gangsters and art

When I first heard HBO was going to make movies for tv, I expected low-budget, b-grade soapers, which is what made-for-tv movies had always been on commercial driven broadcasting. This is probably because the essential ethic of advertising is that people are like sheep, and can be led by their insecurities, their longings and delusions into buying non-essential stuff. Entertainment for sheep is pretty simple – guns, confrontation, some implied intercourse and you’ve got yourself a winner, i.e., you’re going to sell lots of stuff. HBO produces the Sopranos for subscription, a different business model, and they go about it in a different way. They used all their technique, all their talent, all their artistic integrity to make something that looked like real life. Tony has trouble with his kids, gets food poisoning, tells his therapist about his mother just like a real person might. This expanded dimension allowed the viewer to use their own life experience to see into those characters, and to see a bit more of life through their eyes. People like good art – the Sopranos sold a lot of subscriptions to HBO. Not only that. Other production companies began to find support for better stories, better art, even on commercial tv. There continue to be ripples throughout the medium.

It isn’t necessary to call a glass dirty, goes an old bit of rhetoric, but only to put a clean glass up next to it. Someone has to have a clean glass, along with the means to get it on the same shelf, something that wasn’t possible in broadcast drama until HBO came along. Still, it’s clear we have an appetite for something better when it’s available. We need a new business model, one where the private side of our economy takes responsibility for finding, displaying, and promoting local art, and then we may actually begin to realize all those benefits the non-profits claim when fund raising, but never quite seem to find. If business people took responsibility for the art hanging in their own offices, for finding and becoming patrons of area artists whose work they admire, and for making art a part of the conversation at social gatherings, they would find life and business more rewarding, more productive, more profitable, and, in ripples, so would everybody else.

do you have too much money for art?

Could write a novel to hint at it, wealthy insensitives on horseback chasing foxes through peasant crops, but we see it in the news everyday. Might construct a pithy poem, record an insightful song, do a little dance, but let’s just say it out. If you haven’t stood on the edge of a two lane highway late at night in front of the only gas station in miles with seventeen cents in your pocket and one direction as good as another, you’re probably not ready for art. It’s a place you might get to from several directions, and it may not always look just like that, but if you’ve been there you know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean to sound heroic. We’re born into a stormy sea, most of us, and parental expectations, cultural norms, and our own natural limitations are the bare and jagged rocks we cling to. It takes some adjustment, and art helps with that.

Wealth, in this or any time, is about frolicking in warm sunny pools. Royal lines declined without the constant tempering of war because only the immense cost and the strategic realities of battle could penetrate the cocoon of convenience and comfort their wealth provided. Without the strife of daily living – changing tires, making beds, stretching paychecks, several rooms in our personal attic are never occupied. Artists who make art for the ultra wealthy understand their overriding emotion is boredom, having never gone upstairs at all, and they connive to amuse and distract them with giant chrome puppies, diamond encrusted skulls, and such. They’re not like you and me.

We work hard for the money, and with unemployment up around ten percent, we all probably work a little harder. Before we take some of that money and spend it on art, it has to mean something to us. What would that be like? Maybe we like the image, and maybe we like the color, and maybe we like the way our expectation is always fooled when we look at it. Maybe we’ve met the artist, and are following their career as they sell art to friends and neighbors, and we get to see other examples of their work when we visit. Maybe we see in a sincere work of art an old friend in the making, an image and its attendant memories that will always be there, unchanged, wherever life takes us. Whatever it might be, really rich folks won’t get it. They think art is about collecting famous names on stuff -- there are very expensive ink blobs for them.

art is the measure

Art is the measure of regard one has for one’s self. Obvious for the artist, but it actually applies to everyone. It’s true for the art you look at, as well as art you might make. What else is art about – anyone with a better answer step to the front of the line. The artist makes a statement – this is the best I can do, this is what I think you want to see, this will make me famous, and it’s right out front for anyone to look at. At this point the artist is completely honest, or at least can’t hide anything, because if they’re a grant-sucking, art regurgitating camp follower, it’ll show in their work.

For everybody else it’s pretty simple, too. What art do you have on your walls -- at home, in the office, and how important is it to you? Do you see yourself in the art you choose to own, choose to look at, even to notice. Maybe not. Public money has been trivializing and demeaning art for over half a century, and by now the general population doesn’t seem to care – what a surprise. The first artists to be supported, promoted, made famous with public money, grants from foundations and public institutions, were the abstract expressionists after the second world war – art’s Taliban. Instead of firing squads they used ridicule, ending careers, driving established representational artists into menial occupations elsewhere, pissing on all of art history – the way fundamentalists tend to do. More extreme than most, they banned the depiction of anything, and it went on for years and years. You still might hear some old art professor fading into retirement absently mouthing the words –“I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature” for the million-billionth time.

