two cities -- best and worst change places

Over around the u art flourishes, lots of activity. They have galleries and events, a museum with docents, studios and support -- supplies, status, and prestige. It’s pretty good. To directly quote an emeritus from a nearby u, as said to an art professions assemblage a few years back, “it’s a pretty good racket.” They have the support of just about all of us if we pay taxes, and maybe even more if we take deductions. What about the art? Well they sure seem to like it, and are quick to vouch for each other no matter what, so long as there’s no hint of general appeal about it. They consider creating art to which the average citizen might relate outright treason --disgraceful, cheap and tawdry besides.

Somewhere in an abandoned storefront three blocks off campus, with temperamental plumbing, seasonal drafts, maybe bugs, someone sits in paint spattered clothes before an easel picking out that little gob of paint that sits in the neck of the tube after it’s been squeezed dry. Rent is a hassle, supplies come at a sacrifice, and time is stolen from both any sort of recreation and even some honest responsibilities -- a thin edge to walk along. For the work there is no outlet, no access to the public, no airhole. The writers around here all hang around the u and compete among themselves to be more obscure than the artists they extol, and beleaguered galleries just want stuff they think might sell, too desperate to care about art.

The average citizen is screwed. Contemporary art, the kind that all public institutions declare as a mission to herd folks toward, can sometimes seem sorta goofy. For people who work forty hours doing something they wouldn’t do on their own, the effort may appear minimal. To people who apply their creative talents to solving problems in the real world, the rationale for the typical community funded project, installations and such, can sound like three year olds planning an imaginary tea. For reasons like these they don’t tend to take much interest in art, except to marvel at the millions reputedly paid at auction for branded artifacts, a regular item on the evening news.

Time for a revolution, obviously, but no shots will be fired. More galleries and open studios will do the trick. They'll provide more chances to see art, more opportunity to compare and think about what artists are attempting and how well they’re doing it. Along with the pictures there are the price tags, an important part of any art exhibit, because they form the context for considering each piece -- can the price be justified and is it affordable? These questions can only be answered after seeing a fair amount of art, and that’s where more galleries come in. Interestingly enough, the more galleries there are the more there will be, an economic anomaly arising from the former distortion and the amazing range and diversity of artistic expression and taste latent in this community.

blowing up temples -- killing art

Fact is greek and roman temples have suffered over the ages. The temple complex at Delphi, with architectural representations of the ancient world’s classic civilizations, was thrown down by early christians for the same reasons that motivate the muslims of today, and can you blame them really? Illiterate, living in hovels without modern conveniences, and here they are confronted with enduring evidence of people who were smarter, more talented, and more advanced than they’ll ever be. In dumb frustration they lash out, blow stuff up just to not be reminded of what end of human existence they occupy. 

So human it’s disgusting to see and one of our less attractive characteristics, destruction becomes a sort of aggressive envy we know too well. It’s part of our basic issue and fuels petty resentments, jealousies, and vindictive little knife-fights the live-long day. It becomes visible when it comes to art. The destroyed temples didn’t represent function, their gods having moved out a couple millennia back, and without roofs they’d let in the rain that never falls. Out of the stone of the earth they were made purely as art, columns so perfect they were still standing, and the statement they made about human possibility went way beyond holding up a roof.

Drawing a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, submitting a urinal to serious art competition, dismissing historical representational art as prosaic and imitative turn out to be a similar cultural vandalism, all acts of ‘anti-art’ committed by notorious egoist, Marcel Duchamp, self-aware enough to realize his own limitations. What’s left after his ‘redefining influence’ is the rubble of intellectual property, the shredded integrity of attribution, a denial of archival responsibility, along with a haughty contempt for common culture -- fragments of a worthy artistic heritage here and there poking through the soup can miasma. The good news is that art is immortal, doesn’t need a temple, and will survive the temporary distortions of market manipulation and government interferences, no matter how demeaning or exclusionary.

