a dumb artist talks back

When I went to school abstract art was smart and representational art was dumb. ‘I have better things to do with my time than to go around copying nature’ was a group chant taught to incoming classes in every art school for several decades. Text books, popular magazines, and foundation-sponsored periodicals all derided representational art for a lack of creativity, a deficit of imagination, and simply being unworthy of serious consideration. Representational painters were to be shunned as closed-minded reactionaries unable to accept modernity, unwilling to sit in the ‘intelligence and awareness’ section of the bleachers. Even though it makes no sense to us individually based on grade school art classes we all took, the peculiar notion that abstract painting is much more difficult and inherently more profound than producing recognizable images has been boilerplate academic dogma for several generations. 

From different quarters a cabal of self-interests converged to bend and fold art into something that couldn’t be recognized, literally, and reduced it to a blind, manipulated, indexed commodity -- we’ve been calling it modern art. The academics feel conceptually safe and comfortably secure behind abstract art’s ambiguity, and commercial interests can monetize a hyped reputation and iffy investment potential but can’t really grasp, let alone deal in aesthetic value. Behind them all, like a mountain range in the sky, are the financial overlords who suffered discomfort at the social awareness and class-consciousness art had been suggesting just before the massively subsidized ascendency of non-objective abstraction. As odd as it all sounds evidence of this cultural hl-jacking can be found everywhere.

Art, it turns out, is itself the cure. It offers each individual the possibility of seeing past the rigged consensus and directly perceiving the mind of the artist, but this insight won’t be found in text books, classes at the U, or lectures by experts. They’re all in on it. Forget them. Find yourself in art -- that’s the honest way to go about it. If thatched cottages with chimney smoke and glowing windows touches your heart it’s nobody’s business, although you might try looking at more art. Possibly in all the art produced in your area there’s an artist whose work somehow reminds you of something very personal. You can even imagine that were you to meet the artist you might become friends. Short of that it’s quite reasonable to expect that people you like and who like you will probably like the art as well. If in the end it turns out you like dumb art maybe you’ll meet a dumb artist. They’re out there.  

art and wealth -- the oddest couple

It gets shallower as it goes up. Privilege has its cost and convenience isn’t cheap. To a materialistic world this is most unwelcome news. No one wants to hear that life is more engaging and more profound with less, and that the better off not only don’t really care about art but can’t even see it, not really. Wealth insulates -- no more changing tires, making beds, cooking for yourself. Also, no agonizing over financial dilemmas, no need for personal sacrifice, and no day to day participation in the unrelenting adventure of most people’s lives. The ultra-wealthy bought their way out or had their ticket prepaid in trust, and with cool detachment they watch the trudge of humanity from box seats, concerned about cuff links and makes of car. They’d all jump at the paper Warhol, and all his friends, used to wipe their asses or was it peed on -- who cares, they’ll call it art. (google 'piss paintings') That was Andy’s attitude and he just came out and said it for anyone who’d listen -- rich people don’t listen.

Art is about empathy, not some fuzzy communal sentiment, but a deep down intimate connection sometimes so immediate and unexpected people have been known to cry spontaneously in front of paintings. For this to happen there has to be some depth to plum, enough life experience for art to engage, some touch of common humanity already established. Paradoxically this means the people most likely to appreciate art are the ones who have had to make choices tempered by limited resources, not by the comfortable who can more easily afford it. Like being born too beautiful, excessive ease must be overcome, and by the craziest coincidence art can help with that, too.  

everything changes -- sudden conversions

Is everyone changing their minds all at once? Is that possible? We’re herd animals, we put our noses up to sniff the air at same time, and a new breeze is blowing. Simply put the old consensus became obsolete and tattered and a new consensus is giving people permission to express what they really felt anyway. 

William Burroughs said, “the people living on the sea shore in the middle ages knew the world was round because they saw ships disappear over the horizon everyday, but they thought the world was flat because that’s what they were told.” This desire to blend in has been used against us by everyone who ever wanted to control us or sell us something, and we all know this. Art leads out. Art is in the business of individual permissions. Sometimes it happens all at once.

Art has been co-opted in your fair city, don’t care where, to provide the raw ore of fund-raising, and the artists have become the miners with dirty faces and empty pockets. A phalanx of non-profits, including the universities, operate beautiful galleries for the display of art that subsists on public support -- it’s like a circle. They claim to represent a consensus and media backs them up but their events leave many independent artists looking in through steamy glass, and their prospective audience is discouraged as well. It’s like the natural flow has been diverted for the special benefit of people who may not love art.

And what a great time it is with the dam about to burst and all. Non-profits have begun offering artists up to fifty percent of the take at their auctions, up from the traditional zero. Gallery walks are coming to ambitious small communities that don’t even have galleries yet. Visionary entrepreneurs who use art to sell hotel rooms will introduce the notion of buying and owning art wherever they land, and it spreads. What people need is permission to pursue art they like, which is something they give to themselves, and everything changes.

owningart -- why so negative?

Just an aside about what we do here. I understand certain reverences and deferments are expected in greater society regardless of personal feelings. It’s an obnoxious atheist who questions virgin birth during lent and stuff like that. In the the more exclusive society of the artistically aware there are also articles of faith that are unquestioned. I don’t care to debate them -- I’m just trying to drive around them. Art is old. We calculate the worthiness of past cultures by how well they made art and what they made art about. The impetus to deal with the world in terms of art, making and looking, might physically be in our DNA.

