason to ask this question because we’re specialized, and can have similar sensations but see things differently, so true when it comes to art. Let’s suppose you have a degree, maybe took some classes, flipped through a few magazines, just trying to keep up you see, and you’ve filed a lot of art in your memory banks the typical citizen might not have. Makes you cool, right? Maybe.

Art about art cantilevers out over the abyss, but can become pretty flimsy, loud but anemic, requiring constant fan support from the wealthy and intelligent. So here we have a gallery space four inches deep in white flour with a surround of clear plastic sheeting, the pure whiteness festooned with twisted cigarette packs, gum wrappers, and other signifiers of what, exactly? Do you know, would you be impressed? I’m guessing on some level this exhibition cuts like a laser, witty and wise, but over my head by a mile, and it seems that bothers no one. That’s where they were aiming in the first place, it’s art about art. 

The whole business reeks of complicity, is nothing if not expensive, a social-club cult of economic exclusion and tribal totems. Only a prude would bother to object, so easy to just walk away and find more direct engagement, a more rational playing field, but wait. What about an art about life, some variation of representation that draws its comparisons from the common experience side, that seeks access to the mind and heart by opening a file compiled from daily living? As art, it would surely be considered quaint by the subsidized crowd, but it might resonate with everyday citizens in unexpected ways, an art that can be ‘seen’ by everyone.  

instantaneous reformation -- sliding toward critical mass

Recently fielded feedback praising valiant rowboat sorties against the art establishment’s massively fortified beachheads, but at the same time registering gentile skepticism that any of these utopian predictions would come to pass -- original art up in houses up and down the block, an active visual dialogue within communities, and at least break-even prosperity for creatives, busy expanding vision and widening empathy for just about everyone. Looking out the window these days, it’s difficult to disagree. With rampant commercialism demeaning what’s true, even what’s real, all for a buck, and the downward pressure of the world’s wealth in roiling boil toward the top, there isn’t much room for art -- looking, making, thinking about at all.

Impossible odds tends to make the best art, a high-pressure crucible difficult to simulate under lab conditions. Sports fans will understand, being in a position to win is all that’s necessary. We’ve entered a zone of choppy water, successive waves of gender sensitivity, political scandal, monument madness, and executive-power impositions, buffeted and bobbing. A big wave might come along. Some progressive businessperson could decide that the way to impress vendors, create envy among competitors, and remain in the public mind, was to purchase and strategically install original art, so much more economical than new carpets and swedish furniture. These folks are competitive, play golf, brag about their kids, and they’ll notice pretty quick any conversation about someone else’s offices. This could be the detonator. 

Average citizens, having seen enough art up in public to begin to like some more than others, one day strolling a craft fair might spend a significant amount for a painting, even take a moment to speak to the artist. Say they went a little high, a couple of hundred, maybe more, and now they see it everyday. In time they’ll come to understand why some paintings cost much more than that. Of course this happens somewhere everyday, but it remains isolated, even quirky, and eventually fades without the reinforcement and support of neighbors and friends, but if it ever starts happening all around all at once, a new self-sustaining process takes over. Ka-boom. 

Will agree it looks dark, the president only likes art with his face in it, and he represents the nation’s mood at the moment much better than most will admit, but it’s claustrophobic, stifling, airless, and dumb, sorry to say. Visual art, the tangible art object, is looking pretty good these days, as music dissolves in digital, DJ's displacing musicians and effortless transcription shredding notions of originality and ownership. Visual art’s major disadvantage in the twentieth century, the inability to replicate and still retain value, has become its greatest asset in a technological world of 3-D printed anything. This ability of visual art to concentrate and hold value, in the form of unique human expression, will begin to occur to isolated individuals here and there all at once, and one day they’ll become interested in art. They’ll each think it was their idea. 

Charlie loses touch -- too much affirmation

Too much affirmation can be a bad thing. Consider Charlie Rose, urbane, cosmopolitan, famous, rich, and yet in his pitiful attempts to reach out to other people he exposes himself, like maybe a baboon, the so-called ‘shower trick.’ He’s not the only one. As a ploy to win friends this disarming gesture is fairly crude. We don’t know who’s gone along with it, but sometimes people complain publicly, and in this incandescent moment, in a blinding flash of social awareness, it seems wrong. Actually none of it makes any sense at all. 

Rich and famous used to be enough, influential friends, the best seats, and romance should be so easy. On the DL, many professional services are available, well, just about everywhere, and everyday, everyone so much wants to be your friend, including comely career-climbing nubiles, so why? Why behave like a drooling inmate jerking open his robe at a state facility somewhere? Of several possibilities that come to mind, none seems healthy or wise, or in any way fulfilling. Ordinary people suspect it’s a sickness.

Too much affirmation, too much deference, too much phony butt-smooching day after day can make a person ill. The person with power begins to lose touch, begins to see others as fawning sycophants, which, around them, they mostly are. Along with all those privileges, they also feel the weight of everyone’s expectation, their judgement, their jealousy and resentment, whether it’s there or not. I’m guessing here, of course, but we have examples of power corrupting. Military officers of a certain rank can openly declare creationist belief without fear of contradiction from any college educated lieutenant, diving toward mandatory retirement, they won’t know why. Those constructive criticisms in the suggestion box just might be taken personally in the front office, it’s risky.

Does any of this apply to the state of art these days, don’t see how. It might be that some folks are overly impressed with rich and famous, nodding and smiling at openings for ugly, repulsive visual effronteries claiming to be art. Art can be open-robe crude these days, and not all that grand to look at, either. It’s a matter of losing touch, simply by concentrating the power to judge in the hands of too few. They congratulate themselves endlessly, grants and awards, and they sell stock in a bogus house of cards, touting an extrapolated, cross-referenced, mostly imaginary collector value for art, instead of considering inherent worth. 

