gaslighting art -- distorting the picture

Gaslight is an American 1944 mystery-thriller film, adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light, about a woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is going insane.

Gaslight, an incandescent open flame, preceded electricity providing light for dark interiors. Dim, detrimental to air quality, and obsolete so long ago it hardly comes up in conversation, the term has been used quite a lot recently to describe the the president’s approach to politics, based on the movie. He changes his mind, makes false accusations, cites extraneous and irrelevant facts often made up on the spot, so they say. He does this so he can get away with stuff, so the real stuff gets buried out of sight, and to control the news-cycle, and does it work -- I don’t know what do you think?

Where did he learn to do that stuff? Trump and Warhol knew each other, admired each other, learned from each other, although they probably weren’t friends, just guessing, doesn’t matter. Is a half-eaten decomposing peach a work of art, might be, depends on context, and made up on the spot, yes, it can be. What is not a work of art? Pretty much anything goes but original pictures of something seen, we’re too sophisticated for that old ‘personal vision’ routine. Copied from a magazine, peed-on, and poorly constructed make it through check-in fine, but artists with something serious to say about our shared reality are stopped at the door, told to wait in the parking lot. The natural audience for art, a population by and large seeking for something, anything, more meaningful in their lives than increased horsepower and greater convenience, have been ‘gaslighted’ for a couple of generations now, so confused about art they can be taken monstrous advantage of from 57th avenue right down to main street, your hometown.

How did it happen in the first place? It’s there in the art. In the beginning the various components of traditional picture making began to dissociate, to each claim predominance over the others, color field, optical effects, even ‘flatness’ became its own thing, so sad. From there art started to copy stuff, commercial labels, the work of older better artists, until finally it’s nothing but cobwebby conceptual evidence of some transcendent totally-disconnected mental state, and has to be institutionalized on college campuses and tax sheltered in the public square. Art out on the economy, once so noble, has been reduced to a collectible token of fame, like the vanishing glass clorox bottle sought after in flea markets. From the highly progressive nature of recent exhibits presented in non-profit public galleries, it looks like art has been near gaslighted to extinction, raw plywood workshop scraps pinned to the wall over at the u, such as that.

The cure -- visit a museum when in a big city but don't bother with contemporary, get to know local artists back home by their work, and visit enough commercial galleries to understand how art is priced in your area. Avoid the brokers, the guides, the establishment’s special agents who gaslighted themselves long ago in the name of interesting careers living off the creative work of others. Could that be said another way? Maybe, but the point is that perceptual acuity, self confidence, and personal autonomy are there in the art, in paintings plain to see, and you might find them by looking, but not by listening, all I’m saying.