Just don’t care if it’s realism or abstraction, historical religious or progresso appropriative. Here we assert it’s all one thing. Now your professional art expert slices art up into myriad distinct categories, periods and schools, and talks about each as though it was separate and unique, yet somehow interconnected and derived. They present art as a long cascade of evolving inspirations, a litany of artist heroes and their cultural explorations, and to stay in business the center of this roiling consensus becomes their professional compass. They have their point of view.
Step outside the categories and consider the whole pie, mesopotamia on back, to fifty seventh avenue uptown, all of flat art, all at once. We’re not considering message, just the ability of a created image on a flat surface that penetrates the shell of fuzzy, mind-blanking everyday expectations that surrounds each human, no matter who or where they are. What visual element or mysterious color resonance grabs the attention and focuses the mind, these days even more of a challenge because the background noise has begun to overflow the pot, bleeping and buzzing in pocket and purse.
A high price is paid for art in advertising, a usage that shills for whatever cause or product it represents, but in a pure form, art only represents itself. Just art can be an uncomfortable territory, and many the commercial artist who promised themselves independence one day, feels naked and afraid without a client to shoulder the moral freight along with writing the check. The white blank field of an empty canvas, so like the undulating walls of a cave, presents a window of communication between all humans, everywhere, one that transcends millennia, all languages and cultures, becoming history’s bulletin board of cultural attainment. It can be, and probably should be intimidating.
These days every shiny toy turns ordinary pretty darn quick, and yet the successful work of art burns through, and just keeps getting better. It overcomes habituation, becoming a beacon of what’s real in a dreamy landscape of movie fantasy, superfluous convenience, and an accelerating avalanche of obsolescence. What paintings do you remember? When in a museum, what caught your eye? If you saw that image every day, would it fade into the wall or stay fresh, more familiar and present through the years? If you only saw it visiting the museum, say, every five years, would it begin to seem like an old friend after the second or third time? That quality, that magnetic ability to draw and align your perceptual field, totally non-tech and arising only from an arrangement of color on a flat panel, turns out to be a fair accomplishment, really, and if the artist pulls it off, it doesn’t matter what the form is.
Step outside the categories and consider the whole pie, mesopotamia on back, to fifty seventh avenue uptown, all of flat art, all at once. We’re not considering message, just the ability of a created image on a flat surface that penetrates the shell of fuzzy, mind-blanking everyday expectations that surrounds each human, no matter who or where they are. What visual element or mysterious color resonance grabs the attention and focuses the mind, these days even more of a challenge because the background noise has begun to overflow the pot, bleeping and buzzing in pocket and purse.
A high price is paid for art in advertising, a usage that shills for whatever cause or product it represents, but in a pure form, art only represents itself. Just art can be an uncomfortable territory, and many the commercial artist who promised themselves independence one day, feels naked and afraid without a client to shoulder the moral freight along with writing the check. The white blank field of an empty canvas, so like the undulating walls of a cave, presents a window of communication between all humans, everywhere, one that transcends millennia, all languages and cultures, becoming history’s bulletin board of cultural attainment. It can be, and probably should be intimidating.
These days every shiny toy turns ordinary pretty darn quick, and yet the successful work of art burns through, and just keeps getting better. It overcomes habituation, becoming a beacon of what’s real in a dreamy landscape of movie fantasy, superfluous convenience, and an accelerating avalanche of obsolescence. What paintings do you remember? When in a museum, what caught your eye? If you saw that image every day, would it fade into the wall or stay fresh, more familiar and present through the years? If you only saw it visiting the museum, say, every five years, would it begin to seem like an old friend after the second or third time? That quality, that magnetic ability to draw and align your perceptual field, totally non-tech and arising only from an arrangement of color on a flat panel, turns out to be a fair accomplishment, really, and if the artist pulls it off, it doesn’t matter what the form is.
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