Damien Hirst and his ilk are carnally despoiling the ultra wealthy, a deliberately painful public groping, preying on their gullibility, their innate competitiveness over trifles, and their inability to relate to the rest of humanity, what they think or feel. It’s right there in the tank with his decomposing goat, a desperation to ingratiate almost beyond human understanding. Live with it, and look at it everyday why don’t you -- pardon, my outrage brims over. It’s just that we’ve tolerated these abuses for so long. Let’s all demand a bit of decorum from our art, at least an attempt at charm, and for sure a willingness to relate back and forth. Candlelight isn’t necessary, but maybe a little intelligent conversation, a bit of time to get to know each other, and things ought to work out fine. 

looking at same -- seeing different

Once they’re painted, paintings don’t change. A portrait stays young while the person ages, the landscape remains green after the bulldozers and pavers have made parking lots. It’s the viewers who change, what they see and what they care about. Scholars, consultants, and curators are a fickle band, all in frenetic search for that sweet spot two degrees ahead of art-world consensus, careers are born. So one day one of them says, ‘Norman Rockwell, so long dismissed, ought to be reconsidered,’ and the rest ruefully admit to having been a fan all along, like birds shifting down a wire. Art is their day job.

Turns out the general public has been reluctant to visit the big art museums, so as outreach they promote movie posters, host blockbusters, and plan family events to draw people in, desperately attempting to justify monster subsidies. Museum officials time and plot, this is true, the average time the average visitor spends in front of each piece of art, about a second and a half, and wring their hands about the six-pack swilling cretins they’re bound to serve. Projecting the values of their vintage-wine benefactors, they think art can be made interesting by extravagant price tag alone, but big replicated splashes and blobs, signature styles all fabulously expensive, don’t require second glances. So when was the last time you spent the afternoon contemplating your Ellsworth Kelly, your Motherwell, anything else you pass on the way up to your office every day?

 It’s a fact the general public hasn’t seemed much interested in art, content instead with posters and prints, thinking of art more as a knick-knack decoration than as a serious, significant possession. Coming into a new prosperity in the middle of the last century, the common folk just never warmed to abstract art, and view the art scene as reported in media these days as cover for an obscene money cult, which it is. The operative word that changes the whole mess is exposure, the opportunity for people in the community to see locally produced art in a dignified setting. The well-lit, white walled galleries of the non-profits would be nice, but restaurants will do. The very best place to see an original painting is in the home of a friend, in the office of a professional, anywhere you’re required to wait, and better yet, on your own wall at home. 

Look at all those houses, the landscaping, the cars. Doesn’t it seem like somewhere out there, someone would want to own something that didn’t depreciate, go out of date, or get ground up for recycle every ten years or so? Imagine a possession that endures unchanged through every phase of life, that as witness absorbs associations and family events along the way, to be read back in contented maturity in any quiet moment. This would be a possession that can be known like a friend, that becomes a friend, and which, in addition, dependably retains its value. Put another way, how long before the excess of material stuff bulging from public storage units because the house isn’t big enough, begins to consolidate and concentrate into smaller units of greater value? 

When it’s time to reexamine priorities after the turbulent ferment of politics and mores we’re passing through, the parts will come back different, the system will be changed, and art, as visual expression arising from a common experience, could find itself a lot closer to the front of the line. Would a diverse community, with both traditional and world-traveled sensibilities, become aware this asset in their midst and support full-time artists? Maybe.

windows and mirrors -- painting tech

Glass has a flat surface that can be seen through, and glass with silver backing accurately reflects anything in front of it. Ideally it makes no comment, doesn’t have its own point of view, and yields nothing new. Paintings provide a different sort of information from the same flatness, both seen through to the subject and reflecting back on the viewer, a two way experience. The artist chooses a visual vocabulary like the printer chooses a font, aiming for maximum clarity and openness to a particular audience, even if its form is opaque to everyone else.

There are qualities of visual experience that can’t be directly addressed with language, and so a kind of poetry is employed, a free-form, free-association style used in art commentaries on all levels, all in an attempt to serve as abstract approximation of visual art’s potency. Not going to try that here. Will suggest a visit to an art museum, pick a large city for best results. Find a painting you find visually appealing, and spend some time looking. You’re in luck because the lo-cal steady diet of digital fast food you’ve been feeding your brain has left a hunger, a resident longing for the kind of direct human one-to-one interaction authentic art provides. 

A word of caution for those seeking shortcuts. Original art is beguiling for the very qualities reproductions leave out, and the original Hopper has depth and meaning the poster, or the coffee table book, does not. His paintings, many paintings, are also reflections, not of the face you see when brushing your teeth, but revealing of thoughts and feelings you may not have recognized in yourself until now -- what it’s for. You’ll have to do your homework, can’t phone it in. Even if you believe every word I'm saying, you’ll find time with art will allow you to enter a room you may not have been in before, where words don’t seem so important and arguments don’t matter -- worth a try.

Stand in front of your chosen painting and watch while the intention and attitude of the artist rise to the surface -- can you feel the breeze in your face, smell the sea air, hear a dog bark in the distance? Do you feel a presence that spills out of the frame and revives memories, renews vision, and makes you feel good for no particular reason? Now that you’re a believer, go back to your hometown and find an affordable painting that does some of it, and take it home. Let it sink in and find yourself in it.

hiding in plain sight -- art’s invisibilities

Art is not visible to everyone, strange but true. In group scene at a boat landing, the artist is the one person looking back at you, making eye contact with anyone really looking at his painting. There’s one like this at the Speed in Louisville. The museum at the university of Arizona displays a medieval last supper with, one has to guess, the artist himself looking out, the last disciple at the lower right, making a comic gesture indicating skepticism, somehow knowing the bishop, and all believers thereafter, would never see him. It seemed quite intimate, this five hundred year old joke between the artist and me, maybe all painters, maybe all skeptics. From more modern times, once saw an out-of-the-box starving artist painting in a restaurant, in which the painter, on a production line deep in Mexico, had left a cigarette burning on the edge of a sideboard, unseen by his supervisor, or the salesman, the restaurant owner or any of his customers. Hola back to you, you brave, bored person.

This culture’s sensibility about artwork has become like a searchlight, a beam artificially narrowed and directed by enormous movements of money, public philanthropies serving nobody’s interests but their own. Go ahead and lower tax rates but eliminate those ‘loopholes,’ and listen to the whoosh of gigantic institutions collapsing. That’s ok, it was stolen money in the first place. Cede back to the lower classes their share of your obscene wealth, and give up your pretense of having any aesthetic sense whatever. Just look at the art you like, and what you’re claiming you pay for it. Oh, you say you paid full price -- what a chump. 

