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.