art’s plaintive plea -- the last day

Today is the 'last day,' just like three days ago they told me there were only three days left, times a running out, better place my bet, get my order in, for what? Why to give them my money, of course, and for a worthy cause I’m sure, my civic duty, a community responsibility. They have a motto, ‘arts everywhere,’ slightly reminiscent of the local art league’s ‘art for everybody,’ and a self-promotion strategy emerges. They say, ‘And when art is everywhere, good things happen for everyone. Good things like supporting 1,185 full-time jobs......' and maybe we can guess whose jobs they mean. I think they must mean their own.

Charity can be a great business, there’s no product and no objective standard for success. Art seems a benign cause to latch onto, no one sick or dying, but still, hiring a lot of people to think up catchy phrases may not be the best use of those art dollars. These are simply not the metrics that I care about, since I don’t got a degree and wouldn’t be hired on full time anyway, and maybe attitude. I want to know how many artists don’t have full time jobs, or even part time jobs, working in the studio all day. I’d like to know the economic impact of actual art bought and sold on the local economy, and I’d expect non-profit art agencies to be concerned as well. Mostly, I’d like to know how much original art is up in all the otherwise well-appointed homes here about, and how much of that was acquired locally from artists we’d all recognize.

We don’t have numbers, we have eyes, and in those terms there’s not much to show for dispersing all those ‘funds.’ The awful truth may be that a vibrant, self-sustaining art market, with local, regional, and tourist interest just might put the non-profits straight away out of business, the patient recovers and walks out the door. Let’s talk about money, your money and how to spend it, my humble suggestion. Money spent directly on art may not be deductible, a pittance anyway, but there’s a premium involved. You’ll become the owner of an actual piece of art that will probably remain in your possession right through old age, still looking at it years from now. Do what you want, but this logic is gaining traction all around the town, and someday soon will begin to seem obvious to just about everyone, take your time.

preventive medicine -- art’s time-release

Take the opioid crisis, so why are people from all walks of life becoming addicted -- so many, in fact, we’ve had to start helping them instead of putting them in jail? I’m going to guess at root it’s boredom, mind-searing, relentless, and unquenchable, driving people to seek any sort of relief. The cause of the affliction is simple enough, people have been looking at too much stuff. There’s no limit for a machine, happily converting heaps of data and never sleeping, but humans have finite capacities and running up close to red line all day takes a toll.

The instinctual response to boredom is to pile on more stimulation, hire a band, install a strobe light, pour hot sauce on the pancakes, but when you’re close to saturation already, cranking it up still more can cause shutdown. Finally all food is bland and ordinary, sex feels like it’s always in rehearsal, and music is just a lot of screaming and banging, maybe you’ve been there. The short-term fix for some has been narcotics, which can effectively cancel boredom temporarily, but they eventually wear off, and a bigger, meaner boredom takes its place. The short-term fix has unfortunate long-term consequences.

Modern art surveys usually begin by asserting that paintings used to be just pictures of things before cameras came along, but there have always been differences. A photo is an impression of reality in a hundredth of a second, but a painting might take a week or more to produce, with every mark, every color, put there by the artist’s hand, the image filtered through their mind and personality. Such enduring objects have an influence merely by their presence in a room, and provide a gentle antidote to the intrusive updating streaming from the ubiquitous device. Paintings slow the mind down, necessarily, because otherwise they can’t be seen at all. As the rest of reality recedes into an endlessly replicating uniformity, unique art objects like paintings become an ever more potent influence on the confidence and well-being, creative thinking, and appreciation of just about everything by the people who see them everyday. Somehow they feel less bored than fellow citizens, they don’t know why.

deKooning vs the cows -- seeing a difference

Are you culturally savvy and artistically astute? Then tell me, can you tell the difference between a Willem deKooning painting and one done by a farm animal, maybe a cow, just by looking? Not just you, could an expert, could deKooning? No doubt he’s a giant of modern art, his work worth millions with influence in all directions, so who am I to impugn his work? Well I didn’t, and that wasn’t the question. The answer to the original question is probably not, especially later on when his work became more lyrical, as alcohol-induced dementia overtook him, so sad. None of this is about me at all, or even deKooning, it’s about you and just what you are willing to believe, and by what authority. This is a test. If you aren’t familiar with deKooning or the art of farm animals there are plenty of examples online for comparison, so look a few up and let’s begin.

