feeble ideas -- objective art

Public television has been emptying the shelves, putting their heaviest documentaries on in the afternoon for the benefit of kids and adults stuck at home. A couple of years ago they went all out on a nine part series called ‘Civilizations,’ written and narrated by the most worldly Sir Simon Schama, history and art history professor at columbia university and that’s just his day job. It was a wonderful, thoughtful, and lavishly produced series on the history of art. His credentials are olympian and a bit of that carries over in his voice as he guides us through gothic cathedrals and explains how the trade routes to the east provided new pigments for the renaissance.

Easing into the twentieth century he identifies a single moment, a pivot point really, in fact the very nut on which the entire edifice of non-objective modern art is built. He credits Piet Mondrian with producing art that finally broke free from any reference to anything outside itself, the first artist to produce a purely abstract painting. He explained that while the object of art had always been to come as close to nature as possible, of course that isn’t really possible is it, and he (Mondrian) could see it was just a ‘lie,’ a term not usually applied to art in such learned discussions. Then in an almost mumbled aside he also remarks, ‘such a feeble idea, isn’t it, to go around copying the world?‘ Now that’s a downright peculiar assertion Sir Simon. All the art from bison on cave walls up until Piet Mondrian stopped looking up from his canvas was feeble and deceitful? Really? This nugget was presented slyly and it slid by quickly, but leaving objective reality behind was really one of the most radical departures in all of art history.

It's a feeble idea indeed that the objective of representational art has ever been to duplicate reality, but feeble as it was it became justification for a righteous disdain for figurative art of any kind, essentially a blanket censorship against pictures of anything that would go on to last decades. It drove representational painters underground scrounging for any means of support, some becoming shipping clerks and cooks, but mostly it disenfranchised common citizens, depriving them of a visual means of communication and self-expression. The premise is itself a lie, of course, and their argument must also be false. There's never been a person rich or poor, brilliant or barely functional, who thought they could eat the apple they saw in a painting, and the artist wasn’t attempting to create one. The bizarre notion that representational art attempts to reproduce reality was never even a thought until abstract art and its apologists came along.

Anything is possible in front of a blank canvas and total freedom accommodates any use of color and line, but abstract art on a human scale, art that would fit the average living room wall in an ordinary house will always look like it came from the frame shop at the mall, no matter how famous the artist or how much it cost. Produced museum-size, extravagantly large, the trademarked modern masters have created the poker chips for a rigged poker game well over the average person’s limit. In its present form the art industry is the home stadium for the most brazen and accomplished hustlers on the planet with the ultimate non-tangible to romance, not tin siding and lightning rods, not books and vacuum cleaners, but ascending social status and uncharted financial opportunity, with side-deals and percentages every which way. The blatancy of their rat-faced hucksterism knows no bounds. ‘For 48 Hours Only, Gagosian Is Offering a Mark Grotjahn Painting for $800,000’   May 29, 2020   artnews online

These upper reaches of aesthetic appreciation are also a secure roost for the learned and heavily accredited, the holders of the the sacred secret knowledge that elevates DeKooning over Rembrandt and they add their mystique to the modern art enterprise, but in the end it’s all just art, and side by side there’s really no argument. All you modern art mavens, the time has come to open the gilded cage and let art go free, and here's a suggestion for the ultra-rich, it might be wise to grant some solace in the lives of the plantation hands, they're restless. Allow an organic and locally sourced art, grown from the soil of lived experience, to gradually supplant that gleefully corrupt charade of international art fairs and jet-set swindles you call art. Oh, you say it’s happening now, was bound to happen anyway, artists selling art and pretty soon a new painting will be something to talk about over barbecue, just one of the many changes you’ll see.

absurdly expensive art -- sacred legends

Jackson Pollock’s Largest Painting Is Touring the World, and Its Mysteries Are Coming to Light         artnews   May 5, 2020 2:07pm

Progressives can't comprehend how Trump supporters can overlook the utter absurdity of the stuff he says, but they’re ready to be seen contemplating a big formless drop cloth if it’s attributed to Jackson Pollock. Both are examples of faith over reason and to a rational neutral party they actually look about the same.

The painting cited in the article was commissioned for a hallway outside Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in NY, twenty four feet of blank space. The lore has it that Pollock didn’t do anything but stare at it for days and days until finally, at the very last moment, he completed it all in one night. That must have been a really long night because a crew of high school kids, each with a paint bucket marching back and forth stroking and smearing and cleaned up next morning couldn’t have done it. They told this improbable fable because there’s really not much to see, a classic example of the sizzle not the steak. Opportunistic commentators climbed onboard.

