paintings -- common ingredient

How rich do you have to be for a pile of something somewhere in your expansive house to be obviously art? What instructions will you give the housekeeper, do you have to call the artist to move it, are underlings going to laugh behind your back? Other rich people will understand because you’ll tell them how much you paid for it, or you’ll expect them to know already, but be warned, away from the dazzle of the expo your deskilled assemblage might not like the morning light. 

Paintings, on the other hand, are portable, and up off the floor they stay out of the way. When you move they stack together in the van, and when well-made are easily maintained, should last forever. Sizes vary, but mostly paintings are all the same, just colors arranged on a flat, rectangular surface. Buying and selling should be easy, the painting, itself, like the puppy in the window, just wanting to be loved and to find a good home, but it isn’t. 

The complicated part is price, how is it determined and what does it have to do with the inherent worth of the object? Actually, less and less. It’s a common but inverted logic that suggests price determines value. Anyone can see being very expensive is just a big bluff until someone writes the check, and then all of a sudden it’s real, don’t you see? If you have a few extra bucks and a yen for exotic poker, the art game is tailor-made for you -- hold ‘em, fold ‘em, bet on the next big thing. 

Owning art maintains the quixotic notion that commitment, vision, and accomplishment ought to determine price, relative, of course, to the other art around. Simple as that. Rather than consulting a listing of prior affirmations, and factoring in the uptown, high-rent location of the gallery, we suggest looking straight away at the art. Nothing but open-minded, and without regard to abstract or representational, the essential question becomes does this painting sustain a gravitational pull on the attention, is it noticed each time seen? It’s a visual test based on the direct experience of the viewer, and also represents the basic aspiration of anyone who tries to make a picture. All the rest is sauce, at the top a curry of high fashion and tribal identity, the hulking edifice of the art-industrial complex turns out to be a fancy restaurant that somehow lost the meat.

glimmer and shine -- visually challenged

The Art Market Has Changed Dramatically -- but Is It a Mature Industry?
an ‘Artsy’ editorial by Anna Louie Sussman     Jul 8th

The above article contained the following: Yet this sense of exclusivity, even snobbery, is not just a fact of the art market, but the thing that makes it glimmer and shine, said Olav Velthuis, sociology professor at University of Amsterdam. “It is that part of the market that makes it attractive to people, the whole spiel about the waiting lists, and about getting access and not getting access.” Art acquisition serves as “a status mechanism,” he said, a way for the newly wealthy to understand “where they are in this global cultural elite.”
 
So true dat. I certainly don’t have the credentials to question it, haven’t kept up in any case, and frankly find the politics implied sordid and despicable, but it doesn’t matter. The Venice Biennale, a running with the mega rich, is far, far, far away. The rich, I’ll remind you, are not like you or I, and the art they like varies from year to year along with handbags and super-cars, and all the other super neat stuff they use and discard. So far down in the world’s ‘cultural elite’ I don’t care much for any of it, and that isn’t what I mean when I say art. 

A hundred years back machine tools, cranks and levers, basic parts would have floral motifs graved into the faces of the metal. Didn’t make them work any better, just a reminder of humanity amid the heat and grease, one grimy, smoky reality saying hello to another. Some would call that part ‘non-functional,‘ but a part of the whole, testimony to the craftsmanship of the part itself, would be more correct. Art, it’s true, doesn’t perform a task, but it speaks -- about the artist, about the person who chooses it, and sometimes about everyone and our time on earth.

So who are you, just a spectator here to experience what’s it’s like to be rich third-hand, to become emotionally wrought for moments at a time about deprivations and injustices far away, for which we accept not a twinge of responsibility? Apply yourself to art, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, and what you know about art so far, and it will begin to answer back. It’s like finding a room in your head you didn’t know was there. For quickest results look at everything, good and bad, expensive and cheap, and let your brain sort it out so natural. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was as easy for the massively wealthy, but it isn’t.

smarter -- home remedies

Dumb and dumber audiences, the museum directors’ lament. Well, if they want movie posters we’ll cook up a traveling exhibit, scanty attire and guns a blazin’, mindless action and prostituted art. The board has been insisting we keep up appearances with cars in the parking lot when fronting for their convenient philanthropies. One suspects, considering the current state of contemporary art, that someone’s heart is in the wrong place.

