twenty eight million dollar popeye -- too much spinach

It’s ugly. It was human once you know. Started out as a caricature of a stereotype and then became it’s own stereotype, misshapen and distorted with a sad chaotic life, idiotic and predictable enough for longterm residence at the back of the daily paper. It was made into a plastic figure to be sold as a toy with requisite royalties paid no doubt, and then copied much larger by technicians somewhere and presented as art, signed by Jeff Koons, and royalties paid probably not. (see below) Recently it sold at auction for more than anybody’s lifetime income I’ve ever met. Was it worth it? 

What is it might be the first question. It does have the distinction of being an almost temple-ready embodiment of the grease-trap leavings of industrial commercialism. It isn’t where I’d like to dwell or spend any time at all but that isn’t the point. This unlovely thing’s job is to sit somewhere and declare to all the tired hungry people of the world I’d rather piss away twenty eight million dollars on this than help you -- worth every penny. This isn’t a discussion of art, is it? Economics, politics, unbridled porcine avarice perhaps, but not much art to identify with for the less-than-idle less-than-rich. There’s no bottom rung on that ladder and that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see?

Fine with me. It doesn’t seem interesting. Trying to emulate that elevated sensibility here in the provinces would be like a sad ‘cargo cult’ waiting for a caravan of wealthy sophisticates to come through town loading limos with grad-school imitations of what’s in all the magazines. Attempting to appeal to the aesthetic tastes of a class of people who by every purchase, in every activity, and with every breath are trying to shed their common connection with the rest of humanity sounds too much like work. Well Jeff Koons and his customers can sit in sand-boxes filled with money, but we have better things to do with our time. Making pictures, looking at them, hanging them on the wall and recognizing ones you haven’t seen before is a completely different gig, and something you can do in your hometown. 

http://igaming.org/casino/news/steve-wynn-buys-28-million-popeye-statue/ 

who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes

The Connoiseur, by Norman Rockwell

My favorite abstract expressionist painting was by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. While considering another topic I googled it and it was much as I had remembered, but the commentary added an interpretation I didn’t really see. What I see is a republican business-type standing nose close trying to fathom the unfathomable. It’s a joke about abstract art. That’s what I thought first time I saw it and it still looks that way, maybe more so. Good for Norman.

That’s not what the commentary underneath says. It suggests the rigid character with hat, umbrella, and gloves is a stand-in for the artist himself, and that’s bald-faced absurd. He appeared in his own artwork often enough to see how he portrayed himself and it isn’t him. Not just that, but from behind this scholar imagines stand-in Norman to be smiling at this work of genius. I know it’s a lie but I’m never sure if it’s intentional or simply the ‘cult’ in culture, the mysterious ‘art-historical’ ability to see what isn’t there. He says,””Always fascinated by modern and abstract art, Rockwell designed a cover in which he could acknowledge his appreciation of the genre. In 1961, Rockwell's studio was temporarily transformed into an abstract expressionist's workplace as he painted The Connoisseur, a painting about the relationship between conventional and modern art. By placing his back to us, he leaves the interpretation of the museum visitor's reaction to the viewer. If we can assume that he is a surrogate for Rockwell, we may also assume that the gentleman is smiling approvingly.”

This isn’t revisionism. It’s in your face lying, we have eyes, and it’s been the tenor of art scholarship for six or seven decades. It’s the history of art for the gullible among us and, of course, the art professionals who choose to believe what they’re told instead of what they see. Norman made if very clear what he thought of “modern and abstract art” by the way he painted throughout.

http://www.nrm.org/thinglink/text/Connoisseur.html   

artists' brains -- different from you and me

“Drawing on the right side of the brain: A voxel-based morphometry analysis of observational drawing” asserts that artists may have increased neural matter in the parts of their brains that deal with visual perception, spatial navigation and fine motor skills. Huffington Post-Apr 22, 2014

