Owning Art

the naked and the sane

2012-01-20T13:07:00.007-05:00

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote a lot about the nude in art – a couple of big books, and hosted a series about the nude through history on educational TV. Seems the body hasn’t changed since the beginning but its presentation varies widely, and since the denominator stays the same we gain a little insight into how different cultures thought about themselves and everything else. As an example, in modern times Hugh Hefner became famous and rich depicting the female nude in the form of retouched photos. Almost anyone can see these photographs reveal much more about Hef and his readership than about women, humanity at large, or the world around them.

The reason, by the way, for not wearing clothes is because clothing indicates period and rank, and art sometimes aims for something more universal. Beyond that the nude makes an excellent subject because we grew up in families, see each other and have mirrors – we all know the subject well. In some periods the nude demurs and looks away, and everyone expects this. Economic change occurs, society changes, and then one day a nude looks directly out of the picture and into the eyes of the viewer, causing quite a scandal. This assertion of personality on the part of the nude person eventually changes the way people see themselves, as does the character and dignity of the whole presentation. Art is the mental mirror of any culture and the unchanging nude human figure is its key.

Recent distortions in body image which the experts trace largely to advertising have caused both men and women to make fetishes of their own bodies, saving up their nickels to be surgically altered. It’s like an epidemic. Researchers have found skeletal people see themselves as fat, stout folks see themselves thinner, and lots of people obsess about some part or other -- it just seems unhealthy. And then there’s contemporary art.

Metaphoric and ironic are ways to avoid what’s actually there, and it isn’t always as clever as it is sort of sad. Consider the “Nude Show” at the Lexington Art League, a venerable and tax supported non-profit cultural asset to our community. As body images go, it’s all really kinda creepy. They did say in advance that they wouldn’t be interested in rational arms and legs sorts of images but that doesn’t keep the entire enterprise from having evolved into something deranged. This notion that thoughts are better than deeds, that process is more important than product, and that contemporary art is an honest expression of the culture which supports it could use a little distance, an objective assessment, a comparison with everyday reality. Remove the feeding tube of everybody’s money from these cultural charities with their presumption of knowing what's good for the rest of us, and art will begin to bend back toward a common sensibility, and will more truly represent who we are and how we see ourselves.

paleolithic me

2011-12-06T08:20:00.001-05:00

Ever since that movie, “Cave of Dreams”, the painters from that Paleolithic era watch me while I work – a painter myself, you understand. They dress in leather and fur and are in person ripe in modern terms, but smell doesn’t come across – only their murmuring and shifting shapes, usually five or six, and just a few occasional comments. Sometimes one of them will nudge another and they all laugh at once – a deep rumbling. They also watch me while I cook. I explain that animals are raised and slaughtered to be cut up and repackaged in plastic skin and they’re vaguely interested. I tell them metal weeps from rock in a great fire and then it’s pounded into knifes, and pots, and sinks and stuff and they believe me but don’t care to know more. They won’t come around at all when I watch TV. They say it’s all about zombies and I become a zombie, too, when I watch it. I can’t argue.

What they want to know about is painting, and they comment to themselves when I change colors or add some new feature. I explain that the colors I use aren’t much different from what they used, ground from elements they had found themselves plus a few others more difficult to get to, and finished out better, which they concede. As a binder I use polymer plastic instead of fat from the cooking fire, but it does pretty much the same thing. They don’t care for the bridges and overpasses but they get excited when I paint animals. They laughed and pointed at the longhorn, so similar to the cattle they knew – they understood it was real. We are just alike – humans who see each other across thirty thousand years.

IS BAD ART RUINING AMERICA?

2011-10-28T12:24:00.003-04:00

The Andy Warhol authentication board is disbanding. No longer will they rule on the legitimacy of each piece of Andy’s work so now we’re just on our own. Since Andy didn’t limit his editions or even keep track, and since he stayed away from actual production as much as possible, volatile screenprocess solvents are thought to be harmful to health, and since quality control wasn’t part of the system, it’s quite possible to create a Warhol with little more than a sign-making rig, and who could tell the difference? Nobody seemed to mind that the images were borrowed or that the product looked cheap and tawdry since that’s the beauty of it don’t you see?

