rivera vs rockefeller -- art's other history

Throughout the ages people in power quickly learn the minds of the masses can be manipulated with art, and they attempt to limit what people see in order to control what they think. In the twentieth century the free press made this sort of censorship impossible, so those wielding great wealth hatched an extravagant scheme to steal art’s ability to speak the truth by canceling its ability to say anything at all. They called their poison apple ‘modern art.’

A lie within a lie would be pretty hard to crack but since we all have eyes maybe we can find the truth anyway. The first lie goes like this......   After the second great war the world was divided into two opposing camps, one that believed in collective will and the other that was based on individual self-interest. They named this period of bilateral confrontation the ‘cold war’ and it unleashed unrestrained competition on all fronts. America’s best minds from its best families decided they’d do their part by managing the cultural conflict, the battle for hearts and minds. They asserted american preeminence by demolishing the elitist reserves of old europe with the brute force of lots of money.

The truth is they were never really concerned about the russians, walled in behind an ‘iron curtain’ that we ourselves created and made to seem more powerful than they were on the evening news. There was, however, one person on earth the ultra-wealthy actually feared and that was the politically progressive artist, Diego Rivera. In mexico he and his compatriots had proven the power of visual art to bring about social change. The mexican muralists had raised and united the consciousness of a regionally diverse nation, previously convulsed in factional revolution. These painters were committed to social justice and economic reform and to the alarm of bankers in NY their movement was spreading into the US, largely through WPA commissioned murals in post offices and public buildings.

In the years before the war the financial barons conceived an elaborate plot to humiliate and vanquish international progressive thought as expressed through visual art. Nelson Rockefeller and his clan lured the prominently progressive Rivera with a chance to paint a mural in the lobby of the newly constructed Rockefeller Center, a building made of steel that might last a thousand years. He accepted their bait and after several months working day and night, at the moment he accepted their check they jack-hammered it down without allowing any photographs to be taken. In all the history of art and in the course of civilization this was one barbaric gangster statement. (this mural was later recreated in Mexico city). They then began a massive clandestine campaign to eliminate the voice of visual art altogether.

The cold war became their cover story for thrusting abstract expressionism upon the world. It was used like a cultural battering ram to bully and upstage the other side’s classical ballet, their music and literature. To drive home the notion of american ideals they sponsored an art so profoundly individualistic that only the artist knew what it meant, and they pushed hard with tons of public cash for all art thereafter to be ‘non-objective.’ A gigantic government agency was formed to enforce a virtual ban on representational art at all levels, the outwardly beneficent NEA with its myriad affiliations. They assured everyone they were being progressive by only supporting an art that no member of the general public could possibly relate to, as this was in fact their guiding principle. The origins and the means of this massive cultural manipulation and distortion have been documented with names, dates, and deeds, and their sins are confessed by their successors in nostalgic terms as perhaps over-zealous patriotism, but that’s just another lie.

The truth is it’s time for artists to spend more time in the studio and less time as cooks and servers, sweeping floors or delivering stuff, all such as that. This will require recently stressed and newly awakened citizens to begin buying original art to hang in their homes. Actually looking at all the art available, hanging in salons and restaurants, in offices and reception areas, tends to negate just about everything taught in school, and occasionally it arouses thoughts and feelings the very wealthy would like to keep to themselves, or at least eliminate for everyone else. At this moment and after long exile, Diego Rivera returns with a major show at the Whitney in NY, and the potency of articulate and universal visual images will go rippling out in all directions, invading art schools, and then galleries, and finally going up on the wall in peoples’ houses.

biblical appropriation -- visual redemption

Ezekiel was lifted up in a vivid dream and came down on a great plain covered with human carrion, nothing but rags and bone, and heard the lord’s command to preach. Ezekiel suggested to the lord that they might not be able to hear and the lord said ‘preach anyway.’ Once on tv I saw a black guest pastor harangue an affluent white congregation with this story and I wondered if they heard. Visual artists with something to say face a similar dilemma, a public that won’t listen and doesn’t look, but it’s not entirely their fault.

The self-loathing celebrity tripe marketed to status-seeking new wealth leaves ordinary people so disinterested they’ve failed to notice the dirty millions being laundered by donations to museums and rigged auctions, but that rock is being turned over now. The question rephrased for the visual artist would be ‘ but can they see,’ and the answer comes back ‘paint anyway’ and maybe they’ll begin to look. Like in Zeke’s dream, the people in the valley would then begin to put themselves together and turn back into living flesh, but it starts with the eyes.
 

the faith-based commodity -- art worth millions

Some people see an artist’s easel as a magic doorway with fame and fabulous riches on the other side, but very few pass through leaving most who make the attempt lost and bitter dreamers. For the lucky ones who enter through a side-door the process is so simple, just stretch canvas on a wooden frame and cover with color and suddenly it’s worth millions just because of who you are, you media-darling certified genius you. You’ll have to admit it’s pretty amazing compensation for an afternoon of work when other people struggle and sweat a whole lifetime for less. Just how do you and your friends pull it off?

Glad you asked. The intricacies of the high-end art market might be over your head so let’s just say we operate a quasi-religion with a predetermined list of saints and we do quite a robust commerce in their relics. Each piece of their art is like a ponzi-style banknote promising a big profit when a bigger fool comes along, and it’s going to go on forever is what we pray. It’s tricky because the value is virtual and it’s just blind faith that says that this piece of canvas is worth fifty million dollars, fifty million dollars. If for an instant that faith falters the so-called art is liable to be seen, actually seen, as just a blotchy mess on canvas that some artist could have used to make a picture, and fifty million, poof.

Art is worth something, quite a lot actually, but it isn’t out of an ordinary person’s price range and they won’t have to pretend to like it. First it’s necessary to shed the utter nonsense of the art’s mega-ministries, and instead look at enough art, it’s all around, to know when something is good and being sold at a fair price. Anyone interested can do this, looking in restaurants and salons where art is hung and going on studio tours to find a bargain. The ultra rich don’t own art and it’s possible they don’t appreciate it either since to them it’s all about tax breaks and social standing, but average folks just getting through their day deserve an example of the very best someone like themselves can manage on their own.

pulling down the temple -- breaking chains

Deaccession is in the air, all the rage, changing out the old art by old white guys and bringing in all minority, gender-specific, and underrepresented art, all above board and absolutely legitimate. Oh the standards might slip a bit but we haven’t been concerned about aesthetic quality for several generations and think of all the money, why we’ll all be rich. It’s being done for only the best reasons and now they can pay their starving-wage staffs, mostly unemployable art majors who manage the stacks and sweep the floors, and they can pave that parking lot and also acquire a few pieces of art by women and minorities, so neglected. 

Fact is they, any art museum, didn’t buy that forty million dollar artwork in the first place and now they’re trying to sell it. It was purchased at auction by some visionary philanthropist, so generous, who wrote it down on their tax form and deducted the price from the same tax pool we all pay into, leaving nothing but a paper chit for their fair share. Now alarms are sounding, the establishment courtiers have been aroused and the whole business of deaccession has been declared out of bounds, a betrayal of trust, and liable to blow the whole racket, ripping down the green curtain to reveal a bloated tax-evading parasite that’s been calling itself art.

If you want to see deacquisition hit overdrive rewrite the tax laws and watch all those heavy art lovers scurry back to their yachts and start pitching modern masters overboard, because the prices are going to tank. Consider the work of Mark Rothko with an easily recognized signature style and approximately a thousand examples of his work floating around. If anyone has a more accurate accounting let’s hear it. Anyway at about forty million a piece, a high of eighty-six million in 2012, that comes to 40,000,000,000 dollars worth of colored cloth poised to hit the market more or less all at once. It’s a disgrace and betrayal no doubt, but there are several points of view and there will be some who won’t mind when it happens. Pulling down the temple, don’t mind if I do.

waving at the door -- the senses say bye-bye

The world is leaving us, fading away, and we won’t look up long enough to see it go. The world is rain in the face and wind in the hair along with the smells of cooking and leather and sweat and shit, all avoided these days or discounted as minor inconveniences. Modern folks also neglect their bodies applying an array of sauces to processed food while packing on pounds, and they live vicariously through digitalized surrogates, lovably dysfunctional sit-com families, peak athletes in play-offs, and ruthless unstoppable killing machines. Sure looks like curtains for a commonly shared reality and there doesn’t seem to be a thing anyone can do to slow it down. Artists claw at the ground but are swept away as well, inundated by knock-off imitators from all directions and a market that craves familiarity and repetition.

Along with a planet on fire, a disintegrating democracy, and a world pandemic these are interesting odds for anyone considering a career making art. Did I fail to mention that creating by-hand is nearly an obsolete notion and even the idea of a thing unique in itself has almost left the language? It’s going to be a tough row to hoe, a thankless penniless futile assignment, a snow-swept lonely trek up a remote mountain but fools sign up anyway. While it may be the case that there’s no license exam or advanced degree and all anyone has to do it look in the mirror and say I’m an artist, let’s reserve the title for people actually making art independently against all odds. They’re providing a rear-guard, a last-ditch effort to reclaim physical reality and the sheer ability to see, touch, taste and smell the world directly.

through the eyes of others -- art antagonisms

This election shows that it’s not different tribes we belong to, we live in different places in an alternate universe and we’re never going to agree about anything until we line out a playing field in the middle somewhere and agree on some rules. It’s unreasonable blaming art for any of this since art is just an afterthought after all and really not capable of defining the differences we perceive in each other. On the other hand perhaps if we could see today’s art through the eyes of others we’d begin to understand the chaos all around.