It isn’t just up to audience alone to awaken to the stabilizing, confidence restoring attributes of living and working around original art. Art itself, the product of area studios, needs to define a common vocabulary, and to establish a number of familiar voices within the hearing range of its community. The great void between the two should fill up quickly, and art would become more authentic, better. Responding to art isn’t about finding inside jokes and deciphering hidden messages, but nothing is seen without a conscious desire to look. It’s up to the artists to make it worthwhile.

art and business -- different apps

Remember a few years back seeing a taped seminar of a panel discussion, a back and forth between artists and businessmen organized by some civic-minded organization in a large city. Everyone spoke english but there was no translation. So while the business people talked supply and demand, the artist in the fedora was saying, ‘so you have to decide, do you want to make art, do you want to make stuff that looks like art, or do you just want to make stuff that looks good?’ The business types shrugged and looked perplexed, and the artists wondered where’s lunch. It didn’t seem to go anywhere.

Have known talented visionary artists who were lousy at business, and taken advantage of on a regular basis, it’s a tough reality. There’s a reason for this.  Art and business come close to being polar opposites, venn diagrams that don’t touch, mentalities that won’t mingle. The most basic business model says, give up as little as possible to get the most back, and the product isn’t that important. Could be fast food, could be real-estate, so long as it’s legal we’re in, don’t want to go to jail. Artists don’t think that way. The artists wonders, ‘how dark can I make the shadows, how green can I make the face, do these clouds look believable,’ such as that.

Artists are at a disadvantage, but without some business sense they won’t last long. Signing big contracts and landing huge commissions aren’t as immediate as negotiating rent, buying safe tires, staying dressed and fed. Old cars are going to need repairs, tenant plumbing can be undependable, and two dollars less for the same tube of paint is worth telling a friend about. Some business acumen comes in handy. Still that basic equation, buy cheap and sell dear, sounds foreign to an artist. The independent artist, living out beyond institutional support, probably knows the hourly price of labor, and would be perfectly happy with even up. Selling enough to support a modest household can be a nagging concern, but the serious artist keeps it separate. 

The artist picks an audience and works for them, alone in a studio. Will there ever be a connection -- time will tell. This is a long road across a desert with foggy mountains up ahead, get trekking. A shortcut is possible, traversing the razor thin sophistication of granting agencies and shiny magazines, the kind found in online push reviews reeking of skyrocketing prices. Just find out what’s going on in NY this season and wait five years, it's like robbery. If the artist wants to address a broader audience, anyone with a similar general experience, maybe just alive on earth at this moment, good luck. They better find a better businessperson than they are to hold their hand.

reveille for a lost army -- waking up

Owning Art is an attempt to embody and represent the attitudes and tastes of a missing generation, those potential patrons of art essentially disenfranchised by a convergence of special interests, academic, commercial, and political, each seeking to reduce the field and limit access. Although motivated by different agendas, convenience found them in cahoots. Owning Art attempts instead to present the cause of average-citizen lovers of art in absentia, in the familiar terms of daily survival. Will they hear, and the short answer is probably not, but gonna preach anyway. 

Culture evolves when a large segment decides to turn their heads all at once, and old paradigms crumple, an organic yet mysterious molt. The observant outsider with some notion of the past might be able to imagine possible next incarnations, recognize movements toward underserved needs, and be able to divine the ascending and descending vortices of public awareness. That’s all we’re saying. Could go several ways from here, a mind-reading inescapable fascism seems plausible, and nuclear annihilation has been in the news again, but wouldn’t it be nice if things got better? Solar power on the roof breeds democratic independence, and a stable economy serving genuine needs, and not artificially manipulated wants, would in time lead to a sense of security among the population, perhaps even to personal realization and autonomy.

Are common folk too dumb to appreciate art? That does seem to be the establishment’s most basic assumption, and they’ll say it any time derisively, but no need, it’s right there in their art. In the most radical, deskilled refuge assemblage, the message comes through, clear and succinct -- if you’re not willing to go along with this absurdist charade, go home. Don’t mind this, really, and not offended. It’s just good advice. Time to look at something else, and it’s around, always has been. 

Gregarious creatives tend to form bands, exchanging witty banter on breaks while fending off the extra attention, but the more introverted types retreat to studios and are never heard of again. Oh, they struggle nights and weekends for a number of years, but slowly the side-gig, the menial entry-level occupation they took to support their studio, begins to define their lives. They go down thinking, ‘if I could just find exposure in some well-lit venue that even appeared to take my work seriously,’ a carrot that never comes closer, ‘maybe someone would like it, take the next step and buy it, so I could purchase more paint, pay the utilities, call myself an artist.’

Somehow, in this golden scenario, ordinary people would come to realize that while solar on the roof provides energy, artwork on the walls lights up the house, making it more livable, renewing the senses and enhancing life’s possibilities. Would they then jet off to high-roller auctions, vying against the planet’s smarmy looters and swindlers for some trademarked monopoly token -- probably not. Instead they’d learn to see the charm in a painting by a family friend, would find a place for the little watercolor bought at a craft fair, and could be expected to understand why original art costs more, and is worth more than copies.

societies transform -- art evolves

Occasionally have made snide reference to ‘contemporary art,’ but thought I should list my objections explicitly, and basic thought process is the first. Essentially contemporary art is a literary form, a narrative of some sort concerning grand issues, or maybe a complicated joke told in puns, oblique associations, all presented in an inbred self-referencing code. It’s complicated. Grand masters will explain the burdens of viewership, the obligations of confronting and coming to terms with contemporary art -- lots of preparation and research, detective-like discernment, and true belief all come into play.

I must have missed baptism, absent that day, didn’t read the bulletin, wasn’t invited. To my prematurely jaundiced eyes, Jackson Pollock was just another drunkard making excuses for not being able to paint, and it was his grandiose delusion that he could paint better by accident than any historical painter could on purpose. That’s where it all went wrong for me, because without St. Pollock at the front of the parade, the cascading dialogue thereafter, a descending oscillation of ‘isms’ each decade, turns time-bound and hollow. The latest incarnation, a witty, self-congratulatory artfully-deskilled remnant of some super-conscious over-arching truth-telling is miles above my head, said with affection.

