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Friday, September 26, 2014

two conversations at once -- differing destinations

Let’s acknowledge there’s a couple of conversations going on about art. There’s the big one in the back pages of New Yorker which involves all the intelligent, culturally aware folks eyeing the markets for underpriced crumbs from fabulous careers, and the quiet one over here. See, I don’t care about the money. I think an artist should be paid like a craftsman who gets to charge a little more per hour when they do a better than average job. I’d be content to let the quality of the product determine price and not the stratospheric crest of an imaginary wave, but that’s me.

To read in the New Yorker, “sells, at auction, for respectable six-figure sums, with the odd spike into the low millions” about an artist who made the same self-referencing statement on and on is just me eavesdropping on that other conversation. I understand fashion well enough. It’s about what other people want. Is it time-bound? -- to the year, to the season, to the day. People are always changing their minds since they don’t know what they want unless everyone else wants it. It’s a maze with no exit.

I can’t get over this messianic vision in which art, perhaps that picture on the wall by an artist in your town, transcends the cultural hammerlock that school, family, and ‘all over at the same time television’ imposes on everyone without anyone really noticing. It's true this notion of the liberating power of art has sometimes been open to question. I just find for about every third painting I see by Van Gogh I feel an almost mind-melding intimacy that comes across entirely without words, so I couldn’t explain it. It isn’t just him. Art from all over can be like that. 

After all, a consensus made of money can blow away when conditions change, and they will, but that’s not the sad part. The real shame is the low expectation on the part of people who spend millions on the colored monograms of fame only because they might go up in value. Maybe they will, but who could live with that off-handed, talent-deriding section of colored cloth up in the living room without the price tag hovering close by? Their grandiose game of liar’s poker, all hold, fold, and cold-eyed bluff gives art a bad name, and it’s also seriously beside the point.

Credentials don’t count for as much as doing the work, since each decision made once the canvas receives the first mark reveals the personality and life-experience of the person who makes it. There’s no reason to doubt when looking at a Jackson Pollock here was an alcoholic in temperament and method, and as such I’ve always found his work repulsive, but then I take him seriously. It means almost nothing to me that he was famous by proclamation or that any one of his 'painter’s drop-cloth' paintings is worth millions, respectable millions. Artists are attempting to reveal 'self', their own and everyone else’s, something that just happens automatically in the process of making art, and people see themselves in the work or they don’t. Considering the price tag first doesn't help. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Being part of the "quiet" conversation has other benefits besides being underpaid (ha) - the freedom of obscurity, for one. As a musician who once flirted with something more than local success, I found I didn't like it - I preferred the neighborhood hangout where your friends came to hear you play. As a visual artist I only aspire to make enough money to keep at it - still a difficult thing to pull off, but without being hampered by fame or expectations. I can't help but think a six figure income would be the kiss of death.