entering the eye -- Archambeault

James Archambeault, locally renowned nature photographer, recently passed with a nice article in the paper, and testimonials reflected the larger community’s view of his work. Six books of photographs and many calendars, he took photographs of just what was there. ‘I didn’t invent Kentucky,’ he’d often say, modest in his craft. Even so, it’s said he’d wait for hours for the right light, a favorable angle of the sun, and with patience and a loving eye he produced his pictures.

His photographs were of nothing special, and that’s sort of interesting. Mares with foals at their side are grazing as the mist rolls away while traffic congests on the way to work every weekday, who notices? Sunlight falls through the trees and dapples the creek as ATVs bounce down a cowpath, it’s always there. Jim was thinking abstractly, the sky in a pond against the weathered paint of the barn, beguiling the attention, but he used visual terms that were already familiar to any citizen who drives just a few miles out of town. Having once seen at his work, people look the same things but see them differently, and in some cases, see them at all. So many of their statements boil down to ‘he made me see and appreciate’ what was and is always there, day by day.

What artist wants more than that? Oh, I suppose having glamorous associates must be fun, and oodles of money with open afternoons sounds great, but that’s business, amusing the rich, and art is more serious than that. Some folks actually believe that seeing the physical world with more clarity enhances an individual’s sense of self, a far-fetched theory at this point, but just a new appreciation for the quality of light down by the lake at dusk would be enough. Whatever image goes in through the eyes, art’s attempt is to penetrate the forehead, to alter perception, if only by example. People look to artists like James Archambeault to verify their own experience, and to help them find commonality with others who share a sense of values beyond the lowest-denominator sensationalism found in commercial media.

Mary Boone’s atonement -- big house to big house

On Thursday afternoon, the iconic New York gallery owner Mary Boone was sentenced to 30 months in prison. She had pleaded guilty in September to charges that she falsified her expenses to give the impression that the gallery was losing money. Boone admitted to transferring $9.5 million from one bank to another and claiming it was a deductible business expense; other “business” expenses included almost $800,000 for an apartment renovation and a $19,000 shopping spree at Hermès and Louis Vuitton.   Artsy Magazine, online 2/14

Her lawyer ‘argued Boone’s crimes were due to a history of anxiety, depression, and addiction brought on by childhood trauma, and claimed that she had since found religion and clean living.’ No one necessarily believed any of that really justifies cheating on taxes, and closer to the truth would be, 'your honor, that’s just the way we do business.' She was operating in a realm where people piss away money just to impress their close social acquaintances, where sacrifice and honest effort are devalued, even demeaned, and no one knows or cares anything about art that sells for less than six figures and up, no limit. Every day she was helping high-roller clients manipulate the tax code, buying, trading, and donating to major civic institutions at enormously inflated prices, all tricks to hide their burgeoning seam-splitting dynastic wealth.

Surprised she was when agents showed up to explain that while she was enormously rich, she wasn’t wealthy enough to cheat outright. They deserve each other, the ultra rich and vultures like Mary, all of them cozily scamming each other, while the law is usually more concerned with petty crime, common bank robberies and such. Whatever they’re about, it has nothing to do with art, more like high stakes poker in which every play is a bluff, where every card has only momentary consensus value, and where the enormous pot of money in the middle stinks of tax fraud, money laundering, and larceny. What we have here is a political problem, so pervasive as to remain largely unseen, while the art is visual evidence of the debilitating distortion concentrated wealth causes throughout our culture. Time to look elsewhere.