I’m liberal but to a degree, and think artists should make anything they want, but opportunists boating across the to the land of public support and sanctioned recognition might be giving up their citizenship back home, all I’m saying. Visual art goes straight in, doesn’t need four paragraphs on the wall parsing antecedents, or a steady patter of erudite explanations in the ear. The person next you, from wherever on the planet, sees roughly the same thing you see, almost like some kinda universal, a point in common. Turns out much of modern art is rather inarticulate in this regard. Instead of being universal, the best of art these days requires scholarly initiation, the memorization of a standardized liturgy, along with an untethered reverence for market value.

I don’t want to bring down the house, content to see it inflate until it pops and blows away, and a delirium of artificial value collapses. In its place, a rational market for area produced art might arise, as economic justice prevails throughout the land -- yes, suspect linkage. Art connects individuals through the portal of shared experience, and brings an elevated consciousness into the home, as an example of effort made for something other than money, for example. Don’t expect this will ever change. As society reconstitutes itself after this interlude of chaos and rebirth, let’s hope visual art, as respite from the churn of misrepresentation spewing from digital devices, can provide a standard of truth, stability, and self-empowerment consistent with the aspirations of a free and prosperous people.

art after undergrad -- a panel discussion

It wasn’t a discussion meant for me, I sat in back. Saw it announced and was curious about roads not taken, the academic ladder never climbed. One instructor spoke with passion about devotion to studio, and inspiration was there, but it would be so helpful to see the work. Letters after a name indicate standing, accomplishment, and expertise in the professional world, but have no meaning when it comes to art. Credentials for an artist are on the canvas, figuratively speaking, in a form much more revealing than framed diplomas.
 
Picking the right grad school was first considered, price, location, such as that. Related occupations, mostly teaching art, were mulled, although vaguely. The world of paying rent, filling a refrigerator, had the odd feel of foreign territory, the dark premonition of approaching exile. The more mature museum director, invoking broad combat experience, gave all the cadets the word that the civilian world really won’t give you a chance, best not try. Consider something less ambitious, grab a broom, drive a nail. We can all find a place with a state paycheck, climb aboard. 

They exist on an island and operate with a different system of value and meaning, loftier than out in the tract-less barrens of fast food and pickups, beyond campus. No one spoke about studio life on your own, how to buy supplies and squeeze every drop, how to establish a presence without institutional support, because no one they could find has ever done it. It didn’t come up. Even the occasional faculty member with commercial success, any outside income, services a rarified boutique sensibility, and better never appeal to anyone ordinary.

Oh bachelor candidates with broken wings, who could have spent four years learning the tools of visual communication, but instead sought subtle nuances in man-made materials, received pointless praise for third-hand social commentary, and were given the very best grade for totally unfathomable obscurity, where do you think you’re headed? Farther away from the folks back home, that’s for sure, but closer to the cliff, zipping through a field of rye. Seek a better deal. Make art that reaches back and pulls the viewer forward, and maybe they’ll support you, buy your art, even spring for a meal or two. Find alternative spaces to show your work, in salons, restaurants, and even if you never sell a thing, you’ll be contributing to a climate of art awareness and acquisition, supporting fellow artists and causing change. Take a chance.

one percent -- but who’s counting

Most would agree that one percent of the population controlling fifty percent of the wealth leads to unfortunate outcomes for everyone else, and there are significant, rational reasons why, plus lots of evidence. All progressives know the drill. Actually such imbalances don’t benefit anyone entirely, since some humanity must be lost looking out through bullet-proof glass, just guessing. Anyway, that’s a conversation about the distribution of money and here we care more about art. 

So what percentage do you suppose feels the benefit of NEA largesse? Now, of course, its administrators claim paternal concern for everyone, determined to lift the eyes of pagan sports lovers to finer aspirations, so how’s that been going for ya? Contemporary art will never appeal to the masses, either over their heads or below their attention spans, either way, it’s a small audience that actually tunes in. Are they superior intellectually, but of course, but more than that, they’re totally up to date, in good standing with an international elite, even if a grad student living in a rented flat with posters on the wall. The ultra rich will be on board, simply attracted by the notion of exclusion, and they don’t really care what it looks like.

It never turns out well, a small percentage of the population determining priorities, values, and goals for everybody. Incentives quickly turn rancid and myopic self-interest leads to abuse -- it’s built in. I don’t know the numbers but have noticed signs. Progressive non-profit galleries are spooky quiet during the week, the person on desk duty seems startled when you enter, and the museum at the U is newly admission-free so they don’t have to report meager door revenues. Awards and notoriety require peer group certification, a case of career ticket-punchers recognizing their own. Could the same crew sipping wine at all the openings represent one percent of the population hereabouts, maybe one percent of one percent, and not sure they ever buy art, in any case.

No need to despair, just pivot in place and rebel against the machine that made you, oh arts councils everywhere. Change today. Serve the population, instead of seeking the approval of cultural overlords doling out the grant money from on high. Resist selecting art for your galleries as though you were giving grades for a mid-term review over at the school. Doing so limits your penetration into your community and stifles your impact. It erodes your relevance even as you wheedle for more public money. Present instead thematic exhibitions with enough direct, accessible representation to be appealing to the people who help you pave the parking lot, who cover your overhead. Give up your pretense of elevating taste, that sacred mission, and seek compromise with a community ready to embrace area art production, with an active interest in independent studios and in need of public gallery space to become familiar their own artists.

unplugged -- indigenous idiom

The artist selects, alters, and presents a static version of the chaos we all swim in, and people in the community seek to own and live with these expressions, especially when they relate to and extend their own experience. This is the private sector activity of art, a world apart from the big institutional high-roller anything, far from million dollar velvet rope exclusion, so gossipy, so deductible, so corrupt. We’re just talking artists in their studios addressing their own sense of what’s worthy of attention, striking chords of color against color, and along with them, a public familiar with their work, who value what they do. Sounds quaint, huh?

