best bargain prorated -- art

It starts with a piece of paper and awkward attempts to make marks that will conjure any object from the real world in the mind of a viewer, a ball, a cylinder, or a pop bottle. At first you won’t want to show anyone and when you do they’ll probably make a joke. Well get used to it and anyway serves you right for caring what they think. If you intend to travel the narrowest steepest path art has to offer there won’t be anyone there but you, and what you think will be all that matters. Like traveling on a road in the mountains you might occasionally think you glimpse a section higher up but mostly the destination is lost in day-to-day trees. At the top there could be a pass but you might never get to even see it -- doesn’t matter. Traversing a glacier it’s never a good idea to sit and rest, it’s just so hard to start up again and with so many easier ways to get off the mountain it’s best to keep climbing.

The opponent of the artist is the blank canvas and allies should be tubes of paint but they’re not at all friendly, surly and rebellious and in no mood to cooperate with a greenhorn. They sabotage the clear and visionary concept and are quick to mutiny over simple commands. Without sturdy discipline they’ll make a mess pretty quick. Sometime after Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hour apprenticeship, the time he claims it takes to get good at anything, the personality and perspective of the artist begin to show through whatever they paint. This is not a conscious determination and arises through simple practice, it can’t be helped. The subject of a work of art in the end is always the artist, since ten paintings of the same thing by ten artists will yield ten quite different paintings. On canvas what the artist reveals is not about the subject but about themselves, and it’s up on the wall to plum how much the viewer is ready to see -- it’s a two way conversation, shallow or deep.

In the end the art acquired over a lifetime speaks not for the artists, but for the person who has assembled the individual pieces into a living arrangement, each painting or print having become a familiar friend. Truly collecting art, knowing where each piece came from and something about its artist, thoughtfully arranging them room by room with each new abode, and never selling anything no matter how valuable it becomes will land a person in a fairly pretty comfortable nest in the long term. Not just for the painting you see but also for the long apprenticeship that preceded it, the person who collects art has hired cheap and is, without regard to profit or loss, making a very good bargain. 

isn’t art -- financial instruments

Seems some legally-trained art observer suggested that the banana wasn’t really art but an unregistered financial instrument. He reasoned, ‘As I saw artwork increasingly dematerialize, the more I realized that what you’re buying literally fits the definition of a security as adopted by the Supreme Court....... it’s even truer to say you’re buying a percentage ownership in the fame.’ Reaction was immediate and overwhelming. It’s like when you say something out loud that everyone knows already but no one else has acknowledged and you know right away it was the wrong thing to say. ‘“I was so drunk when I wrote this paper,” and he went on to explain how very drunk he was, oh please forgive me.

There’s a good reason the simple fact that the art market today is really another form of financial speculation should never be whispered in the same room with lay people. We must protect the sincere and simple faith of the flock is what they tell themselves. Art left long ago. To cite a period in Rothko’s career when he became intensely interested in ‘fuzzy edges’, invoking the grandeur and authority of modern art’s iron-clad liturgy, requires an aesthetic insight the average person will never attain -- this all seems so familiar. A Rothko painting made on a scale that would fit the average home would be a visual sink hole, less interesting than a bird calendar. Some museum in texas holds a series of Pollocks done easel size that nobody wants.

In general the population has become disillusioned about art, unsure of its premises and suspicious of motives, with many finally turning to sports with at least knowable outcomes and a rationale that reaches several levels. They’re not likely to be seduced with rotting bananas or much of anything else about art that attains national media attention. Outrage seems sorta cheap but it’s become the bloody mosh-pit of contemporary art, some peculiar amalgam of identity and ethnicity, edgy politics and above all a casual approach to actualization, any suggestion seems good enough. Have I missed something? The banana is a joke, I get that, and the punch line is when somebody pays a stupid amount for it making the artist just the setup person, it’s an old vaudeville act, ha ha. Still, it just doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with art, except perhaps to demean and humiliate it in the eyes of the world -- history sees you guys, from both directions.

People renounce their faith everyday. They open their eyes for the first time and suddenly see that art condenses and distills their own unspoken disappointments and aspirations, especially when it’s been produced totally unacknowledged and against all odds in some small town where it's imbued with qualities the facile grad-school comets of instant success will never attain. It’s not so difficult for the average citizen to begin to realize that super-bowls recede into the past one after the other, but a work of art owned and lived with never changes, an increasingly potent concept these days. What the artist managed to express and what the owner sees there is between those two, a long-term conversation that may mature and change as years go by. Real art is unlikely to spoil in a week.

Duchamp and the banana -- comes around

Modern art is hilarious and insists it’s deadly serious, financially overflowing and yet a cardboard sham, but the whole mess teeters on shaky ground. From way back some original fuzzy thinking has finally come down to this, a perishable piece of fruit attached to the wall in the most plebeian way possible, with duct tape. Is it so different, really, from a porcelain urinal entered in an art competition under a fictitious name long ago, on its way to becoming the most notorious single icon of modern art? Seen from the outside that episode seems nothing more than an adolescent prank by a second rate and derivative painter, the petty revenge of the rejected. Originally intended as a turd in the punch bowl, Duchamp was no doubt stunned and amazed to be declared a genius because of it. It was this peculiar inversion of parody and the real that ‘liberated’ art from a slavish reference to things seen, and converted the very notion of art into a puzzle to be thought about, written about, and talked about endlessly.

It’s little wonder an american culture distracted by a constant stream of advertising images, all with captions and voice-overs to explain what’s being seen, might miss the market-dictated descent of art into toxic self-effacement, and then one day the banana. So who steps forward from this vast assemblage of every possible definition of art to say ‘enough, too far, too dumb, and way too expensive?’ No one on the inside gets to make that claim, and that’s about everybody who shares the creed of modern art. If you bought the urinal in art school, well here’s a banana. Thanks for the money and the trivialization of art in the eyes of the public, it’s been a steal and surely robs the future.

Modern art isn’t superior to all the art there ever was, and in the end will only be an aberrant chapter in a long history of human expression first found in caves from way before the time of towns, before fame, and before money. The real obscenity here is not the banana for a hundred and twenty thousand in an edition of three, two sold at the fair and a third held for one hundred and fifty thousand to be sold to a museum -- it’s the whole enterprise, the publicity-seeking money-laundering charade of pissing away buckets of money because there simply isn’t anything else to do with it, it just keeps coming out of our sleeves. This won’t be cool much longer.

Art accurately reports and reflects the times, and spreads the message of an evolving consciousness the forces of control would always like to suppress and try to dilute with their state sponsored anti-art. Above and beyond, a vast network of charitable foundations and complicit museums traffic in the vastly inflated tokens of ponzi scheme art, all of it only a break-ranks run on the market away from total collapse. Time to flush the whole business and just look at art, it’s everywhere. Any open exhibit of a hundred pieces in your hometown will have one or two you’d like, maybe enough to own, and if the price turns out to be uncomfortable perhaps you should give up something else. Trust yourself.