One thing is for sure, however: Mural was an instant hit. Critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “I took one look at it and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”

So Mr. Greenberg who are you exactly, some literary nobody who in a blinding flash recognizes great art and suddenly you’re famous too, haven’t we seen this act before? Clement took point position for abstract expressionism but lots of popular publications, scholarly treatises, tax sheltering foundations and the mighty NEA were ready to declare figurative art of any sort dead, obsolete, retrograde and boring. In college art classes students were told copying nature was too ‘easy.’ The motives and the mechanics of this reconstruction of the cultural landscape are covered in this blog twice just recently, but the result in any case was to rob the american people of a form of uncensored communication and expression. Was the cultural lobotomy of the populace the main goal or just collateral damage of the cold war rivalry of mirror-image adversaries, it doesn’t matter now.

It’s time to look at art for what’s actually there, and not imagine instead that it represents some many-tiered edifice of successive brilliant conceptual breakthroughs, the world of art like a child's tea-set version of science where real discoveries are made. I don’t care how many zeros go on the price tag, three hundred of the same thing with slight variation isn’t a signature style, it’s a trademark straight away. By now third generation derivations of the modern masters hang in motel rooms and medical facilities everywhere, so that after all these years average people don’t remember what was lost. Well it isn’t going to be that difficult to fix this problem if we each do our parts.

The first thing would be to really recognize Jackson Pollock in his work as alcohol-drenched, nihilistic and defeated, it’s all there. Against the wall in a goodwill store instead of a grand museum, think about it. Average citizens understands this well enough, they have eyes. Well it couldn’t last forever. As soon as some small independent art museum decides to deaccession a Rothko or two and beat the rush, the real value of the industry’s sacred stockpile will be revealed, a hissing balloon, any day. The next thing you can do is to start looking at all the art available in your neighborhood and thereabouts. Pictures of things have voices, and people who look at a lot of art can hear them. When one sings a song you like take it home, it won’t cost millions.

Warhol and Trump -- blood cousins

So am I the only one who sees a direct connection between Warhol and Trump, a classic case of art preceding life so clear we could have seen it coming. I never liked Warhol for almost exactly the same reasons people now hate Trump. I’m not making Warhol responsible for what’s happened or even his fans, and will concede many of Trump’s supporters have never heard of Andy Warhol, but that isn’t the point. A case is being made for art as a prophetic reflection of the near future and what example in human history could be more graphically clear?

The awful science-fiction fact is that Warhol and Trump aren't really people like you and I, but instead are some sort of alien mollusk inhabiting a human shell and none too gracefully in either case. The terrain they literally see is as different from what regular people see as the vision of some other life-form, which they are. These creatures inhabit a fluid universe composed solely of the responses of others and and have almost no regard for physical reality. Trump could have a private chef but he’s happy with fast food, his great mind can’t be bothered with three dimensions. Both have been acknowledged as master manipulators of fame and social influence, and each is notorious for making decisions based solely on the emotional response of their audience, the very truth determined strictly in terms of popularity.

Such persons are well suited to retail and right at home in the fashion industry, but modern mass media has given them wings. A mediocre mentality unencumbered by a bunch of education and devoid of any notion of moral obligation or responsibility, it’s simply lacking, has a huge advantage over regular humans who feel constrained by verifiable facts, who use reason, and who display empathetic feelings for others. The success of these two similar personalities, neither of them very smart, reveals a culture lulled into a stupor by sit-coms and crime shows and delivered to commercial and financial carnivores like livestock to slaughter. The place they’ve led us is pretty grim, everyone teetering at the edge of an abyss devoid of meaning, where accomplishment is jeered at and momentary fame fills everybody’s dreams.

