ruined by wealth -- rich people’s art

‘Radicalism has lurched to the right, and ...... challenges sophisticated art’s presumption to the crown of American culture, .............. awkward for those whose careers depend on rich collectors and elite institutions, sitting ducks for plain-folk resentments.’ New Yorker, mar 27

One art writer I try to read is Peter Schjeldahl, a contributor to every third or fourth New Yorker, and he’s one articulate hollow horn. Clear and confident, he applies a wry and astute observation founded in a vast familiarity with every sort of art there is, entertaining and informative. Sorry to say he’s an elitist and proud of it, explainer for big art, big money, and the elevated sensibility of the one percent Bernie’s been hollering about, warning us against. Oh, they hide their big houses behind security gates and avoid the public eye in skyboxes, but they parade in tiaras and silk ties for art.

They think they own the show. It’s just something else they stole along with all that money. Now I shouldn’t fault the rich, but I’m gonna. I got me a case of the ‘plain-folk resentments’ up to here. Rich people’s art is another example of too-much-money tribalism, not just members-only at the club but a taste in art no common working person would care to follow, a brand-name fetishism tinged with silly and ugly, and expensive beyond belief. I, for one, don’t believe it.

Does all that money bend reality, it sure tries. When it comes to art, those big names get traded around like poker chips, bought at auction and donated for tax credit to the complicit museum director, champagne all around. Academics emulate, defensible from every angle, and downtown gallery directors troll for social aspirants in from the countryside citing a long listing of official approvals, testimonials, and previous price points. It’s become a whole industry, but down on the ground, far from urban penthouses, strip mall galleries find it difficult to unload the product. Like one of those multi-level sales schemes in which the higher-ups make millions, if you believe it, but garages fill with unsold herbals, the galleries in satellite cities are full of expensive art no one wants to buy, while they sit and sigh about the common tastes of the customer.

This really isn’t difficult. Rich will be going out of fashion soon. Oh they won’t lose their money, but suddenly it won’t seem so cool to be draining resources away from the ‘plain folk’ just to spend fifty million for a yard of painted fabric, break out the champagne -- not so fast. Resentment, maybe some is due, but I wouldn’t care for that art any more than today’s minor leaguers looking for their shot, meanwhile rolling in grant money. Plain folk, as it turns out, have more respect for art and the effort it takes to produce it than the filthy rich and all those who want to be like them. Life experience, can’t beat it when it comes to looking at art, and the tilt of recent economic trends has more people experiencing life more directly, now that most of the comfort has drifted upward, if you get my drift.

To ease the change in your own life, look for art you find personally appealing, you’ll find some solace there. Don’t pretend an interest, nodding with furrowed brow, in front of the fabulously famous and morbidly expensive sign-making on display in major museums everywhere, made possible by generous donation of some renowned foundation or wealthy couple, wink. The real revolution is in the head, everyone’s head at once, and it seeks human value that can’t be bought and sold, but can be expressed through art. Time to buy some.

*** for a graphic illustration of how the same facts can support opposite conclusions, consider ‘the case of the 330 million dollar finger,’ posted 1/16/14 on 'owning art,' a discussion of the financial crisis in Detroit and the issue of selling the collection of their art museum. Schjeldahl's rebuttal, from the magazine, are included in comments. 

art of revolution -- self-verifying grassroots

There’s a revolution at hand simply because it’s time, the old system worn out and sinking slowly, its basic contradictions having come home to roost. The industrial expansion after WWII started the money percolating upward and we all got a taste, but thick foam has formed at the top and the fizzing has been getting less. Time to stir it up again. Right or left, it teeters, and technology will serve whichever, sane and sustainable or no place to hide.

Art has a part, an extremely asymmetrical insurgency down on the ground, behind the scenes, and it's partisan for the sane and sustainable, the full realization of human potential, the more humane and most pleasant side. Don’t expect the state to help with this. Committees will choose the art that fills the space closest to budget, with some left over for lunch and such, but won’t enhance the escalator ride all that much. The revolution is going to start underground, below the media’s academic erudition, behind the non-profit curator’s back, but you’ll see it coming.

