For years, even decades after WWII, on remote islands in the south seas there existed a weird religion, the ‘cargo cult,’ the result of a sad misunderstanding. Isolated island peoples had witnessed the great war through a very narrow window. One day engineers arrive to bulldoze an airstrip and within a few days more large silver birds, C-47’s, begin to land and disgorge all sorts of stuff, machinery, ammunition, and K-rations. From the trees the native people saw everything and thought they understood. After the god-like warriors left, they cleared their own small strips in the forest and built rickety vine-lashed towers hoping to attract a large silver bird of their own. They sat and waited while the crops withered, becoming poorer and poorer hoping to be suddenly rich. Seems pretty quaint from where we are, wishful thinking plumb out of hand.
Damien Hirst can get away with stuff because he’s a darling of the super rich. He understands their superficial needs and wants, and this cynical insight provides his edge, his super-star advantage. Having blown through the best of everything, the well-positioned crave the pointless, the ingrown, to be sullied and lightly ridiculed, they don’t know why. They see through the sham, the tawdry goofiness of it all, and yet still embrace it, so sophisticated, and it sorta makes sense. The ultra-wealthy play poker with art, buying and crating ‘masterworks’ until the price goes up, and there’s nothing wrong with that -- if you’re so rich life is boring. What’s sad is to emulate those off-hand, self-mocking, seven-dimensional puzzle-pies out in the provinces where regular people have jobs and pay mortgages.
The kind of art rich people crave isn’t difficult to produce, since doing anything well is out of fashion, and that makes art totally open and democratic, is what you’d think. Since no one can say what’s good anymore, acceptance breeds acceptance, and cocktail-party personalities rocket to the top to fade out after a ‘season’ or two, a scene exciting and glamorous, but not an act that plays well in the provinces. Oh maybe the stray westward-leaning saudi prince, or perhaps a lost chinese billionaire might have flat tire on the limo and wander into some little strip mall art gallery only to recognize stuff like in their penthouse, but way too cheap to take seriously so won’t buy anyway -- silver bird lands, pecks around, flies away.
Art galleries struggle to survive and insist on blaming the customer for not being eager to step up and pretend to be rich, although some do. Non-profit galleries host well-attended social events, but their galleries stay sleepy and dark the rest of the month, and the museum at the U stopped charging admission, one suspects, so they wouldn’t have to report negligible attendance figures when budgets are discussed. What’s wrong with this picture, literally? From within the industry it’s easy to see it’s the lowbrow cretin culture, playoffs and pickups, that’s holding us back, common citizens too dumb to like art, but that isn’t what it looks like from the outside.
Charity professionals latch onto art as a socially benign gig, the perfect patient who won’t die and yet never gets well as long as they're running the show, so it works for them, but the retail end has been paltry. Embracing the highbrow sensibility of Manhattan has left all those brave-front, upbeat, small town gallery directors staring out through plate glass. It seems galleries are always popping up and flaming out, in what has been a remarkably unstable business. This will change, it’s changing now. Aspiring artists are increasingly abandoning the academic, institutional model, a life based on grants and stipends, insular and aloof in their hometowns, to find forms of expression more compatible with the local climate, more in tune with area expectations. It’s a place to start. We will all grow together, our own chickens here to hatch, silver bird fly on.
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