sixty nine million isn’t enough -- art that isn’t

‘This Is Going to Be a Billion-Dollar Piece Someday’: The Buyer of the $69 Million Beeple NFT on Why It’s the Greatest Artwork in a Generation  artnet news, march 12, 2021

It looks sorta like a flotilla of plastic refuge accumulating on the ocean or maybe a compacted street carnival, surely nothing very appealing and where is this thing? The last part is easy because it isn’t really anywhere and it’s not a thing, it exists as a digital conglomerate only. Imbedded in its grainy pixilation is an endless slide show of snapshots, a tar pit of blind associations. There’s only one thing interesting about it and that’s the humongous price tag, and ironically it's been paid for with crypto cash. It doesn’t resemble a work of art so much as a brazen swindle, and yet perhaps this transaction is not so different from the regular commerce in modern masters. Millions of dollars are assigned to replicated signature icons on a volatile and arbitrary, ethically-arid and opaque market. It’s all crypto.

This sordid media event isn’t really worth a busy person’s time and attention, and that’s the charm of it don’t you see? The image is so meaningless and the price so outrageous that the average person won’t notice the hand is really in their pocket and the art is being stolen from their wall. Just like your typical crime syndicate, the high-roller art market will eventually burn down the territory and rounders tend to abuse their golden goose if you know what I mean. Reckoning is in the air. The taxman has been sniffing around their phony philanthropy, and the dirty source of all that sanitized black-tie money, so civic minded, is also being questioned. As a sign of the panic that’s just around the corner, major museums have suddenly started casting excess modern masters overboard to lighten their liability. They call it ‘deaccessioning’ and over night multi-million dollar works of art, mostly by old white guys, start backing up on eBay.

They’ve finally reduced the notion of art to a financial feeding-frenzy over something with no material existence, so maybe it’s time to let multi-million dollar art just float away. Those huge paintings were meant for museum walls and not for houses, and their grandiose ambition comes through loud and clear despite otherwise meaningless drips and smears. Sometimes salaried artists at the university attempt to emulate some current trend and people who subscribe to art magazines may discuss, but self-supporting artists surviving out in the community don’t usually follow the trades, and there are reasons. For one thing those large over-powering abstractions in the museum look a lot less impressive room size, and there’s a museum in Ft Worth still trying to unload its easel-painted Pollocks, small, dark, and infinitely sad.

Any artist who makes the effort on their own, finds a room and buys their own supplies, most likely won’t have time to chase a mercurial sensibility in a luxury art market far away. If the artists working other jobs to support their art didn’t have a need and desire to say something to those around them they probably wouldn’t bother. With seventy million dollar bullshit being celebrated on the evening news it isn’t easy to even have their voices heard, but that’s changing. The artists have been here all along, but the public is seeing more of their work these days. At some point seventy million dollars for non-existing art won’t seem as relevant or as interesting as having a local artist or two up on the wall in houses all down the block.

cultural fire sale -- cashing in the masters

The current controversy in the art news is about art museums beginning to ‘deaccession’ parts of their collection, to sell off surplus masterworks moldering in the stacks when they might be converted into much-needed cash. This has suddenly become an issue for major institutions now that money laundering restrictions are being applied to fine art and tax-code revisions are on the way. There’s lots of posturing about respect for a sacred trust but with the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions, and it’s funny because it’s all bullshit. They can say they’re selling off old white guys to diversify, to properly maintain the collection, or to pay the help a living wage so noble, but they’re really just trying to beat the rush. They refuse to acknowledge that a glut of serially replicated masterworks seeking their own true level in an open market will lead to an entire system of value being wiped out, herds of ultra-expensive Rothkos and Pollocks going extinct.