Well what this all has to do with junk bonds and phony mortgages I couldn’t say, but it doesn’t seem to be completely different, now does it? Could the same mentality that accepted Andy as a great artist for reproducing soup can labels and cleaning product boxes really fool itself into believing that bogus financial instruments could go on forever – yeah, it’s possible. A market capable of paying out seventy one million dollars for an ugly green smear of a double offset print without the slightest notion of how many were made or how many still exist would be perfectly willing to piss away the future.

Better art may not fix our problems overnight, but images and practices which embody the self-regard, personal integrity, and the character to create the significant instead of just what sells couldn’t be a bad thing to hang around the house. When America starts to evolve and heal from its orgy of self cannibalism, a new art will emerge – the expression of a mature, objective, rational culture.

MLK Mao -- a story of cultural confusion

2011-10-24T10:05:00.005-04:00

I came across an image with ceremony online a couple of days ago and I found myself wondering why the American people would erect a thirty foot statue of the demigod Mao emerging from a mountain wearing an impassive, expressionless Martin Luther King mask there on the National Mall. Then I found out it was made in China. The politics of it are over my head, and as a symbol of cultural and economic imperialism it’s too complicated. Simply as art it’s less than eloquent.

Couldn’t fault the Chinese artists, commissioned to represent a great man in a struggle far away, martyr to an issue that they, living in the most homogeneous society on Earth, probably couldn’t really even comprehend. Through Chinese eyes they made the best monument they could make, but I wonder about my fellow citizens here who don’t seem to notice or care that it looks more like an ‘imported’ bobble head toy, only real big, than an appropriate and thoughtful expression of honor and gratitude.

did painting die?

2011-09-29T08:48:00.000-04:00

So I hear that painting is an obsolete form and nobody does it that way, any more. Art has branched out, explored new territory and now can be anything. Just call it art and digitalized or hot-glued, it’s art. Actually though, really, it’s sorta all the same. It’s pretty much gotten necessary to know if the artist is just a student or hugely famous before it’s possible to tell if it’s, whatever, any good or not.

Not so long ago, actually half a century, popular music was squeezed through the taste lowering filter of commercial radio and the product wasn’t the best. An ever aggressive market had manipulated soulless technology to demean the public taste for financial advantage. Well, it might have gone on forever but along came Bob Dylan, and everything changed. The public discovered it liked being taken seriously.

The form he chose to cut through the ‘wall of sound’ recordings of the high-powered studios wasn’t just old fashioned – it was ancient. The tradition of troubadours, from Homer down through the middle ages, had almost withered away when young Bob started perform using only his own instrument and voice. Somehow he was heard through all that well established media machinery using simple tools, being direct, commandeering a commercialized, trivialized medium to speak mind to mind.

So, all I’m saying is painting has been around a while, too. Painting in oils gave artists the ability to create a field of believability potent enough to transfer thought and emotion in a stable and enduring form, and that unique feature of visual art has more value now in an increasingly temporary reality. Painting didn’t die. Painting was sick and neglected but is starting to recover now. A serious painting stands as a beacon on a rock when the digital sea is blowing whitecaps and we find ourselves drowning in froth, just as any original art at all can be a life preserver.

has art been undervalued?

2011-09-21T10:21:00.001-04:00

If the nutrition could be drained out of food and be replaced with some sort of vegetable/animal dreck from stainless steel holding tanks, would it be offered to the masses as food, and would they eat it? Yes, they would for a while, but they’d catch on. They’d see themselves turning to lard and start demanding green stuff, a calorie count on the menu, and fewer “additives” all around. It’s happening now.

