advocating for art -- gimme gimme

“Remember, governments don’t cut arts funding to save money. They do it when they are afraid of what artists say and do."

”Saw this interesting quote on facebook, and didn’t know whether to register amusement or grief. It was said with all the brusque defiance of a teenager demanding the family car, and demonstrated a similar self-serving crybaby logic. Where is this phalanx of artists ready to bite the hand that feeds them, and where is this hand that passes out goodies to biters? I’d like to know. That isn’t the way life works, not since I’ve been here. Artists who live on government subsidy are pets, patted on the head and given a patch to play in.

Saying that out loud may be offensive to some, but show me different. I’ve been to the graduate/faculty show over at the U, and I didn’t see too much for the government to fear. Actually, I also didn’t see much to like, by anyone. What sort of art do you have in your houses, people? Broken teacups on the floor and six foot cream-color sculptures of snot, I doubt it. I suspect without massive ‘funding‘ you’d have to look for other work, or maybe apply yourself to reaching out to fellow citizens, identifying with the community you live in, and producing an art that speaks to some common aspiration, whether the government approves or not. Sounds harsh, so sorry.

I understand they seem alien, the people who actually contribute from their own lively-hoods to provide all these swell studios, the professional grade gallery spaces, and send their kids off to school hoping to learn about art. The rich people in tuxes have shifted your sizable burden down onto them, and their accountants and lawyers also ride. It’s a little unseemly for you to express your contempt for the sensibilities of common folk, or study on ways to offend them, maybe to gain a moment’s notoriety or just to express your cultural superiority. All in all, sorta looks like pooping in the hand that just handed you a twenty, sad.

The government would be just as happy if art and artists said nothing at all, since those on top want to run everything. Art represents a level of communication, of human interaction, they can’t control and it makes them uneasy. Rather than censor and harass the way the fascists do, democratic governments would rather subsidize obscurity, blind the court jester and pull out his tongue. It’s done with peer group reviewers who recognize their own, the freeloader’s wink and nod, and at the same time they create a huge unassailable money sink to launder tons of stinky cash and avoid paying legitimate taxes. Rejoicing all around except for the culture losing its eyes and a voice, the people who pay and yet are deprived of this means of realization and growth, along with the artists who attempt to live from their art in their own communities.

If you don’t like government censorship, don’t take their money. Give up your swell studio and grant allowances, paycheck with parking space, and ease on out into the deep end of the pool where art is a two way enterprise, meeting a public halfway and providing a value worth the money, an improvement for their lives. I can see why you whine when purse strings get tight, but don’t bitch about a government you’re part of, agents of anti-art, you share in the guilt. No sympathy.

mild media nausea -- home remedies

Do international trolls fanning the embers of paranoia in the survivalist community create the chaos, or are those dark imaginings just the organic result of social media, and does it really matter? Probably not. The trolls didn’t invent paranoia, they just poke it through the bars of its cage, amping up non-specific petty resentments into white-hot hysteria, attempting to push the conspiracy-minded adrift on their own armed island of insanity. Mad scientists direct the show and tell the trolls what to say, just technicians after all, it’s like their day job.

These scientists are busy molding the world for others from inside their heads, pumping out little pleasure bumps for just the right answers, scaring them to get their attention and then making them mad, steering chunks of the population like sheep into separate penned enclosures. From the outside we can just watch it happen, and if some superhero from the comics doesn’t intervene soon, save the day, we’re all getting marched right back to the middle ages, only this time with wall to wall surveillance and machine gun towers. Where are the lines of resistance? Who stands against these big-number mass-manipulators, and how does the individual keep their feet when the swirling digital whirlpool is dissolving the floor? 

Painters fight a rear-guard action, keeping open the gate to three dimensional spatial awareness, the so-called ‘real world,’ by expanding unique moments and freezing the flow of sensation in an act of total attention, the proof embodied in its artifact, the work of art. At this point I feel obligated to acknowledge there are others who define art differently, well ok, everybody else, but time seems short, and while not ready to panic, it might be time to reconsider painting as the visual art form it was back before it became ‘anything at all.’ Painting as a technology doesn’t just record reality, even when it tries -- it alters it. Consider how malleable reality is for online vermin with their flickering outrage videos and insane accusations, and then imagine the power, over time, of a painting that never changes, that absorbs and collects memories, and that somehow has you constantly noticing stuff for the first time.