We’ll look through a common set of eyes, in this case male, and what you mostly remember from your high school experience are three years on the varsity, starting left guard senior year. There’s a lot about the culture you don’t understand. You don’t know why any of the cartoons in new yorker magazine are funny, and you’re left out by references to past wars or politicians you’re very vague about. You might be an intelligent practical person capable of running a big farm, able to make quick consequential decisions, and be kind and humane toward your family and friends, but you will not be transported by the piece of art that just sold for thirty times the price of all that soil and all the tears, sweat, and triumph of a lifetime on a family farm. It’s probably just going to piss you off. Well you’re just going to have to live with it and ignore it, but if you ever get the chance, you’re going to vote for Trump. It’s a disaster but I don’t blame you.

I don’t agree with your politics but I’m down with your point of view. An article noted that it was interesting how many rich kids wind up being successful as artists, and it isn’t just the trust fund studio or the early sponsorship of the parents’ friends -- an obligatory and empty gesture, they’ll give it to the maid. Their real edge of course is growing up with rich people’s art, the kind that says my offhand gesture is more potent and meaningful than ten years of your gardener’s toil and he’s compensated very nicely. Not everybody likes that kind of art. To make it bald-faced perfectly clear some worthy and productive people find the art presented in media to be patently offensive. Perhaps the cultural progressives thought they just didn’t care or that they wouldn’t notice, but over a hundred million dollars for the ugliest dumbest art possible, to be fair that is its charm, makes people so mad they tend to overlook their own self-interests.

There’s a simple fix to all of this but it’s going to make a lot of rich people wail and gnash their teeth. Float thirty or forty prime Rothko paintings on the market, everyone attempting to unload all at once, and see how many millionaires jump over the hedges to snap them up. At one time the Marlboro Gallery held seven hundred and fifty three of them and that isn’t all there are, who knows? Even with all the status-seeking new money flooding in it’s a good bet this gravy train will soon grow rancid, and once prices start to retreat there’s likely to be a period of free-fall to some more rational consideration of actual value, and who knows?

Maybe we should reconsider our approach to education and not separate out the gifted and privileged to run things and preserve the culture, but that’s a political discussion. When it comes to visual art let all the Warhol fast-food art, to be fair its charm, seek its own level against more organic and locally-sourced, more conscious and accomplished picture making. When the people who support this economy find some form of expression they can relate to maybe it will help to disarm the rage of frustration that pollutes our politics.

a miracle or something -- turning heads

Artists, I only know a few, are mostly solitary dreamers, every afternoon in front of an easel alone with their fantasies. They imagine friendly openings in their hometown crowded with average people like themselves. The guy who works on their car says he thinks their stuff is swell and he’d sure like to have something above his service desk, so the artist says well the next time I need a repair, a big repair, and he says great idea, and so does the dentist, such a nice little town. Then the artist watches the evening news during a pandemic and sees all the talking heads sequestered at home.

These people aren’t the artist’s neighbors, they’re articulate and educated public figures immersed in urban culture and interacting at all levels all day, that’s their job. You’d think with an entire nation visiting them at home they’d find some credible piece of art to use as a backdrop on the wall behind them. I wouldn’t fault them for sticking to the facts, but it becomes clear pretty quick that art isn’t a high priority in their hi-rise urban dwellings, so how likely is it going to be that people in this little town are ever going to pay more than a nickel for something more personal than a sailing ship from the mall? In this moment you’re eavesdropping on a common solitary conversation in front of easels everywhere, and this sense of futility becomes an element in the paint and it’s an extra load to carry.

Well finally what happens is they all turn their heads at once, it’s like a miracle or something. One day some hard to place commentator with a peculiar point of view logs in with a visually compelling and thoughtful painting his cousin who drives a food truck made on the wall behind him. It lends credence to what he’s saying, and he's remembered. Like aroused sharks all the home-bound pundits are out looking for art that fortifies their well-reasoned points of view, but as usual they’d be behind the general population who are poised at this moment to begin valuing the art produced in their own hometowns. This dearth of art on the walls in middle america is like a desert waiting for rain, and then everything blooms overnight. In this season of magical thinking with things not even considered battering each moment’s expectations and in the realm of infinite possibilities it could happen. At some point some level of saturation will pass and each morning a few more people everywhere will wake up wanting to look at art without knowing why. Artists are also optimistic against all odds and that's in their paintings too.

the end of art history -- a rebirth for art

‘The End of Art History,’ by David Carrier, from hyperallergic online, 9-26,
“Writing a global art history demands that we give up historical thinking.”

What he’s trying to say is that if we consider the contributions of everyone we’ll have to abandon this artificial orthodoxy we’ve imposed on all of art for the last seventy five years, and it’s back on the streets for us. So what is the ‘historical thinking’ we have to give up and where did it come from in the first place? Does it have anything to do with evolving cultural consciousness or is it more of a fish trap for just the financially fattest tuna constructed by critics and scholars for their friends the marketeers, all of them in the same leaky boat?

The history of 'art history' in the twentieth century is all about exclusion, narrowing the the acceptable form of expression to an arbitrary and impenetrable ‘signature’ style that requires an implicit compromise to even be called art. Through many breakthroughs and redefinitions, these days just an impertinent thought takes the place of all that skill, and even though the public sector seems to be doing great there’s nothing left to sell to the public. The real reason to give up on the artificial construct called ‘art history,’ the frenetic pursuit of novelty, notoriety and outrage, is because every taboo has been excised and all former standards breached until there’s not much left to say. The art most valued by our culture according to the price tag has been reduced to time-bound posturing, hollow sensationalism, and it’s ugly.

The ‘discovery’ of pouring or splashing or dripping in some unique new way probably wasn’t as significant as all the art history books say it was, and what it produced isn’t worth what they claim it is now either. They’ll get theirs when it all comes tumbling down, when all their hermetic double-dealing is exposed to the open air of a free market. Museums will begin to deaccession from the stacks, cautiously at first, and the plantation workers, all those exploited and underpaid employees with art degrees, will begin to unionize and expose the dirty practices of their gentile institutions. Oh, you say that’s all happening now and it’s already rolling downhill? Can the end of ‘art history’ be far behind?

No one I know or have ever met is likely to spend 20m on a retread Rothko for their restored castle with eighteen foot ceilings, ‘it’ll be great for the great hall.’ Maybe we should look at something else. It might be nice to have real art on the wall in a modest real house, a bit of individual character to flavor all the manufactured stuff we all live with. Caution is advised -- don’t buy an art magazine, they’re shills for the industry, don’t go to lectures by anyone who doesn’t make art, and don’t believe the gallery when they tell you how much anything is worth. Most of all forget anything you’ve learned about ‘art history,’ we're starting over. Just look at all the art you see in public always noting the price, and before long you’ll recognize a bargain because you’ve also learned to recognize actual accomplishment. Now you’re ready to buy some for the house.

one world -- separate planets

I proposed in a previous post that humans all inhabited different planets depending how they imprinted on the world as they found it, the world itself being open-ended and full of possibility. This time I offer examples of two different planets residing in exactly the same orbit as reflected in the points of view of two contemporary writers concerning the same subject, paintings in the western canon from hundreds of years ago. In this case it’s handy that the traditional linage of western art allows so direct a comparison, and when seen from this long perspective it turns out to be a telescope on our own times too.

One dispatch came from the CNN news wire and was titled, ‘One of the last privately-owned Botticelli portraits could sell for over $80M.’ In it the ‘head of Sotheby's Old Master painting department said that it could "very well be the next painting to surpass the rarified $100 million threshold." In doing so, "Young Man Holding a Roundel" would become the first painting to achieve a nine-figure sum at auction since Claude Monet's "Haystacks," which fetched over $110 million at Sotheby's New York last year.’ This report comes from a planet of avarice and greed where people are aggressive and mean, and where no matter what anyone has it’s never enough and art is just another thing to have.

The other, oddly enough side by side in the same media, came from the New York Times Magazine, 9-23, written by someone who had gone on a pilgrimage to visit the paintings of Caravaggio in the little churches up and down the coast of Italy where he traded his talent for board, beans, and sanctuary. The trip was summed up this way, ‘A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.’ This planet has more parks, and the people are friendlier and more humane.

fantasy futures -- concrete consequences

Oh you shouldn’t find fault with the ultra-wealthy, they make the world go around. That’s what they tell us and what they tell themselves, but it’s really the people they hire that do all the work while they enjoy their assets. They know that if they decide to play golf, or go skiing, or never come back at all things will be just fine because their executive secretary knows more than they do and doesn’t really need them. I’m not sure anyone does since they’re not much more than retread old world gentry, mostly just a bunch of high class thieves just like last time, and they hire out the stealing too, retaining only the best tax lawyers and art advisors, sometimes different offices in the same outfit.  

