fine tuning vision -- changing channels

Not surprising that our internal worlds are all completely different and as unsettling as that may be for some, it’s also true for our external world as well. It’s difficult to demonstrate and we can’t see through each other’s eyes, but reasonably intelligent people coming to completely different conclusions about the same stuff are an indication they’re probably seeing different things. The equipment we use is fairly standard and we can wear glasses or have surgery to bring it up to par, but what we notice and pay attention to is something else. Seeing is a highly subjective and done by each person in their own way. Two people naturally grow closer when they can take a walk and see the same things.

The first rule of the mechanism itself is that you can’t see something you’ve never seen before. There’s no template in your memory and your search for one will draw a blank, so an alien could sit down next to you and you wouldn’t know. Native peoples at Vera Cruz couldn’t see the european ships at first, and thought Cortez had risen from the sea. This built-in limitation is good reason to travel when possible and to look at stuff all the time, it’s like increasing your vocabulary. More important are the lenses, the filters and modifiers that determine how you see anything. Political parties and religions, career choices and family obligations all attempt to tint the light, to bend the beam until what we see is really a very personal version of the world we all share.

There’s no reconciliation for people trying to deal with each other from different planets even though they may live side by side. These days the rules are gone and the eye gouge and groin kick are on the table, thanks Andy, as the peculiar tribalism of the internet shunts us into ever more diverse realities. This would be a good time for undercover hometown artists wearing actual paint stains on clothes with real holes to start hanging their work on fence posts, in any restaurant with an empty wall, lit at night in vacant storefronts and in that sweet bakery down on main. People want the truth and it’s the artist’s job to rattle expectations, to jostle seldom used templates and rummage through dusty memories with an image that says it’s real, but obviously isn’t. The successful work of art in a representational mode alerts the attention each time it’s seen, and after a while the lenses begin to loosen up and drop away, and the world in general can be perceived more directly.

Do scales fall away from the eyes in a biblical sense, the viewer transfixed with tears streaming, to then stumble out into a world fresh and new as they’ve never seen it before? That’s a lot to ask, although the typical gothic mentality must have been severely torqued when confronted with a renaissance painting for the first time. It’s enough these days just to create a marker folks can compare to their own lived experience, like a life saver for people lost at sea to swim toward. Art engages dusty machinery we all have on board and identifies our points in common, speaking in our inner ear about the world we live in and share.

class warfare -- art’s front lines

Does a secret cabal of extremely powerful people control the rest of us by manipulating the media, the economy, even the arts, herding us like sheep from some mahogany-lined bunker, as has been alleged from time to time? If those guys exist they’re just part of a larger dynamic, playing their part in a grander scheme. Human consciousness evolves and little monads like us are swept along, even the really rich ones. Turns out the cabal has been there since robber baron days and electronic media has given them the means to domesticate and control a compliant public, to divert them with sports and tell them what to think on the evening news. Media drugged and docile, the common citizen pays exorbitant prescription prices and credit card fees, while generally ignoring art which they’ve been led to believe is way overpriced and most probably meaningless. This is by design. The assault on figurative art began back in the early thirties when the Rivera mural for Rockefeller Center was commissioned and then destroyed before it could be seen, and thereafter began a campaign to discredit and destroy figurative expression altogether. The advent of the insurgent abstractionist movement of the forties and fifties was mostly a shadily-financed sham, no one bought in the beginning, and the modernist regime has ultimately resulted in the reduction of art to a pursuit novelty and notoriety, portrayed in media as little more than a commodity for consensus-driven speculation.

That was art in the old world where stinking wealth was flaunted, millions pissed away on hideous carnival novelties and commercial flotsam masquerading as art. Is it over, probably. Ordinary people who have been threatened with extinction could be expected to question their condition a little closer, and might turn to art for solace. Some will begin making it, threadbare monks setting up studios in storage rooms and garages while working menial jobs to pay rent. One day they wake up with a yen to paint, to say they were here and to stake a claim in a world and a lifetime that passes quickly. Many will just find themselves interested, won’t know why, and they'll start looking at art. What they’ll see there is the character and wit of someone like themselves, only perhaps a bit more independent, more ready for sacrifice and less tied to the wheel. They’ll admire that.

When original art goes up in houses and apartments displacing sports posters and bland reproductions, it will be a sign the american populace is beginning to resist the siren song of salvation through acquisition, driven to pursue the best deal possible while being fleeced. Would wide-spread art ownership change the character of the population making them more independent and resilient, without doubt and that’s the very reason relatable representation art was sabotaged in the first place. Even so, as the world turns the mexican muralists have returned after almost a century of exile and are currently under quarantine at the Whitney Museum in NY. When it reopens their message of cultural unity and class consciousness could burst forth once again. In any case, when average people feel empowered to judge what art best represents their particular point of view new communities arise, and purely commercial interests feel threatened. Will the cabal on high resort to surveillance fascism creating a dark gray world with comics for literature and sullen brutality for entertainment? They’ve thought about it, but art is on the other side. Art is about cultivating and fulfilling human potential, expressing longings and urges, disappointments and ecstasies in an elevated area of our intelligence where words won’t even reach. Turns out art is the pill you take to wake up and recognize yourself as more than a consumer on a treadmill, with your own personality and point of view expressed through the art you hang on your walls.

