planned obsolescence -- a barnyard turnaround

I wrote this blog for a number of years to express frustration at an art world which had rejected me, it was mutual. A less obsessive sort would probably have moved on, found some semi-creative niche in the big world of commerce and concentrated on comfort, but I took on the challenge of moving the mountain. Partly heroic, I liked the idea, but I didn’t have much choice. Family issues had shuffled my priorities and reconnection to others and to physical reality, itself, would shape how I came to conceive of art. This was, in fact, the way I found myself standing on the wrong side of the fence, when more exclusionary and non-objective forms were receiving support and recognition.

Occasionally along the way, I’ve offered the aside that what I was saying would become obsolete when the art world began to move on to the new reality, which would be about now, really. So let’s keep score. I said a new generation of DA’s would go after the money laundering and tax evasion among major art donors, and that at some point a run of deaccession by major museums would deflate the market for ‘masters’ and collapse all speculative investing. At this point it could be said to be teetering.

I also suggested that a grass-roots reawakening in hometowns would reestablish representational art as a forum for thoughtful expression, and a lattice for connection, empathy, and trust among neighbors. Of all the many forces pulling and twisting present day society, the rise of studios and galleries from underachieving rental properties, outdoor painting events, and murals on blank walls all indicate an interest in representational art within communities is being renewed.

I even predicted that the very facts of origin and duration would make original works of art inherently valuable in a world of swirling images and ephemeral facts, each of us standing in digital quicksand. The fact that one person made it and it’s the only one there is, will have increasing potency, and if some element of humanity comes across, inhabitants of a one-use world may value it instinctively, without knowing why.

It was my outside hope to connect with other rebels, undercover jedi knights working regular jobs, painting on weekends and waiting to be seen, or people looking at art and seeking a doorway, but I know they’re out there. My squeak just doesn’t carry very far, like whispering into a hollow log, but I haven’t been entirely wrong so far. Words have been discredited lately, Orwell predicted, but pictures supersede languages, and a painting can be a nod back and forth among many, as well as a verification of self, and an individual’s anchor against the tide.

who really pays -- real art thieves

A new generation of prosecutors promises pursue the tax manipulation going on in major art transactions, such as art bought at a bogus auction for an absurd price, and then donated to a museum for a write-off right away, black ties and limos. These are essentially thefts by very wealthy people from those who contribute to their opulent lifestyles with actual sweat, occupational stress, and physical effort, and the brandname artworks they use for collateral mean no more to them than squares of colored cloth. That’s awful and needs to be fixed, but there’s a more insidious crime going down. They also stole the art.

It’s up for debate -- are common folk too dumb to appreciate art, or are they too smart to pretend to like something they don’t? It’s going to be difficult to argue that rich people are more intelligent when you look at their art. The emotional charge of a color field painting made by an artist weeping into their whiskey is undeniable, until you consider there might be a thousand of them out there, maybe more, no one knows. Present these paintings any way you like, but in the end any one looks like all the others.

People who earn their livings forty hours at a time don’t dream of acquiring such rarified markers of genius, they’re too smart. Working people aren’t charmed by the notion that an afternoon of clever and audacious paint application can be worth more than their lifetime total income, and tend to find themselves unmoved when they see the results. Oddly enough, the one thing that’s out of bounds for serious art these days is any possible appeal to common taste. This dictum exists so rich people can feel smart and it makes the market manageable, but what happened to the art that used to hang in homes, and where are the artists who made it?

Turns out it’s one of art’s first lessons, learned when any particular person shakes themselves free of the mythology of modern art, its celebrity movements and sensational breakthroughs, and just starts looking at art for themselves. Art is about self-discovery first of all, and sooner or later realizing the ultimate decision about what you like is yours to make.

carts before horses -- identity art

Picasso is the pied piper who led twentieth century art astray but it wasn’t in his paintings, it was in the marketing of his name. In his prime, Picasso made art all day long, everyday, taking time out for lunch and using the fish bone in his art that afternoon. He didn’t care what you thought of it, and that was part of his charm, but it was his becoming internationally famous that changed art. Thereafter the name in the corner became more important than the image, the actual art. Even though he made art across a wide range of styles, from assertive statements miles ahead of his contemporaries to almost thoughtless scrawls, all that needs to be said to establish a piece of art’s status is just the name. For the remainder of the twentieth century art slowly transformed into a managed and manipulated pantheon of personality cults, with ambitious artists striving for fame like horses in the derby. In galleries, patrons were encouraged to place their bets and live with the results.