If those same commercial wizards could siphon off the humanity, the ingenuity, the art in art, and replace it with brand-name shoddy sensationalism, reducing art in the process to a game token, a trading card, a sideshow entertainment, would they? Oh, they’d try -- lowering everyone’s gaze by demeaning their aspirations and their expectations of themselves, reducing their sole expressions of self to the right brand of beer. For them art becomes a souless commodity without a face or content, just a name, just an autograph to be traded up or down, an empty beachhead for phony conversation.

That's too bad because we could use something better. Does anyone else feel themselves in the tow of a sucking vortex of occupational dementia, reducing thoughts to emoticons, chewing through the attention span, turning everything grey making everything taste the same? Are we going to just keep turning up the volume? If we could see ourselves as our perceptual interfaces with world, we wouldn’t be fat – we’d be skinny, skinny and pale. Perceptually speaking, we’re hardly here at all – media-impaired zombies flickering as we walk. Does art cure it? Well, no, doesn’t cure, just provides the vitamins to fight back, the exercise to lift our heads, and it scrapes the scales from our eyes so we can see.

leverage

2011-08-17T09:56:00.003-04:00

Archimedes claimed he could move the planet with the right leverage. He was just making a point, but isn’t that what we’re all looking for -- the biggest bang for the buck, the most reward for the least effort, the pivot point where pure thought becomes potent force. Well, that’s what art is. Not just art but the very making of art is an exercise in obtaining maximum mileage from materials, studio space, and studio time. Unless art is supported from the outside, a trust fund or a teaching position, maximum efficiency is prerequisite across the board, in lifestyle as well as actual art production. In fact, without occasional help and timely good luck, making art for a living can be a very difficult passage and people fall away.

The ones who make it through to self-sustaining studio status have found a use for every scrap of paper, every inch of pencil, and every hour of studio time, usually because it’s all borrowed or stolen from earning a living working for someone else. What they’re actually trying to do is more amazing, something very close to alchemy, that ancient mythic quest. In the popular imagination artists attempt to transform base material, traditionally canvas, paint, and wood, into an object worth the cost of beans and a roof to someone else. Since selling art in a commercial age conditioned to beer-sign expectations is obviously improbable from the beginning, most artists instead attempt to create an object worthy of the days, weeks, and years devoted to finding a voice, the sacrifice of income 'being creative' sells for in industry these days, and so on. Artists have done this in the past.

The real mythic quest is to use the common materials available to all mankind to create an object which represents the artist and their time with some dignity, in the course of human events. Gold is only a shiny metal.

Cy Twombly is dead

2011-07-08T12:04:00.003-04:00

Cy Twombly is dead. I couldn’t tell his work from that of the more seriously challenged clients of an adult daycare facility, and neither could any art expert on the planet. Drawings in caves rival the very best graphic people we’ve got – Picasso would have to stretch. So what’s going on here? Is contemporary art a hoax, a quasi-religious cult of personalities, a mass delusion, a conspiracy of thieves? Any or all, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t art. I think Andy Warhol and the mortgage swindle are different faces of one identity – art, not reflective of life, but a direct expression.

These processes work both ways, and messing with either the chicken or the egg affects the omelet. It’s a good time to look at art differently since no one we know is going to change banking. Art doesn’t function here, in central KY, as an expression of the community. Since I’m one of them, the common folk, I share their assessment of Cy Twombly and every museum director, uptown gallery owner, and millionaire art collector can look at his stuff all day – I wish it on them. Visual art doesn’t care what language you speak, and cares even less about academic awards, financial ranking, or the condition or style of what you have on. Pictures bypass the censorship of verbal thought, with its locks and gates of cultural conditioning and official sanction. Pictures can say anything, but not all pictures do.

golden calf and other animals

2011-06-20T16:44:00.001-04:00

Now I don’t know if Jeff Koons has ever made a golden calf, but maybe he should. The golden calf has had symbolic meaning since the first was made, about 3500 years ago, out in the desert east of the sea. Seems Moses needed time to think, and went off into the wilderness for forty days – a European vacation. When he came back they had setted up an alter and on it placed a golden calf. They don’t describe it in detail, but it isn’t necessary. A bovine of shinny metal, even on Wall Street these days, always means the same thing – “We’re all in for the material world, wealth and carnality.” Moses took exception, because, he said, it would turn out badly. He suggested a list of simple rules he hoped would get people thinking about something besides money.