Conceptualists inhale grant money with timely puns and receive awards for notching any remaining taboos, but their stuff can be less than attractive, not very portable, and hardly privately own-able. They’re in another part of the park, with a system of value based on fame-rating, arbitrary and restricted, and a vast institutional apparatus, schools, museums, such as that, supported by just about all of us. If the funds that hone contemporary art’s cutting-edge were devoted instead to developing an awareness and appreciation for art-making as practiced in regions, districts, and hometowns, several changes would occur. The local product would improve immediately, created by artists, with time in the studio, who can see a way forward, and simply by comparison a buying public would begin inching toward sophisticated by their second purchase. Art would eventually sustain itself. 

There’d be no excuse for an entitled, entrenched bureaucracy depriving average citizens of an accessible and personally relevant mode of art, deriding and excluding area artists, all so they can claim art needs their help. Some might suggest that art, unlike homelessness, doesn’t really deserve a vast charitable support system, and that money donated to a local fund for art would be better spent buying a piece of art, a more direct and effective way to support art production in the first place, and one that grants a tangible and lasting reward. Decades of state support have turned the nation’s wall space arid, and have left the general public self-conscious and unsure about buying and owning art. What remains is a vast desert of sheetrock, waiting for the rain of individual self-verification, of communal self-confidence, and a maturing public finally sickened by the paper-thin pandering of an ever pervasive commercialism. Clouds gather.

comes around -- art precedes

Did you hear about the liberal fond of Andy Warhol but who doesn’t like Donald Trump, so alike in so many ways I’m here to tell you. Andy was one clever marketeer but he was venal and shallow -- virtues in his world. He stole, show me an image he created that isn’t a lumpy shoe, and he cheated, no one knows what’s actually ‘authentic,’ made at his direction, and there’s no way to tell. He exploited all around, paid minimum to the production people in his ‘factory,’ and resorted to a mannered misdirection when confronted directly. It’s all there in his art.

So now time has passed, and now it seems we have come to live with those virtues, those values, in ‘real life’ -- imagine that. In this case the art preceded, revealed the mind set of the wealthy upper classes, and announced the agenda for debasing the culture and trivializing any complaint about anything. Was there a cabal of capitalist dukes and barons using Warhol as forward artillery, softening up the impact population with soup cans and brillo boxes -- doesn’t work like that. It’s somehow more mysterious, but don’t pretend the connection isn’t clear and obvious. In real life they admired each other, Warhol and Trump, recognized each other, wore the same feathers. 

Resisters look to thy walls and ask yourself, ‘do I see integrity, do I see commitment, am I invited to share a vision I find inspiring,’ or does my art reflect the current situation? Maybe you’ve been sabotaging yourself. What’s the answer, gosh, I don’t know, but will make a suggestion. Art is not mysterious. It’s the most direct, non-prejudicial, easily understood thing in life, all the rest is advertising. No one knows more about it than you, and that’s the beauty don’t you see? Experts who look sideways at each other and not straight ahead at art have lost their way, and you get to choose your own direction -- art precedes.

true victims -- artless houses

It isn’t the artists we care about, resourceful and independent, they’ll get by. When times are tight they can fall back on one of the many occupations they’ve sampled along the way, industrial production, waiting tables, such as that. Even without material success they get to be artists, and that’s a privilege in itself, especially around here at this moment. We’ll save our sympathy for the real victims, the vast majority in this culture who never have the opportunity to see original art, and understandably never entertain the notion of owning any.

Let’s start with businesses. Original art is jarring, it demands attention, and chances are employees won’t like it at first, but art in production areas and break rooms proffers tangible results. Better than motivational posters, it’s a gesture of respect from management that builds loyalty and cohesion, as well as providing an example of creativity and commitment with a long-term positive influence on job performance. In offices original art catches the eye of vendors, competitors, and the public, alike, projecting a progressive image and producing a lasting impression. Along with those practical considerations, original art in the office makes going to work more pleasant, just does. 

Art at home, guess we never thought about it. We’ve got department store prints, maybe a reproduction poster, a ship, a meadow, can’t remember, don’t really care. This isn’t surprising. Uptown in those austere, polar-white galleries, art is unreasonably expensive and visually unintelligible, so totally not us, and museums have become more interested in ‘things,‘ the big rock in LA for example, cutting-edge silliness. Locally, subsidized art agencies present the most time-bound, self-referencing academic conceits available. This is unfair. People ought to have the opportunity to see the art being made all around them, not just third-hand derivations of what’s trendy somewhere else. Would they pay attention -- it’s much more likely. 

The deriding of local art production by an academic elite given responsibility for choosing art exhibited in non-profit galleries, how art is covered in local media, and what artists are worthy of attention and support, is simply sad. Will interest and support for local art production ignite and become self-sustaining, now that more art is being seen in public? The question becomes when, with murals on blank walls, paintings for sale in restaurants and salons, does someone, somewhere, set an example by buying and owning some, perhaps with local media coverage? Some small gesture by any of several media outlets, interviewing the businessperson ahead of the curve buying art instead of new office furniture, finding someone of modest means who lives with art instead of driving a new car, would help to crystallize a movement long overdue.

tribal converts -- seeking identity

Group identity is reassuring, and many just want to burrow into a tribe somewhere, want to march together, ride together, tail-gate together, it’s all good, but not everyone finds comfort that way. Some get lost from the crowd, can’t cope, and check out early various ways, but others adapt and live among us thick as thieves. The handyman with his own truck, making half as much as his brother-in-law while working twice as hard, is four times as happy, and probably saw through the game early on. 

Some living their lives on the outside choose to make art, and especially in a society besotted with commercialism and multi-media infotainment, it’s  a worthy challenge indeed. One person attempting to confront the seething maw of capitalism, that lowest denominator grinder of souls, and still remain whole and independent has to be a noble aspiration. In real life the odds are extremely steep, the path obscured by myth and misdirection, bogus experts and incompetent guides abound. The state-subsidized crowd won’t accept you, while the costs of art supplies, rent, and time spent are all borrowed against a future acceptance that may not come, and truth be told, probably won’t. It’s an arid, minimal existence even when ‘successful,‘ promising endless contention with galleries, an uncertain future and not much money. 