I could suggest this way of looking at art is backward but this is about art, and words will never convey the what the art says directly. It’s a fact that a clever forgery of a famous piece of art that would cost tens of millions is worth absolutely nothing, and probably no fun to look at either. Who would really want to own a genuine Jackson Pollock if he’d never become famous and just happened to live next door? I could go on but we all have eyes. It’s the cross-eyed offspring of signature art that currently informs the art aware, and all around art is being solicited from check-list identity groups, anyone neglected or excluded because of who they are as a member of a maligned minority. Sorry, you’re a little late. In this quaintly southern town our local celebrity artist, Henry Faulkner, was notoriously, almost belligerently, gay decades ago, so that ice has long been broken, and nationally gayness is almost assumed.

Art, believe it or not, is quite democratic, and the insight and attitude embodied in the image doesn’t reveal who made it, although similar sensibilities might recognize each other through art. Frankly, it’s not that important, who made it. It’s interesting to learn about the artist, but it’s a side street, an add-on, something extra you can in time forget so long as you hang on to the painting, putting it up wherever you live and seeing it everyday.

the future of art-- art of the future

Paintings are meant as seductions. Each is a device to beguile and entice the senses, and in this age of scalded nerve endings, advertising excesses and entertainment overload, it’s not easy. Paintings are tangible entities not likely to change for several lifetimes, so they’re able to bond with the mind of their owner, becoming more real and present over time instead of fading into the background. Initially, however, they must cut through the fog of digital goo that surrounds us all to impinge the mind and enter consciousness. That means they must catch the eye of the inattentive and distracted, which describes a great many who don’t usually expect too much from art. It’s an interesting challenge.

Art is a collaboration, not a one-way street. The artist contributes the image and the viewer is receptive, and so the completed circuit is made. The often struggling, independent artist feels pressure to meet an audience’s prior expectations, just hoping to stay in their studio. Even so, some instead choose to express themselves in real time, and since to be in the moment is to be ahead of general awareness, it’s the more visionary but much riskier path. It supposes that the evolving consciousness of a coming generation appears on the easel first, the product of isolated effort and self-revelation. It works because we’re all connected, and painting can be a source of insight into the mind and vision of a coming generation. As peculiar as this sounds, examples abound.

The experience of art requires audience participation, and the conscious presence of the viewer. The artist probes for access, chooses images and applies techniques that maximize penetration, that slip past the perceptual thresholds and mental turnstiles to pull at the attention and engage the machinery of recognition and awareness. A successful work of art resonates, rings in the senses like a tuning fork, a deep visceral sensation never fully described in words. Works of art can suggest new possibilities to tired, bored eyes, and like a water can in a dry window box, can cause new growth to appear in the form of more detail and texture in everyday life.

Look at all art available, and wait until you recognize yourself, you’ll know. Some artist somewhere has found a key that unlocks how you think and feel, and others, all around, are having the same sensation. Art is part of human mentality, and though it seems to have lost its way over several generations, yoked and compromised by advertising, actively obscured and declawed by federal subsidy, still it rises to the surface, honest and direct, the fulcrum of personal sanctity and self-determination. Buy a painting from an artist in your area and hang it in your home where you see it everyday. Participate in a movement, and reclaim your ability to see for yourself what the world has to offer.

windows and bridges -- art’s practical functions

We all live in boxes we build ourselves. We begin construction at birth, and by now it’s as big as all we’ve experienced. Much of it is inherited, and in the beginning cues come from family members, and then from teachers and peers, and there’s the amount of travel and stuff read, all of it altogether. The size of the box and its contents varies immensely person to person, so much so that conversations can be difficult between them. Windows and bridges are what’s needed, yet somehow the internet has been slamming doors and removing connections back and forth, drawing in the cell walls on everyone’s already pre-packaged sit-com existence. Does any of this sound familiar?

