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.