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.

modern art -- thanks CIA

Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? By: Lucie Levine April 1, 2020, (https:/daily.jstor.org) 
It’s an emerald city expose’, pulling back the curtain to reveal the Rockefeller clan busy turning the rest of humanity into their chicken farm, and then this virus comes along. Suddenly our social evolution is being ‘punctuated,’ and a different system of values will emerge when this is over. The tectonic constraint of top-down social control was about to release on its own, politics had become dysfunctional and the people were being impoverished by predatory creditors, functional illiteracy and such, when along comes this gigantic jolt. Let’s consider one possible outcome.

This article chronicles the cold war shenanigans of ultra elitist CIA wizards dueling for the psychological soul of post-war Europe in the high court of mass consciousness, you can read it for yourself and it’s nothing new. After the war, when confronted with Russia's old world culture, their bolshoi, their literature, their music, all such as that, these guys needed something to say back and they chose art. They used a lot of taxpayer money to promote an art, abstract expressionism, around the world so stupefyingly individualistic that it didn’t say anything, all meaning privatized and sucked back into the the inscrutable essence of the artist. This article notes that they were getting good reviews in foreign places, but of course they paid for those too.

So that’s their excuse. They subverted american culture for the sake of world supremacy and we’re all better for it, so quit your whining. Still I think it’s just a cover for their actual motive all along. The rich guys' real fear was an awakening class consciousness, since the mighty red army had no consumers back home to finance their war machine, so only a matter of time. Extreme wealth here was more frightened by the mexican muralists, stitching together a fractured society in Mexico and uniting and inflaming poor people north of the border, making the case for social justice plainly visible even to the unlettered. Under cover of competition against a fundamentally disadvantaged economic structure, they made art mute, tore out its tongue, and haven’t been troubled by it since. These days art’s their clawless plaything in a gilded cage, an ultra-expensive exotic for their trophy tussles and bragging rights, sadly a passed-around whore.
 
Behind it all, what they really wanted was to shut down and eliminate the possibility of empathetic communication among the general population, so they sponsored an art no person familiar with honest effort and real accomplishment would want. At the same time, they began undermining and discrediting figurative art of any sort, a massive campaign by all art-related government agencies, in a covertly influenced media and including university art schools. ‘I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature’ became a standard academic refrain for several decades. The secret orders from on high were to sabotage visual art so we can tell them what to think, indenture their futures and live off their aspirations to find some meaning in existence and to connect with each other -- clever, but it couldn't last forever.

Figurative art is about seeing the world and presenting a vision of it on a flat surface, and within the interpretation suggesting points in common with the viewer, perhaps evoking some thought or feeling never considered or one too personal and private to share. In any case the super-rich don’t like it, and would prefer to limit our mental world to demeaning sitcoms and violent cop shows so they can sell us trucks no one needs but seem to want anyway, who knows why? How to get out of it is the same way we got into it. In your hometown look at enough art to decide what you truly admire, and it won’t be difficult if you first disregard everything they’ve ever told you. Sooner or later you'll pay the artist and take something home. Whatever the ultra wealthy don’t want you to have is there.