Can’t take it lightly. People travel far, leap out of airplanes, splash through rough canyons, try exotic desserts, all in the hope of feeling something, a reminder of being alive, each day of the week so dull and boring. It’s like an epidemic. Take a shortcut, buy some art. Occasionally consider the talent and time it took to make it and the personality and human feeling put into it, although the art should be whispering this to you all the time on its own. Better art says it louder, that’s how you can tell. The reason to own and live with art is to establish your own little garden at home, a nice non-digital place to sit down, and to access the upper floors of your perception when out in the world, a better view than endless streaming video has to offer. Art is a concentrate, the distilled essence of what’s been left out of modern life. Art on the wall is a seasoning for the bland porridge of everyday existence, a wedge to hold open the doors of perception, and an antidote for the toxicity of strident talking heads on the telly every evening.

mutable reality -- personal mile-markers

 I’ve quoted ‘Dennis the Menace’ before, probably my favorite comic graphically -- great economy of line, texture and background, and along with the threadbare gag of embarrassing parents over something said in private, occasionally someone says something interesting. On feb 27, Mr Wilson remarks sideways to his wife while watching Dennis over the fence, ‘I believe he’s a good boy, but I’ve also read a lot of fiction, and it could be affecting my reality.’  Mrs Wilson looks noncommittal, just the slightest squint pondering what her husband’s been smoking, but all in just a few lines, hair and glasses. Well, Mr Wilson, there’s a lot more than the antics of the boy next door at stake, and just reading books isn’t the worst of it these days.

Turns out an army of online trolls has been yanking everybody’s reality toward a dark paranoid pit of tribalism and hostility with short videos featuring staged outrages and false conspiracy narratives. No need for social scientists, we can all see it works. I could stand here and tell you that reality, itself, is like jelly, subject to be squeezed and pushed by all you see and listen to, but no one listens to me. I’m just not as convincing as the digitally-spawned seething dragon of misinformation and chaos distorting the world in front of us, perhaps you’ve noticed. Dealing with dragons is beyond my puny reach, but I will assert that original art in one out of ten houses slowly points us in the right direction, calms us down, and eventually nudges us toward more thoughtful and reasonable conversation, all of us living in a more pleasant universe. 

When it comes to influencing reality, paintings have certain advantages over the technical device, long term. Successful art doesn’t habituate, won’t fade into the background -- the image remains fresh each time it's seen. In time bonding takes place, people grow fond of the art they own, and as its contents are incorporated into their point of view, the world alters accordingly. Pretty bold contention, I’ll admit, but stand back from the evening news and consider the current national debate over what’s real and who gets to decide, all of that, and then appreciate how fragile and mutable our reality really is. Art doesn’t change things, but in subtle ways it alters attention, and isn’t that the key? The process will never be more transparent than in this moment, or the issue more thoroughly analyzed and debated. The nature of reality, of truth, of what sort of world we live in, rages in front of us, news network vs network, and could there be a better time to buy a first piece of art?

pragmatic art -- role reversals

I used to think the major utility of visual art was in the realm of general perception, the individual’s interface with the world. Early on I began to notice that looking at english landscapes at the museum seemed to enhance the depth and detail of what I saw on drives around here, but didn’t know why. Wondered if it has something to do with the nature of painting, itself, since everything in a painting is noticed and accounted for. When taking a picture of a cow by a fence with your digital, the clouds in the sky, the willows down by the creek, every small detail just comes along, but the painter’s been everywhere, seeing and translating into ‘flat’ the field, the fence, the cow. The evocative painting helps you to notice stuff you’ve just been sloughing aside, if only by example. The actual experience is an increasing appetite for more detail in everyday surroundings, and a deepening of atmospheric awareness. Your spectacles are gradually becoming cleaner, but you won’t know why. That painting from the pawn shop with the unreadable signature, it’s worthless, hanging over the mantle, behind the couch, maybe in the kitchen could be having an influence. Even totally abstract art can have this effect, raising to awareness the pattern in a wooden door or shadows in a shaft of light, the texture of the driveway or coherent design in nature.