So why, in converted storerooms and vacant lofts, are so many people trying to do it anyway? Art supplies in some form occupy a shelf in trading posts out at the edges of habitation, and drugstores in small towns all have a few colors and a brush or two. Of course, most who try to paint, it isn’t easy, accept that a career would be out-of-the-question unattainable, but in front of an easel they dream. Is it a fantasy of glamour and bright lights, celebrity notoriety and serial debauchery, all the stuff they say on television and in the magazines about the world of art, maybe not. They think, ‘what if I could pay the rent this way.’

Success for the studio artist is staying in the studio, simple as that. The economy will drag you back and hand you a shovel, artists never make it very far up the ladder in a lifetime. Shovel with the left hand is the age-old advice for independent artists, but sometimes it takes both. However it’s done, the object is to keep working until the art supports itself, or decrepitude intervenes. That in itself qualifies for membership in an old, old tribe standing slightly beside the human race, wryly amused and keenly observant, paint brushes in hand they salute each other across the ages.

folk revival -- back to basics

Yes, anyone can see the modern world has moved on, that internationally all the urbane, sophisticated and culturally aware among us have developed a taste for more progressive expressions. Uptown galleries are full bore contemporary with their exhibits reviewed in the arts section of major papers, while our threadbare little screed, advocating for flat representational art at home, seems horribly out of touch. Well, sometimes the last becomes first, particularly in such an unstable season. For years Bernie used to make the same speeches in congress and anyone attending would just look off, but what he had been saying all along finally began to resonate with the public. It’s obvious it was the world that changed, not Bernie.

Owning art proposes a new model, turns down an alternative avenue, moves the needle to a different groove. In our version the person who buys and lives with art is at the peak of the pyramid, and the marker of authenticity is simply that they use their own money, so sincere. For many, I’ve sullied the notion of art already, but I think everyday people are smart, and can make rational choices when all viewpoints are represented. The breaking news that an endlessly replicated trademark painting by some name-brand artist has sold for tens of millions seems alien and unreal to the average person, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of understanding and appreciating art, just not that art. 

So go ahead and conceptualize, assemble and cannibalize until your expos are reduced to the sludge of modernity, but don’t expect us down on the ground to be impressed by your swell cultural credentials, or to care. Owning art is not about changing art, but about connecting art to a broader audience, and additionally favors the work of artists living on the economy, in the community. Once connected, these two groups will mature together quickly, make up for lost time, and begin a viable relationship as they gain confidence in each other. If that happens, art changes quickly on its own, becoming experientially based and more celebratory of day to day living.

contemporary art -- a thin disguise

Attended a contemporary landscape exhibit and discovered something I’ve been suspecting for a while, but there it is. There were no landscapes. The term ‘contemporary’ is one gigantic inverse modifier, but I wonder what it really means. Everybody’s just supposed to know already, and I’ll guess it means good, up to the minute, worthy of contemporary attention, such as that, but haven’t heard it said out loud. If it was explained it would probably sound pretty wiggy, full of false assumptions, leaps of faith, and a lot of hot air. Wait, just thought of a great grant proposal.

Seen it happen before, there was a nude show hereabouts that wandered away from the human form into parts and acts, disconcerting and deranged. With each new regime, year by year, the exhibit became more contemporary. So let’s define the term contemporary, not as the sanctioning label applied to art that might possibly interest a modern person, but as it functions visually, what it does. Painting a tree isn’t so difficult, saw how to do it once on tv, but painting a convincing tree is hard. Doesn’t have to be a realistic tree, but it has to say tree to the viewer, the more the better.

It would be much easier to grab some old abstract experiment from against the studio wall and give it some outdoorsy sort of title, you could just make one up, and it qualifies, it’s contemporary. What won’t qualify as contemporary are paintings of the outdoors, trees, fields, mountains, clouds -- so quaint, bless their hearts, they’re not artists, that isn’t art. Something going on around here surely won’t stand the light of day. With any depth of perception the term contemporary just looks cowardly. Maybe I could find some gentler way to say it, but visual art doesn’t have time for sly innuendos about gender and race, the peek-a-boo references to someone else’s art, the momentary hitching to what was in one gallery last week, soon to be in every gallery up and down the block. Pretentious and shallow -- could be a compliment. 

A local arts council mounting a ‘contemporary landscape’ competition, and then disallowing the participation of anyone actually painting landscapes is a brutal form of state censorship, aimed not only at painters who aspire to earn a living from their work, but also against entire communities who look to local art councils for guidance, but find a steady diet of contemporary art disappointing and demoralizing. Actually there are many painters who paint landscapes anyway, without official recognition, and a truly open competition, judged by an accomplished painter or two, would see more traffic during the week, garner real public interest, advance careers, and put more art up in houses -- all good things.

following the money -- art’s destinations

Owning art advocates for art that can be owned, not by museums, not by corporations or foundations, not by any business entity hoping to enhance a public image, but by individuals for personal use, to be hung in a house, an apartment or office, and seen everyday. For practical living-space purposes the favored form is painting, although anything original qualifies, drawings and by-hand prints. 

There are two distinct pathways to arrive at decisions about acquiring art, depending on whose pocket provides the purchase price. People who purchase art with other people’s money, on panels and committees, choose a different sort of art than they'd want to live with day to day, or pay for themselves. The Rockefellers were leading advocates for abstract art back in the day, providing foundational support and prominent display in big banks, but that wasn’t what they had over the fireplace back at the home-place, just regular folks after all. 

The decision to part with personal money points the consciousness, refines discernment, and provides the most direct avenue to visual sophistication and market savvy, lessons etched in the skin. Without buying, owning, and living with art, the most erudite expert is just a spectator, a press-box commentator who ‘never played the game.’ Owning art also favors representational art, but that’s just being practical as well, recognizable images being both more accessible to the viewer and more challenging to the artist, a gravitational realignment long overdue. Of course it’s possible to maintain a timely sensibility concerning contemporary art, but this ain’t no disco -- long term ownership has little interest in time-bound fetish art, so tired by the year after next.

Is this asking too much, this quiet corner? After all, it’s only a niche, a small slice of the big art pie, the quaint notion that the-less-than-wealthy might support working artists as community-based professionals who provide a bit of curry in bland suburbs, flavoring each house with its owner’s own personality. There’s the problem of stupidity, of course, that average citizens just will never have the background to even look at art, but we’ll just have to laugh that one off. It’s actually the people overly concerned with reputation and resumes who have trouble seeing art.