Art will go up in restaurants and offices, direct from the hand of the artist to the eye of the viewer, like a live performance all the time, and it’s bound to connect person to person, what art does best. ‘One-day’ painting events draw figurative artists out in the open where interested citizens can compare their color sketches to familiar neighborhood sights. These are catapults against the art establishment’s insistence on exclusion and cutting-edge obscurity. When enough local art is seen, accepted, and purchased to become self-sustaining, art becomes a viable avenue for community expression and self awareness, and political concerns and environmental sensitivity are in there too.

Trust yourself to look at art, to see what’s there, to learn what makes it good or bad, it’s political. Ceding personal autonomy to higher authority has crossover consequences, and a good beginning at taking it back is accepting the responsibility to see and judge works of art. As a fact, the fascists hate art and artists, in case you needed a further hint, so join the revolution and see for yourself. 

disdain and envy -- other people

Few people around here understand art, but even less than that get artists -- who do they think they are? They won’t hitch up, refuse to define themselves by assignment in the great corporate machine, won’t chase the carrot and always trying to avoid the stick. Misfits by choice, mostly, although refugees innately allergic to the conventions of daily life where they came from, harboring varying degrees of post-stress, wander in. As Freud supposedly suggested, it’s a community invested in self therapy.

In-laws assume incompetence straight away, and business people, even part time employers, give the artist a fishy look, unsure if some ordinary gross superlative concerning the local sports team would elicit more than a smirk, such sulky superior assholes. It takes thick skin, a willingness to show up with paint on your pants, to drive an old car, to live with the inconveniences a lack of money provides, just to make art on your own time. It’s always going to be easier to make more money doing something else, or even to make art that’s easier to sell, but once out this far why compromise? Serious artists tend to be stubborn and self-driven, not unlike old school farmers in a GPS world.

There are compensations for a life in art. Expectations aren’t just low, they’re commodious. It’s difficult to imagine what deviancy, in dress or behavior, would be considered out of bounds for an artist, a great cover for a simple private existence of one’s own choosing. Social pressures are minimal, and the sincerity of friends isn’t questioned since no one expects even an expensive meal in your company. Rich folks will understand. As a fact, ordinary people have a soft spot for artists, and sometimes trade services for art, tear up lunch tabs, and even look intently at their artwork.

There’s a land that I heard of where artists are respected for the life choices they’ve made, the risk they’ve taken, and for their calling to express in the raw the anguish and joy of existence, before it’s pressed out, prepackaged as entertainment, and thrown away. It isn’t someplace else, it just isn’t now.   

speculation and fraud -- thin red lines

‘The contemporary market has been subject to extreme speculation, but there is a difference between speculation and fraud.’ from some online mag
 
Doesn’t that say it all? There’s a thin red line somewhere dividing honest, reputable people in the field of art from the shysters and manipulators, but we don’t know where it is, and they’ve lost track themselves. It isn’t just about money, institutions form little duck ponds by damming up the steam, prestige and dollars passed out by cultural agencies like they were grading class projects. It’s social issues at the moment, the feckless sort of complaining permissible under state control. They’re calling it serious art, the only serious art, sponsoring exhibits, padding resumes. 

On the speculation side, suppose you’re considering three point five for a mega-star deceased, not knowing there are three hundred nearly identical paintings warehoused somewhere, and that the one in front of you is a forgery, not overly significant since the artist didn’t paint the real ones either -- too boring, hired hourly assistants. Wouldn’t touch it myself, you understand, having survived a lifetime of advertising, phony promises and outrageous lies, but I’m sure you’ll make it all back, unless, of course, the bottom falls out, so sad.

I have no interest in any of it, don’t care to keep up, a lumpen philistine am I, and with further delusion, presume to project this state of mind on a lot of other people I’ve never met, and only imagine to be out there. This ghost army does like art, however, firstly as a way to consolidate their home’s value into something they can see and live with everyday, and which travels with them when they move, sane and practical. They may not know it yet, but a significant painting in the family will read back all that it’s seen years from now, witness and then touchstone of life’s important events, practical and priceless. At present, it's the price that holds them back, ‘extreme speculation’ and artists on salary distorting market values, but regions will eventually determine their own prices as practical people start wanting to own some, start looking around and educating themselves.

too much time -- a royal solution

We’re heading for a crisis, it’s a coming. Pretty soon there’ll be no work for humans, machines will do it all. Ditch diggers, the proverbial bottom rung, are gone already, one guy pulls levers while a digger made of iron does the work of several. Robots move up the ladder fixing food, performing surgery, doing the taxes. Before long they’ll be driving cars and trucks, and that’s when it becomes seriously awkward. Way more than half the jobs for men in america involve driving something, and what are all those guys going to do? 