I suppose there are good rich people out there, and if lottery money fell from the sky my own meager character would be tested, but the money at the top all comes from the bottom, that’s obvious. Do people on the bottom struggle to stay warm and dry and are they forced to consume unwholesome food because it’s cheap? How about the middle class, warm and dry but somehow perpetually dissatisfied with the shiny new products that never bring the happiness portrayed during time-outs and pitching changes. Turns out it isn’t just the money they’ve been stealing. Each person’s self regard has to be pretty battered or they wouldn’t be changing their hair color or buying a truck that belongs on a construction site just to improve themselves, and to be truly fulfilled, satisfied, and finally happy.

To cover their crimes the very rich stole art and turned it into a neutered and near-sighted house pet on a golden chain, and they steal a lot of money that way too. Would you pay millions of dollars for a painting by Mark Rothko? They’re all pretty much alike, that’s what makes them a Rothko, and no one has any idea how many were made or even who made them all. It would have been just like a job for one person to make so many so similar, hundreds. All significant no doubt, but drive, passion, and emotional intensity, maybe not after the first one or two, and the formula is so easy to copy that forgeries abound, and who can say otherwise? Publicly shy private art museums, philanthropy’s most classiest tax shelters, are getting antsy about their phony assets and trying to float the fifth Rothko in their stacks for cash, the parking lot needs paving, and there’s been wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the entire industry all the way to the top.

When the international art industry eventually collapses in an avalanche of measured and responsible museum deaccessioning, leading to portfolios for pennies and investors wedged in all the exits, ordinary people will begin to discover organically-produced, locally-sourced original art all around them. Full of vitamins instead of empty calories, hormone free and unadulterated, friendly and challenging at the same time, a painting that represents the very best the painter could do in that moment has its own charm, and it broadcasts a good feeling out into a room. Over time the artist’s affection and regard become mutual and having it around just gets better, people say. In this dollar driven and competitive world we’ve inherited, each person deep down yearns for verification that’s there’s something more important than money, and some find that character, truth, and communion are things we can share through art, what it’s really for.

It’s the dawn before the world of tomorrow, a brand new day in which either great wealth tightens and consolidates it control and art as a channel of human expression and sincere communication drowns in cheap advertising like a swan sucked down in a cesspool, or material assets are distributed more evenly and art and artists become a feature of community life everywhere, contributing to the genuine sense of well being and satisfaction a fully realized and secure people deserve.

multiverse controversy -- picking a planet

What are the chances of a multiverse, myriad realities next to each other like the bubbles in beer foam? I don’t know about out there, but I suspect we’re living it everyday, each set of human eyes looking out on a slightly different planet. There’s temperament, some set of predilections from a previous life or a unique toss of genes, no one has explained it, and that’s allied with experience, everything that’s ever happened to a person, remembered or not. Their interaction forms a distinct planet inside each person’s head and it’s going to be slightly different from the planets inhabited by family members, and maybe very different for someone across town or totally unrecognizable from that of a person in another country at a different time.

As we intermingle we begin to sense how alone we really are and that our disagreements with others can’t all be explained because they’re too dumb to see the same truth we do. They seem to have their own truth. This engenders an underlying unease, a subliminal terror at losing touch, and nominally free citizens scurry under the skirt of the nearest tribal identity, a sports franchise, a mega-religion or a political party. Business won’t help. They’ve been using our anxieties against us, urging us to huddle next to their brand names and to be loyal to their products, but there’s not much comfort there. Truth be told that’s actually how we wound up in this wretched place to begin with.

Being alone in the universe can be scary. That’s why there’s art. Throughout history art has been used to link up the population and standardize their planets. We’ve been through a difficult period, wars and political assassinations, disease and injustice, crime and climate change, and each of us could use something to hold on to. Art as it’s presented in media these days hasn’t been much help either, the domain of an ultra-wealthy sensibility manifesting an ironical self-loathing, but there’s a groundswell of hometown interest in hometown art under our feet. After a long drought art is being seen in neighborhoods again, and people are finding solace in artwork that celebrates the commonalities and visions they share, on the planet they’d prefer to live on.   

Trump as avatar -- art as antidote

Trump is the avatar of resentment. His genius is composed of it and it’s his power. Hillary and her clan seemed to think everyone who counts would see things her way. Well this is a wake up call for the woke. The general population has grown confused and moody on an empty-calorie cultural diet of escapist entertainment and endless sporting events created only to con them into buying things they don’t need for a promised life that doesn’t exist. Someone better start pumping value back into daily existence like quality universal education, affordable decent housing for everyone, and something to believe in and hold on to or we’re going to have a mess on our hands.

This isn’t about politics, it’s about life with no meaning, no attainment beyond the envy of strangers, and the meager and fleeting joy in buying a bigger pickup or getting a new tattoo. Humans as animals can only be abused so long and then they begin to agitate, to deviate, and to express their repressed aspirations. The machinery of state long before Trump arrived has been manipulating institutions and incentives to loot the value created by the economic system and move it to the top, and what we have here is a predictable reaction. Devotion to Trump is not about his policies, blind and ignorant vandalism mostly, but in his robust ‘fuck you’ to all that benign ‘we’ve got your back’ bullshit from a government devoted to marketing lives and selling its citizens cheap to large corporations.

As an emergency measure, I’d suggest an IV of original art, organic and locally produced, at least until the fever subsides, anxieties abate, and people begin to find enough satisfaction and fulfillment in their own lives to stop finding fault with each other. Art is the distillation of a culture’s perceptions, its needs and desires, and all systems of control seek to manipulate and neuter it. In totalitarian states artists are imprisoned and art is destroyed but in a capitalist democracy a tax-driven institutional obscurity is used to muffle honest expression and to deny independent artists access to their own communities. At some point artists and the public will begin to find each other through alternative venues, outdoor painting events and organized studio tours, and psychic healing will begin. After that honorable work for a reasonable wage with enough free time and societal support to pursue whatever the hell anyone wants would be nice, finally a healthy place to live and no Trumps nowhere.

democratic art -- domestic influences

Moses was appalled when he got back. He’d been up on the mountain considering the meaning of it all and while he was gone the people erected a golden calf, these days frankly reproduced as the bronze bull on wallstreet, and it’s an expression of base materialism plain and simple. When just stuff is worshiped greed sets in and the people begin behaving like pigs, doesn’t matter the time or place. Pretty soon their civilization crumbles and they go back to cooking over an open fire and living with animals, waiting to start over.

Moses decided to give them something else to think about, like when the vet distracts your dog before it gets its shot. He said look over here and see these stone tablets given to me by the one and only god, and drag yourselves away from doing better than your neighbor for a moment that you might see life differently. The commandments aren’t particularly bad advice in a general sort of way but that’s not the point. Humans are capable of incandescent attainment and we have the examples of DaVinci, Beethoven, and Einstein, and we have the art of the ancient chinese, the egyptians, the meso-americans and the greeks, but when things get good we can backslide.

Convenience comes in handy and having household machines that help with the chores should leave us free to read a book, to visit a museum, to expand our universe and live up to our potential, wouldn’t that be great? To see how we’re doing let’s look at our art since after all, it’s the way we judge all the civilizations that came before us. It seems we’re in trouble. The scrapping and replacing of the last century’s monuments, righteous and necessary no doubt, reveals an easing of standards that’s less than comforting, and millions and millions of dollars for dogshit art at auction is a ‘let them eat cake’ formula for disaster. Somehow just having more free time hasn’t made us better.

It was an eye-opener to me and a novel notion of democracy when I read that attendance at the theater in ancient greece was mandatory. Utilizing their art and literature they were imposing intelligence and rationality on the population. Every citizen was being to asked to measure themselves against the culture’s highest ideals, and it seems to have worked well for a few hundred years, average citizens accomplished and thoughtful with lives well lived. Here we have our own version of democracy and each of us decides what to look at and what to think about on our own, it’s that way in writing. We also have more choices, from the imbecilic to works of art that are smarter than we are, and we get to pick and choose which to live with and see every day. Does it make a difference, the greeks thought it did. 

the soul's reflection -- the grifter's gift

Study Finds That Abstractions Don’t Elicit Universal Emotional Responses Among Viewers   artnet news, august 11, 2020
“Aesthetic effects are not universally shared but rather are highly determined by private evaluation,” it stated.
 
Turns out abstract art is pretty much a blank slate and you take away only what you brought with you, everyone projecting their own meanings on a square of pure improvisation. Now that’s freedom but it isn’t communication since it’s been determined definitively there’s no universal meaning in abstract art, and maybe no meaning at all. Back when the abstract expressionists first ascended they had all the meaning, subconscious supremacy and action immediacy, all such as that, and it was the representational artists who had nothing left to say and besides we’re not even looking at pictures of anything any more no matter what. Literary people fanned the flames of abstract expressionism realizing before anyone else that it truly was a blank slate and they could write anything they wanted about it. They were free to fly, constructing counterpoints of airy conjecture that would baffle their editors and leave the general public in the dust.