Goofy sort of research with elements of prank, but plausible enough to get a headline. It isn’t surprising that the physique of the athlete is generally superior to the average office worker. Athletes at all levels work their bodies in all sorts of ways beyond just practicing the skill-set for their particular sport to achieve a condition simply called ‘shape’. You can spot them in the supermarket loading up on bulk protein, a toned outline under tight skin, and maybe they inspire better choices among the rest of us, more fruit and less cake. Doing a brain-scan isn’t so convenient and even if it was true it would be beside the point. Of course the brains of artists are different because they ‘train’ -- they look at stuff. Does it make their brains bigger -- who cares? The fact is they see more and anybody can. 

To do it requires no sweat but it does take energy. One has to apply consciousness to mundane surroundings wherever one happens to be, and a surprising thing begins to happen. It’s been widely reported -- the more you look the more you see. Vision becomes “the only form of eating that produces its own meat”, a translation I’m sure but the intent is clear. The difference between the perception of an artist and coequally the viewer of art, and the rest of the population can’t be seen externally but it’s there. They’re seeing more in the same places. Their perceptions are in shape. 

presidential prophesies -- the future from the present

What harbingers do you take seriously? President Carter was an introvert who turned outward and embodied a concern for community felt in the hearts of many in his time. Bush, the backslapping extrovert quoting ball-scores and telling crude jokes, turns inward and becomes a painter after his stint as national ego in-chief and I wonder what it means.

George is really pretty good for a rank beginner and I wouldn’t deride him for that -- too bad he gets all that attention. He has the courage to be judged, takes that chance and comes out miles ahead of all those condescending noted authorities who ‘never played the game’. I’ll try to be more clear. There are people who assume rank and position in the art establishment with too few dues in the pot, professional chameleons who look all directions and change color with the crowd. They can’t decide if Norman Rockwell was an artist, a great artist, or not even and the tide moves back and forth every ten years or so. They don’t know what art is.

George will probably never be good having started way too late, but he’s put himself on that highway and something about it is so compelling, some part of himself was so thirsty for time in front of an easel that he’s willing to humbly accept an avalanche of ridicule and scorn just to be able to do it. His persona has softened and ‘decider’ no more, he devotes himself to looking at things and noticing stuff, trying to figure out how to make flat canvas say the same thing. Well, that’s George’s thing and we move on but he was a man of his time elected to represent all of us, and in the arc of his presidency somehow he did, ending in a bankruptcy no one expected. 

Still at the crest of a wave of national consciousness our most recent ex-president has concluded that self-discovery was the missing component, and so does a nation suddenly interested in art. It isn’t just him. Oh I’m as rational as the next but history with art as its expression can be read a couple of different ways, and the way things are going looks to me like artists are going to be the ballplayers in another generation or two.

Pussy Riot -- facing down the iron fist

Saw members of ‘Pussy Riot’ on Charlie Rose last night. Worst musicians and most fearless artists I’ve ever seen. Art stares back into the face of brutal soul-crushing authority while everyone else examines their shoes, and it’s the vulture who turns away. This is after journalists have been publicly poisoned, political opponents bogusly charged, tried, and sent to prison, and under the constant surveillance of the secret police. Art may in the end be the only solution. 

Pussy Riot is not about subversive lyrics, sly derision of those in power tolerated from above as feckless even useful dissent. It’s courage and defiance they personify, and they’ve willed it to ripple out from them through performance because they understand art isn’t passive. Art both reflects and directs self-image, the realm of possibilities for the individual and for their community, as totalitarian regimes have understood well enough. Those who would control minds fear art more than foreign armies, and their feeble attempts to subdue and bend it trace a real yet unwritten history of the twentieth century. Well documented are the darkly hilarious machinations of fascist and communist national cults trying to limit and restrict art only to make it more virulent and powerful.