It’s amusing, sorta, when institutions cause a problem and then complain about it. Woeful indeed is the state of visual art these days, the grant dependent crowd flogging gender and racial motifs with the flimsiest of backgrounds and only casual control of their medium, whatever it might be. The already famous are farming it out anyway. Oh glamorous art establishment, as your dollar-drunk cruise ship sinks slowly in your own poisonous lagoon, surrounded by multi-million dollar flotsam, smears and drips and half-baked signage, we bid farewell.

Out here we’re concerned about distribution, ownership, the real business of making art in the real world. Fame must be nice, so many people chase, but it seems relatively unimportant to the reasonably secure adult engaged with work and family, normal. Do they like art? Well, no, not the stuff they see featured on the news, in the magazines, covered tabloid style online. Conceptual art is over their heads, off their view-screens, call them dummies if you must. When they think about the art at all they must first confront a tsunami of corny stunts, preposterous nonsense -- Christo’s fence, Koon’s Popeye, Hirst’s pickled goat, who’s a dummy?

It’s much easier to start from the bottom than the top. An actual market for art doesn’t begin the bidding at fifty million, more probably three or four hundred. May not be top-notch, the artist isn’t attempting to make a living but trying hard, revealing potential, probably getting better. One out of ten in this price range will be worth the money, probably more, and it’s a good place to start. It’s up to you to figure out which one it is, and if you make a mistake won’t hurt too bad. As soon as you take this first step automatic processes engage, gears slip into position, and you’re accepted into the club.

Sometimes called ‘buyer’s remorse,’ there’s a simple mechanism in our heads that second guesses every dollar spent, and makes us smarter for next time, we rely on it. Use it like an escalator when learning about art. Simply seeing other art will inevitably inform you if you made the right choice, and if not you’ll be smarter about it next time, see? After a while you’ll understand why some paintings are worth more, even a lot more, and it won’t have anything to do with the artist’s social life, or even who they are.

art as antidote -- ditching dope

Today we’re going to talk about the most important attribute you have, any creature has down to the mud-dwelling mollusk -- simple attention, the ability to recognize what’s important. The wolf’s howl may be farther away but somehow more relevant, worth taking more seriously than the hoot of an owl. And so it goes, we’re built to survey the territory and guide ourselves accordingly -- all of us, anything that moves. 

Milk of the poppy is flooding the land, and it gets anybody, all walks of life, every economic level, young and old. This chemical dulls the attention, that’s its job. That’s also why it’s so popular, and it isn’t being used for just physical pain. That’s only an excuse in the beginning. So many of them die, and if you could ask them the question just as the EMT squirts in the narcan, a large number would probably pass, tired of the life they’ve been living. This seems unnatural.

The evening news likes squalor and shows us mud streets with sewage, blowing paper and trash, houses made of salvaged sheet metal, and out in front a gang of laughing kids, showing each other affection, giggling at the odd stranger in a safari jacket and his sidekick with a camera. To our eyes, sodden as we are with modern conveniences, their joy doesn’t seem natural either. Just what the hell is going on?

You’re not a genius, over-stimulation is going to overwhelm you. Your bucket for attention only holds so much, and when it overflows you feel bored. As a fact, that’s one of the ways you can tell. More input, turning everything up to nine, more watts of sound and more pixels in the eye doesn’t help, in fact just makes it worse. Who isn’t on board so far? Who among us hasn’t noticed this already on their own? Turns out there can be such a thing as too much fun.

Instead of narcan, we suggest owning art, looking at art, becoming comfortable with it. Art grooms the attention, that’s its job. Art on the wall doesn’t shoot lasers, has no digital components, won’t interact -- it’s just an arrangement of colors on a flat surface. If it’s good art, it’s continually worthy of your attention, that’s the test. Sit in your living room and look at it. Mental processes stop racing, something you may not have noticed until it all begins to slow down. Contemplating a work of art reveals more than you thought was there at first in the hours, days, and years you spend with it, and you’ll start noticing other stuff too, birds singing in the parking lot, the color of the sky in traffic. More than that, you won’t be wanting to turn it all off with a pill.