We’ve had experience supporting people who don’t work, who aren’t productive, and it hasn’t been pretty. Warehoused people don’t excel. Back home they have a tendency to sit up in the government housing, front brains flickering out on prescription medicinals, watching sit-coms from the fifties, it’s all fuzzy, they don’t care. What happens to rest of us when there are no jobs? The old ball and chain that earns our bread helps us maintain focus, organizes the week, and presents us with achievable goals to work toward. One day some sleepless plastic and metal bot bumps you out of your job, and it will be there ahead of you by the time you retrain. What’s the incentive to rise in the morning, comb the hair, exercise, without work? It’s a fierce problem, socially as big as global warming, and solutions haven’t even been proposed.

Prince Charles, a lovely fella, hosted a documentary about painters among the royal family, ‘royal paintbox’, pbs archive, the useless people at the other end of the spectrum. They’ve seen what happens, over generations, to people who never have to make their bed, wash a dish, or saddle their own horse, and they search for meaning, for mission, anything to avoid the rot of the indulgent, unproductive life. Some, it seems, turned to art. As Charles leaves through a portfolio, you might catch yourself thinking some of these people, both sexes, where really good, like it’s a surprise. Charles explains the ability to sketch made it possible for the royals to recall the exotic landscapes, cities, and peoples they’d seen visiting the global empire, and it got serious from there. Not likely to lead the cavalry charge, subdue an uprising, or even bully their neighbors, anymore, the royals found in art a way to develop and demonstrate character, and to match themselves against the finest painters among the commoners whose hard-won accomplishments they admired and respected.

Their biographies are there in the notebook sketches, apart from the words. Here is a watercolor impression of perhaps north africa, palms in quick sure strokes, confident and deft, domes, people, camels. The person who made this painting was not meek, wasn’t hesitant or nitpicking careful. They were, in fact, totally spontaneous, in command of their medium, and sure of themselves. Their sketch also probably looks pretty much like the place when they made it, the atmosphere, time of day. It doesn’t look that way anymore, but the character, discipline, and wit of the artist remains, their mark as a serious person in the face of privilege and infinite leisure. If the serfdom of machines leaves us with too much time on our hands, what will we do? Chances are in days to come we’ll know a lot more, think a lot more, and some of us will even spend their time making art.

capitalism’s crucible -- people’s choice

Capitalism is an economic system that allows people with intelligence and self-discipline to rise above the social station of their parents, to own a home, to earn a degree, to make a million, but no matter how you slice it the ten percent at the top will see themselves as precious and apart, while the ten percent at the bottom are pushed off the bus, can’t be avoided. Social programs reduce the horror, pensions and welfare, but facing it alone can be daunting, and no matter where you start, it’s all a trapeze act over a gaping, pitiless abyss, aka failure, drug addiction, and poverty -- living on the street. 

Life and death competition from an early age isn’t something we invented, most creatures in nature face a similar situation, but this modern version has been wonderfully productive as compared to caliphates and kingdoms, clans and collectives. Desperation and glory come to the dance arm in arm, and taking dire chances produces the advancement we see expanding geometric as we speak. This crucible of the open market, oddly enough, does not drive art these days, which resembles more a corrupt form of crony socialism in our midst. 

At the top it’s a fetish market, the artificial scarcity of just a few sanctioned names, ready to run a few more generations on the ‘new money’ capitalism is bringing in from all over the world -- 'yes, already rich people spend their money on this stuff, you’re welcome.' They’re set for life even if the government does rewrite the tax laws regarding donations to art museums, don’t bet on it. They control anything left with ‘funding,’ granting agencies behind every bush fielding applications, tossing out the independents, the direct communicators, any art and artist who might generate a popular following.

