reason not to buy art -- the way it's sold

The gallery director moans -- we’re not taking on any new artists, the market’s gone soft and we’re packing it in after thirty five years paying uptown rent. People just aren’t buying art these days because of the uncertain economy or because pro football and beer commercials have coarsened everyone’s taste. It couldn’t be because the merchants of art burned down the territory with outlandish systems of value, so busy establishing a bluebook rating for every sanctioned artist that somehow the art drained away.

Frankly nobody cares what sort of kickback shenanigan got the artist into a big corporate collection, or how they arranged for the unreadable writeup by a college friend, or that their ticket-punching career got them all the way here. Art world affirmation used to be enough to sell almost anything, but they don’t seem to be buying it anymore. The rational person purchasing art, just as when buying anything else, has two questions. First, is the particular piece of art in question worthy of the price, and second, will paying that price improve my life by at least an equal amount over the years that I own it?

If this might be you there’s homework. Knowing if a piece of art is worth the asking price requires visiting galleries whenever possible, a completely free, informative, and amusing pastime. Nod and smile, and say “just looking”, and you’ll be left alone. Spend some time in front of any painting you find appealing and then bend forward to read the price tag next to it on the wall. Knowledge comes quickly and not only will you be finding out how much to pay, you’ll be discovering what you like. In time you’ll recognize a good piece at a fair price and if you think you might like it even more if you see it everyday, you’ve found a good reason to buy art.

in the end -- what's real

Is your new pickup real? Seems real now. Ten years from now some teenager will be tearing it up, some fast food worker won’t be able to afford oil changes, it’ll be recycled into toasters -- you won’t have it. On down the road how about your couch, your house, your tattoo that you’ll still have but won’t look the same somehow? Lives churn -- jobs, friends, financial conditions move up and down come and go. What doesn’t change, anything?

There’s that little painting you saw a long time ago in a gallery, in a studio, in a restaurant for sale, and it seemed expensive at the time but you liked it. Over the years it’s occupied different walls in different cities, heard happy and sad conversations, seen your family grow and all that while it’s become more familiar, more intimate, and an anytime tunnel back to all those places.

In whatever decades you have left invest in art now, money spent on your own future, and chances are you’ll never check to see if the price has gone up. No scientific studies have been done, but antidotal evidence, uncounted testimonials, and a world dissolving into digital makes the case that art is real, or will be the only thing real someday.

the wave is on its way -- Hopper in Paris

Hopper outdraws Picasso in his own hometown, people standing in line in the rain in front of the Grand Palais in the middle of the night, and big crowds too all around Europe. Now isn’t that strange? Hopper isn’t new. Before Warhol there was Hopper, but he was regarded as retrograde and obsolete by modern abstractionists, the conceptualists, all those who think of novelty as the highest achievement in visual art and its ultimate goal. Hopper’s art hasn’t changed -- what has?

The mentality of an age can be discussed and written about endlessly but it’s quite visible for all to see in the art. The personality-cult commercialism of Warhol stands as emblematic of the greed and derision of personal integrity which collapsed the world’s financial markets, and maybe one didn’t cause the other but they reflect the same values. In fact we’ve fought through thickets of theory, splashes and stripes and deconstructions, all looking for something, what, ourselves? It takes so much faith, and energy, to find significance and meaning in the accidental, in the sneering offhand gesture, in the fat ginned-up resume.