Art in the west has been buffeted by different forces. Here art sells stuff and even sells itself. Ask Andy Warhol about politics and he’ll talk about carpeting the streets (saw the interview) but walking through his shop he’ll order more Lisa’s, “we can always sell those” (from a documentary). At least in a democracy there’s no attempt to control art from above, unless you count the NEA, myriad foundation grants, and state-supported teaching institutions everywhere. Here the artist doesn’t fear heavy footsteps followed by loud knocking in the night, but still there are challenges. The first is an almost totally alienated audience. Squeezed on one side by the vulgarity of commercialism and from the other by an academic establishment passing out honors and grants and hiring teachers from within a state-supported farm system, the general public opted out, walked away, and the vested interests said good riddance. Each takes a much bigger chunk from a much smaller pie.

Pussy Riot is a hard act to follow. Artists here can’t count on one sorta goofy performance resulting in a gigantic state show trial seen all around the world, and which in effect puts the state, itself, on trial. That’s a lot to ask. Here artists need to be honest with themselves and hope their example will endure, as paintings do, and ripple out at least a sense of independence and some notion of purpose beyond money. 

W shows his art -- the burden of fame already

W’s art is met with derision by all who opposed him politically, and they revel in his struggles, his vulnerability, his naive honest attempts to make images. It’s the same for all of us but he get’s pilloried as stand-in for every painter who’s taken those chances but never received even ugly reviews. This is a time of reflection he’s never known before, an attempt to struggle with limitation and doubt, and one can only wish he’d tried it sooner.

He claims as his inspiration Winston Churchill who took his painting quite seriously. He compared the strategy of making a painting to mounting a military campaign and it had more credibility coming from him than, say, me. Still, I’m pretty sure I know what he meant. Painting will teach W something about delayed gratification and cause and effect, even unintended consequences, and that’s all before he leaves the studio. He’ll also learn something about the hollow horn of art criticism from people who find profundity in a drip, a smear, some petulant display of ego-inflamed/such genius.

W just started and for that he isn’t so bad. Given a couple more decades at the easel he might be posing and resolving deep universal human issues, and who could doubt he’d make a better president?

bureaucratic art is to art -- art on assistance

Kids in art school pick up elitist notions. It’s only that old institutional insularity really, but they internalize it. Civil occupations are usually based on knowledge rather than performance, and the secret knowledge of the art department is what brings home their bacon. They teach some strange stuff.

One is that worthy art really didn’t begin until the ‘year one’ of the modern art era, about 1950. Before that it was just the churches that bought art and of course there were portraits of industrialists' wives and other sorts of decorations for houses and such. Art wasn’t very interesting back then, just copying nature with no imagination, so art had no support or interest from anyone until the advent of the great funding entities, governmental and private/tax-deductable -- the NEA and the foundations.

The contempt shown for representational art, and the art department’s full disapproval for any student who insisted on pursuing it, shaped institutional instruction for decades. Recall being told about a class critique where the only way a representational painting would considered was upside down. In the outside world the people who paid the freight didn’t like abstract art, never liked abstract art, but that was just their problem. ‘We have words that apply to them, philistines and sports fans, and ways we feel superior wandering between studios peeling an orange while they grind away nine-to-five to provide our income.’

Well to heck with all y'all and your demented installations trailing ribbon and tinsel like abandoned carnivals, your publicly-funded ‘board-game tokens’ around town, and your bias for a style of art only a bureaucrat could justify or support with other people’s money. That’s not art. It’s some sort of imitation of art process that qualifies for a grant but would never survive on its own outside its incubator. Believe it or not the common folk are not too dumb for art -- they’re too smart for that stuff.

The culture has shown its capacity to discern quality when a full array of options are available, although the system can be rigged to limit choices. It’s over. Once a certain amount of art is seen by the public the cloistered peer group reviews for those fat regional grants, all the public money pumped into art production will seem like just another ‘farm bill’, just a pointless giveaway to those who may not deserve it.