This inherent meaninglessness of abstraction is desirable in certain quarters and corporate entities particularly prefer its non-committal qualities for conference rooms and offices, a splash of color for muted business interiors without revealing even so much as personal taste, conceding not even that much advantage. Fans of abstract art also include anyone mentally lazy or just disinterested who find it convenient for breaking up blank wall space in waiting rooms and such since who looks anyway? To be fair some abstract art does get lots of attention but only as the price tag begins to swell to gigantic proportion and overshadow the art, ironically in itself something recognizable after all.

In the end there’s only art, all together, and we have centuries and continents of it already laid down. In our era of general prosperity some knowledge of art should reasonably be the common heritage of everyone, not just the gated reserve of the insanely rich and those who long to be like them. Down the street and around the corner someone is painting what they see, don’t know why. Their work won’t be valued by the establishment since they still haven't found the first step on the ascending ladder of certified affirmations the industry calls a career. This is the time when their work will be cheap, before the general population begins to awaken to their own human potential, abruptly weaned from sports and stadium concerts, shut out of bars and forced to cook at home, even bored enough to pickup the coffee table book and actually look at the pictures. Pretty soon they’ll be able to see the art in front of them too, and the buyer’s market for pictures of things will be gone.

the art of time-binding -- personal markers

Heard a story about how Marc Chagall deep in his nineties was shown a painting he had done around nineteen twelve and after looking for a moment he started to cry, so sweet such a quaint old man. His patronizing fans could not travel back with him to a drafty studio, his friends and the life he had back then, but the painting sent him down a long dark wormhole and left him smoking his pipe close by a wood stove, the smell of turpentine in the air and horses in the street, good times. Paintings have a way of absorbing events and experiences and then releasing them back during a moment’s contemplation, places lived and things seen.

To be clear I’m talking about real art and not whatever someone happens to have on the wall at the time, as easily forgotten as last year’s calendar. Original art from the hand of an artist has a presence museum posters or mass produced mall art don’t possess, similar in a way to the difference between music in live performance and anything recorded. It’s an argument that can be settled only by direct experience, and it’s the reader’s responsibility to verify this simple fact on their own. Assuming it’s so, by depicting a moment’s experience within a matrix of skill and manual effort, time is arrested and the artist manages to put a foot in the revolving door of daily experience.

A painting bought when young for too much money at the time, to celebrate graduation or the new job, to mark an arrival in a different city or just because you didn’t want to let it get away, will pay for itself over and over in the years ahead. From the date of purchase the painting forgets its artist and begins remembering the life of its new owner going forward. A few pieces of original art becomes a personal entourage, inhabiting the walls each time there’s a move and in between witnessing daily joy and strife, finally becoming a repository of all that mileage as close by as a cup of coffee and a moment to reflect. Art can bind a lifetime together by halting and gathering time in significant moments, creating islands in a constantly-streaming river of memory and enabling more potent and tangible recollections than a tumble of old photos and videos with no artistic value of their own.
 
Time is flapping at the edges these days, the great wars overlap as centuries collapse and history becomes a blur, while possible futures are trending on a highly volatile and virulently contagious form of instantaneous group-think right there in everybody’s hand. The very act of painting speaks of a different time frame and the painting in itself insists on an extended attention span to even comprehend its image. Over time there’s also reason to wonder why it still seems so fresh and compelling when everything else in the room has become familiar and largely goes unnoticed. Art is a time-binder, a recorder and witness that lives with you and is seen every day, not sequestered on a bookshelf or compressed in a digital cloud, and having it around provides perspective on the years as they flow by.

original art -- the industry’s stepchild

There’s a big problem for original art just for starters because its lip-service advocates don’t really like it. The scholars don’t like it because they live by analyzing the evolution and mutation within a limited bloodline, and galleries insist on something similar to art that’s much more expensive. Interior designers don’t like original art at all because it dominates the sofa and carpet where the margins are fat, and don’t pull out a wad of millions and expect to find anything serious. In that range speculators bid on a Rockwell or a Rothko with equal fervor and it has nothing to do with the art. They’re buying a known brand and hoping to unload it tomorrow for more so whatever’s on the front doesn’t count, it’s just a poker chip.

The awkward fact is that art made directly from life can seem abrasive, unfamiliar and raw, especially after seeing similar work online or reproduced on a poster. It can be as quirky and idiosyncratic as the artist and you’ll find their personality is oddly reflected in the way they portray the world. If the sum of their life experiences and all the art they’ve ever seen filtered through the prism of their mind happens to coincide with what’s currently written about in media and pushed in galleries they’ll be rich and famous pronto, but that’s unlikely. As truly original art their product can’t even find a venue since there’s no established consensus on its value. Gallery directors don’t even know what they’re looking at without a record of prior sales, and deep down academics resent actual artists in exactly the same way sports writers are jealous of athletes.

Why artists continue to work anyway while earning a living at some menial occupation (‘with their left hand’ from an old artist proverb) is a mystery born of discontent probably, but in any case they choose it. Equally important, along with making art is the looking, completing the circuit and sharing mind to mind with the artist, but also with all the others who look at it as well. Painting is far from obsolete these days, and as the floor and walls dissolve in digital goo and we argue on the phone with non-humans, it’s just about the only thing that’s real. Original art is the one thing left in the house that could last for a lifetime, just for a start. If it’s compelling enough, over time bonding takes place and a comfortable friendship develops. A few pieces of original art become something to hold on to.

The art establishment’s empire of certified acceptance and bluebook evaluation largely excludes truly original art and inevitably degenerates into a cascade of mediocrity and cheesy marketing. In this moment a rank opportunist is selling fabulously-expensive paintings of evenly spaced dots claiming there are ‘no two alike,’ while another is having a series of stupidly-expensive museum-sized sculptures fabricated that revel in the mentality of toddler-hood. The only thing dumber would be a panel of one solid color, oh you say someone already did that. The lucky thing turns out to be that all humans have the equipment onboard, may be dusty, to decide for themselves when an artist has been able to express something they’ve only felt, or perhaps made visible something they didn’t know they knew. Just understand that it’s in your human nature, some would say the very way we think, to constantly make comparisons. We’re doing it all the time anyway, so consciously use it on the art you see around town.

Don’t attempt to look at one piece of art and try to decide if it’s good or not, you’ll need an expert. Instead put up two paintings and consider which of the two you like better, almost anyone off the street can do it. Don’t be afraid of liking dumb art to begin with, just put it in the bank and move on. Soon you’ll find something you like better, by comparison. Everyone up and down the block might take their own journey but in the end the art that hangs in people’s houses will reflect and express what they all have in common as well as their differences, and in the richest, most advanced society ever on earth, the notion of everyday people seeing, discussing, and owning art is not too much to ask.

smashing atoms -- colliding worlds

At the cern collider in switzerland they’ve been unraveling reality, pulling smaller and smaller threads until they’re down to whimsically named little wiggles of nothing, and now they want to build a bigger one to go even further. They’re hot on the trail of how it all works and it’s a glorious quest, but what can be done with the answer? Just how far beyond the human realm do they need to go, because the territory they’ve entered is an odd sort of real.

This brings us to Schrodinger's cat, the physicist’s favorite quantum paradox. There’s a cat inside a box and your logical mind says it’s either alive or dead, but in a quantum reality it isn’t either until you lift the lid and look. Somehow this also applies to all the dancing little particles that form the substance of the world, and all the way up on a human scale it sounds suspiciously like a person’s perception forms at least part of reality. This is a loose translation of endless blackboards of computation since these deep thinkers tend to be rather shy about the theological implications of the various dimensions they’ve encountered. It’s all much easier with pictures.

It’s just natural to assume the world looks the same to everyone but present day dissent and discord say otherwise. Two equally intelligent people can watch the same evening news and each totally miss what the other saw. What we have here is two different sets of experience and belief, the individual continents of our personal worlds, and we’d all get along better with more overlap. Don’t expect much help from scientists, this insular order of monks are totally removed from the world until their funding is cut. This is a job for art and artists, who even without funding have been here all along.

Look at a photograph and see what you always see but look at a painting and see what the artist saw and this will be different. The artist represents their experience as faithfully as their skill set allows, and the viewer compares it to what they see on a normal day, mission one complete. Artists can go farther. In their paintings they can encode attitudes and insights about life and living, although this isn't directly intentional and more a product of process. The viewer recognizes and assimilates this information but not at a conscious level, so just looking lets it happen. Does looking at art alter reality? With a bigger atom smasher maybe we could find out, but no doubt it changes the way the world is seen, and maybe the way we all see it together.

the mural and the emoji -- art for the ages

The mural in the foyer of the university’s chapel has become a contentious issue, a WPA commission to visually chronicle the history of kentucky, but it’s difficult to imagine what depiction would be deemed politically correct these days, or maybe the day after tomorrow. The school administration says we’ll just move it, no big deal, but they know it’s part of the building and can only be destroyed. Black students find the mural highly offensive because they’re depicted as field workers, but the history of this country and the history of the world are flush with offenses against people and pretending they never happened won’t make anyone safe, as a fact just the opposite.