No need to work that hard in front of a Hopper -- he takes you there. Blowing curtains evoke a rush of warm air on a summer evening before air conditioning, last light, damp smells and faint echoes, all sorts of things that don’t come through with a photograph, that thinnest slice of reality. People find themselves and their own experience verified in Hopper, and he pulls at them to stretch as well, to see more, to feel more, the reason people love art. Suddenly there’s many more who like Hopper. These people seek something more substantial than fashion, something more enduring and thoughtful than soup cans. Art is going to change.

big hotel

The bridges between representational art and the public are down, blown up by advancing abstractionist forces back in the nineteen fifties, and traffic has been rerouted through the gift shop. Spot and spin paintings bring in millions, self-serving non-profits have co-opted art as a charity, and comfortable homes full of books and smart furnishings have decorator prints on the walls. Still independent artists, ragged partisans of a populist art insurrection, in temporary studios and in and out of other employment, are making art about what we all see, think about, relate to and understand. Although many feel themselves cutoff and surrounded, isolated and alone, relief is on the way. As if dropped from the sky a big hotel that takes art seriously suddenly appears bringing rain to a previously parched landscape. As a greater array of art gains exposure, a more aware public will begin to make their own choices, and the playing field will level up for everyone.

without art the world collapses --

Without art we would all fall back into immediacy without the ability to imagine what lies beyond our senses. Humans discovered this long, long ago, and have been making art ever since -- art that created the singular realities each culture shared. Monumental and sacred art of the past were less poetic expression and more about creating a reality that favored the few who hired the artists. These days nothing’s changed. First you have to accept that most every surface you see is some application of art -- menus, cars, clothes, as well as the oil-slick advertising which spreads to cover every surface. Movies and TV shape lives by example, and we’re wired to incorporate all of it as though it was real. We can’t help it -- the art around us determines our world.

Stone lions won’t make us fear the king and floating cherubs don’t have us believing in heaven -- anymore. The present crew of media manipulators have been hired just to get our money, and they bend reality so we’ll spend freely. It works but there’s a downside. We all know this. Occasionally serious and dedicated artists seize the controls and produce movies and other kinds of art that present broader possibilities, and we call it art mostly because it was made for some other reason. It’s a discernible quality. What’s left for the individual is to decide what art to have around.

original vs reproduction -- it’s all the same, isn’t it?

To believe original art is somehow better than its digital-perfect clone requires a shamanistic view of art, or is it Marxian? Either would work and both are about work. When those on the production-line combine their labor with raw material they own some part of the thing created, and focusing intense concentration, chanting and ritual, on a physical object imbues it with an indwelling presence. By either point of view, primitive or progressive, putting effort into manipulating inert material instills a value that remains. Digital reproductions, identical and one dimensional, are facades without backsides, airy spooks with no value as art. It becomes problematic when a new one, or a thousand, pops out with only the momentary pressure of a finger. Negligible effort inserts a fat zero into either equation.

Marx was chiefly concerned with fair compensation for individual effort and many artists would settle for that, but in the older view the original object is sum of the artist’s thought and effort up until that point which will perpetually radiate into any room. The difference between original and reproduction is the difference between having a musician come to dinner with you and your family and then play in your living room, and listening to the digital replay later on the finest system available. The sound is all there, probably better, but it isn’t the same, not even close. Original art is more than the image -- by almost any system of value, even if it’s simple rarity, one-of-a-kind from the hand of an artist has inherent worth no picture of it could ever have.

representational art -- just the smallest slice

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
Edgar Degas

Art is the biggest word in the world. It has industrial meanings, legal meanings, advertising and entertainment meanings, all aside from the many kinds of visual expression it covers. Representational art is just the smallest slice -- art that lies in the tension between believably real and yet obviously made. It isn’t our eyes that decide what’s real. A lifetime of distilled experience is constantly interpreting what goes on in front of us, and representational art slips in through the back door while it’s being decided. No one reaches for a wine glass in a still life, and yet feeling the convincing presence of a wine glass broaches an age-old, inborn question, and it doesn’t go away. In the difference between the actual thing and its painted representation there’s a lot of room to get to know the artist and to listen in on a conversation that’s been going on a long time. If the artist, in person, has a sense of humor, suffers compulsions, is given to dreamy nostalgia or searing intensity, all that shows up when they paint -- a flower, a truck, or a portrait. These qualities are not consciously intended by the artist but appear automatically as they paint the world around them, and that’s how their work reads back when it becomes a part of a daily environment.