art -- the only thing that floats

Two people are having a conversation. A dog enters the room. One person loves dogs, sometimes even more than people, and this dog is so friendly, wagging and saying hello. The other person doesn’t like dogs, had no animals as a child, and finds all that wagging and head bobbing disturbing and maybe threatening. Do they see the same dog? They’ll both agree they see a dog, even a brown dog, but it isn’t the same dog. If you’ll concede that through each other’s eyes the dog would be unrecognizable, consider it also applies to the room, the sky, the car one of them is so proud of, and even to each other’s faces, so different from what they see themselves in the mirror.

Politics makes it obvious, people seemingly are living on different planets while inhabiting the same space, but it's revealed in more than the alternative facts on the evening news. The most obvious difference in individual perception has to do with attention to detail, how much information is extracted from any given scene. The native american of the southwest probably sees a bit more in a desert landscape than a typical tourist, peering through tinted glass while doing seventy five across what appears to them a wasteland, but it's also true for two passengers on a bus sitting side by side. After the sensitivity has been determined, there are individual preferences concerning what to scan for. Some folks are only interested in essentials, navigating rush hour traffic and driving a hard bargain, while others tend to notice colors, highlights and shadows, the texture and mood of their surroundings. These are generally the artists and their fans.

The second group reaches out to the first by making art, presenting an invitation to open some of the closed doors in the skull. The first group appreciates this enough, once they've gone through a few doors, to share some of their efficiently gathered loot. For many loosely allied reasons, pubic and private, this transaction has been gaining traction recently. The human spirit doesn’t appreciate being squeezed down into brand-loyal consumer units, and a reckoning is at hand. Words are dead. The doublespeak of advertising bestows love on kitchen products, and politics has muddied the waters even more. 

Artists make pictures that anyone can see in their own way, yet to all they’re a signpost to a fuller awareness and understanding of the tangible reality we all inhabit. There's ample testimony that living with a favorite painting influences how the world is perceived. Having art around makes the evening light turn lemon yellow, more wildlife appears on drives in the country, and with greater discernment, even the news that's ‘between the lines‘ starts coming through.

Quality of life has become an issue, now that competitive efficiency has everyone stretched thin to keep up, so many anxious, feeling depleted and dissatisfied by the canned gratifications streaming up from their device. Something seems to be missing. What happened to the blue of the sky, the taste of a cooked meal, or the little burst of joy at the first crocus coming through the snow? The list goes on. In this peculiar liquid point in history, when the increasing current seems to indicate a waterfall up ahead, the art on the wall becomes a lifesaver, a flotation ring to hold on to. Spend a little money and get something nice.

ding dong twentieth century -- Dorothy waking up

The twentieth century left a peculiar art legacy, one distorted by market manipulation, cults of personality and notoriety, and massive clandestine and public government interference. The gauntlet was dropped back in nineteen thirty one when Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Diego Rivera to create a fresco mural for the ground floor of Rockefeller Center, and after six months of labor had it jackhammered down before the public had a chance to see it, or even for any photographs to be taken. The rules were enforced by armed security people.

The rich guys had spoken, ‘that’s what we think of your brotherhood of man in pictures bullshit -- now get out of our way.’ With government money they nurtured a breed of artist so corruptible they’d make nonobjective messes on a canvas and turn them in for cash, a special program for artists in new york that was more like welfare than the other NRA art programs. It was an incubator for the abstractionist movement, and many of the early ‘masters’ had this blind and generous program on their resumes. Since the second world war, government money for art schools, for grants and foundations, and massive tax breaks for art philanthropy have rewarded the abstract and conceptual, and cavalierly demeaned and excluded visual art that any working, home owning, tax paying person might like. They in fact made a point of supporting art which had no chance of commercial success, since no one would pay for it, and for several generations it was their code, their mission, and their badge of honor.

Their cover story for this massive distortion of the entire realm of visual art was the international competition with the soviet union after the war. The reds were all snooty with their ballet, their classical music, and their deep humanistic literature, so we countered with huge, highly individualistic abstract expressionist paintings, our cowboy artists fiercely proclaiming their existential freedom by splashing and dripping. Along with wall-to-wall support at home, the state department exported their gigantic works of art to a europe still destitute and devastated by war, with lavish openings and planted positive reviews. They also used tons of money, wasn’t their money, to deride as retrograde and backward any form of representational art, and art students in schools everywhere were ridiculed for even attempting it. It turns out it wasn’t really about the russians, was it?

Early in the century the mexican muralists had given mexico a national identity, helping it overcome exploitation by foreign powers by healing its social and political fragmentation, speaking eloquently to a largely illiterate population. They were even influencing the american artists hired by the WPA to paint in post offices and public buildings, and worker solidarity and farmers rights were frequent themes.

Somebody up top decided to fix the problem, this threat of social solidarity, by pulling the plug on pictorial art altogether, eliminating the vehicle of discontent right front of the whole court -- the mad king cuts out the tongue of the jester. Instead they substituted an irrational art, proclaiming it from all corners to be more profound, more insightful, and even more beautiful in its ugliness. Abstract art ascended and pictorial art of any sort was banished and condemned, seemed like from all corners, as backward and dumb, and for several generations no culturally aware person would even look at it. The mexican muralists and their movement wouldn’t be heard of again for the rest of the century.

As the twenty first century establishes itself, the corruption of the institutions of art, the money and reputation laundering, the tax evasion and transparent fraud, but mostly the elevation of vile nonsense, have tended to sully the twentieth century’s art legacy. Time to start over. We face a harsh reality in which words have robbed of meaning by the doublespeak of politics, entertainment shows up in garter straps, and as advertising creeps on to every visible surface, many humans find they ‘can’t get no relief.’ More and more they find themselves categorized as a predictable consumer unit, and their life choices limited to coke or pepsi, ford or chevy, and my team verses the rest of the league. ‘There must be some way out of here’ is what many of them are thinking.

Art is starting over as a grassroots movement across the land, you must have noticed. Several factors contribute to a new awareness of visual art, but the spirit that animates them all is simply appetite, a desire to emerge from the consumer cell of mind constricting algorithms to become again fully human, empathetically linked with others through the expression of art, a fundamental human capacity they managed to block with interference for a while. Much comes across in original pictorial art that advertising bleaches out, conveying messages that are felt rather than thought, providing insights and observations that aren’t trying to get you to buy something. You should get aboard, the train’s leaving, real art in people’s houses is about to start happening, and more art is being seen in public everyday. When people look up and begin to notice, the product will get better quick since comparison is what we do, and after all that constriction art’s future contribution to community life is bound to be joyful.