It was billed as contemporary landscape exhibit but there’s only the most flimsy reference to anything outdoors. Here’s an area of piles of stuff on the floor, could be cornmeal, formed with dixie cups and such in the manner of beach art, an arrangement that just doesn’t stick in the memory. It couldn’t be moved and wasn’t for sale. Also, there’s a vertical stack of little video screens each playing a digital version of outside, a double-dip irony that’s for sure, and it was for sale, but I looked right at the price and couldn’t relate it to anything. Piece by piece, room by room, it was all a calculated affront to honest human endeavor, an insolent sendup of what art is supposed to be. Let me explain.
Here we contend that art is a kind of device you buy for the home to make your life better. The orchestra is a social construction organized to make life better for its listeners, and the prestige of the city, the social status of the audience, and the price of admission are important but secondary, and certainly not the inspiration behind the music. In a similar way the worth of a piece of art is in its tangible influence on the owner’s perceptual sensitivity and appreciation of everything else, and as evidence, instead of charts and graphs, real-life testimonials overwhelm. Ordinary people like and respect art, but the state apparatus wants to keep them apart. This is actually due to an intricate pattern of bureaucratic incentives built in, and not some overriding conspiracy to keep people dumb, but somehow it works out the same.
The state, federal down to local, makes a huge investment in art, and supports public galleries, pays for public art, and government agencies exercise a massive monopoly on art education, an embryonic financial scandal gestating now. On every campus can be found a for-profit free-loading art school, running up student debt for little more than operating a daycare special projects program, for which there is no resulting occupation, no professional status, and no job security, unless you count future daycare drones. With lots of free time after they graduate, academic experts get to choose the art that goes up in the public galleries, going about it as if they were back in school giving grades to people who will never make a living. Openings are swell, everyone loves a party, but there’s going to be plenty of parking the rest of the month. Stupid people, don’t care about our art, sad.
Form without substance can be trendy clever, but beyond the hallowed sanctity of the all-white gallery might resemble clutter, and it’s difficult to imagine taking much of this ‘landscape’ exhibit home. Along with the demise of the annual nude exhibit, these folks have a serious aversion to confronting the subject, peeking and hiding, making mud-pies and calling it cuisine. It’s beginning to seem this term ‘contemporary’ is some sort of invisibility cloak that accepts every form of expression, but excludes with prejudice any attempt to deal with shared reality. This aesthetic is for tax-funded tit-suckers, yet to be weaned to the harshness of everyday reality, and it’s no wonder they avoid it.
Great ideas are cheap over craft-brew late at night, but ordinary people make difficult decisions, adjust their goals to what’s possible, and put out a lot of effort just to stay even. They might not appreciate that four years of earnest effort has led you to make piles of cornmeal on the floor, so intimate, so expressive. That doesn’t mean they don’t like art, won’t support art, or aren’t interested in artists and their lives. You’ve been showing them the wrong art -- on purpose? who cares? I’ll tell you what would work better. Actually show landscapes by local artists, they’re out there, and their paintings won’t be all folk art primitive, corny and quaint. Some will show insight and vision and convey that with emotional impact to any viewer who ever looked out a car window. Your galleries would have visitors all month, people would bring back friends, and some would even consider buying art. Nothing wrong with that.
To achieve enough mastery of any medium to just make stuff recognizable requires at least the kind of commitment ordinary people might apply to their own occupations, and without a doubt they understand that. If the artist can use those tools to bend and alter what a person sees, to defy their expectation, quite average people feel challenged to see more and they like it. The government on any level doesn’t need to be involved, so can keep those multi-layered contributions, use them elsewhere. Then watch while non-profits wither, art schools begin to teach studio survival skills, and then turn around to see local art and artists thrive, in your town as many galleries as restaurants, and original art up in houses down the block.
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