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 Doesn’t it seem like somewhere out there, someone would want to own something that didn’t depreciate, go out of date, or get ground up for recycle every ten years or so?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.
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