Does this mean art will die, or just come down in price? If a painting by someone internationally famous suddenly drops from fifty million down to whatever it might bring against the artists from the community, side by side, it still might come out on top, but if it’s too big for the average house no one may want it anyway. Against a formerly fifty million dollar painting some of that local stuff may not be so bad, a little less stylish but with perhaps more to say, and given the direct support of their community area artists would get better and say more. Somehow I don’t feel sad for the establishment, rank upon rank of authorities and administrators floating away, locked in an airy castle erected by strip-mining the culture. Great while it lasted.

When it’s revealed that the painting bought at auction for an astronomical price and donated to the art museum is joining five others almost just like it already in storage and only two of them genuine, the glamor drains away. Fifty million dollars for a modern painting is stock-market speculation on a crypto-commodity, and this money-mill hijacking of art devalues and derides sincere attempts to find a singular voice at a level where average people live. More than that, this aesthetically-innocent, accountant-driven barter in trophy art appropriates and exploits society’s appetite for self-expression, but as we speak their pirate dynasty implodes. Major donors have been accused of humanitarian crimes, forgeries are being found out in the lab, and the minions are in full rebellion, wanting more money and telling dirty secrets, but worst of all the public is changing its mind. Instead of supporting modern art's grand charade they’re about to go looking for sense-affirming and world-verifying, locally-sourced and personally-relevant art in their price range and buy some.

some way out of here -- painted doorways

To utilize art, to make it pay back, to find its function in daily life it’s necessary to consider our own limitations and the barriers we have built-in. We’re prone to habit, actually it’s worse than that. Anything we come across goes through an extensive recognition process shuffling through stacks of images stored in memory to match up with what we’re seeing and give it a name. In familiar territory the sorting goes by too quickly to notice, but as a tourist in a strange environment it’s occasionally possible to witness a lag time figuring out the scene in front of you. Your search function has had to reach further to find comparative information, and sad to say, if no matches are found you’re not seeing it.

This might sound strange but examples abound. The old line coach sees things on a football field the average fan never considers and a horse breeder appraises characteristics of a horse no one else notices. It sure seems the world around us is as broad as our own experience, a box that’s only as big as the places we’ve been, and most who travel say they see more when they get home. If it turns out our minds really work this way, only recognizing what’s been seen before, then how do we expand our field of vision and become more aware of the texture and detail in daily life? This becomes an increasingly pertinent question these days with a population enthralled in transitory screen images, which, along with the monotony of rush hour traffic and the uniformity of many abodes, flattens experience and limits the range of our perception.

Art extends vision and depth of awareness by stretching what the mind accepts as truth, or at least by posing the question. Strolling in the museum a particularly powerful painting can produce a sense of vertigo as the senses recalibrate to accommodate its bold assertions, and chances are the sky will seem bluer and birds will be singing out in the parking lot. Most art doesn’t work so quickly, but people have it around because it enhances their ability to see everything else. At this particular time especially, art is an escape hatch from the sense-narrowing mass-media world we inhabit, and an artist’s vision hanging on the wall reminds us of how much there is to see.

old art, new art -- saying hello

from cnn, jan 13   A warty pig painted on a cave wall 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest depiction of an animal
It's now thought that the capability to create figurative art -- that references the real world -- either emerged before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and headed for Europe and Asia more than 60,000 years ago or that it emerged more than once as humans spread around the globe.
 
That’s a very old picture of a pig and it raises some interesting questions. More than tools or weapons, art reveals a higher consciousness, and this pig provides a point of connection, mind to mind, across the ages. Since we’re the first to see it, it must have been meant for us and even though we’re modern people with cars and telephones, we still see a pig. That says a lot about being human since any animal, bat or bear, that wandered into that cave since didn’t see anything at all.

This picture doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already about warty pigs, they haven’t gone extinct, but it’s remarkably revealing about our distant ancestors, artists long before they made pots or wove cloth. Not just that. If some modern artist made a picture of a cow and time traveled back, these cave dwelling people would recognize it right away. This form of expression and even communication seems right for us since in our natural state we’re ‘sighted’ animals, with half our brain devoted to deciphering what we see. Very recently mass communication and its sidekick crass commercialism have made most of us more comfortable but also cheapened and diminished our lives, and loyalty to the home team has replaced more individual responses to our very complex existence.