Changing the world by replacing the art seems to indicate that art is pretty important and it’s all important if it shapes the world we live in. The mural in question reads like a hieroglyph. It’s a complicated junction of many different ideas, each image a trailhead for its own journey into a dark and bloody land, how we got here. Human slavery was part of that history but we don’t think that way anymore and that’s one of the things this mural makes explicit. Still art can be read different ways at different times by different people and this conversation is the way we eventually find commonality, and that’s this mural’s job. After all these years its purpose is finally revealed, but that six-sided irony aside, it’s a pretty nice painting. It’s a real work of art and not wallpaper, not school emblems or a trophy case, and compared with the other original works of art on campus it has something to say about raw intellect and depth of scholarship quite apart from what it literally says about our past.

Across campus at the entrance of the art museum stands the recently installed emoji mood totem, a stack of five plastic spheres depicting happy at the top in bright yellow and sad at the bottom in blue. Red is in the middle, maybe on top, who cares, it belongs on a playground and not for the older children. All students of every hue should be alarmed at the slippage. There was a ceremony for its placement with the president of the university and all, and that’s a cynical and mercenary betrayal of the whole notion of education, but I’m not going to do anything more about it than to compose this little sermon. Picturing them side by side the message is clear and until they destroy the mural, anyone can see it.

mega-merchandizer -- Andy’s art

I’ve always been out of step with contemporary trends in art and I’m resigned, but at no point is this divergence greater than when it comes to Andy Warhol. An exhibit of his work recently opened at the Speed Museum in louisville. To me he’s the diva ghoul of art, from his early days peddling photos of fatal car wrecks to robbing the graves of celebrities and shamelessly selling their tragic personas, all such as that. He’s notorious as well for a total lack of empathy for those in his circle and a lack of interest in anything that didn’t benefit him directly, a model in kind for our current president, imagine that.

Still, I’ll attempt to see the other side. When Andy came along art had stumbled, the dominate mode had been rudely transitioned to pure abstraction and average folks never bought in. They were suspicious at first but gradually just lost interest which was fine with the marketing moguls and state supported academics, both camps willing to collaborate on an obscurity only the extremely intelligent, culturally aware, and financially secure could comprehend. This dearth of art for everyone else was barren ground, and Andy and his industrially prolific factory were the perfect invasive. He changed art wall to wall no doubt and to the scholar that’s enough. To them it’s all about influence and legacy and Andy leaves a wide wake, there’s the president.

I grew up in a house with two commercial artists wed to retail marketing and that was Andy’s beginning too, so I see what he did. Andy was never really an artist and didn’t claim to be. ‘Art, that’s a man’s name‘ was his standard reply to a bothersome reporter. If you had called him a retailing genius you’d have likely gotten a very rare hug, a wink for sure, because he was. There have been family dynasties built based on his principles, all in retail. The bare-knuckle fashion industry mentality rampaged across old fashioned artistic notions like intellect and vision, already in distress, and made art all about social standing and glamor, the very same things that sell shoes and dresses.

I’m more interested in art not made for money and wouldn’t you know, it’s everywhere. Reducing art to multiples of whatever can be sold has cheapened art, even the notion of art, to a point where artists just about everywhere can’t make an independent living. Instead they paint for pure passion and the hope that their work will be seen and recognized by someone somewhere someday. If they can get enough practice in to be revealed in their work perhaps they’ll make friends with others who think like them and receive their support. Art taken seriously at a local and regional level could lead to a viable and wholesome exchange and become an organic self-sustaining element of community life fostering mutual respect and understanding, why not? One thing is fairly certain, there will come a day when the iconic and sought-after soup can label will be just a soup can label once again, but the painting bought direct from the artist twenty five years back will have become much more valuable, regardless of its current market price.

changing symbols -- bending what’s real

Altering reality by manipulating symbols is a magical business sure enough, but these objects that are being attacked are also works of art. Once completed, works of art are worthy of consideration based solely on their level of accomplishment. An insightful and profound painting from the hand of an unpleasant person with questionable politics and despicable morals by current standards might still be pretty good. In our current climate the level of art is hardly considered, yet each object’s symbolic strength has grown immensely. Statues in the park or on the courthouse lawn that stood for years out in the elements, from folksy weather-chewed infantryman of indeterminate allegiance to lofty generals who were a year in the studio and took six months to cast, are suddenly much more significant than when they were when erected.

During this period of slightly demented politics the confederate general, Robert E Lee, as represented by a bronze statue blazes incandescent, a demonic presence that radiates oppression and tyranny across the land, so pull him down, bash and humiliate him, good riddance. Sad to say it was this same zeal that destroyed much of the art and architecture of antiquity, and history isn’t pleased. A plaque in various languages to explain simply and directly who the general was, what he did and the cause he represented, would be repurposing the indelible mark the sponsors intended by making it out of bronze, forever highlighting an episode in our history that should never be forgotten. Most of the rest of the civil war monuments are lifeless and unworthy, and should be melted down for all the new statues going up to take their places.

But wait a minute, might be a problem here. The list of candidates seems endless, forgotten and neglected heroes each worthy of memorial tribute no doubt, but where are the artists to make their likenesses and what foundry is going to cast them in incorruptible bronze for ages unborn? It may be the artists capable of such craft have been as neglected as the long list of candidates, and expertise in pouring large chunks of bronze with intricate detail has grown scarce and cost prohibitive. The plan, if there is a plan, is to tear down the offensive works of art, art that the artists themselves had hoped would last a thousand years, long after the confederacy and even the united states had been forgotten, and replace them with what? Three-D printed photo-replicas in plasticine or maybe press a button holograms that wink and smile? Whatever form the new tributes take, they probably won’t last a thousand years or even past the next new set of causes.

Better it would be to respect the art along with the artist and the workers who translated their vision into dark impervious metal, and channel all that symbol bashing fervor into organizing for institutional change, while at the same time might be nice to revere the the lost monuments stashed away in parks and under the trees to real heroes who moved us all forward.

lonesome Ed -- pandemic resonance

Visual art is not about thinking. Thinking about art is possible but thoughts are made of words and we’ll call that form ‘literature,’ criticism or commentary, poems or jokes, doesn’t matter. Visual art is about perception and attention and it enters the brain on its own channel and is interpreted in its own set of circuits. In a fundamental way art conveys information directly into the mind of the viewer without using words, without verbal thinking.

This is very difficult concept for writers about art to grasp. Their business is primarily selling their own words and they look for action metaphors and clever associations no one else has considered, and even come to think of themselves as full partners with artists. They don’t really see the art because they don’t know how to look, so they make up stories. Recently there’s been renewed interest in Edward Hopper for all the right reasons but it’s significance is missed by the literary crew. They’ve been happy to relate the solitude of his subject matter to the pandemic, a clever and superficial reading of his recent popularity. Odd isn’t it that the mexican muralists are also being rediscovered, and this shifting of public taste toward representational art could be bigger and more lasting than a disease.

The quality that made Hopper perhaps the premier painter of the twentieth century with ultimately the greatest influence on the future of art wasn’t in the lady looking out a window, a few patrons at a diner or a lady sipping tea. Anyone could make those paintings and they do, closets full of them, but those are ideas in words and they weren’t his secret. Sad to say the essence of his greatness is mostly lost in reproduction, and in a magazine or on a screen you see just a schematic of the actual art. In a museum his paintings seem to generate their own light and are alive with detail from across the room. He’s not particularly interested in the people, their rivers of internal angst or even their motive for being there. For him figures were static props put there to demonstrate his main concern. He wanted to start with the same paint box everyone uses and pull from it a totally uncanny representation of afternoon light streaming in a hotel window, the descent of evening in empty city streets. These are the very same things everyone else has seen themselves, yet depicted with an immediacy and tangibility that both enhances the flavor of the viewer’s own experience and suggests seeing the very same things more deeply.

I can say this with some authority because I read what he said about his art and I believed him, while critics and commentators invested in abstraction have no ears for the qualities of representational painting and never see beyond subject content. Representational art is about seeing the world through the eyes of others, and if you have the opportunity to see original work from the hand of Van Gogh, or Ed Hopper, or any painter who made it into the museum you can compare it to what you see back home. It’s not wrong to think about art, but learn to pay attention to your own responses because visual art enters the mind without climbing the stairs, while all that witty prose about it never makes it past the ground floor.

the art of dreaming -- waking up with art

Some people have accused the president of lying and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t look at it that way. It’s more likely he thinks of what he says as ‘salesmanship,’ deal-making lingo, and he doesn’t necessarily see the connection between what he says and what actually is, and in fact there’s no connection. He’s speaking to a population that’s asleep, more of an opiated stupor, and they hear him in a dream. Here’s how it works. The super bowl happens in the middle of the NBA season and basketball playoffs overlap with the beginning of major league baseball. The world series is played in the middle of football season, and they’re building a new stadium for soccer but who knows where they’ll fit it in. That takes out the middle hump of the population, they might as well be asleep. Their minds are filled with trades and statistics and their emotions are drained, elation with each touchdown turning to anger and frustration with each interception, and they talk that stuff when they’re not watching. When the cycle is suddenly broken, as it has been, some will wake up and begin to wonder what their congressman’s been doing, how other people are living and maybe even how they’ve been living themselves.