Take ten images by each lined up in any order, and then try to sort them by artist, and for extra credit assign reasonable price tags to each. Why should this be hard? Now a real expert doesn’t even bother to look at the front, doesn’t care really, and instead audits the paperwork back to the dealer, scrapes a little off for spectroanalysis, before pronouncing a work as unbelievably expensive or a barnyard curiosity. How dreary.

What does it mean, this genius/bovine confusion? I don’t know. I’m asking you, what do you think? This is the most important question of all, because finding the confidence to decide what your eyes see, instead of relying on someone else’s professed expertise, is going to come in handy for more than art, in time becoming an advantage across the board. Are you telling me, am I telling you, that being in charge of my own taste in art affects the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the way I think of myself? Yep. The art you own is like an ongoing conversation you have with yourself, with the artist, and with a time and place. Farm animals have a quiet dignity but lack the consciousness to keep up their end, mostly just dabs and smears, so ‘lyrical.’

Art will find out how gullible you are, and the ‘experts’ will tell you some pretty silly stuff just to see what you’ll go along with. The best thing to do is look at all the original art you come across, and learn to listen to, and then to believe your own responses. Sooner or later you’ll trust yourself to like the art that speaks to you, and learn to trust your own eyes.

losing my religion -- secular art

A few years back I met a man who went about touting the early work of Marcel Duchamp, and one thing becomes clear, as it must have been clear to Duchamp, himself, he was never going to be a famous painter. His retreat into intellectualism and puzzle-box obscurity is the ‘damascus road revelation’ for a gigantic modern art industry of cohabiting galleries, auction houses, and slick national magazines, along with phalanxes of educational and cultural professionals, all the while providing cover for the talentless and chronically deskilled. Seems ironic that his ‘breakthrough’ piece, the anonymous urinal in the famous armory show of 1911, could also be seen as an adolescent prank, an early example of disgruntled trolling that, against all odds, accidentally made him famous.

From that bolt of olympian insight, a controlling and self-serving institution has arisen with a glorified origin story and a pantheon of most earthly saints. Proud of its open-minded acceptance of every sort of expression, still it has no use for dissidents and exiles unbelievers -- too big to be a cult, it must be Modern Art. Going way back, really, I’ve always been suspicious of the opportunistic visionary, and the smarmy, insular hierarchies their sycophants attempt to impose on just about everybody. I don’t dissent, not any more. I walk away. No one has to come with me, but I won’t be alone. The desire to make art, to see art, to commune through visual art is more basic and universally human than any particular culture or civilization, and the human race has standards. Call me atheist if you must.

Take a pot of flowers. Is it trite, not worth a glance, essentially invisible to the artistically aware and educated person? That’s a choice, but if you look all along at every flower painting you come across, you’ll begin to see a lot more than flowers. Van Gogh made such paintings, long a cliche before he came along, and yet people experience a sort of emotional gravitation standing in front of one of his paintings having nothing to do with sunflowers. If all you can think about is the price tag, you might be missing something, just saying. I would explain it further, but words trail off, you do actually have to be there. All around, in your hometown, there are men and women earnestly attempting to paint what they see and revealing themselves in the process, can’t be helped, and isn’t that the reason, after all, it’s called art?

As they get better, the human connection in their work becomes more potent, and at some point you might say their interpretation strikes a chord, something like that, but of course words fall short. One thing sure, they won’t ever realize their full potential unless they get to do it everyday, which most of them would be doing if they could, and that won’t happen unless friends and neighbors, folks like yourself, buy something. What greasy oligarch from whatever continent outbid his obscenely rich buddies for some scrap of fame doesn’t really matter to anyone, not even to them for more than a minute, and it sure doesn’t matter around here, any here where you happen to be. Oh I know the ‘church,‘ if you get my drift, has a list of things you shouldn’t see, simply refuse to acknowledge, like paintings of pots of flowers, such as that, but we’re pagan around here and we like our art visual. Avoid the hymns and liturgy of cloistered academics, and instead look for art in alternative spaces and upstart galleries. Find an artist from the neighborhood and be a fan, on your own.