goldfish art

Recently a posting on an art blog reported an exhibition in which goldfish were swimming in blenders and patrons were invited to push the buttons. Sounds like something severely abused children might do, unsupervised. Participation in violence isn’t going to be my favorite arts activity, and seems, in certain respects, to be bald-faced unwholesome. On this blog, in this mode of thinking, we ask that people consider taking money that could be spent on other stuff and buy art with it, instead. The major argument we have to make is about mental health, psychic well-being, individual realization, and much of contemporary art, including pureed live fish, doesn’t seem to help with that. Art has great power in the human mind, and trivializing dark impulses might be counter-productive is all I’m saying.

attention span management

Does the internet give us access to all the information while making it near impossible to think? Well, yeah, so it seems -- people have been doing research. It has to do with dwell time as much as anything. Being smart, it turns out, isn’t so much about brain power as the ability to focus what we’ve got in one place long enough to gain traction. Surfing is screwing it up. The reason print media is losing relevance is because fewer and fewer people can get to the bottom of the page. Is that bad? – probably. When slogans are seen as philosophy and sensationalism is called the news human potential starts way behind, and politics turn atavistic.

Art doesn’t cure it, but it can offer some relief. Art fortifies the attention span by expanding the moment. Instead of a flickering universal search, one teapot sits next to a cup and a lemon ever since you bought it, inherited it, were given it as a gift. On the first day a painting is seldom a match for the most modest of home entertainment centers, but it gains slowly, catching and holding our notice over days, months, and years. Owning interesting art is an investment in attention span management in coming decades, and it’s becoming a better bargain every day.

Starving dogs and public art

Most public art seems little more than quirky decoration, compared with that thing in Chicago in a square of its own, right downtown. It’s worth noting Picasso couldn’t get a visa to visit the US, and Chicago, not NY, always seemed to represent America’s brutality to European artists. Even so, when Chicago accepted it for free they didn’t bother to think it might mean something. Though they won’t admit it, they’ve come to suspect implied criticism of some sort, and have been trying to figure a way to dump it in the lake for years. I wouldn’t pretend to know what it means, either, but it has the hunched shoulders, the bare ribs and splayed pelvis of canine starvation – humanity’s own notification of serious bad times. I’ve actually seen the homeless sheltering underneath to soak up the residual heat in the steel, as if it had been intended. I don’t agree or disagree – I’m just awestruck.

art and sports

Art, like sports, is in the experience of playing the game. The reason color commentators at sporting events are former players and coaches is because we naturally give more credence to those who have had the experience. Without them all the stadiums, sports publications, and all the experts would be out of work. The game of art is simple. The participants are the artists who make it, and the people who look, buy, and own it.

Sports requires athletic ability and special physical attributes – jockeys are small and football players are big. Few of us qualify. Art requires looking and thinking, which should include almost anyone willing to try. Lectures and demonstrations won’t make you a better tennis player, but getting out on the court, maybe being embarrassed at first, will. Nerves and reflexes, muscles and joints will eventually know the game. Try looking at original art, in due time buy something appealing, and hang it in a place where you’ll see it every day. Mysteries will fade, and you’ll begin to know what you like, why you like it, and where to get it. You’ll be in the game.

seeing truth

Jackson Pollock, his paintings are famous and so is he, a seminal figure to be sure. Besides being famous, his paintings are unbelievably expensive, and just in case you wanted to buy one, here’s what you get. Jackson couldn’t do representation, so you’d acquire a revolutionary form of painting, one that profoundly embodies despair, frustration, and futility. Some said at the time that Jackson’s work wasn’t art, but you wouldn’t hear that from me. I see the spontaneous, totally authentic expression of monumental social unease and self-doubt turned aggressive and belligerent through the medium of alcohol. Beyond rendering his inner existential tantrum, the work, itself, has also been gloriously self-destructive, commercial paint solvents eating away at raw canvas, and museums keep his paintings on constant life-support. Pure genius, that.

The question is, if you’re not a terminal alcoholic verging toward suicide, why would you want to own one of Jackson’s paintings, or even spend much time in front of one at a museum? The awful truth about art is, it’s really true – art reveals the artist at whatever level you care to look, and sometimes you find yourself in there, too.

other people's eyes

Some people aren't sure how the world looks around them until they check other faces to make sure everything’s ok. They dress, not to suit their own taste -- whatever that might be, but for other people’s sense of what’s cool this year, this month, this time of day. Some people, it turns out, seems to be most of us, and it isn’t hard to understand. We swim submerged in advertising which constantly promises to make each of us more acceptable to everyone else, and even though we know they lie, some part of us believes them. They know we'd all like to be liked, to belong, to go along with the crowd.

It’s in the purity of art where the dross of any tangible value burns away, and all that’s left is an impossible price for some sanctified master's offhand gesture, sustained and justified only because someone else, somewhere, would pay that much and more. If no such buyer is available, an anonymous phone call to the auction floor enters a bid for them as if they existed. The value of art, according to industry bluebooks, is an accumulation of prior approvals, the consensus of qualified authorities, and, at the top, artificial prices established in bogus auctions. Looking through the eyes of other people has its drawbacks.

For one thing, it’s very hard to see art that way. Actually seeing art requires looking through one’s own eyes, and as a fact that’s part of it, just in itself. Picasso said, “Art is a lie which helps you to see the truth”, and if you can actually see what the artist made, without reference to fame, or price, or what anyone else thinks, you have a chance of seeing everything else that way, too.

change

Google changed last night, again. They didn’t tell me. I just found it this morning doing something different. Change is becoming unpredictable. The youngsters stay on top of it for a while, but they’ll go spinning off, too. Art as a life-saver ring tossed to the person over-board makes sense – more every day. Art, itself, doesn’t change. Fashions come and go, but a worthy piece of art becomes more interesting, more potent with age. Even mediocre work gains in stature simply by being original, as charming frontier portraits down at the courthouse attest. What changes is how we see it, although it doesn’t happen overnight. An original painting owned forty years will become something entirely real, as furnishings and gadgets flicker and change all around it.