one world -- separate planets

I proposed in a previous post that humans all inhabited different planets depending how they imprinted on the world as they found it, the world itself being open-ended and full of possibility. This time I offer examples of two different planets residing in exactly the same orbit as reflected in the points of view of two contemporary writers concerning the same subject, paintings in the western canon from hundreds of years ago. In this case it’s handy that the traditional linage of western art allows so direct a comparison, and when seen from this long perspective it turns out to be a telescope on our own times too.

One dispatch came from the CNN news wire and was titled, ‘One of the last privately-owned Botticelli portraits could sell for over $80M.’ In it the ‘head of Sotheby's Old Master painting department said that it could "very well be the next painting to surpass the rarified $100 million threshold." In doing so, "Young Man Holding a Roundel" would become the first painting to achieve a nine-figure sum at auction since Claude Monet's "Haystacks," which fetched over $110 million at Sotheby's New York last year.’ This report comes from a planet of avarice and greed where people are aggressive and mean, and where no matter what anyone has it’s never enough and art is just another thing to have.

The other, oddly enough side by side in the same media, came from the New York Times Magazine, 9-23, written by someone who had gone on a pilgrimage to visit the paintings of Caravaggio in the little churches up and down the coast of Italy where he traded his talent for board, beans, and sanctuary. The trip was summed up this way, ‘A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.’ This planet has more parks, and the people are friendlier and more humane.

fantasy futures -- concrete consequences

Oh you shouldn’t find fault with the ultra-wealthy, they make the world go around. That’s what they tell us and what they tell themselves, but it’s really the people they hire that do all the work while they enjoy their assets. They know that if they decide to play golf, or go skiing, or never come back at all things will be just fine because their executive secretary knows more than they do and doesn’t really need them. I’m not sure anyone does since they’re not much more than retread old world gentry, mostly just a bunch of high class thieves just like last time, and they hire out the stealing too, retaining only the best tax lawyers and art advisors, sometimes different offices in the same outfit.  

I suppose there are good rich people out there, and if lottery money fell from the sky my own meager character would be tested, but the money at the top all comes from the bottom, that’s obvious. Do people on the bottom struggle to stay warm and dry and are they forced to consume unwholesome food because it’s cheap? How about the middle class, warm and dry but somehow perpetually dissatisfied with the shiny new products that never bring the happiness portrayed during time-outs and pitching changes. Turns out it isn’t just the money they’ve been stealing. Each person’s self regard has to be pretty battered or they wouldn’t be changing their hair color or buying a truck that belongs on a construction site just to improve themselves, and to be truly fulfilled, satisfied, and finally happy.

To cover their crimes the very rich stole art and turned it into a neutered and near-sighted house pet on a golden chain, and they steal a lot of money that way too. Would you pay millions of dollars for a painting by Mark Rothko? They’re all pretty much alike, that’s what makes them a Rothko, and no one has any idea how many were made or even who made them all. It would have been just like a job for one person to make so many so similar, hundreds. All significant no doubt, but drive, passion, and emotional intensity, maybe not after the first one or two, and the formula is so easy to copy that forgeries abound, and who can say otherwise? Publicly shy private art museums, philanthropy’s most classiest tax shelters, are getting antsy about their phony assets and trying to float the fifth Rothko in their stacks for cash, the parking lot needs paving, and there’s been wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the entire industry all the way to the top.

When the international art industry eventually collapses in an avalanche of measured and responsible museum deaccessioning, leading to portfolios for pennies and investors wedged in all the exits, ordinary people will begin to discover organically-produced, locally-sourced original art all around them. Full of vitamins instead of empty calories, hormone free and unadulterated, friendly and challenging at the same time, a painting that represents the very best the painter could do in that moment has its own charm, and it broadcasts a good feeling out into a room. Over time the artist’s affection and regard become mutual and having it around just gets better, people say. In this dollar driven and competitive world we’ve inherited, each person deep down yearns for verification that’s there’s something more important than money, and some find that character, truth, and communion are things we can share through art, what it’s really for.

It’s the dawn before the world of tomorrow, a brand new day in which either great wealth tightens and consolidates it control and art as a channel of human expression and sincere communication drowns in cheap advertising like a swan sucked down in a cesspool, or material assets are distributed more evenly and art and artists become a feature of community life everywhere, contributing to the genuine sense of well being and satisfaction a fully realized and secure people deserve.

multiverse controversy -- picking a planet

What are the chances of a multiverse, myriad realities next to each other like the bubbles in beer foam? I don’t know about out there, but I suspect we’re living it everyday, each set of human eyes looking out on a slightly different planet. There’s temperament, some set of predilections from a previous life or a unique toss of genes, no one has explained it, and that’s allied with experience, everything that’s ever happened to a person, remembered or not. Their interaction forms a distinct planet inside each person’s head and it’s going to be slightly different from the planets inhabited by family members, and maybe very different for someone across town or totally unrecognizable from that of a person in another country at a different time.