Women have recently found themselves let off at a bus stop that’s existentially nowhere, nothing but a faint horizon line and a light blue mist. The old movie parts won’t fit anymore, and they've had to set off in some new direction and redefine themselves from scratch. They call it being woke and it seems to be literally correct, a percentage of mainly younger women measuring each step as a conscious choice and looking for meaning in the mirror. Everybody has been confronted with the ubiquitous skull on everything from mud-flaps to baby clothes and the dawning realization that it’s a sign of imminent death, and the pandemic possibility of premature mortality has sobered up a few. It’s a bit like a slow thawing, a population emerging from its old shell and in this vulnerable yet mutable condition capable of assuming a more cooperative, eco-friendly and sustainable way to behave on the planet. How do these newly questioning citizens communicate and how does the word spread of a new community consciousness? Now would be the time to suggest the actual value and utility of art.

If you feel the need to spend fifty million dollars on a painting that’s essentially only a big price tag with some color smeared here and there, there’s no law says you can’t. You’re dreaming, of course, and the world will shake you awake soon enough, but everyday folks participating in art, making it, buying it, owning it and hanging it on the wall makes the transition to a new awareness quicker and easier. Art on the wall will make recognizing the like-minded less of a guessing game and leads to better conversations, and as a bonus art broadens and deepens perceptual function and you’ll see more detail in the world. Will a piece of art alter the universe and bend reality, maybe not enough to notice, but it can provide a bit of traction in a very slippery place for the determined climber, attempting to realize their own human potential, awake. 

a prize for lies -- art zombies

Fictional portrait of Jo and Edward Hopper wins Walter Scott prize   £25,000 award for the year’s best historical novel goes to Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Narrow Land, which depicts the artists’ marriage.....   The Guardian, US edition
 
In the name of science archeologists use sophisticated technology to desecrate burials all over the planet, all the while bemoaning the damage done by grave robbers before the legitimate scientists arrived to catalogue all that sacred stuff and put it in boxes, but at least they don’t lie. Do they keep things to themselves, we’ve always wondered, but they don’t make stuff up if they want to stay in the club. Scientists insist on integrity, no making up stuff and no borrowing without attribution, everything must be original to be signed by an author. They do this to protect the truth.

Art is like science, constantly churning with new discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs by famous personalities, except that it isn’t connected to the real world by anything. No repeating an experiment to verify nothing, it’s all just conjecture and truth has to run for its life. In art they dig up dead people too but they put them to work, leech off their poignant life stories to animate unworthy art, happens all the time. Along comes a book, could be good but that’s doubtful since the author has had to dug up corpses for characters and made them do stuff they’d never do in real life. What order of desecration would this be? This book has won a prize awarded by people who have no more respect for a dead artist, or honest originality, than the author.

Ed Hopper was a real person with a notoriously private private-life and the expression he made to the world was in his artwork. There’s no real reason to know about his personal trials, but for someone to use his name to pump up some second-rate word pie is just sad. Art has respect for the truth but it’s verified on an individual basis, and oddly enough it starts with you. Art is about self-concept and it’s up to you to pick and choose, but don’t suppose you can disregard honesty in art and find it in politics or recognize it in business. I’ve seen Hopper paintings so luminous they seemed to cast a light on the museum floor in front of them, and the notion of some literary ghoul gnawing his bones to win a prize and sell some books is beyond tawdry and cheap, it’s probably unhealthy for anyone who touches it.

Hannah Gadsby -- loving and hating Picasso

Is Hannah Gadsby, the Comedian Behind Netflix’s Viral Standup Special, Today’s Most Vital Art Critic?  At a time when the art world still hasn't quite figured out how to address icons who have done abominable things, Gadsby's special "Nanette" should be required viewing.  july 16, artnet news online  

Here is a female comedian performing a withering commentary on the way women have been depicted in art by old white guys, irredeemable pigs if you must know. That the entire culture has been warped by an all male religious order in the employ of a totally masculine creator of the universe is too big a chunk for her, so she castigates the artists, mostly men of their time. She's down on Picasso special for having a much younger mistress, not supposing she may have liked older men, she wasn’t asked. Let’s concede that Picasso was an overbearing egotist since it shows in his work and even made him rich and famous. He may have caused women to weep but I've never heard he refused to let anyone leave, so none of my business, his critics’ or yours.

Hannah’s not in favor of banishing him from the museums however, because ‘Cubism is important. Picasso freed us from the slavery of having to reproduce three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface.’ It’s not really technically correct since no matter how he rearranged stuff, his art was always referential, but wait a minute. Did she say ‘slavery?’ The word has a meaning and I’m not sure it applies here. Let’s face the bloody truth for a change. Freedom from ‘having to reproduce three dimensional reality on the two dimensional surface’ is really just a license to make messes, look around.

In the history of art, world-wide and all time, non-objective abstract art is destined to be seen as aberration rather than emancipation, evidence of a failure of nerve and a vast intellectual laziness brought on by the mesmerizing backbeat of pervasive commercialism, citizens climbing over each other to own a more luxurious pickup. Well it’s all over now, a new day dawns. Art has the power to heal and unify, the recently resurrected mexican muralists proved it years ago, and interpreting the three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface is the carrier for a message that resonates deep inside. Let’s grant that the personal lives of artists are note-worthy if they’re celebrities or if there's little that can be said about their art. In all other cases it isn’t really necessary to know the artist’s gender and orientation, skin tone and ethnic background, political views or domestic entanglements. Ask of art that it demands your attention and dominates the room it’s in, and that it filters the world through the artist’s eyes and onto a flat surface so that you can compare it with your own. How consenting adults behaved long ago won’t come up.

feeble ideas -- objective art

Public television has been emptying the shelves, putting their heaviest documentaries on in the afternoon for the benefit of kids and adults stuck at home. A couple of years ago they went all out on a nine part series called ‘Civilizations,’ written and narrated by the most worldly Sir Simon Schama, history and art history professor at columbia university and that’s just his day job. It was a wonderful, thoughtful, and lavishly produced series on the history of art. His credentials are olympian and a bit of that carries over in his voice as he guides us through gothic cathedrals and explains how the trade routes to the east provided new pigments for the renaissance.

Easing into the twentieth century he identifies a single moment, a pivot point really, in fact the very nut on which the entire edifice of non-objective modern art is built. He credits Piet Mondrian with producing art that finally broke free from any reference to anything outside itself, the first artist to produce a purely abstract painting. He explained that while the object of art had always been to come as close to nature as possible, of course that isn’t really possible is it, and he (Mondrian) could see it was just a ‘lie,’ a term not usually applied to art in such learned discussions. Then in an almost mumbled aside he also remarks, ‘such a feeble idea, isn’t it, to go around copying the world?‘ Now that’s a downright peculiar assertion Sir Simon. All the art from bison on cave walls up until Piet Mondrian stopped looking up from his canvas was feeble and deceitful? Really? This nugget was presented slyly and it slid by quickly, but leaving objective reality behind was really one of the most radical departures in all of art history.

It's a feeble idea indeed that the objective of representational art has ever been to duplicate reality, but feeble as it was it became justification for a righteous disdain for figurative art of any kind, essentially a blanket censorship against pictures of anything that would go on to last decades. It drove representational painters underground scrounging for any means of support, some becoming shipping clerks and cooks, but mostly it disenfranchised common citizens, depriving them of a visual means of communication and self-expression. The premise is itself a lie, of course, and their argument must also be false. There's never been a person rich or poor, brilliant or barely functional, who thought they could eat the apple they saw in a painting, and the artist wasn’t attempting to create one. The bizarre notion that representational art attempts to reproduce reality was never even a thought until abstract art and its apologists came along.

Anything is possible in front of a blank canvas and total freedom accommodates any use of color and line, but abstract art on a human scale, art that would fit the average living room wall in an ordinary house will always look like it came from the frame shop at the mall, no matter how famous the artist or how much it cost. Produced museum-size, extravagantly large, the trademarked modern masters have created the poker chips for a rigged poker game well over the average person’s limit. In its present form the art industry is the home stadium for the most brazen and accomplished hustlers on the planet with the ultimate non-tangible to romance, not tin siding and lightning rods, not books and vacuum cleaners, but ascending social status and uncharted financial opportunity, with side-deals and percentages every which way. The blatancy of their rat-faced hucksterism knows no bounds. ‘For 48 Hours Only, Gagosian Is Offering a Mark Grotjahn Painting for $800,000’   May 29, 2020   artnews online

These upper reaches of aesthetic appreciation are also a secure roost for the learned and heavily accredited, the holders of the the sacred secret knowledge that elevates DeKooning over Rembrandt and they add their mystique to the modern art enterprise, but in the end it’s all just art, and side by side there’s really no argument. All you modern art mavens, the time has come to open the gilded cage and let art go free, and here's a suggestion for the ultra-rich, it might be wise to grant some solace in the lives of the plantation hands, they're restless. Allow an organic and locally sourced art, grown from the soil of lived experience, to gradually supplant that gleefully corrupt charade of international art fairs and jet-set swindles you call art. Oh, you say it’s happening now, was bound to happen anyway, artists selling art and pretty soon a new painting will be something to talk about over barbecue, just one of the many changes you’ll see.

absurdly expensive art -- sacred legends

Jackson Pollock’s Largest Painting Is Touring the World, and Its Mysteries Are Coming to Light         artnews   May 5, 2020 2:07pm

Progressives can't comprehend how Trump supporters can overlook the utter absurdity of the stuff he says, but they’re ready to be seen contemplating a big formless drop cloth if it’s attributed to Jackson Pollock. Both are examples of faith over reason and to a rational neutral party they actually look about the same.

