collecting or self-discovery -- investing vs owning

As a child I remember seeing the famous seminal magazine cover with face of Jackson Pollock over the question, ‘is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ It was a most provocative question, and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since. Even at that age I’d already had direct experience with mid-western angst and insecurity transformed into rage and mayhem by saturation in copious amounts of alcohol, and Jackson Pollock’s art never seemed all that mysterious to me, each painting a feckless tantrum by a talent-challenged bum. Can’t be kind, don’t know why. Invoking Freud to justify his betrayal of consciousness was the same sort of rogue genius all alcoholics use to explain the girlfriend’s black eye, a fender crushed against the wheel, why the boss is a jerk. Seeing Jackson riding up in the front coach, I just never got on the train, and modern art chugged away and left me.

Somewhere down the line the uptown dealers turned the enterprise of art into a game of competitive acquisition, and the resume indicating consensus approval became more important than the art, a revolting development. Along came artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, less concerned with art than arousing the sodden attention of the ultra wealthy with just the right whiff of novelty, the lot of them too jaded, too insulated, and too complicit to comprehend art about real life, it would burn their eyes. Even out here, far from that penthouse paradise of social ascendency, those who presume to officiate good from bad art, your exhibition and grant committees, the critics and writers, along with cadres of academics at all levels, follow the lead of the major metros at about a ten year interval, another form of trickle down.

I don’t care enough about million dollar art to not like it, no more concerned than the average citizen, since we all know the rich are different from you and me. In museums, in galleries and pawn shops, I’ve seen paintings that made me respect and admire some person I’ll never meet, perhaps someone no one has ever heard of, and I just don’t have time for the trademarked gold-chippers, none of them capable of recognizing their own work from a fake. If the world survives all that stuff gets recycled, but visual art about how the world can be seen will be needed once again to show us the way, to help us find ourselves.