Alchemy as a physical practice is questionable from a couple of perspectives, both practical and motivational. While modern science shows elements can transmute, this usually involves the release of huge amounts of energy. Our sun is transmuting at this moment, but this isn’t a business for the medieval backroom laboratory, and the part about becoming ultra rich is a fantasy for the extremely poor in any society, but to sacrifice participation in the world just to one day be able to buy your way out of it sounds like a great waste of effort.
Alchemy as a metaphor, on the other hand, can be quite useful, especially in these times when so much of our world needs transmuting, the search for some process that converts dark political undercurrent into cooperative enlightenment and individual autonomy, for instance. Modern media may not hold the answer, and actually tends to add to the problem. Something happened to change the culture post world war, mid-century last, and it spirals down to now. The advent of television enabled mass manipulation by commercial interests in everybody’s living room, and the lowest common denominator began to dictate how we saw ourselves. About the same time the extremely wealthy began to treat art as a plaything, a trophy of wealth itself, just a pampered and predictable house pet on a leash. The sitcoms were stocked with demeaning stereotypes, and art got stupid too.
Now I’m not saying a monochromatic panel by Ellsworth Kelly isn’t the pinnacle of a particular moment in the cascading evolution of contemporary sensibilities, but pretending this square of fabric is worth millions of dollars is just a way to steal art from the public, and to distort the notion of art, itself, substituting instead a zombie horde of replicating smears and splotches. These 'emblems of arrival' can easily be sold to the upward aspirations of new money crashing in from all corners, sucking the planet dry. That’s some pretty base bullshit. Converting the sneering disdain of the ultra elites into any value still held by the part of humanity that produces more than they consume, day by day, is beyond our biggest atom smasher, and way too large a task for art’s credentialed gurus -- best start over.
Just this weekend, rain or shine, area artists paint outdoors in this town, a few hours to depict just what they see, and, oddly enough, just what the person looking over their shoulder sees too. They’ll have a party that evening to compare what each artist has captured to what regular citizens have seen before and gotten used to, take for granted. For many, it’s an eye-opening experience, ready for the sun to come up on the same streets, but noticing more than the day before. Quaint it may seems to the super rich and their retinues, invested in the myth of runway art, each season some brilliant yet derivative hot new thing -- tiresome, sure it is, but what they think doesn’t count, not anymore, not when compared with the experience of actual art in a hometown, opening clogged perceptual pathways and broadcasting its friendly affirmation all year round. If art could do something like this for an individual, for a community, the abstract notion of alchemy might not sound so impossible.
Alchemy as a metaphor, on the other hand, can be quite useful, especially in these times when so much of our world needs transmuting, the search for some process that converts dark political undercurrent into cooperative enlightenment and individual autonomy, for instance. Modern media may not hold the answer, and actually tends to add to the problem. Something happened to change the culture post world war, mid-century last, and it spirals down to now. The advent of television enabled mass manipulation by commercial interests in everybody’s living room, and the lowest common denominator began to dictate how we saw ourselves. About the same time the extremely wealthy began to treat art as a plaything, a trophy of wealth itself, just a pampered and predictable house pet on a leash. The sitcoms were stocked with demeaning stereotypes, and art got stupid too.
Now I’m not saying a monochromatic panel by Ellsworth Kelly isn’t the pinnacle of a particular moment in the cascading evolution of contemporary sensibilities, but pretending this square of fabric is worth millions of dollars is just a way to steal art from the public, and to distort the notion of art, itself, substituting instead a zombie horde of replicating smears and splotches. These 'emblems of arrival' can easily be sold to the upward aspirations of new money crashing in from all corners, sucking the planet dry. That’s some pretty base bullshit. Converting the sneering disdain of the ultra elites into any value still held by the part of humanity that produces more than they consume, day by day, is beyond our biggest atom smasher, and way too large a task for art’s credentialed gurus -- best start over.
Just this weekend, rain or shine, area artists paint outdoors in this town, a few hours to depict just what they see, and, oddly enough, just what the person looking over their shoulder sees too. They’ll have a party that evening to compare what each artist has captured to what regular citizens have seen before and gotten used to, take for granted. For many, it’s an eye-opening experience, ready for the sun to come up on the same streets, but noticing more than the day before. Quaint it may seems to the super rich and their retinues, invested in the myth of runway art, each season some brilliant yet derivative hot new thing -- tiresome, sure it is, but what they think doesn’t count, not anymore, not when compared with the experience of actual art in a hometown, opening clogged perceptual pathways and broadcasting its friendly affirmation all year round. If art could do something like this for an individual, for a community, the abstract notion of alchemy might not sound so impossible.
1 comment:
But haven't you noticed that "subtlety of brush work" in Kelly's monochromatic panels? (As pointed out in the description of Kelly's work at a featured exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute I witnessed years ago).
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