The painting cited in the article was commissioned for a hallway outside Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in NY, twenty four feet of blank space. The lore has it that Pollock didn’t do anything but stare at it for days and days until finally, at the very last moment, he completed it all in one night. That must have been a really long night because a crew of high school kids, each with a paint bucket marching back and forth stroking and smearing and cleaned up next morning couldn’t have done it. They told this improbable fable because there’s really not much to see, a classic example of the sizzle not the steak. Opportunistic commentators climbed onboard.

One thing is for sure, however: Mural was an instant hit. Critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “I took one look at it and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”

So Mr. Greenberg who are you exactly, some literary nobody who in a blinding flash recognizes great art and suddenly you’re famous too, haven’t we seen this act before? Clement took point position for abstract expressionism but lots of popular publications, scholarly treatises, tax sheltering foundations and the mighty NEA were ready to declare figurative art of any sort dead, obsolete, retrograde and boring. In college art classes students were told copying nature was too ‘easy.’ The motives and the mechanics of this reconstruction of the cultural landscape are covered in this blog twice just recently, but the result in any case was to rob the american people of a form of uncensored communication and expression. Was the cultural lobotomy of the populace the main goal or just collateral damage of the cold war rivalry of mirror-image adversaries, it doesn’t matter now.

It’s time to look at art for what’s actually there, and not imagine instead that it represents some many-tiered edifice of successive brilliant conceptual breakthroughs, the world of art like a child's tea-set version of science where real discoveries are made. I don’t care how many zeros go on the price tag, three hundred of the same thing with slight variation isn’t a signature style, it’s a trademark straight away. By now third generation derivations of the modern masters hang in motel rooms and medical facilities everywhere, so that after all these years average people don’t remember what was lost. Well it isn’t going to be that difficult to fix this problem if we each do our parts.

The first thing would be to really recognize Jackson Pollock in his work as alcohol-drenched, nihilistic and defeated, it’s all there. Against the wall in a goodwill store instead of a grand museum, think about it. Average citizens understands this well enough, they have eyes. Well it couldn’t last forever. As soon as some small independent art museum decides to deaccession a Rothko or two and beat the rush, the real value of the industry’s sacred stockpile will be revealed, a hissing balloon, any day. The next thing you can do is to start looking at all the art available in your neighborhood and thereabouts. Pictures of things have voices, and people who look at a lot of art can hear them. When one sings a song you like take it home, it won’t cost millions.

Warhol and Trump -- blood cousins

So am I the only one who sees a direct connection between Warhol and Trump, a classic case of art preceding life so clear we could have seen it coming. I never liked Warhol for almost exactly the same reasons people now hate Trump. I’m not making Warhol responsible for what’s happened or even his fans, and will concede many of Trump’s supporters have never heard of Andy Warhol, but that isn’t the point. A case is being made for art as a prophetic reflection of the near future and what example in human history could be more graphically clear?

The awful science-fiction fact is that Warhol and Trump aren't really people like you and I, but instead are some sort of alien mollusk inhabiting a human shell and none too gracefully in either case. The terrain they literally see is as different from what regular people see as the vision of some other life-form, which they are. These creatures inhabit a fluid universe composed solely of the responses of others and and have almost no regard for physical reality. Trump could have a private chef but he’s happy with fast food, his great mind can’t be bothered with three dimensions. Both have been acknowledged as master manipulators of fame and social influence, and each is notorious for making decisions based solely on the emotional response of their audience, the very truth determined strictly in terms of popularity.

Such persons are well suited to retail and right at home in the fashion industry, but modern mass media has given them wings. A mediocre mentality unencumbered by a bunch of education and devoid of any notion of moral obligation or responsibility, it’s simply lacking, has a huge advantage over regular humans who feel constrained by verifiable facts, who use reason, and who display empathetic feelings for others. The success of these two similar personalities, neither of them very smart, reveals a culture lulled into a stupor by sit-coms and crime shows and delivered to commercial and financial carnivores like livestock to slaughter. The place they’ve led us is pretty grim, everyone teetering at the edge of an abyss devoid of meaning, where accomplishment is jeered at and momentary fame fills everybody’s dreams.

Using simple logic we can find our way out by the same way we came in only this time we look at art that speaks of integrity and commitment, that registers in the higher compartments of our mind and that challenges the way we’ve always seen the world. Does such an art exist you might ask, and oddly enough its very existence is determined by who’s looking and why. In a mutual quest for awakening and self-realization, area artists and their patrons collaborate on making the regional product better, raising standards and priming expectations in an ongoing conversation back and forth. This ain’t no picnic and there aren’t many solutions left except to paint a better world that alters the vision and aspiration of humanity toward something more sustainable, more conscious and more humane.

finding audience -- changing everything

‘Is there an audience for what I do’ is what any artist would like to know, but even if people are ready to respond how can I address them, what would be the point of contact, and how are they going know I exist? This is the existential dilemma above and beyond the assemblage of materials, the acquisition of skills, and scrounging for the economic space to practice art, ironically known as free time. The independent artist must emerge from a vacuum, art supplies and studio rent out of pocket and at sacrifice until a style matures and a statement can be made. Only then is it time to ask ‘where’s my audience?’ When that time comes for many there’s no point of contact and no way to even be seen.

Once their initial ten thousand hours are logged, the amount of time it takes to get good at anything, the artist encounters art’s turnstiles ten miles high. The galleries are essentially consignment shop enterprises and management is chronically over its head paying uptown rent, fronting lavish openings and courting critics. They don’t have time to look at art or even for personal taste, and are only interested in prior sales and what other galleries are showing the work. The non-profit public-funded sector favors a kind of art too advanced to have popular appeal, and its recognitions, grants, and awards are reserved for the private worm farms produced by artists with a regular paycheck.

Still the pressure builds. People are painting everywhere these days for fun and some become addicted, the act of painting even altering how they see the world. Disenchanted art students leave school and strike out on their own, working menial occupations while seeking their own visual identity on their days off. However they begin there’s lots of art being made in all directions, and if any of it started to sell it would suddenly all get better, like a drop of rain makes the desert bloom. It’s the other side that’s really unknown. Will fellow citizens, forcibly and suddenly weaned from the mind-numbing spectacle of media-hyped gladiatorial events interspersed with craven opiated commercials, begin to wake up to their own more subtle inborn potentials? Would they turn their attention to art?

For this to happen the public doesn’t need to improve, just wish for a better alternative. It’s up to artists to reach beneath the surface, to identify and make visible the points of common humanity we all share. For the artist it’s all part of the same quest and finding an audience, daunting as it sounds, is just the cost of doing business here. If ever enough original art is seen, not just in public venues but in the houses of friends and neighbors, artists might finally be welcomed into community awareness along with athletes and entertainers, and be recognized not in person but by the work they do. If there’s an audience out there for visual art it could wake up all over all at once as a grass roots movement beyond urban centers, and what fellow citizens value, talk about and think about, could turn out to be the pictures on their walls.

romance with things -- emotional support art

Someone said they fell in love with a painting. There’s a chance it could be more than just an expression since a painting is a unique object and that in itself is increasingly rare. Starting from a blank surface everything about it, every mark, every color, and every idea came solely from one person. Deliberate or spontaneous, crude or precise, the artist’s personality emerges in art they make. Once made however the painting begins a life of its own as a complex and singular expression, the sum of uncountable individual decisions, every color and each brushstroke, until the vision is transcribed and made visible. 

Something is encoded in the visual realm that words can’t quite touch, and trying to talk about it just takes us further away so let’s not. Instead just assume there are other ways of knowing, and that Van Gogh was saying something when he painted a pot of flowers that people from around the world, regardless of their spoken language, can comprehend and it’s not remotely about flowers. The person down the street, a cook, a tradesman, almost any menial you may run across could also be a painter, and they may not pull the weight of a Van Gogh but something comes out of their sheer effort, and it comes across to you if you stop to look. What happens after that is just automatic, you don’t even have to try.

Bonding, it’s a feeling affinity for the familiar and a built in feature of our operating system. We latch on to complexity in our surroundings, get to know it and fall in love. With family always there you may not have noticed, but country poets grow fond of the farmstead that doesn't change year after year, a favorite shirt is hard to throw away, and many feel sadness when the quirky old car finally quits, we’re born this way. Advertisers study our psychology and keep setting out little enticements to fall in love with their brand, running the same jingle over and over and putting their names on ballparks. They devise lots of nasty little tricks to take devious and self-serving advantage of our basic tendencies, but being the way we are turns out swell for art.