As we intermingle we begin to sense how alone we really are and that our disagreements with others can’t all be explained because they’re too dumb to see the same truth we do. They seem to have their own truth. This engenders an underlying unease, a subliminal terror at losing touch, and nominally free citizens scurry under the skirt of the nearest tribal identity, a sports franchise, a mega-religion or a political party. Business won’t help. They’ve been using our anxieties against us, urging us to huddle next to their brand names and to be loyal to their products, but there’s not much comfort there. Truth be told that’s actually how we wound up in this wretched place to begin with.

Being alone in the universe can be scary. That’s why there’s art. Throughout history art has been used to link up the population and standardize their planets. We’ve been through a difficult period, wars and political assassinations, disease and injustice, crime and climate change, and each of us could use something to hold on to. Art as it’s presented in media these days hasn’t been much help either, the domain of an ultra-wealthy sensibility manifesting an ironical self-loathing, but there’s a groundswell of hometown interest in hometown art under our feet. After a long drought art is being seen in neighborhoods again, and people are finding solace in artwork that celebrates the commonalities and visions they share, on the planet they’d prefer to live on.   

Trump as avatar -- art as antidote

Trump is the avatar of resentment. His genius is composed of it and it’s his power. Hillary and her clan seemed to think everyone who counts would see things her way. Well this is a wake up call for the woke. The general population has grown confused and moody on an empty-calorie cultural diet of escapist entertainment and endless sporting events created only to con them into buying things they don’t need for a promised life that doesn’t exist. Someone better start pumping value back into daily existence like quality universal education, affordable decent housing for everyone, and something to believe in and hold on to or we’re going to have a mess on our hands.

This isn’t about politics, it’s about life with no meaning, no attainment beyond the envy of strangers, and the meager and fleeting joy in buying a bigger pickup or getting a new tattoo. Humans as animals can only be abused so long and then they begin to agitate, to deviate, and to express their repressed aspirations. The machinery of state long before Trump arrived has been manipulating institutions and incentives to loot the value created by the economic system and move it to the top, and what we have here is a predictable reaction. Devotion to Trump is not about his policies, blind and ignorant vandalism mostly, but in his robust ‘fuck you’ to all that benign ‘we’ve got your back’ bullshit from a government devoted to marketing lives and selling its citizens cheap to large corporations.

As an emergency measure, I’d suggest an IV of original art, organic and locally produced, at least until the fever subsides, anxieties abate, and people begin to find enough satisfaction and fulfillment in their own lives to stop finding fault with each other. Art is the distillation of a culture’s perceptions, its needs and desires, and all systems of control seek to manipulate and neuter it. In totalitarian states artists are imprisoned and art is destroyed but in a capitalist democracy a tax-driven institutional obscurity is used to muffle honest expression and to deny independent artists access to their own communities. At some point artists and the public will begin to find each other through alternative venues, outdoor painting events and organized studio tours, and psychic healing will begin. After that honorable work for a reasonable wage with enough free time and societal support to pursue whatever the hell anyone wants would be nice, finally a healthy place to live and no Trumps nowhere.

democratic art -- domestic influences

Moses was appalled when he got back. He’d been up on the mountain considering the meaning of it all and while he was gone the people erected a golden calf, these days frankly reproduced as the bronze bull on wallstreet, and it’s an expression of base materialism plain and simple. When just stuff is worshiped greed sets in and the people begin behaving like pigs, doesn’t matter the time or place. Pretty soon their civilization crumbles and they go back to cooking over an open fire and living with animals, waiting to start over.

Moses decided to give them something else to think about, like when the vet distracts your dog before it gets its shot. He said look over here and see these stone tablets given to me by the one and only god, and drag yourselves away from doing better than your neighbor for a moment that you might see life differently. The commandments aren’t particularly bad advice in a general sort of way but that’s not the point. Humans are capable of incandescent attainment and we have the examples of DaVinci, Beethoven, and Einstein, and we have the art of the ancient chinese, the egyptians, the meso-americans and the greeks, but when things get good we can backslide.

Convenience comes in handy and having household machines that help with the chores should leave us free to read a book, to visit a museum, to expand our universe and live up to our potential, wouldn’t that be great? To see how we’re doing let’s look at our art since after all, it’s the way we judge all the civilizations that came before us. It seems we’re in trouble. The scrapping and replacing of the last century’s monuments, righteous and necessary no doubt, reveals an easing of standards that’s less than comforting, and millions and millions of dollars for dogshit art at auction is a ‘let them eat cake’ formula for disaster. Somehow just having more free time hasn’t made us better.