Using simple logic we can find our way out by the same way we came in only this time we look at art that speaks of integrity and commitment, that registers in the higher compartments of our mind and that challenges the way we’ve always seen the world. Does such an art exist you might ask, and oddly enough its very existence is determined by who’s looking and why. In a mutual quest for awakening and self-realization, area artists and their patrons collaborate on making the regional product better, raising standards and priming expectations in an ongoing conversation back and forth. This ain’t no picnic and there aren’t many solutions left except to paint a better world that alters the vision and aspiration of humanity toward something more sustainable, more conscious and more humane.

finding audience -- changing everything

‘Is there an audience for what I do’ is what any artist would like to know, but even if people are ready to respond how can I address them, what would be the point of contact, and how are they going know I exist? This is the existential dilemma above and beyond the assemblage of materials, the acquisition of skills, and scrounging for the economic space to practice art, ironically known as free time. The independent artist must emerge from a vacuum, art supplies and studio rent out of pocket and at sacrifice until a style matures and a statement can be made. Only then is it time to ask ‘where’s my audience?’ When that time comes for many there’s no point of contact and no way to even be seen.

Once their initial ten thousand hours are logged, the amount of time it takes to get good at anything, the artist encounters art’s turnstiles ten miles high. The galleries are essentially consignment shop enterprises and management is chronically over its head paying uptown rent, fronting lavish openings and courting critics. They don’t have time to look at art or even for personal taste, and are only interested in prior sales and what other galleries are showing the work. The non-profit public-funded sector favors a kind of art too advanced to have popular appeal, and its recognitions, grants, and awards are reserved for the private worm farms produced by artists with a regular paycheck.

Still the pressure builds. People are painting everywhere these days for fun and some become addicted, the act of painting even altering how they see the world. Disenchanted art students leave school and strike out on their own, working menial occupations while seeking their own visual identity on their days off. However they begin there’s lots of art being made in all directions, and if any of it started to sell it would suddenly all get better, like a drop of rain makes the desert bloom. It’s the other side that’s really unknown. Will fellow citizens, forcibly and suddenly weaned from the mind-numbing spectacle of media-hyped gladiatorial events interspersed with craven opiated commercials, begin to wake up to their own more subtle inborn potentials? Would they turn their attention to art?

For this to happen the public doesn’t need to improve, just wish for a better alternative. It’s up to artists to reach beneath the surface, to identify and make visible the points of common humanity we all share. For the artist it’s all part of the same quest and finding an audience, daunting as it sounds, is just the cost of doing business here. If ever enough original art is seen, not just in public venues but in the houses of friends and neighbors, artists might finally be welcomed into community awareness along with athletes and entertainers, and be recognized not in person but by the work they do. If there’s an audience out there for visual art it could wake up all over all at once as a grass roots movement beyond urban centers, and what fellow citizens value, talk about and think about, could turn out to be the pictures on their walls.

romance with things -- emotional support art

Someone said they fell in love with a painting. There’s a chance it could be more than just an expression since a painting is a unique object and that in itself is increasingly rare. Starting from a blank surface everything about it, every mark, every color, and every idea came solely from one person. Deliberate or spontaneous, crude or precise, the artist’s personality emerges in art they make. Once made however the painting begins a life of its own as a complex and singular expression, the sum of uncountable individual decisions, every color and each brushstroke, until the vision is transcribed and made visible. 

Something is encoded in the visual realm that words can’t quite touch, and trying to talk about it just takes us further away so let’s not. Instead just assume there are other ways of knowing, and that Van Gogh was saying something when he painted a pot of flowers that people from around the world, regardless of their spoken language, can comprehend and it’s not remotely about flowers. The person down the street, a cook, a tradesman, almost any menial you may run across could also be a painter, and they may not pull the weight of a Van Gogh but something comes out of their sheer effort, and it comes across to you if you stop to look. What happens after that is just automatic, you don’t even have to try.

Bonding, it’s a feeling affinity for the familiar and a built in feature of our operating system. We latch on to complexity in our surroundings, get to know it and fall in love. With family always there you may not have noticed, but country poets grow fond of the farmstead that doesn't change year after year, a favorite shirt is hard to throw away, and many feel sadness when the quirky old car finally quits, we’re born this way. Advertisers study our psychology and keep setting out little enticements to fall in love with their brand, running the same jingle over and over and putting their names on ballparks. They devise lots of nasty little tricks to take devious and self-serving advantage of our basic tendencies, but being the way we are turns out swell for art.

Here’s an experiment you can try over the next few decades. Go to a major city with a big art museum and spend some time looking at a few paintings, anything that catches your eye. Some works of art keep saying more the longer you look so take all afternoon, and then go home and don’t think about it for ten years. At this point take time off and go do it again. Those few paintings won’t look the same as first time, this time they’ll be friendlier. If you visit again ten years after that they’ll be glad to see you and you’ll be glad to see them, old acquaintances. If you’ve never had an involvement with a work of art, never really stopped to look and heard its questions in your head like how was it made, why is it so weird, and even questions you can’t name, then you probably won’t believe me.

