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.
 

the faith-based commodity -- art worth millions

Some people see an artist’s easel as a magic doorway with fame and fabulous riches on the other side, but very few pass through leaving most who make the attempt lost and bitter dreamers. For the lucky ones who enter through a side-door the process is so simple, just stretch canvas on a wooden frame and cover with color and suddenly it’s worth millions just because of who you are, you media-darling certified genius you. You’ll have to admit it’s pretty amazing compensation for an afternoon of work when other people struggle and sweat a whole lifetime for less. Just how do you and your friends pull it off?

Glad you asked. The intricacies of the high-end art market might be over your head so let’s just say we operate a quasi-religion with a predetermined list of saints and we do quite a robust commerce in their relics. Each piece of their art is like a ponzi-style banknote promising a big profit when a bigger fool comes along, and it’s going to go on forever is what we pray. It’s tricky because the value is virtual and it’s just blind faith that says that this piece of canvas is worth fifty million dollars, fifty million dollars. If for an instant that faith falters the so-called art is liable to be seen, actually seen, as just a blotchy mess on canvas that some artist could have used to make a picture, and fifty million, poof.

Art is worth something, quite a lot actually, but it isn’t out of an ordinary person’s price range and they won’t have to pretend to like it. First it’s necessary to shed the utter nonsense of the art’s mega-ministries, and instead look at enough art, it’s all around, to know when something is good and being sold at a fair price. Anyone interested can do this, looking in restaurants and salons where art is hung and going on studio tours to find a bargain. The ultra rich don’t own art and it’s possible they don’t appreciate it either since to them it’s all about tax breaks and social standing, but average folks just getting through their day deserve an example of the very best someone like themselves can manage on their own.

pulling down the temple -- breaking chains

Deaccession is in the air, all the rage, changing out the old art by old white guys and bringing in all minority, gender-specific, and underrepresented art, all above board and absolutely legitimate. Oh the standards might slip a bit but we haven’t been concerned about aesthetic quality for several generations and think of all the money, why we’ll all be rich. It’s being done for only the best reasons and now they can pay their starving-wage staffs, mostly unemployable art majors who manage the stacks and sweep the floors, and they can pave that parking lot and also acquire a few pieces of art by women and minorities, so neglected. 

Fact is they, any art museum, didn’t buy that forty million dollar artwork in the first place and now they’re trying to sell it. It was purchased at auction by some visionary philanthropist, so generous, who wrote it down on their tax form and deducted the price from the same tax pool we all pay into, leaving nothing but a paper chit for their fair share. Now alarms are sounding, the establishment courtiers have been aroused and the whole business of deaccession has been declared out of bounds, a betrayal of trust, and liable to blow the whole racket, ripping down the green curtain to reveal a bloated tax-evading parasite that’s been calling itself art.

If you want to see deacquisition hit overdrive rewrite the tax laws and watch all those heavy art lovers scurry back to their yachts and start pitching modern masters overboard, because the prices are going to tank. Consider the work of Mark Rothko with an easily recognized signature style and approximately a thousand examples of his work floating around. If anyone has a more accurate accounting let’s hear it. Anyway at about forty million a piece, a high of eighty-six million in 2012, that comes to 40,000,000,000 dollars worth of colored cloth poised to hit the market more or less all at once. It’s a disgrace and betrayal no doubt, but there are several points of view and there will be some who won’t mind when it happens. Pulling down the temple, don’t mind if I do.