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.
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