It was an eye-opener to me and a novel notion of democracy when I read that attendance at the theater in ancient greece was mandatory. Utilizing their art and literature they were imposing intelligence and rationality on the population. Every citizen was being to asked to measure themselves against the culture’s highest ideals, and it seems to have worked well for a few hundred years, average citizens accomplished and thoughtful with lives well lived. Here we have our own version of democracy and each of us decides what to look at and what to think about on our own, it’s that way in writing. We also have more choices, from the imbecilic to works of art that are smarter than we are, and we get to pick and choose which to live with and see every day. Does it make a difference, the greeks thought it did. 

the soul's reflection -- the grifter's gift

Study Finds That Abstractions Don’t Elicit Universal Emotional Responses Among Viewers   artnet news, august 11, 2020
“Aesthetic effects are not universally shared but rather are highly determined by private evaluation,” it stated.
 
Turns out abstract art is pretty much a blank slate and you take away only what you brought with you, everyone projecting their own meanings on a square of pure improvisation. Now that’s freedom but it isn’t communication since it’s been determined definitively there’s no universal meaning in abstract art, and maybe no meaning at all. Back when the abstract expressionists first ascended they had all the meaning, subconscious supremacy and action immediacy, all such as that, and it was the representational artists who had nothing left to say and besides we’re not even looking at pictures of anything any more no matter what. Literary people fanned the flames of abstract expressionism realizing before anyone else that it truly was a blank slate and they could write anything they wanted about it. They were free to fly, constructing counterpoints of airy conjecture that would baffle their editors and leave the general public in the dust.

This inherent meaninglessness of abstraction is desirable in certain quarters and corporate entities particularly prefer its non-committal qualities for conference rooms and offices, a splash of color for muted business interiors without revealing even so much as personal taste, conceding not even that much advantage. Fans of abstract art also include anyone mentally lazy or just disinterested who find it convenient for breaking up blank wall space in waiting rooms and such since who looks anyway? To be fair some abstract art does get lots of attention but only as the price tag begins to swell to gigantic proportion and overshadow the art, ironically in itself something recognizable after all.

In the end there’s only art, all together, and we have centuries and continents of it already laid down. In our era of general prosperity some knowledge of art should reasonably be the common heritage of everyone, not just the gated reserve of the insanely rich and those who long to be like them. Down the street and around the corner someone is painting what they see, don’t know why. Their work won’t be valued by the establishment since they still haven't found the first step on the ascending ladder of certified affirmations the industry calls a career. This is the time when their work will be cheap, before the general population begins to awaken to their own human potential, abruptly weaned from sports and stadium concerts, shut out of bars and forced to cook at home, even bored enough to pickup the coffee table book and actually look at the pictures. Pretty soon they’ll be able to see the art in front of them too, and the buyer’s market for pictures of things will be gone.

the art of time-binding -- personal markers

Heard a story about how Marc Chagall deep in his nineties was shown a painting he had done around nineteen twelve and after looking for a moment he started to cry, so sweet such a quaint old man. His patronizing fans could not travel back with him to a drafty studio, his friends and the life he had back then, but the painting sent him down a long dark wormhole and left him smoking his pipe close by a wood stove, the smell of turpentine in the air and horses in the street, good times. Paintings have a way of absorbing events and experiences and then releasing them back during a moment’s contemplation, places lived and things seen.

To be clear I’m talking about real art and not whatever someone happens to have on the wall at the time, as easily forgotten as last year’s calendar. Original art from the hand of an artist has a presence museum posters or mass produced mall art don’t possess, similar in a way to the difference between music in live performance and anything recorded. It’s an argument that can be settled only by direct experience, and it’s the reader’s responsibility to verify this simple fact on their own. Assuming it’s so, by depicting a moment’s experience within a matrix of skill and manual effort, time is arrested and the artist manages to put a foot in the revolving door of daily experience.

A painting bought when young for too much money at the time, to celebrate graduation or the new job, to mark an arrival in a different city or just because you didn’t want to let it get away, will pay for itself over and over in the years ahead. From the date of purchase the painting forgets its artist and begins remembering the life of its new owner going forward. A few pieces of original art becomes a personal entourage, inhabiting the walls each time there’s a move and in between witnessing daily joy and strife, finally becoming a repository of all that mileage as close by as a cup of coffee and a moment to reflect. Art can bind a lifetime together by halting and gathering time in significant moments, creating islands in a constantly-streaming river of memory and enabling more potent and tangible recollections than a tumble of old photos and videos with no artistic value of their own.
 
Time is flapping at the edges these days, the great wars overlap as centuries collapse and history becomes a blur, while possible futures are trending on a highly volatile and virulently contagious form of instantaneous group-think right there in everybody’s hand. The very act of painting speaks of a different time frame and the painting in itself insists on an extended attention span to even comprehend its image. Over time there’s also reason to wonder why it still seems so fresh and compelling when everything else in the room has become familiar and largely goes unnoticed. Art is a time-binder, a recorder and witness that lives with you and is seen every day, not sequestered on a bookshelf or compressed in a digital cloud, and having it around provides perspective on the years as they flow by.