Art won’t answer the question of why we’re here, no matter how much we’re willing to spend, but it does offer questions. These questions enter the nervous system somewhere below a conscious level, and art on the wall is broadcasting a strange set of signals for internal recognition circuits to sort out. Without being aware of it, looking at art refreshes and recalibrates the senses so that the birds will be singing in the parking lot when you leave an art museum. They’ve been there all day but you didn’t hear them going in, and there might be other stuff you’ll begin to notice all at once, clouds in the sky, shadows on the lawn. Art can open a window but it’s up to you to crawl through and begin seeing what’s always been there. Owning and living with art is a technique, a method and plan, to become more open to the world.

I was amused at an article setting out to review the symbolism in Picasso’s ‘guernica,’ when it’s pretty certain that every human who ever lived, going all the way back to the stone age, would get the gist right away. Visual art doesn’t require translation, and we understand painters without speaking their language. In the turbulent goulash of images all around us, enduring original art can be a touchstone, an oasis of genuine human value in a commercial grey-zone, and a lifeline of affirmation for individuals who have become increasingly isolated in the digital crowd. Chances are if you find yourself liking a particular artist, let’s say someone from your hometown, it’s possible others who also like the same artist will share similar values, and might turn out to be friends. Art is a way to represent yourself, so that others might guess less about who you are, and so that you might know them a bit better. Windows and bridges for sale.

non-sexual abusers -- short-circuiting joy

Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine...  from the Wall Street Journal, 8-13

Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.

Deep in florescent-lit caverns media engineers remotely drill into your noggin to squeeze out every drop of dopamine until you’re down and dysphoric, fogged out and bleak of brain. That’s their job. They continually masturbate the entire population without touching them, seducing them instead with chimes and likes and all sorts of whacko affirmations. What we have here are blank-face zombies in all directions, and they want to eat your brains because theirs have dried up and blown away from too much screen-time.

Could a work of art cure this condition, probably not, but a house full might mitigate. Works of art stretch the attention span back out so a person can taste a well-prepared dinner, enjoy a drive in the country, or have a deep thought. Limit screen-time and reserve a little dopamine for the real things in life, outdoor adventure and exploration, family events and personal relationships.

Suddenly we realize we are all essentially on our own, each of us comparing what we see to what we already know, and social media has revealed how widely that varies person to person. Orwell predicted the contamination of language, debased as much by advertising as by politicians, and the notion that pictures can convey meaning and express commonality is reemerging in daily consciousness. Yes, art is antidote, the decontamination and recovery from all that digital diddling online.

painted mirrors -- the face we choose

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, please tell me a big fat lie,’ is the beginning of a fairytale, but turns out it’s true. Nobody else sees what you see in the mirror even though the silvered plate glass is one hundred per cent accurate. Those shades and that pompadour do sorta make you look just like Elvis but no one else sees it, and that goes for whatever the rest of us think we see in the mirror as well. We look at least slightly different to everyone on the bus, and that pretty much goes for the rest of the world as well. Turns out that everything we see is rooted in what we’ve seen before and limited by the span of our own experience. We’re not so complicated.

Babies arrive as hardware in search of software, and they imprint on everything until they eventually adapt to their family’s values and conception of reality. In adult life a broader experience yields a greater perspective and a wider, wiser view of life, and many people love to travel, sample ethnic food, and read books that extend their own experience into new realms. Movies and mass entertainment can insinuate artificial experiences into our personal version of reality, and as our culture comes ever closer to the dramatized ‘escapism’ of our leisure time, maybe it’s time to make a few rational choices about how we see ourselves.

Art won’t fix things, it’s not a panacea, just nice to have around to humanize the house. The artist makes a design on a flat surface that engages the machinery of recognition and when that channel opens a person might somehow see themselves, and can even see straight through the art to the artist. When such a piece of art hangs in their house it becomes a reflection of their character and passion for life that never changes, that doesn’t wrinkle and age like the image in the bathroom mirror. A few pieces of original art reveal their owner’s true identity, and help to remind them everyday of who they really are.