art’s tension -- communication vs hiding

"Artists Are People Driven by the Tension Between the Desire to Communicate and the Desire to Hide" 
Don’t know who said it, doesn’t matter, sure sums it up. Yes, that’s the high wire, the razor’s edge to negotiate if you want to make art, and it’s something to keep in mind if you care to understand it. Art addresses a built in human dilemma made particularly intense in impersonal contemporary times. To ‘communicate’ as an artist requires a willingness to become vulnerable, to reveal the inner self, something most folks wouldn’t consider doing in public. Turns out there are ways to work around the embarrassing part if everyone pulls together, an excuse to hide behind the art.

The period immediately following WWII witnessed art veering harshly to the right, into a radical fundamentalism called ‘abstract expressionism’ which banned depiction of anything, pissed on art history, and generally made a mess, so daring. The quite mature artist in John Fowles story ‘Ebony Tower,’ called it a failure of nerve after the great human trauma of the war, a decision by art, and the culture behind it, to hide its face. The image, the conduit of thought and feeling, the vehicle of visual communication, was lost. Much of abstract art reveals the artist only by default, in the blankness of its form, the featureless green panel of Elsworth Kelly and the opaque and hidden mentality behind it.

The conspiracy involved a motley crew of self-perpetuating government agencies and slightly shady commercial opportunists. The notion that representational art is ‘simply copying nature’ has been infinitely repeated in campus rookeries where legions of artists have been hiding out for decades comfortable with benefits, don’t rock the boat. Up from bible door to door in alligator shoes to the heavyweight uptown galleries tourists never see, the salesman of the mystic ‘intangible’ is a wizard of human insecurities, pleased to sell you your own tie. Mostly we’ve been living in a society willing to hardly notice abstract art in motel lobbies, in board rooms, anywhere a point of view of any persuasion would be avoided. We’ve become distracted.

At some point there’s an awakening, folks rub their eyes and want to see what’s there, suddenly more interested in their own everyday experience, and art that confronts it. The artist willing to let you decide if this painting they’ve made reminds you of something you’ve seen before is taking a big chance in the first place. Oh they may say they don’t care, but that would make them just an illustrator, and they have way more invested. Acknowledging that vulnerability, and how well they’ve earned your trust in return, is the first line of you talking back. This is a conversation that takes courage both ways. In the end it isn’t the artists who make this decision but the culture itself which turns all of its heads as one, and chooses a new vision and an evolving art that communicates frankly and directly what they see and how they feel about themselves.  

punctuated vision -- sudden sight

The world looks different from a new point of view, and it changes in chunks. The recent election has helped a large portion of the population to focus on substance, and has reminded individuals to make critical personal choices for themselves. When a new consciousness appears art changes.

Art is a search for common meaning, for a welcome sign in the crowd, a glimpse of your own reflection in all the art to be seen these days. That’s right. The center of the universe is at your feet when it comes to art, and it moves forward when you do. The standards within a community should be a collaboration between art producers and the population that supports and owns art, and don’t they grow together? Once the myth of secret knowledge blows away, art can be evaluated at face value, which means in direct comparison to the other art available. Both art and the population's discernment get better geometric.

A common sci-fi theme from the fifties -- one summer night a meteor lands in a field just outside of town, and all the children conceived that year share some common alien bond, so creepy. Big jolts to the system, the economic collapse in 08, our recent election, kick over slow social evolution and produce a new mentality that spreads on contact, making old ideas obsolete. In an increasingly digitalized reality will citizens come to value the singular created object as something rare and unique, seeing in art a reward and a refuge for individual thought? Maybe.

If it happens, art all at once seems interesting to a new demographic, the same folks who didn’t much care before -- they won’t know why. If about the same time artists find a more accessible means of expression, if media on all levels become more open-minded about the art they cover, and if non-profits devote more effort to developing an audience for local artists than in cultivating tribal identity for ‘we progressives,’ a self-sustaining art exchange between studios and private ownership might occur, a more authentic regional character would eventually be expressed, and common civility, understanding, and empathy would become easier all around.

comes around -- karma’s tool box

Hey progressives, does it seem ironic to you that the tinhorn mercenary values you abhor in Donald Trump are the exact same qualities you celebrated in Andy Warhol just a generation back? Up on Olympus they noticed. Let’s give them a dose of the real thing, greedy, shallow, and dumb, and see how much they like living it. Was it the russians, was it the FBI, who primed the pump to produce this fiasco -- it was you.

As a person Warhol was a translucent newt-boy, so unwholesome and genderless, so inarticulate and evasive, so morbidly shallow and celebrity sodden one wondered if sunlight would reduce him to a wisp straight away, but it’s the art that’s been corrosive. If you can believe a blow up of a soup can is art, not just art but worth tens of thousands, and no one knowing how many there are, you sorta deserve your Trump. So sad.

Meanwhile high above the clouds the minor god of contemporary art has run amok, offending the immortals with tinny imitation, mindless repetition, and relaxed moral judgement leaking out into business, scholarship, and yes, even politics. There are forces at play here larger than the candidates, more powerful than puny policies, and we act it out down here on earth. How do you like fake news?  