Authentic art which represents a community sensibility comes not from the artists, so many willing to submit their talent to any wind that blows, but from the people who in the end decide what they want, and it’s coming. Simple exposure will resurrect an interest in owning and living with art, igniting a chain-reaction of acquisition, while connecting the names of area artists to their characteristic style of expression. When enough original art is available, the machinery of commerce will crank up and average folks will self-educate, begin to have favorites, and decide what they want for the house. Artists will have the ability to survive outside the state system, and there’ll be something else to talk about at social gatherings now that the basketball team never loses.

scifi art -- organic advantages

In ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ Arthur Dent was always trying to get the food simulator on the spaceship ‘Heart of Gold’ to produce a cup of english tea, which the machine could do almost, but not quite.

Now there’s fluff this morning, they’re calling it art news, that someone has made something that looks like art using ‘algorithms’ no less -- almost but not quite. My news feed thinks I’m interested in Van Gogh, and it’s amazing what they put him through in a week -- glad he’s gone. Could a computer make a Van Gogh? More than unlikely.  

Making art turns out to be the one thing computers can’t do better than humans. Oh, they can make stuff that looks like art, as humans sometimes do, but it won’t say nothing. Computers experience neither joy or pain, have no aspirations, and don’t really care about you, or anyone. They have no DNA. Along with eye color, hair distribution, and various susceptibilities, there are vast uncharted tracts in our DNA tracing cold mountain passes, wars and deprivations -- ecstasies and triumphs, the encoded experience of thousands of generations, and if you don’t buy that then there’s the life each of us face everyday. Computers experience none of that, and they don’t make art. It would never occur to them.

art in school -- educating the audience

Art education isn’t all that important to future artists, since becoming an artist is an individual path undertaken by only an extremely small percentage of students who were going do it anyway. It’s important in a practical sense because those who do become artists are going to need an audience one day. It can be daunting to practice art when the public doesn’t know squat about it, and self-exile and isolation rarely come as a surprise. Can’t blame the public who seem to have very little grasp of history or geography as well, too bad, although some say knowing about art helps with those other subjects by increasing the ability to absorb and opening the mind. It’s a theory. 

There are impediments -- beyond the perennial lack of funding, the subject isn’t easily taught. In school art is divided up into separate realms and categories that confuse the young mind, any mind really. There’s the centuries old art in museums with religious themes and subjects no one cares or even knows about these days, and more recent art, divided into traditional art that looks like stuff and modern art that doesn’t. Good enough. A few hours on art in a school year won’t unlock every mystery, but doesn’t matter. Some percentage of students will start looking on their own and ultimately begin to think for themselves, one of art’s more common side effects. Then later, as they begin to establish themselves in life, perhaps they’ll recognize the value of owning significant works of art, significant at least to them, and carrying them along wherever life takes them.

Art should be taught in school because art is a tool every citizen is entitled to, one that provides understanding of self as well as a way to comprehend the world and other people. Art as a practice is about seeing, discerning, and understanding -- educational advantages in a world full of visual deception and false promises. 

flogging the past -- John Hunt Morgan’s last stand

Remembering the bad old days of cold war propaganda when some bad old things were said about the soviets. On weekends the paper would feature pictures of stout russian women in heavy overcoats laboring in rail yards, such as that. On a more intellectual level the communist party was accused of disappearing people when they fell out of favor, scratching their names out of books and cutting them out of old group photos. Year by year the little oval portraits from the first party congress continued to disappear leaving pale little oval blanks behind the glass. What bastards. 

Then I began to notice the tracings of people on this side officially forgotten. I was an adult before I ever heard the name Paul Robeson, a huge talent and personality shunned by american media presumably for challenging racial customs, and Rockwell Kent, once famous painter and pubic intellectual, who embraced the notion of communism and the Soviet Union, and was subsequently forgotten by general proclamation -- Rockwell who? His wide ranging illustrations, including incredible woodcuts, can still be found in books of certain vintage, a Random House edition of Moby Dick, for example.

Suddenly in my hometown, in your hometown, all over the wind has shifted, deciding to blow back the other way for a while. Overnight we want new statues of new heroes, and we’ll want to get rid of the old ones. Nocturnal graffiti artists have expressed group disapproval on their pediments, and many want them carted away, out of sight--out of mind, disappeared. Doesn’t one wonder on occasion what sense of history each human would have if each succeeding civilization wasn’t intent on destroying every symbol of the previous -- temples and libraries, gods and thought processes. 