Bureaucrats probably aren’t bad people, and don’t prefer obscure contemporary art for aesthetic reasons, oh no, more a deep institutional imperative favoring self-perpetuation. ‘Art for everyone’ is just the cover motto for instead being ‘up to date,’ same as perpetually out of reach. Time to turn the tables, as in turn them over, and release art, artists, and everyone else from the yoke of ‘community support,’ and allow the economic system to work. Allow the population the chance at a more accessible, more comparable and understandable, more ownable art being produced right around here -- and see once and for all if art can compete and survive like the rest of us.

what does it mean -- what paintings do

Curious citizens can’t decide what to look at, the painting itself or what it’s about. Which way to go depends on what decade magazine you pick up, new theories popping from the chest of the last big thing, elbowing to the front of the line. It’s difficult to tell what you’re supposed to be seeing. With canted brow self-proclaimed authorities presume to be in touch, having acquired degrees it’s well known, but something is happening here and they don’t know what it is. 

Sometimes theories get out of hand. Radical extremists in the fifties, insisting their art must be seen totally for itself alone, banned outside reference of any kind, and we had no pictures of anything for years and years. Now there’s a crew claiming the art is just the signifier of some larger truth, some bigger issue -- refreshingly sketchy, unencumbered with trying too hard or having had too much practice.

Come with me down side streets to avoid the jam up on main, horns blaring, tempers rising. First it must be clear, painting isn’t anything like photography, even though they sometimes cover the same beat, enter at the same door. The painter applies color to a blank surface in an attempt to beguile the viewer into paying attention for more than a moment, not such an easy task. Even better would be to create an image that penetrates the scales of habituation and indifference covering most people’s eyes, constructing a picture perpetually present, forever interesting. 

There are no rules for how this is done, although conditions change. Currently the terms of citizenship move under our feet, digital engineers far from sunlight are boring into our back brains, and people watch jumbo-trons with replays instead of the puny little players down on the field. It’s becoming difficult to believe anything, especially anything seen -- imagine Elvis in any context imaginable. That’s the task of the painter, break through all that. It’s a challenge, and it doesn’t help that the art establishment, top to bottom, is in the corner trying to find a withered vein, addicted to controversy and sensationalism, terminal, so sad. 

Paintings don’t change and that’s their charm. Oh, they won’t flash through the sensory circuits like pornographic pickups shooting lasers, whatever your device is selling, but they gain by repetition, becoming more solid and real over time. Buying a painting is actually an investment in your own future, but the possibility of selling it again for more money is considered elsewhere. Finally, when dealing directly with art, seeing what’s actually there both requires independence in the viewer and causes it as well -- an incremental, barely-noticeable advantage day to day.

the art of controversy -- who paints what

nbc news online -- #MuseumsSoWhite: Black Pain and Why Painting Emmett Till Matters
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/museumssowhite-representation-black-pain-why-emmett-till-painting-matters-n737931
  
They’ve been having a dumb argument about who gets to paint what, without bothering to look at the paintings. In this particular case the succinct answer is no one gets to paint this subject, the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till. The photograph is sufficient, there’s nothing more to say.

These two artists, one white, one black, have choreographed a fake news event over a martyr’s dead body, leap frogging up through the google search, the way we do things around here. Something overlooked in all the mad discussion is how marvelously ‘deskilled’ both these painters actually are. They’ve managed to present works of art at sixth grade level, we like to
keep them busy on rainy days -- kudos to you. Who needs to ‘learn to paint’ when just a simple smeary gesture says it all, makes all the national magazines, becomes an item on the news.

This is the bottom, no further down to go. At this point visual art has been reduced to a token for some current view-screen issue, just a place-holder, boring if it says too much. This is a sadly limited way to think about art, as a chic form of advertising for some social cause, made more potent, presumably, by its offhanded, could care less manner of presentation. Generate volumes of controversy if you can, but it still won’t be much to look at. Time to walk away.

Artists all around have moved on to something different, tired of earning the highly quotable press review but no money, a mostly academic privilege in the first place. With federal and state funding draining away, artists struggle with their own commitment as a way to imbue their art with substance, instead of borrowing from someone else's grief. Do the common folk respond? I don’t know, too early to tell. I am pretty sure they won’t ever give a damn about this dumb, disrespectful and demeaning artificial argument.