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.
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.
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