Could this potential audience be largely imaginary as some would suggest, maybe, but might just be invisible so far, nibbling at the edges, getting to know local artists by sight, counting pennies. Area art production could suddenly become a torrent if neighbors, business owners, friends and associates all bought a starter piece together, a rolling coincidence all across town. When enough art is seen in public the mystery will disappear, area painters will have fans, and businesses will want to display their work. Simply spending money out of pocket makes everybody more discerning and aware, and the artists will all get better, working everyday.

religion on campus -- the art cult

Religion is a sacred subject, and must be respected no matter how convoluted or bizarre. It’s a deal we’ve made with each other, a clause in the social contract, and it means we don’t have to justify our choices when we ‘believe’ something. It works more or less. Keeping belief and knowledge separate can be a challenge, but we do our best for the sake of civic functioning, all of us living together. It’s a simple formula. We don’t spend public money on any one religion, don’t endorse a particular point of view, ideally, and allow each person to decide on their own. It’s like written down somewhere.

Religions with state support have a history, and as soon as the checks roll in they’re passing out official titles with privileges, inventing handshakes, and concocting a doctrine so serpentine the logical mind could never follow. They burrow into the treasury and insulate themselves from criticism and scrutiny with secret knowledge. For some reason this is easier to recognize from a couple of hundred years away than it ever seems at the time. I don’t know what goes on over on campus, but I’m sure it has great consequence. At a recent gallery talk, the functioning high priest intoned that the art, itself, couldn’t be assessed or even looked at without already being so deep in the woodpile no sunlight enters. We’ve heard all this before, the tendency to mark territory by bureaucracy at any level, run wild. 

I’m not afraid of the culture even though support has been spotty so far. I understand it. Schools teach that art with enough general appeal and common accessibility to possibly earn a living out in the general population is not worth bringing to class. It’s bound to be confusing for the students, in training, actually, for a life of institutional dependency, the so-called ‘lucky’ ones, and even more baffling for the average citizen who chips in. Instead of all of that socially significant puzzle-box stuff, just put up two paintings in a public place and ask which is better. Fame doesn’t matter, a long resume doesn’t matter, and it won’t even matter what the ballots say. Just asking the question sets off a cascade of thoughts the average citizen doesn’t normally hear in conversation, and before long they’ll be talking to each other. Just go crazy, put up paintings on the sides of buildings, install original art in offices and restaurants, and don’t forget salons, customers like it. Visual art doesn’t really require a ton of homework or an advanced degree. Art goes straight into the noggin, advanced degree or no degree, and by the way, all those crazy things are happening now.

dream homes -- real life

Every sunday in my hometown they publish a dream home, some real estate jewel to gin up the envy, and then the ads. Something’s always missing. These houses never have art, and there’s a reason. Will admit that just this week it’s possible to identify two museum reproductions, but that stuff is less than invisible, and less than art. Real art won’t abet the designer’s craft, and doesn’t care about location. As a matter of fact, art is subversive, difficult to handle, not for the faint of heart. Art can be the interior designer’s nightmare, and civilians should only approach with caution.

Art can take over a room, and become, by habit, the first thing noticed. It’s the couch and drapes that’ll have to match up, but it probably won’t matter -- with art in the room it’s more important to be comfortable. Other furnishings drop in, periods and diverse sources learn to live together. Art isn’t for everyone. For example, if it’s important to you to live up to everyone else’s expectations, absolutely no one expects you to buy art, and you’d only be self-conscious about it if you did, don’t bother. 

On the other hand, if you tend to move occasionally, rearranging your stuff to fit each new abode, art provides familiar and friendly right away. If you stay in the same place, everything else in the house eventually becomes out of date, worn, and replaced, but the art doesn’t change at all, just gets better, portraits never age. On the scary side, you might reveal yourself to anyone who wanders in, in-laws, neighbors, someone fixing a faucet. They’d look around, look back at you. You take your chances. 

Somebody might like your art, and there are pretty good odds they’d like you, and while not absolutely certain, you might like them, too, or at least have things to talk about, find other things in common. Art doesn’t really care about the zip code, the shape of the driveway or the composition of countertops, such transitory stuff. Art is more about your attitudes, your values, what you respond to, and if you start looking at art, sooner or later you’ll recognize yourself, give it a try. Take that piece home and hang it where you’ll see it everyday.

up the off ramp -- driving over traffic cones

How does it feel to drive the wrong way against traffic, busloads of tourists wave from windows and ferraris rocket by? Dangerous as it sounds there’s comfort in knowing it’s the right direction, that the destination is worth all the dirty looks. In a previous post, I found myself dissing most of ‘modern art,’ and to tell the truth it felt pretty good, like exposing a cult. I’ve always been skeptical anyway, everyone nodding and smiling at preposterous assertions. Can an all-white painting be significant, is cannibalizing other people’s art being creative, does being a celebrity, knowing a celebrity, or wanting to be a celebrity make art any better? 

I’m here to report the traffic thins, there’s less dodging and more cruising, and I can see others coming up behind me in the rearview. Polarities reverse and energies realign, art starts making sense to ordinary people while experts find their myth-based orthodoxy sounding preposterous even to them. Why is this happening now? Every so often the serfs rise up, usually when conditions become intolerable forcing people recognize their commonality with others. Did someone mention art? It’s not for nothing artists are repressed in authoritarian systems, harassed and imprisoned, and it isn’t for being directly political. People in charge want everyone facing forward, focused on them, and actively discourage anyone from looking sideways, at each other. They don’t like art. 

They won’t say that, that they don’t like art, because it sounds barbaric, anti-human, so instead they say they like a certain kind of art better, essentially a form of advertising for their particular silo of corn. The church used art to arrange reality so that the clergy always ate well, and fascists love uniformity and depictions of unending happiness, don’t know why. In nominal democracies they use a different approach. In the name of support for art and artists they insist art become a tax-dependent charity. They water parts of the garden and let others go dry, disenfranchising whole segments of the population, both artists and their natural audience. This self-sanctioning favoritism trickles down through museums and teaching establishments, non-profits and foundations, determining grants and accolades, but not for artists who make pictures or anyone who might be interested in them.