It’s a freaky fact that humans didn’t lose the ability to create and understand figurative art until the twentieth century when a new regime of non-objectivity took over. Referential art of any sort was derided all the way back to the pig, and Simon Schama, knighted and renowned art authority, remarked that it was ‘such a feeble idea, to go around copying the world.’ Well he’s a heavyweight, he weighs down wikipedia, but wait a minute. This notion of accessing higher realms by abstractly applying paint in your own unique way sounds pretty feeble all on its own and its product isn’t real compelling. Maybe it wasn’t such a breakthrough after all.

The fact remains that a picture of anything isn’t likely to impart any new information about its subject, but through the act of depicting the world the artist is revealed. It’s not mysterious. The viewer compares their own experience with what the artist has painted and a conversation takes place. An example of a first line might be: I made a picture of a pig so that you could see it forty five thousand years from now and know that I existed. It’s not about the pig. Isn’t it remarkable that after mountains, seas, and deserts, civilizations come and gone, after forty-five millennia representational art still ends up saying essentially the same thing?

art recovers -- was never really sick

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse.

It’s a matter of incentives and which side of your bread the butter is on. The US has a huge budget for art with tier upon tier of agency support and tax-funded ‘nonprofits’ in every community. Subsidized art is a major industry with blocks of real estate on college campus dedicated to a preparatory program that leads essentially nowhere. This entire bureaucratic dynasty is based on the lack of appeal of art to the masses, those duds who support uncounted careers in art, most without making any. Something fishy here, some element seems to be clogging the works, and it's almost like there’s an incentive to support an art that’s grossly unpalatable to average people, and desperately in need of life support in every little town.

For art to thrive there only needs to be two kinds of people, the people who make it and the people who buy and live with it. Agents who facilitate this exchange should get a taste of a self-sustaining, economically viable cottage industry and a clean contributor to community prosperity and well being. It should be clear that every person who draws a tax-funded paycheck to promote and support art has a vested interest in keeping art scrawny and underfed, ugly and unappealing, and they do what they can to keep those first two types apart. They’ll freeze out independent artists and flood their tax-supported galleries with a conceptual obscurity only a complicit insider could love. They justify their parking spots this way.

Their entire enterprise is sustained by the aspiration of average people for some form of honest self-expression and they step on the product and drain its nutritional content. I feel as much sympathy for them as they’ve shown artists who might have had a following in their own hometowns but for them, and for the society they’ve impoverished. Perhaps this is harsh. There’s not much you can do with an art degree in the real world and finding a regular paycheck from some arts agency is so much easier than trying to make art in a town where no one looks at art. Still, full recovery requires budget cuts and that means mass layoffs of people without real training and a purge of state agencies whose main institutional imperative has simply been self-perpetuation, so sad.

Art in communities everywhere is about to pull out the tubes and rise from ICU care, ripping back the curtains to feel some sunshine with feet on the floor and art up on the wall in houses all across town. There’s two or three artists around here, wherever you are, who are pretty talented and they’d get better with more time in the studio. If you bought a piece yourself you could follow their progress and maybe talk to them at an opening, on a studio tour, or when you purchase another piece directly. Art which couldn’t exist without government subsidies probably shouldn’t, and art that broadens and deepens your perceptions and makes you think is all around.

rivera vs rockefeller -- art's other history

Throughout the ages people in power quickly learn the minds of the masses can be manipulated with art, and they attempt to limit what people see in order to control what they think. In the twentieth century the free press made this sort of censorship impossible, so those wielding great wealth hatched an extravagant scheme to steal art’s ability to speak the truth by canceling its ability to say anything at all. They called their poison apple ‘modern art.’