Well they aren’t just symbols, these chunks of bronze downtown, but works of art built to outlast the fickle winds of society’s approval, and they’re still hanging around after the love has grown cold, cold. It’s bound to happen, songs are sung, but bronze is difficult to work with, lost wax, molding and pouring, and these are formidable accomplishments which might last damn near forever on their own. The one of Breckenridge just isn’t inspiring. It looks ordered from a catalogue -- go ahead, melt it down, but John Hunt Morgan on a horse, buttons on his tunic, spurs on his boots, the bogus equipment on his horse, a local whimsy, is really pretty nice. Not many artists and skilled shops could pull that off these days. 

Calling John Hunt just a lowly horse thief is sure enough silly, since we know every statue of Sherman in front of a northern courthouse is and will be safe, and he outdid John at every turn, in every way -- but that was all so long ago. Who cares, at this point, who John Hunt Morgan really was, let it rest. By now he’s just a bronze equestrian dressed up in military regalia, looking sure of himself full of youth and romance -- let him stay. 

healing arts and art -- getting better

My reality has worn spots, a patina of human usage, and leaves room for sudden shifts of purpose -- let’s go for a ride. I visit a hospital only when serious repairs are called for, but there I see a day-to-day much different from my own. Florescent lit and subterranean, endless hallways branch Escher-like behind the information desk, and me always lost after the second turn.  

Here is purpose beyond the individuals in it, each with personal lives but on time for every shift. It’s a worthy mission and an avenue toward full human potential, but there’s an environmental price to pay in all that sterile uniformity. The body thrives on vitamins and minerals but the total organism needs different levels of stimulation, and euro-style functionality and easily cleaned surfaces don’t provide much, especially everywhere all the time. 

That’s where the art comes in. Does art promote healing, maybe, but mostly that’s a theory found on grant applications. Discomfort, debility, worry and concern are all serious distractions from the enjoyment or even the consideration of art, and the average patient just wants to go home. Original art becoming a feature of hospital environments primarily benefits those who tread the same halls, traverse the same public spaces, eat in the same food courts everyday -- the hospital staff. 

Art on the wall, that distilled essence of human experience and empathetic communion, is the static antidote for surroundings drained of character, charm, and warmth by the need for efficiency, emotional distance and organic isolation. The hospital becomes more livable with real art. It’s only a side benefit if art seen by a patient, or maybe an attendant or relative, so catches the eye that the name of the artist is written down for future reference. Art displayed in that most public place, frequented by every social class and ethnic distinction, shows respect for all and gives the entire population ‘permission’ to like the art as well, and that’s a slice of spiritual healing all around. 

losing money -- a matter of scale

‘Why do so many art galleries lose money?’ is the provocative headline in the Bloomberg News, and it’s a reasonable question since, as they point out, the billionaires are running up the score on their end snatching up everything at the art fair over six figures. What gives? 

In the first place the high end contemporary market isn’t about art -- it’s about having so much money you get points for pissing it away, so much the better if it’s pointless. Six hundred horsepower to drive down to the launderette seems excessive, big boats that never leave the dock line the lakefront, and the ultra wealthy buy art just because it’s expensive. It probably wouldn't be practical to try to emulate that here.

Art discussed in terms of auction performance and not content might not be much to look at, but given the proper trademark signature it doesn't matter. For the sake of the present discussion we’ll ignore everything over five figures as being essentially irrelevant to our original question, since few art galleries in this territory go that high, and those uptown marketing strategies, appeals to peer prestige and glamour, grow weaker out here in the provinces.

When the proprietor of a retail shop spends all day looking out the front window it’s time to freshen the offerings, upgrade the stock, sell something else. It’s sorely tiresome to hear gallery owners bitch about dumb customers, the poor economy, their crushed hopes and dreams. They’re just not going to be able to sell grad-student imitations of what the big guys get away with because they don’t have the same conspicuous-consuming customer base who don’t care how much they spend, who never sacrifice to own art. It’s a matter of scale.

Gallery director, you may be doing your best to look like downtown Chicago, but that may not be the best way to address the audience in front of you. If the fault is not in your public maybe it's your merchandise. If not enough buyers are helping you with your rent isn’t it time to acknowledge that the home-grown product is more potent, more eco-friendly, and better for the economy and state of mind of the local population than that trendy magazine-derived stuff you can’t sell, a realization which could turn failure into success. Good luck.