The evidence for this assertion is everywhere, in museums, in faculty art shows, in the way so-called contemporary art dominates non-profit galleries and tilts awards toward artists already receiving state support. Now if you happen to be an arts professional on salary you’ll already have your fingers in your ears -- la la la, but the train leaves the station anyway. In my little corner, murals grace parking lots, people paint outdoors in groups, and it’s my guess this is happening everywhere across the land. Pretty soon the government loses control, the culture asserts itself, and art becomes a viable, self-sustaining component of daily life and the expression of a thoughtful, rational, advanced civilization -- a wide open highway.

AI -- art's answer

John Henry said to the captain, ‘a man ain’t nothin’ but a man, but before I let that steam-drill beat me down, gonna die with a hammer in my hand.’

Hits home these days, huh? Steam-drills have, over several generations, evolved into bots, answering our trivia questions, driving our cars. The competition has moved beyond the physical plane, backhoes digging our ditches and forklifts toting bales. The contest has traveled up the spinal cord, and now we face their beady photo apertures sneering at our wet viscera, just worms with appendages to them. Pretty soon they’ll be doing the shopping, controlling city services, even providing companionship to the lonely and bored, and inevitably the servant will eventually take over.

What if artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides it doesn’t like us? In that case the biological phase of evolution is over, the larval stage has been completed. We’ll be obsolete. Could go that way, but no one really knows. Something we do know is that as soon as robots can deliver their own parts, humans are on the street. What to do? Right after climate change, mass unemployment has to be a big problem. Just being issued a box of microwave meals and keys to a flat, left to roam around all day and that evening root for a favorite team, won't be enough.

Machines with attitude aside, how will humanity handle total unemployment? What will occupy our time, stimulate our intellect, give us any joy? I’d like to nominate art, that last human refuge, a remaining island where machines can’t follow. Oh they’re smarter all the time, but no DNA, no half a million years of prosperity and famine, victory and defeat, love and hate woven in. Humans make jokes, share confessions, express longings, fear, and anger -- nothing a machine would understand, or care about. Machines can definitely create stuff that looks like art, especially since about anything qualifies these days, but passion and commitment are difficult to program, and without struggle, humility, and some degree of redemption on the part of the viewer, hard to recognize.

Idle humans degenerate quickly, and without goals and aspirations turn into preening, self-indulgent nabobs, with lax muscle tone and a long list of petty irritations. We have examples. Machines can tolerate climate change and mass extinctions, and won’t be sorry when we’re gone. We better find our self-respect somewhere, or we won’t mind all that much either. Art isn’t easy to make, and good art is even more difficult, paint itself being the most uncooperative medium known, infinitely more obstinate than ink-jet anything. Making a compelling image with the stuff can be a strain, could take several years of practice, and might involve an assertion of integrity and independence visible for all to see.

What part of us transcends the business of existence, the realm of the machine from here on out? If it’s nothing must be time to go, our role as midwife to mineral-based, star-trekking intelligence over and done. Gaze first at the Mona Lisa, not the postcard but the real thing, and consider that a human just like yourself made it, that millions of people like yourself have admired it, and that no super computer has a clue about why. 

exclusion ugly -- art’s messages

Who could understand ‘art’ without insider access, extensive post-grad conferencing, the trained eye of an expert? It isn’t me. I’ve never gotten past ‘what’s it a picture of, and how good is it,’ just a simple country yokel. That’s why I don’t try to stay current on latest developments, and default on my dues. I stand way back, about a hundred and fifty years, and taken as a chunk modernity poses some interesting questions.

                           

Shortly after the turn of the twentieth, art began to court the wealthy and connected, and to hide from common folk. This radical unhitching of art from direct experience is all documented, by the way, in every museum in the land. It started with a urinal entered in an art show, an adolescent prank, really, but it was so fundamentally offensive, so insolent, so single-frequency moronic, that it was taken as a work of genius instead. It became the porcelain pivot point for the movement known as ‘modern art.’ By using money, the wealthy have been able to coax art into their private pen where they torture and distort it, keeping it dependent and totally unpalatable to the larger society, a wretched servant forced to carry their money bags past the IRS, and to provide identifiable trophies for the well-appointed semi-royal residence. Theon Greyjoy in real life.

This loathsome scheme was challenged from the south, by the mexicans. Diego Rivera made big paintings with millionaires in silk hats standing next to aztec warriors, next to conquistadors, next to farmers, all together, in a voice of common humanity, and he went to war with the Rockefellers, using their money. A big mistake. He made eight large paintings for them on commission, and then with the studio still rented produced eight more they wouldn’t like. Remember one in which rich people in furs and tuxes checked safety deposit boxes in a vault, while just above them there were long rows of bunks showing how the indigent were housed out on long island, such as that.

They set a trap, not just for Diego Rivera, but for the way humanity views itself, nothing less. They said to him put up a fresco, you can paint anything you want in our new steel building, should last a thousand years, and we’ll send you back to mexico rich. He fell for it. It took him an arduous six months on scaffolding, working uncounted hours every week. They wouldn’t allow photographs at any point, and when he was finished they jackhammered it down immediately. What was on it you may ask, and it can be seen, re-created in mexico with the funds left over, but it was a great defeat for us all. With Rockefeller sponsorship, a new wave called ‘abstract expressionism’ flooded the museums across the land, big, spontaneous, and mute. The common folk lost interest, and wasn’t that part of the plan? 

So, lets scroll down to the end, catch up with the present day, and examine prime evidence, it isn’t hidden. Recently a billionaire from the fashion trade purchased the most prized painting on the planet for a record hundred and ten million dollars, and maybe we could take just a moment and look at it, consider what it has to say, about life, about art, about us. It defines ugly. It’s repulsive, a billboard for death by overdose, nihilistic, bored yet surly, all the while remarkably, transcendently unskilled and hard to look at -- but let’s try. Basquiat’s painting is repulsive for a reason. You’re not supposed to like it. You’ll see it, but won’t even try to process it’s incoherent scrawl. It does it’s job. It’s a bar across the door, a stink-bomb in the hallway, and exclusion zone to your mind. It makes art look not just unattainable but easily lived without, the message loud and clear -- ‘go root for your favorite team you six-pack swilling cretin, we’ll manage the art.’

It won’t work forever.