So, go through your life seeing only shiny surfaces and machine design, dealing with digitized versions of reality while living in a cubicle and working from home, it’s an option, in fact that’s where it’s all headed unless some humanizing force intervenes. An original work of art suggests consideration on levels of thought seldom visited in the average commuter’s day and the lasting effect is to alter the way the world is perceived, broader, deeper, and in more detail. Chances are you’d never notice the increased gradients of information you’re observing or the the depth of discernment you apply watching the news, but you’ll be a little more fond of your painting year by year.

self-improvement -- visual vitamins

So what was greek art about, lots of pagans cavorting was probably not the main thing. Greek art is about intelligence and it’s what you notice first. Here we have the embodiment of athletic grace and you say it was carved out of a large chunk of rock using hand tools? That’s so awesome. It’s almost unbelievable that a fellow human just like you or me could be that smart. It’s going to be most impressive to anyone who has worked with their hands and who has come to understand the natural world is not overly cooperative. Rocks just want to be rocks.

So in a museum you find yourself looking at some ancient greek carving pulled from a river bank. An artist might marvel at just a hand, bones and nerve under translucent flesh and the carver didn’t accidentally snap off a finger, didn’t gouge too deep and cover it up, anywhere. It’s an altogether perfect translation, an enduring example of genius, and any average person ought to be impressed as well. During the dark ages these evidences of ancient brilliance proved overbearing and intimidating, and much made in antiquity was deliberately destroyed. Still, it’s possible to sympathize with the frustration and resentment of people wearing animal hides while sheltering beneath corinthian columns.

Art still does that, speaks mind to mind, in fact that’s its job. Art conveys intelligence, self-regard, and a commitment beyond the siren song of more money since for the majority of committed artists there’s so little. Art’s actual message isn’t difficult to see once it’s on canvas. If ten artists were to paint the same thing, an apple, a bridge, or a landscape, you and anyone you know could pick the smart one, and it really would have nothing to do with the apple, the bridge, or the countryside. If they were all brilliant you’d still know which one appealed to you the most, art isn’t difficult. Non-objective art can be difficult, you could say it works overtime, but insider secret knowledge doesn’t always turn out to be profound and a busy person really can’t be bothered chasing it down. As for the trademarked modern masters, ‘seen one, seen them all’ is their business model and market strategy, who cares?

Using art as a tool for self-improvement and self-knowledge is infinitely more practical than planning to put the kids through college on the fortune you’ll make when you sell that ugly thing you feel obligated to hang, can’t wait to be rid of it. Instead spend the same money and invest in yourself and the person you’ll become, in the solace and comfort of the home you’ll come to live in, and buy some art from a talented painter living in your area. Meet them and buy direct, a memory that will remain with the painting forever. If you look at enough art you’ll soon recognize a bargain, so get in now and avoid the rush.

ultimately conceptual -- wasn’t there again today

Ian Wilson, Conceptual Artist Who Declined to Make Physical Objects, Is Dead at 80 april 17  artnews

'For the later stages of his life, Wilson may not have been known as well as some of his Conceptualist colleagues, perhaps because the immaterial nature of his art makes it difficult to exhibit, but he was an integral member of the movement from its beginnings.'
 
Now that what I’d call going all out, drilling down on the implications of your philosophy, making a singular career commitment. It needs to be admired either as a deep delving into absurdity or an unfathomable bolt of genius, depends on point of view. It didn’t say how he made a living, if that was necessary, but I'd guess probably by teaching art at some extremely expensive and exclusive institution. He’s right you know, that is where it leads, conceptual art. Well who with everyday responsibilities has time for stuff that isn't there I’d like to know. I care about as much as the average person, we have lots in common. This doesn’t mean we don’t like art.

Your industry is obsolete, phony magazines touting the art of anyone who buys advertising, blatantly rigged show auctions, phony philanthropy and tax havens, money laundering and social climbing, but mostly intellectually barren stupid art. Jeff Koons, the highest priced living artist, has been dialing back his appeal to lower and lower instincts, finally reaching the sensibility of toddlerhood with a sculpture called ‘playdoh,’ and the ultra wealthy love it. They’re all obsolete.