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.