art, art, everywhere -- but not that much to see

You’d guess people must love art. There’s art up everywhere, in offices and reception areas, across from the elevator, in waiting rooms and down the hall, even in rest rooms.  Smears and spatters are popular, patches of color to coordinate with carpet and upholstery, and in molded gilt framing it’s all so common as to be easily unseen, not even noticed. Seems a lot of famous, big time art sold at auction isn’t all that difficult to emulate, and sweatshop factories in low wage countries produce stuff that looks sorta similar on an assembly line, strictly for export. Just order from a catalogue, take it out of its box, hang it on the wall and forget about it.

Let’s start over. All painting is an arrangement of colors on a flat surface, going all the way back in human history to the smoothest, flattest cave wall that can be found. Sorry to say, all those separate categories of abstraction and realism are only in your head, arbitrary distinctions propagated by aesthetic scholars and salaried academics busy damming up their own little duck ponds. Forget all that, it just makes understanding art more difficult. A successful work of art attracts and holds the attention, no matter its form, or how much it costs, or who painted it. It’s a simple test, and it depends on two things -- the talent and ability of the artist to create a design which compels a person to look, and the viewer’s open-minded willingness to consider this alternative to their own experience.

It’s this interaction, the engagement of the viewer with the artist, that is the essence of art, and it’s in the space in between where art happens. This quality of art may be missed by people who only consider price and reputation, and many more, almost all of us, have just become visually numbed by all the meaningless art up everywhere. For the individual artist it’s an interesting challenge and worthy of a best effort, creating an image so compelling it causes people to look up from their devices, which even stretches their attention span back out to seconds, minutes, and hours week to week, so that they enjoy having a painting around even more over time. How to go about it is an open question. There aren’t any requirements, and there aren’t any rules. Here’s your canvas flat and white and your colors and brushes are close at hand, so with all of the history of art behind you and all the stuff that hasn’t been thought of yet, make a picture that a typical twenty-first century person, slowly drowning in digital quicksand, is going to see and want to look at.

Sounds hard but it could be even easier these days. Original art has permanence which can be a grounding influence, and it’s the sole possession that becomes more noticeable, more present with time rather than fading into its surroundings, like a permanently charged battery of human effort and intellect there on the wall. No matter the current state of affairs, in this uneasy time of transition it’s the artist’s job to establish the value of visual art in the lives of ordinary citizens, and they have to do it with pictures. Without always knowing why and for no one reason, average people are beginning to look.