Seems we keep slipping back, and we pay the price. Thinking about money all the time turns humans into pigs, and commercial TV pours on vicarious sex and violence to seal the deal. Where’s Moses with his almighty authority to save humanity from winding up in the gutter, again, herded like sheep by great wealth with private security? You say he’s gone away, and no one would listen to him now, anyway? Maybe we’ll have to throw down the golden calf ourselves this time, and in its place establish an art that asserts human dignity has a higher value than yellow metal dug from the ground, made into the shape of a muscular phallus with horns.

devolution

2011-06-07T09:48:00.001-04:00

Just saw ‘Cave of Dreams’, about artwork so old, 32,000 years, and so graphically sophisticated it calls into question what it means to be human. It was preceded by previews of two animated movies, one the antics of blue elves and the other about anthro-racecars, apparently produced to entertain morons, or, in the case of young children, morons in training. Oh what have we become, my only friend…………….

truth, lies, and vampire art

2011-06-03T11:53:00.000-04:00

Andy was absolutely truthful, and his art helped a generation lie. Instead of creating an engaging, thoughtful image people would want to see, he reproduced the Brillo box and the soup can with the most varieties, already the most commonly seen images by the largest number of people, banal and empty. This inversion of cognitive process became his brilliant gimmick, selling out art with a candid panache, and universally lowering expectations with his crude counterfeiting. He ran a sweatshop art production operation he called “the factory”, without irony, and expressed total disinterest in the subject of art –- “that’s a man’s name”, said he. He derided human aspiration, most famously stating that, “in the world of the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The ensuing total desolation of the human spirit he kept to himself.

So the evening news degenerates into tabloid sensation, communal credit cards have been maxed-out, and we are confronted with presidential candidates simply unworthy of ridicule. Surely, there’s no connection. Could it be that reducing the notion of art to blotty celebrity posters and squeezing the dollars out of the corpse is the direct visual metaphor for the atavistic mentality that wrecked the economy, abandoned and exploited vast constituencies, and declared the highest attainment of all to be the acquisition of enormous wealth, banal and empty? If there was a connection, not a correlation but, actually, an identity, art would be ‘real’, and would both reflect and determine how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Time to take art more seriously --

the welfare queens of art

2011-05-28T17:06:00.000-04:00

At a time when municipalities are laying off firemen and cops, when legal aid is shutting down, when health and housing benefits are being withdrawn from the poor, non-profit arts organizations petition, demonstrate, and politically intimidate for more money. The cultural benefits they enumerate come from the creativity of people in the community who probably also work day jobs, while they get along quite nicely with just forty hours.

If the community is going to invest in art, more money needs to go to the artists. Instead it goes to organizations that are all overhead, doling out drabs to impose radical-chic agendas on artists seeking their recognition, any recognition, while keeping the audience at bay. Performers need community support to supplement ticket sales, but community response is part of the equation. Supporting visual art means looking at enough art to get to know the artists in your area, and buying some simple piece of original art, sometime – maybe a hand-made print or a watercolor. The money will go to a good cause, and you can keep the art.

the buy and hold collector

2011-05-18T08:45:00.002-04:00

These are people who buy art only to put it in storage for ten years, intending to bring it out again when the price has quadrupled, prices pumped ever higher at widely publicized fake auctions, convicted and time served. These collectors don’t care what's on the front -- colors, talent, craft, or vision. What they do care about is celebrity and favor, trends and revivals, all based on the name, the trademark, the brand. Well, it can’t go on forever. Like a cartoon coyote, big-time art can only stay up in the thin air so long as it doesn’t look down, and then it’s spiraling free-fall to a little puff miles below.

