Sight is universal, and all humans understand pictures, just as we can see the extinct animals our ancestors painted on cave walls, but language is tribal, the grunts, whistles, and clicks all learned associations to real objects, a true exercise in abstraction. There are political implications here, but rather than point them out, perhaps it would be more convincing to consider how various systems of political order respond to visual art. The most repressive governments just round up all the artists and imprison or kill them, case closed, but others employ various forms of censorship, harassment, or, in the case of democracies, systematic exclusion. How did it happen here?
The saga of the Rivera mural at Rockefeller Center, in the early nineteen thirties, was a confrontation between referential visual art, representing universal human understanding and solidarity, and the raw power of dynastic wealth seeking the fragmentation of society into manageable camps competing against each other. Well, it’s pretty clear big money kicked visual art’s ass, blasting universal understanding to pieces using jackhammers, and posting armed guards to prevent any photographs ever being taken of Rivera’s finished mural. (The mural was later re-created by Rivera in Mexico.) This was followed by the both private and government sponsorship of mute, non-objective painting, in the media, with grants and prizes, and with recognition and prestige. Big abstract paintings went up in all the big banks in New York. (late in life, Nelson Rockefeller attempted to make amends by offering reproductions of his own collection of european masters, in his mind and by his words an altruistic gesture, in a self-financed gallery on fifty-seventh avenue.)
Once you’ve seen an example of the signature art of the so-called ‘modern masters,’ you’ve seen them all. Beyond that, I also don’t care about ‘conceptual art,’ and it’s not about not understanding. The statements on the wall are dense, self-referencing, and it requires a ton of effort to squeeze any of that meaning out of, or into, the thing there on the floor, perhaps suspended or free-standing. It’s ugly, or perhaps best to say not visually compelling, and they’re pretty emphatic that it wasn’t meant to be. That's not the point, since off-hand and unskilled makes it more real don’t you see? I’m all for artistic freedom, but why are we, all of us, paying for this stuff? Why does the government, along with major corporations and tax-code surfing agencies of all stripes, seem so interested in promoting art without visual content that mostly fails to interest all but the smallest segment of society?
Art needs to find its voice, up from the ground, in a time when forces from above are seeking to keep us distracted, to trivialize and demean us, and keep us at odds with each other. The current political polarization of the entire nation is about fifty-fifty, a tribute to their algorithms, but we don’t have to take it, anymore. More people are painting, more people are looking, and when more people start owning original art, conversations will become more civil, points of view will broaden, and truth and character will be easier recognize, trust me. Somewhere there’s a painting that seems to evoke the same bridge, a similar pot of flowers, an evening light that you already have in your head, and regardless of your knowledge of art, perhaps in spite of it, you’ll find yourself assessing it, comparing it, maybe even wanting to own it. In any case, people who like the same art you like are potential friends, and a community becoming aware of its own artists is likely to discover bridges never crossed before. They’ve kept representational art at bay for seventy-five years with government cash, producing a mountain range of art no one wants to look at, but as part of larger societal transitions, the visual side of the mind, humanity’s common ground, is about to assert itself, again.
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