A lie within a lie would be pretty hard to crack but since we all have eyes maybe we can find the truth anyway. The first lie goes like this......   After the second great war the world was divided into two opposing camps, one that believed in collective will and the other that was based on individual self-interest. They named this period of bilateral confrontation the ‘cold war’ and it unleashed unrestrained competition on all fronts. America’s best minds from its best families decided they’d do their part by managing the cultural conflict, the battle for hearts and minds. They asserted american preeminence by demolishing the elitist reserves of old europe with the brute force of lots of money.

The truth is they were never really concerned about the russians, walled in behind an ‘iron curtain’ that we ourselves created and made to seem more powerful than they were on the evening news. There was, however, one person on earth the ultra-wealthy actually feared and that was the politically progressive artist, Diego Rivera. In mexico he and his compatriots had proven the power of visual art to bring about social change. The mexican muralists had raised and united the consciousness of a regionally diverse nation, previously convulsed in factional revolution. These painters were committed to social justice and economic reform and to the alarm of bankers in NY their movement was spreading into the US, largely through WPA commissioned murals in post offices and public buildings.

In the years before the war the financial barons conceived an elaborate plot to humiliate and vanquish international progressive thought as expressed through visual art. Nelson Rockefeller and his clan lured the prominently progressive Rivera with a chance to paint a mural in the lobby of the newly constructed Rockefeller Center, a building made of steel that might last a thousand years. He accepted their bait and after several months working day and night, at the moment he accepted their check they jack-hammered it down without allowing any photographs to be taken. In all the history of art and in the course of civilization this was one barbaric gangster statement. (this mural was later recreated in Mexico city). They then began a massive clandestine campaign to eliminate the voice of visual art altogether.

The cold war became their cover story for thrusting abstract expressionism upon the world. It was used like a cultural battering ram to bully and upstage the other side’s classical ballet, their music and literature. To drive home the notion of american ideals they sponsored an art so profoundly individualistic that only the artist knew what it meant, and they pushed hard with tons of public cash for all art thereafter to be ‘non-objective.’ A gigantic government agency was formed to enforce a virtual ban on representational art at all levels, the outwardly beneficent NEA with its myriad affiliations. They assured everyone they were being progressive by only supporting an art that no member of the general public could possibly relate to, as this was in fact their guiding principle. The origins and the means of this massive cultural manipulation and distortion have been documented with names, dates, and deeds, and their sins are confessed by their successors in nostalgic terms as perhaps over-zealous patriotism, but that’s just another lie.

The truth is it’s time for artists to spend more time in the studio and less time as cooks and servers, sweeping floors or delivering stuff, all such as that. This will require recently stressed and newly awakened citizens to begin buying original art to hang in their homes. Actually looking at all the art available, hanging in salons and restaurants, in offices and reception areas, tends to negate just about everything taught in school, and occasionally it arouses thoughts and feelings the very wealthy would like to keep to themselves, or at least eliminate for everyone else. At this moment and after long exile, Diego Rivera returns with a major show at the Whitney in NY, and the potency of articulate and universal visual images will go rippling out in all directions, invading art schools, and then galleries, and finally going up on the wall in peoples’ houses.

biblical appropriation -- visual redemption

Ezekiel was lifted up in a vivid dream and came down on a great plain covered with human carrion, nothing but rags and bone, and heard the lord’s command to preach. Ezekiel suggested to the lord that they might not be able to hear and the lord said ‘preach anyway.’ Once on tv I saw a black guest pastor harangue an affluent white congregation with this story and I wondered if they heard. Visual artists with something to say face a similar dilemma, a public that won’t listen and doesn’t look, but it’s not entirely their fault.

The self-loathing celebrity tripe marketed to status-seeking new wealth leaves ordinary people so disinterested they’ve failed to notice the dirty millions being laundered by donations to museums and rigged auctions, but that rock is being turned over now. The question rephrased for the visual artist would be ‘ but can they see,’ and the answer comes back ‘paint anyway’ and maybe they’ll begin to look. Like in Zeke’s dream, the people in the valley would then begin to put themselves together and turn back into living flesh, but it starts with the eyes.