Public money turns art into the idiot pet we walk twice a day and otherwise ignore, and that’s its job. Built into the distribution of public money are enough filters for mediocrity to ensure a public thirst for self-verification and redemption will have to look elsewhere – politics or religion, perhaps. The poison in the well are the decisions of self-serving bureaucrats who don’t know or care anything about art – check the walls in their houses for verification. Artists with self-respect may turn away, and find themselves turned away from, with no access to grants, commissions, and the resulting public recognition. (see previous post – 'upside down') Public institutions -- non-profits, state commissions, public university art schools all expend vast resources, the public's own money, to commandeer the public’s attention for their own benefit, not the benefit of art, the public or its culture.

It’s time to see past the vast public art enterprise, so dependently attached to the veins of our political structure, and look for independent art and artists who express, in some unspeakable way, the seriousness we have felt, or would like to feel, in our own lives, day to day.

can’t get there from here – Kroger bakes art

Kroger wants to do right by their customers, wants to give them what they want at a fair price, but they get tired – tired of people complaining about the bread. It’s refined and processed, reduced to the lowest common denominator for taste and nutrition, and has no personality at all – like cotton candy that turns to paste when you touch it to your mouth. Sick and tired of hearing it, so they decided to give those so-called art bakeries, the ones producing traditional breads with character, texture, and taste, a run for the customer’s money. Deep in stainless steel labs late into the night they tested and baked until they had an array of breads to rival any family-owned, neighborhood bakery. There were seeded tops and different shapes, all looking really diverse and wonderful, but all made from the same regular old white bread dough. All the different kinds of bread tasted the same, and not a bit better than their regular bread. They found the look, they had the technology, but they couldn’t produce a good loaf of bread.

The very process of finding and funding public art provides the look of art, the sensation of something new, but it’s a generic, one size fits all, bleached of meaning copy product – glitzy and clever on the outside, but all the same white bread on the inside. It isn’t anyone’s fault – it’s the process. Constructing cool stuff to conform to guidelines and parameters, figuring markups and materials, delivery dates and installation constraints turns artists into culture vendors and fills a city up with things that eventually rust, fade, and collect debris. Does it add to the quality of life – maybe. Mediocre in gives mediocre out – it’s like a law or something. Artists line up to receive a drop of public money, in the form of direct commissions from city or state, or the tax-deductible sponsorship of business, while myriad non-profits grow glossy. The city is left with stuff to maintain forever and ever, or until the thrill is gone.

It isn’t the art that’s the problem – it’s the backward set of priorities that puts it there on the corner, in the median. The Picasso in Chicago (see prior post, July 4), often cited as an iconic example of public art, wasn’t chosen by committee, wasn’t paid for with public money, didn’t fit anyone’s parameters.

one art

There is one art. Scholars who explain it all to the rest of us don’t see it that way. They divide art up with fences and gates, categories, periods, schools. They do this because that’s the way they’re taught – so much easier to score the tests. By the time they’re done, representational painting and abstract painting are different things, modern and contemporary are separate realms of expression, every year in SoHo has it’s own stars. Actually, the idea of making marks on a flat surface which somehow create 3D pictures in the mind stretches back thirty thousand years we know of, and it’s been going on continually since. Languages require a lot of learning and divide up humanity into regions, tribes, nationalities – the obvious source of many of our problems. Art goes in directly. Fifty percent of the brain interprets vision and eighty percent of the circuits connect in some way, according to tv documentaries. Art needs no translation.

Art has been used to pull many wagons. Early on we think it had to do with hunting, the Egyptians made it talk, the church used it to shape and condition human experience, and we sell stuff with it. Behind it all is this mysterious ability of human perception to animate line and shape on a page. Our purpose here is to deal with the pure stuff, and it doesn’t really matter which box you pull it out of. There are artists all around with something to say, and some create visual images as deep and wide as you have eyes to see.

inception

Seems like a novel idea, planting seeds in the subconscious to grow and bear fruit in the inner workings of our heads – actually, it’s happening every day, but instead of attacking us in our dreams they use art, and call it advertising. The power of art, the persuasiveness of art, and it’s all focused at getting us to buy something – toothpaste, motorcycles, ED medicines. Does it change behaviors? They sure make a lot of money claiming it does, with charts and graphs.

upside down

Just sitting thinking about people I knew, committed artists living and breathing it, who have gone other directions, given up, settled for less. A couple were landscape painters who loved the countryside, loved their brushes and tubes of paint. One had a studio down the hall – his high school buddies would fall in on Friday night from their different professions to drink beer and engage in old familiar conversations, and the other lived up the stairs. Doing other stuff these days. A ceramicist who had a studio across the hall was making free standing figures, finally clock faces and trivets – she knew all the formulas, understood the chemistry, watched the kiln all night while it slowly built up temperature, and she’s gone, too. I’m not making this up.

Their expectations weren’t that high – no one expected to be famous. Their only ambition, and mine, too, was to pay the rent, to buy the materials, to keep going. Not only did they finally find themselves defeated, the artwork they would have made in their maturity never happened. The people who might have owned their work, lived with their art, and enhanced their lives with it settled for less as well. Artists I know who struggle on have learned how to hang sheetrock, how to repair furniture, how to live with old cars, while non-profit arts groups suck up grant money, pass out favors, take home regular paychecks with medical and retirement. Art is upside down in central Kentucky.