Solutions are simple if you still believe the the old gods -- change the art. Seek out the qualities you admire, integrity and accomplishment, commitment and originality, and buy some, hang it where you see it everyday. Not right away, but in time see it all begin to change into a world where human dignity, dedication, and honesty mean more than they do these days.

gimme some truth -- faking the news

Seems somebody sabotaged our truth meter, abused their exalted positions as experts and sold a line of crap so corrupt the whole enterprise is being called into question. It’s getting to the point any person of dubious intent can make up the news, and if enough people believe it might as well call it truth.

Where is the festering source of this herd-like delusion regarding what’s actually going on? It isn’t in the history books, slanted perhaps, but largely accurate when it comes to facts, and it doesn’t come from science, intimately engaged with reality and aware of actual consequences. Could it be art, which has insisted for decades that repetitious signage was worth obscene amounts of money, touting an aesthetic system patently at odds with common sensibilities? It’s more than possible, and the tax code rides shotgun. For all its glamour and prestige, contemporary art is a confidence game carried out in plain sight, a robbery during business hours, and the culture pays the price when no one believes anyone, anymore.

‘Who are you gonna believe’ is the question of the moment, the lying art magazines, the compensated critics, the safe and warm academics, or your own eyes? Unless you happen to be an impeccably sophisticated urbanite high above street level, you can’t do both. Everyday people like pictures, but the art industry doesn’t. Actual inherent worth in a work of art gets in the way of their spiel, confuses their issues, defeats their bluebook assessments. Take a charming little painting from above the mantle to a certified appraiser who might glance out of vague curiosity, then looks in a book. Can’t find the name, signature indistinct, according to them, worthless. You didn’t want to sell it anyway.

In the face of dire conditions can we expect an upgrade in the discernment of a free and self-reliant people, one day soon responding to an art more truly reflective of the interests and aspirations of their region, their generation, and the individual’s place in the world? If it happened the resulting grounding of owning art would ripple out, inform the day, and insist on a personal verification for stuff believed.

price sells art -- car lot logic

In the market, the price of art represents what ‘someone else is willing to pay for it’ -- a dealer explains it this way, and it’s not much of a test. There’s lots of folks with more disposable loot than you, ready to spend you under the table any direction, just a given. When making a major purchase of any kind we usually need more information, like does it work, will it last, does it improve my life enough to justify the sacrifice I’m making to own it? Can’t do that with art, the only specs you’ll receive are in the resume, a history of prior sales.

With the point of view engendered when ‘working on commission’ beneath it all, art has wandered into regions so self-referential and inverted, attained counter points of idiocy so refined it’s beginning to give excessive wealth a bad name. That’s not all. Practical folks who in some degree rub up against cold reality every day don’t have time for the snotty obtuseness, the industrial ugliness, with the most hideous mockeries rising to the top -- google ‘Koons, Hirst’. Art’s a mess when greed drives the bus.

An individual work of art should have presence on its own, and the artist decides how to get there, there are no rules. You, yes you, get to judge the degree to which they’ve been successful, not by glancing sideways to gage the reactions of persons standing next to you, but by internally feeling something -- a sudden loosening of knots, an instantaneous awareness of surroundings, something wholly personal, you’ll know. Not surprisingly, this experience is totally unrelated to what someone would be willing to pay for it. We don’t have to be like them, the trophy gathering ninnies, to look at art, to admire and understand art, to own and live with art in our homes.

new year -- old fashioned support

The new president and our governor just like him think business solves everything, and then there’s me. I also agree that the government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers, governs best that governs least, and that welfare is detrimental to incentive and innovation, but I’ll stay out of politics. I’m only talking about art.

Artistic ferment we’ve got, a university town becomes a lens for it in a less than progressive state, but there’s a change of mood all over. Tenuous and arbitrary, ready to dart right of left, no one knows what’s going to be happening six months from now in the broadest sense, and we’re all a bit on edge. While the window is open for creativity and artistic expression, it might be wise to prop it up, establish a sustainability and independence that survives sudden policy changes from above.

In this moment we have the artists, multifaceted ultra-supportive media, outdoor murals and youthful enthusiasm -- what’s missing is business, the public buying art. A seed in gravel, to borrow an expression, springs up quickly but establishes no root, withering when support dries up as it does when government changes priorities. Art has to penetrate the community to actually become viable, go up in houses, be seen in public settings, become familiar and meaningful to those who’ve been showing little interest up until now. It’s a good thing art is being produced in studios popping up all around, and that’s a first step, but artists need real income and more importantly, there has to be more opportunity for average citizens to experience and own original art.

The crux is this -- life is too stupid if individual identity and expression are limited to a make of car and brand of whiskey, like they’ll try to tell you on TV. Art is the curry that makes all this manufactured sameness palatable, and it’s been missing for most folks, ironically prone to turn rancid when hoarded by a few. Its ‘function’ in this modern life is to humanize the house, to elevate the workplace, to provide a touchstone of uniqueness that endures. 

Civic entities with strong central control put up lots of public monuments, fountains, commissioned art, just saying, but democratic ideals lead to solar on the roof and art up in the house. The business of art -- individual studios producing artwork to be purchased and hung in homes and offices seems particularly feasible in the current climate. In the new year, if art becomes more accessible, more open to comparison and appraisal, a curious public may notice and begin to support art and artists the old fashioned way.