What’s going to happen next? Art will be there, but it will morph and change to fit the situation, adapt to new conditions, and have a different meaning to people coming along after, depending on their needs. The current situation in the heartland is one of depression and drought, independent artists waiting tables, unseen bird prints in the hall, normal for so long by now it’s just seems normal. Now, I don’t know where all those muralists hired by the WPA came from, painting in post offices and public buildings across the land, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t learn through on-the-job-training. They must have been around already and doing pretty well until the depression came along, so the notion our national culture never supported artists may not be historically accurate, however, it all came true in the fifties when high art flew away leaving a stunned population behind.
Popular artists, Grant Wood, Ed Hopper, Tom Benton, maestro Diego Rivera, and all the hometown practitioners disappeared, went underground, shunned by national media and lost to popular awareness. Abstractionists marched away at a right angle, turning art into an essentially literary enterprise, soaring scholarship and movie star fame, but their rote repetitions weren’t much to look at, and not all that popular. The early AbEx painters received massive government support because their giant paintings were exhibited as international cold-war declarations of free enterprise and unbridled egoism, existentially superior to the other side’s severely regimented bolshoi ballet, makes you so proud. A schism was formed, and high culture appropriated art as their exclusive marker of financial and social attainment. These new rich didn’t much care what it looked so long as it was obviously expensive, or at least looked expensive, taking their cues from slick magazines happy to validate any smear, for a taste of the take. Art became a status symbol, a monopoly token to collect, and ‘about to be famous’ became the secret sauce that made anything non-referential palatable.
Government became involved, big time. The NEA arose in the sixties, and banished referential painting of any kind, preferring to support more progressive, more adventurous and less commonly accessible forms, and for years figurative art was dismissed without a second look, so commercial, too easy, just dumb. Students who brought such paintings to class critiques caught ridicule from the instructor first of all, and playground rules applied. As a result, a wide uncrossed wasteland grew between a high culture, elegant and sophisticated brand-name collecting, and art for the masses, manufactured decorator art, posters and prints, and the substitute art available at the mall. There remained regional genre markets where representational artists took refuge and where the talented did quite well, but their efforts never enter a national conversation.
Well, it’s all over now. Local coops spring up, and amateur artists group together to motivate and inspire each other, making better art each day for themselves first of all, and local businesses have begun to allow local artists to exhibit on their walls because customers enjoy it. Social media enables local artists to become familiar to fans who come out to see their actual work, and maybe take some home. There are, incidentally, also a few psychological changes happening in society overall, and a national reassessing of personal identity plays a part in a new taste for art as well. The arid basin between a popular appetite for intimate individual expression, and the artists already living and working in everyone’s hometown is about to revive, and it’s already starting to rain.
The NEA will still beg for money, who cares? Art never asked to be a charity, to be crippled by abstraction, encouraged toward the pointedly abrasive, and then held up as an example of a poor disadvantaged and malnourished relic of culture that just wouldn’t survive without massive government assistance. There’s a name for that brand of madness, that sort of crime. Let Trump demolish the NEA, we’ll get by. Local art and artists are getting better, just as citizens are beginning to expect more, comparing area artists in public settings, and becoming familiar with what they do well. The new awareness engendered by this dark political interlude, the contradictions of our hypocritical society welling up and exiting the body politic like a rampaging boil, eventually will lead us to a new civility and rationality, and probably more art up in houses, with artists taking the place of athletes as heroes in hometowns. Wouldn’t it be nice?
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