The notion that art has utility at all isn’t really part of any conversation I hear, so I make these assertions in a vacuum, or maybe on an island. Now and again I might contend that contemporary art is over my head, but it isn’t really. I just don’t want to play, but this isn’t about what I want, there’s lot’s of us. I understand entrenched cadres of arts professionals come to quick consensus when an artist has ‘matured’ enough to receive grant aid and official recognition. They embrace obscurity and are really just agents of the state, self-perpetuating drones from the bureau of silly walks, so sad. So instead of all that, I’m saying art is the bracing you install at home to keep the collapsing walls from squeezing you down into your iphone. Original art can be a wormhole portage back to fresh air and sunshine, a pan-pipe beckoning back to direct sensual experience. Could turn out, these days, visual art communicates even more than that. 

The young today are very entrepreneurial, making ice cream and brewing beer, but mostly searching for the app that will earn money while they go off sight-seeing, good luck. As bulkheads begin to buckle, long-term security doesn’t seem as secure anymore, and independence and personal freedom have been gaining in popularity. Original art is a projection of that as well. The independent artist is a person who decided to make a stand against gigantic odds, a pugnacious shrew challenging a mostly indifferent rhino society, and they leave a trail, a testament to their insight or rage, all informed by their outsider, free-range existence, odd jobs and social experimentation. How that level of information comes across in a picture of anything, sailing ship or sunny meadow, I don’t know. Like the pheromone in the air you respond to but can’t smell, there must be some faculty in your brain, might be dusty, that recognizes and responds to the declaration of personal freedom the artist unconsciously put there while rendering a pot of flowers or a portrait of your aunt. As the world melts down in digital and is built back up with 3-D printing, original art is the one element that can’t be reduced, that won’t be censored or commercially compromised, and that one day soon could be valued for just existing at all.

times art a’changing -- new rules

At the movies, back in the black and white fifties, one summer night a meteor falls in a field just outside of town, and all the children born that year have vacant stares and nothing in common with their parents. In the sixties it sorta happened. As culture evolves, next generations see the world, not opposite exactly, but definitely in opposition, and it’s happening again. The outcome is uncertain. A high-tech return to middle ages feudalism and the superior status of the ultra-wealthy seems plausible, they obviously want it, but democracy, that gritty underdog, each individual within reach of their full human potential, might win out someday.

No one person could change things, but it might be time to pick a side. Don’t need a weatherperson to know which way the wind blows, and culture gurus are even less reliable. Better it would be just to lick your own finger and hold it up to the sky. It will feel colder on the windward side, and you get to make your own determination. Shouldn’t be hard these days as the wind begins to howl, the earth moves under foot, and it seems change is happening on its own already. Authority discredits itself before our eyes, politics and business are besmirched, and the harbinger of it all, art, teeters on a cliff. Will the art object, perhaps obscure in itself but with long resume a flapping, continue to represent the social aspiration of new money, mute as coffee stain, aloof and unfriendly, or will art assume a whole new assignment in the world of tomorrow, almost here?

At this point could explain why exposure to original art tunes up the receptor cells and resensitizes the perceptual net, and further how it modifies and supports its owner’s self-image, an all day effect, but words can be deceitful and enough has been said on all fronts already. Can only offer a prescription, to be filled whenever any artist offers their work in public. Look at everything. Most art you’ll see is bad, but you won’t know that, not until you’ve begun to notice what’s better, which won’t take long. Above all, don’t listen to academic experts, a crusty old clergy reciting an arcane genealogy of past market icons, the rebels and rascals, still touting their descendants and derivatives, finally bankrupt, galleries empty, public finance shriveling, so sad.

As artificial pinnacles of art sophistication and high finance begin to collapse, all that penned-up interest and art awareness will spread out, finding a more natural level in the daily lives of ordinary citizens. The moist finger knows the wind will be howling shortly, and a new point of view, more nuanced regarding personal identity and less inclined to accept bs from above, blows in, as a new generation learns to express themselves through the art they buy and live with.