‘velvet buzzsaw’ -- horror movie art

Saw a movie last night about art, ‘velvet buzzsaw,’ on netflix, but didn’t get quite to the end. It started out to be an insider expose of the art world at the top where millions of dollars are required to be taken seriously, and that is in fact all you need. It’s about a critic so powerful he can make or break artists or even galleries, but he’s pure, an ethical egomaniac who makes snap judgements based on his superior gut, an onboard aesthetic oracle. The action starts when a gallery assistant snoops after the death of a reclusive neighbor and finds a trove of unseen canvases, artwork so magnetic and astounding that it stuns jaded professionals, fresh air in an arid industry. Loved the premise but movie executives must have decided there should be more blood, so when the vile art advisor puts her hand into a hole in a metallic sphere in the gallery late one evening, she finds a wood-chipper inside. The metaphors were rolling loose and sloppy with a pool of blood to sell tickets for a movie about art that no one would otherwise want to see. That’s when I began to suspect an unhappy ending and went to bed, but I appreciated the the arctic white interiors and high-gothic conversations portraying the horror of big time art.

The art was probably done in-house by the studio art department, just props after all, and to convey the notion of visual potency the screenwriters gave the paintings some sort of creepy supernatural power, but the message comes through. Artwork created in isolation to assuage some internal existential dissatisfaction rather than chasing the high-fashion caprice of conspicuously dirty money may turn out to be better art, and given the chance it would displace that vacuous charade of tax evasion and competitive spending, actual substance slicing through the posturing and petty contrivance for all to see. This is the renegade notion that drives isolated painters everywhere pumped up beyond max to make a movie. After decades of working at art they still find themselves invisible, unable or unwilling to satisfy public-funded gallery programs and without commercial representation, year after year piling up the art.

When they die the art remains stacked hopefully in a dry attic until the grandkids haul it down to the auction house for pennies on the dollar. The auctioneers will advertise the work of an artist who died two decades ago and sell out the lot. It could be the first time the art has seen the light of day or been judged on its merits. The people who buy it will be acquiring the best and deepest expression that the artist was capable of making in that moment. Over time they may begin to recognize those same qualities in themselves by some sort of empathic osmosis, something that can’t be explained but which people who own art will understand. Now if those same people would just buy the work of living artists, perhaps from their own neighborhoods, those hordes of artwork would never accumulate while the art would naturally get better with support and encouragement, and the world would be a better place.

Hunter Biden takes up art -- cleansing the soul

Hunter Biden has taken up art, the last refuge of the fallen and disgraced. Can he be successful? Presumably the answer is yes, he has the the proper necessaries to climb aboard. ‘from the artnet news -- Biden has no formal training as a painter and has yet to land gallery representation, but he plans on exhibiting his work in the future. Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, a former board member of the Whitney Museum in New York City, said she believes Biden can have a successful career in the art world due to his prominent last name.’  Never once in the article did it mention his art or show a picture. Beth Rudin DeWoody probably hasn’t seen his work either and as a fact it isn’t for sure there is any, but that’s not the point.

Art at the top is all about the autograph and in news this week a consortium of big time dealers has landed a whopping seventy million deal on a Mark Rothko painting that almost any grad student could have made, and if they mounted it on a similar foundation and used the right paints Rothko himself couldn’t say it wasn’t his. Big time galleries make this same mistake all the time. ‘from a wikipedia article on the defunct Knoedler Gallery in NY -- between 1994 and 2011, under Freedman's direction, the gallery had sold faked paintings of works by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among others. read section four.’ I don’t feel sorry for the people with fakes, what’s the difference? They look the same. Isn’t the question really why is faking them so easy? How could a sign painter working in a garage get away with it, not faking just one painter but any of them, all of them?

In the movies art forgers are always going after Rembrandt and it sounds impressive but there was only one person in history who could really do it well and he died a few centuries back, and besides, all of his paintings were accounted for long ago. Much easier to imitate are the moderns because much of the actual work is done by ‘studio assistants’ anyway, and nobody bothers to count what goes out the door, just gimme money. Fakes abound but no one is particularly interested in finding out which they are since the value of a piece of cloth can drop tens of millions down to zero in an instant and who would even want to know that?

Smells like corruption and it just seems to follow Hunter around. If it’s time to seriously reform your life, change your last name to smith or jones and seriously try to paint. Don’t expect a free ride. Don’t expect Beth Rudin DeWoody to notice. Your social standing may drop, you might detect a smirk or two at family gatherings, and you better have a trust fund handy. It isn’t easy, it’s almost impossible to make a living as an artist without rich friends, without inside connections, or without some form of public support living on the dole. What’s needed is a public no longer blinded by the antics of the archbishops and saints of a phony religion laundering money and avoiding taxes while appearing all black tie pious and philanthropic. Actual art boils up out of the ground in troubled times, and art supplies are being sold everywhere. Surely someone has something to say besides remember my dad.