Here’s an experiment you can try over the next few decades. Go to a major city with a big art museum and spend some time looking at a few paintings, anything that catches your eye. Some works of art keep saying more the longer you look so take all afternoon, and then go home and don’t think about it for ten years. At this point take time off and go do it again. Those few paintings won’t look the same as first time, this time they’ll be friendlier. If you visit again ten years after that they’ll be glad to see you and you’ll be glad to see them, old acquaintances. If you’ve never had an involvement with a work of art, never really stopped to look and heard its questions in your head like how was it made, why is it so weird, and even questions you can’t name, then you probably won’t believe me.

So, go through your life seeing only shiny surfaces and machine design, dealing with digitized versions of reality while living in a cubicle and working from home, it’s an option, in fact that’s where it’s all headed unless some humanizing force intervenes. An original work of art suggests consideration on levels of thought seldom visited in the average commuter’s day and the lasting effect is to alter the way the world is perceived, broader, deeper, and in more detail. Chances are you’d never notice the increased gradients of information you’re observing or the the depth of discernment you apply watching the news, but you’ll be a little more fond of your painting year by year.

self-improvement -- visual vitamins

So what was greek art about, lots of pagans cavorting was probably not the main thing. Greek art is about intelligence and it’s what you notice first. Here we have the embodiment of athletic grace and you say it was carved out of a large chunk of rock using hand tools? That’s so awesome. It’s almost unbelievable that a fellow human just like you or me could be that smart. It’s going to be most impressive to anyone who has worked with their hands and who has come to understand the natural world is not overly cooperative. Rocks just want to be rocks.

So in a museum you find yourself looking at some ancient greek carving pulled from a river bank. An artist might marvel at just a hand, bones and nerve under translucent flesh and the carver didn’t accidentally snap off a finger, didn’t gouge too deep and cover it up, anywhere. It’s an altogether perfect translation, an enduring example of genius, and any average person ought to be impressed as well. During the dark ages these evidences of ancient brilliance proved overbearing and intimidating, and much made in antiquity was deliberately destroyed. Still, it’s possible to sympathize with the frustration and resentment of people wearing animal hides while sheltering beneath corinthian columns.

Art still does that, speaks mind to mind, in fact that’s its job. Art conveys intelligence, self-regard, and a commitment beyond the siren song of more money since for the majority of committed artists there’s so little. Art’s actual message isn’t difficult to see once it’s on canvas. If ten artists were to paint the same thing, an apple, a bridge, or a landscape, you and anyone you know could pick the smart one, and it really would have nothing to do with the apple, the bridge, or the countryside. If they were all brilliant you’d still know which one appealed to you the most, art isn’t difficult. Non-objective art can be difficult, you could say it works overtime, but insider secret knowledge doesn’t always turn out to be profound and a busy person really can’t be bothered chasing it down. As for the trademarked modern masters, ‘seen one, seen them all’ is their business model and market strategy, who cares?

Using art as a tool for self-improvement and self-knowledge is infinitely more practical than planning to put the kids through college on the fortune you’ll make when you sell that ugly thing you feel obligated to hang, can’t wait to be rid of it. Instead spend the same money and invest in yourself and the person you’ll become, in the solace and comfort of the home you’ll come to live in, and buy some art from a talented painter living in your area. Meet them and buy direct, a memory that will remain with the painting forever. If you look at enough art you’ll soon recognize a bargain, so get in now and avoid the rush.

ultimately conceptual -- wasn’t there again today

Ian Wilson, Conceptual Artist Who Declined to Make Physical Objects, Is Dead at 80 april 17  artnews

'For the later stages of his life, Wilson may not have been known as well as some of his Conceptualist colleagues, perhaps because the immaterial nature of his art makes it difficult to exhibit, but he was an integral member of the movement from its beginnings.'
 
Now that what I’d call going all out, drilling down on the implications of your philosophy, making a singular career commitment. It needs to be admired either as a deep delving into absurdity or an unfathomable bolt of genius, depends on point of view. It didn’t say how he made a living, if that was necessary, but I'd guess probably by teaching art at some extremely expensive and exclusive institution. He’s right you know, that is where it leads, conceptual art. Well who with everyday responsibilities has time for stuff that isn't there I’d like to know. I care about as much as the average person, we have lots in common. This doesn’t mean we don’t like art.

Your industry is obsolete, phony magazines touting the art of anyone who buys advertising, blatantly rigged show auctions, phony philanthropy and tax havens, money laundering and social climbing, but mostly intellectually barren stupid art. Jeff Koons, the highest priced living artist, has been dialing back his appeal to lower and lower instincts, finally reaching the sensibility of toddlerhood with a sculpture called ‘playdoh,’ and the ultra wealthy love it. They’re all obsolete. 

real repentance -- seeing what is

I understand how difficult it is to give up an addiction having wrestled with tobacco years ago, and withdrawing from a religious or political cult is bound to cause psychological distress as well, so I understand my beam of morning sunlight on the floor won’t be welcomed. The institution and industry of modern art, international jet-set art fairs and such, is going to quiver, fade and disappear in a puff of financial collapse and resource redistribution. It’s beginnings were shady and it flounders in scandals, arms and drug dealers laundering dirty money and there's the lying cheating way they do business, all in the service of an art so repetitious and uninteresting it can be sold by the artist’s name alone.

Let's decompress. Way back at the beginning didn’t the idea of ‘accidental’ art ever bother you just a little? I took studio classes at two universities during the seventies and both times the painting instructor introduced their class by pouring paint on a large piece of canvas laying on the floor and squishing it around. The second one turned it over and started embellishing whatever soaked through, an altogether original approach and a solid breakthrough. Repeating this performance at the beginning of each semester guaranteed a steady income, along with unlimited paint, canvas, and studio space. Maybe best of all every term the institution provided fifteen or twenty fresh young faces all eager to please a demigod with the power of grades, but the other art teacher who didn’t turn the canvas over got all the same stuff. So what was their lesson really?

Accidental music can be interesting sometimes, random horns in a traffic jam, railroad cars screeching and banging on a really cold morning, the din in a crowded restaurant with poor acoustics, but very few people would buy a ticket to  sit and listen. So why would anyone spend ten seconds staring into an accidental Jackson Pollock painting? If farm animals can make art essentially indistinguishable from multi-million dollar masterpieces, what does that say about art, about life, about us? Try stepping out of your own skin for a moment. If someone were to explain that the very notions of virgin birth and chastity among the unwed were really psychological devices of draconian social control and sexual exploitation so diabolical they would enslave humanity for centuries, some among us wouldn’t like it hearing it. If you truly believe in modern art with its pantheon of successive pop celebrities and the sanctified brokering of their holy relics, in the phony press with its compromised critics and the tax-supported academic establishment keeping accessible art out of the hands of common folk, maybe what I've said will sound offensive and in a similar fashion. Well, it's a similar load.

Rothko, Pollock, and the rest of their movement went for really large canvases, too big for an average person in a regular house to even get through the door, so much the better. There’s dramatic effect in scale and in a spacious gallery big paintings are impressive, but the museum has one of each on exhibit and five more in the stacks, all acquired as tax-break donations bringing the church’s traffic in indulgences up to date. Resurrection in this season seems more appropriate this time around, and art about what all eyes see has returned after long exile, ready to kick some ass and clear the temple. While figurative art isn’t in itself the truth, it is a way to the truth, and having it around cleanses the glass and sharpens perception, but mostly it returns to each individual the joy and responsibility of judging on their own, unbinding and releasing the potential for personal growth.

home office chimes in -- program notes

As this blog approaches its five hundredth post, I’ll offer this aside to any casual reader. Some might notice certain recurring themes, especially the ongoing struggle between the brazenly infantile art of the morbidly wealthy, you’re nailing it Jeff Koons, and a more wholesome and nutritious product sourced closer to home, art from your neighborhood or slightly beyond. This will continue.

I was making a historical point sometime last week and a couple of days later saw it verified in an article online, and it went the same place. That may have seemed redundant, but usually I react to varied references to art in the news, mostly national but sometime local. By the second or third paragraph it turns into some sort of awful heresy, calling out an orthodoxy that’s patently absurd, an industry based on deceit and conspiratorial speculation, and an academic community long ago tamed and playing it safe, making an art unassailably opaque. I don’t expect to change the world with my blog. I’ve seen prophets grind themselves down trying to change minds only to see it happen on its own just a few years down the road, an yes, legalization comes to mind along with maybe one or two others.

I’m calling this conceptual documentation, my ‘told you so’ to posterity, chiseled here in the granite of the cloud. It witnesses the transition to a new way of seeing and thinking, something that will find manifestation in visual art all at once all over. I know my puny voice is only part of a chorus that will grow louder until it drowns me out, radical no more making points hardly worth saying. I am constantly aware that the only people liable to access my blog have been indoctrinated since childhood in the dingbat religion of modern art, and can feel only mild nausea, while the typical citizen expelled from art long ago by the gushing largesse of the NEA probably wouldn’t be reading it in the first place. Still, each piece I write is a pebble I toss in the pond to raise its level, that I kick off an embankment to begin an avalanche, a butterfly flap of my tiny wings to add to a wind that already blows. It just makes me feel better to get it said, and to hope it encourages someone, maybe you, to think of art as a portal to self-awareness, hung on the wall and over time becoming a personal reflection more honest and insightful than the one that keeps changing in the mirror. Thanks for taking the time.