Here at owning art we just don’t care about fashion. Oh sure we’d like to be presentable, but when the latest style lets in drafts or hurts our feet we take a longer view and go for comfort and function. Our premise is simple -- on the wall original art is the time-release antidote to the toxic side-effects of the digitalized, stamped and extruded treadmill we’ve inherited. Art becomes, in this present condition, the distilled essence that seasons our daily porridge, a personal anchorage in the seething mob, and an intimate conversation you can have with the artist, and all artists, over a lifetime.

Art will be regionally authentic when it becomes self-sustaining, when art is bought and hung in office or home and when independent artists can earn a living making it. Owning art is exceedingly positive, suggesting a more direct dialogue between working artists and the community they serve -- more exposure, and advocating for a direct personal relationship with art based on looking and due respect for any artist who produces to the absolute limits of their ability. 

time - it won’t hurry

Time is the magic ingredient. You can come up with the best invention, sing the most beguiling song, have the perfect body but if you’re not there at the right time, week, day, and hour the train won’t stop. Actually cool stuff is around all the time, but the public’s attention is like a flashlight in Pharaoh’s tomb and can’t take in too much all at once. If you see the beam of light swinging your direction dream of the stars, but it’s a lucky few who show up just at the right moment.

Back in the fifties a new breed of hucksters realized they could bend the public attention beam with clever advertising delivered through rapidly expanding mass media. They applied a simple formula which combined grinding repetition with an inch by inch violation of convention, and it worked for everything. It’s good for selling trucks and shampoo, burgers and art. It has the unfortunate side-effect of turning everyone into pigs. Well, it’s better to be a happy human than a dissatisfied pig, and a whole lot of people are getting that feeling now. It’s about time.

There’s not much convention left to violate. On TV barely legal, almost naked girls are orally sodomized by double cheeseburgers, they seem to love it, and visual art has been through so many ironies and appropriations it’s been reduced down to spots. At some point public attention will realize it’s been binging -- wake up in an alley, dust itself off, and go home. The new economy will belong to a more self-possessed population that understands the temporal fragility of good times and who will be less likely to be led over a cliff to make others rich.

What it means for art is hard to say, but it’s probably a better time to be an artist than it has been for a while. The public attention is scattered, but as corrupt dynasties crumble it’s free to find its own way and it just might wake up with the ravenous appetite of the finally sober drunk.

truth -- what is it good for?

So what does truth mean in art? It doesn’t mean anything in the art is true. That’s not its job. Art is supposed to alter the perception of the viewer so the truth can be seen, and that is its job. Truth, it turns out, is everywhere all the time, but sometimes it seems invisible because no one can see it. There are examples.

Safe examples would be the ones we’ve already resolved, like smoking. The truth was always there, but it was invisible. It wasn’t a shock to anyone that tobacco was addicting, devastating to health, a poison manipulated to cause the most harm in order to obtain the biggest profit. Everyone had known all of it for a hundred years and they weren’t called ‘coffin nails’ for nothing, but the public couldn’t see it and wouldn’t acknowledge it. These days public service announcements trumpet the news that tobacco is bad, but back in 1965 during an interview John and Paul smoking cigarettes seemed perfectly natural. In fact, it only seems odd from here.

There are other truths closer to our own time we’re still not ready to look at directly, I’m guessing. If you’d like to see them, try looking at art. Think of art as similar to workout equipment for the professional athlete, not the game itself but an enhancement of the level of play. So in the museum it’s a picture of some king in armor, what’s next? -- wait. That shiny breastplate isn’t really made of metal. It’s an arrangement of colors on a flat surface cleverly telling you a lie, and if you can see the lies in art you’ll be more impressed and amused by artists, some artists, and on your way to becoming more discerning when you read the paper. If you can learn to trust your own eyes and see what’s actually there in a work of art, regardless of what experts tell you, you’re on your way to seeing through TV commercials and what politicians would like you to believe. It’s like doing exercise.

south of the border -- art and blood

At the beginning of the last century Mexico was divided by class and ethnicity and it was grinding itself down to bloody oblivion. Peasant armies, power hungry elites, and foreigners interfering had fractured society into irreconcilable polarities whose only remaining coin was death. It wasn’t the generals and politicians who finally brought them together. It was the painters.

Diego Rivera portrayed them all -- conquistadors, industrialists, farmers, and native people all standing together in big murals, solemn, dignified, and equal. Pre-conquest culture, traditionally derided by the colonialists was acknowledged and a pride in simply being Mexican began to make it possible for them to deal with each other. Other renowned painters addressed basic social issues, and their movement spread to the United States where the WPA hired out-of-work artists to muralize public buildings and post offices in the 1930’s.

The ability of these scenes from ordinary life to influence the self-image and the social concerns of average citizens was so alarming to the top percent that a new art declaring the representational image obsolete and unintelligent surged to predominance with heavy financial backing shortly thereafter. Oddly coincidental is all I’m saying. The last of the post offices are coming down about now, although most of the murals were destroyed years ago. There is a movement in San Francisco to save the murals in Coit’s tower -- worth googling.

We don’t have the same conditions now and art that renews our tattered social fabric probably wouldn’t make it into public spaces for reasons we’ve discussed previously. Everybody gets to decide for themselves, but I’d suggest some sort of art that compensates for the constant assault on our pride and personhood streaming out of commercial media. It’s just the way they sell stuff but it takes a toll on everyone. Owning art that verifies your own experience, with qualities of merit you recognize yourself, would probably influence you in your daily life in ways you would approve of.