New money and old envy could keep their autograph business going for a while, raw petroleum transmuted into a magazine’s fashionable living room, but they won’t produce significant art. Google Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Serra to see why. At some point society’s gaze will shift, a culture in crises reexamines, higher fuel prices will bring about a new seriousness, a deeper introspection, and a new respect for the clarity and immediacy of visual art. Sometime, in not that many years, Warhol’s entire output will suddenly appear tawdry and tattered as an abandoned carnival, all smeary posters and sloppy plagiarisms, and people won’t admit to owning any of it. One ugly auction without enough "clients" and the rest of big-time art starts to leak, hissing and sagging, turning all that warehoused ‘buy and hold’ art into rotten cantaloupes.

just art

2011-05-15T15:21:00.001-04:00

What art expresses, first of all, is self-regard, and it applies to cultures and to individuals. In modern times artwork is an amalgam of craft and vision, and just its making, regardless of content, demonstrates the dedication and commitment of a serious person. The viewer who admires the art for its effort and accomplishment is taking them self seriously, as well. Somehow in this exchange viewer and artist acknowledge each other, although they’re separated by time – a message sent and received, both directions. That’s good enough – it’s what’s needed. Art doesn’t sell anything, not even itself, and that’s a reason to buy it. Sometimes it’s just good to get a friendly nod as you’re heading out the door – we’re all in this together.

the one thing

2011-05-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

Computers can do everything better than we can, except for one thing. Computers can’t make art. Computers can make stuff that looks like art, but it isn’t the same. Thirty two thousand years ago somebody made pictures of the animals in their world deep in a cave. Somehow we moderns can look at the marks they made and recognize animals that no longer exist in Europe, animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands.

In the art they made to represent the world, they revealed themselves, and, as it turns out, made a statement that stands for us all. Wouldn’t phase a computer – its gut and heart wouldn’t feel a wave of deep nostalgia for such an eloquent expression of awareness from so far beyond our earliest recollections. A computer would have no clue why people stand in line to see Van Gogh, and be at a total loss to explain why they go back. Smarter, faster, harder to kill they may be, but they don’t know our history on this planet as carried in our genes, and they can’t create images which resonate in human consciousness. Only art and artists can do that.

real estate adventures –

2011-05-06T10:02:00.000-04:00

heard this amusing story about a house showing where the owners have to be gone, and the real estate agent tells them later the clients didn’t want to buy their house, but, based on the art hanging on the walls, did say they’d like to be friends.

looking at the man in the mirror

2011-04-22T08:35:00.006-04:00

The ethic of post-atomic American culture has been a savage commercialism lowering and leveling our expectations of ourselves, as reflected in our art. Does an old movie magazine photo of Marilyn Monroe, proclaimed as art by Andy Warhol, really reflect our inner being? Maybe. On the other hand, the whole art enterprise bears the earmarks of a winking-nodding conspiracy of cruising sharks. Does the entire tawdry matchstick castle have to crumble before people begin to shake off the corruption of our taste, the evasion of taxes to stock museums -- more winking and nodding, the unquestioning support of vast teaching operations leading to no visible means of support? Maybe not.

wrong orifice

2011-03-14T20:12:00.002-04:00

Vision takes up half the brain and auditory just a corner. Words go in through the ear, and even when we read with our eyes the information processes through language decoders in our ears – we “listen” to the written word. Much called art, these days, goes in that way too, and it’s the wrong orifice.

proof

2011-03-12T09:42:00.005-05:00

I’ve read where art students were right most of the time when trying to decide if the art in front of them was made by a professional artist or by a farm animal/small child. This “research” was cited as irrefutable proof that abstract art is – what? Are we really having this conversation? Is this serious or is it a joke, and could it be either, since we’re only talking about art? What this research actually reveals is something about the expectations of the researchers and the respect they feel for making art.

art and tears

2011-02-17T09:15:00.004-05:00

Ever see a piece of art that made you cry? It’s a quaint idea. An artist can make you cry when they touch a place so far down tears seem to come for no reason. It’s not unlike putting your finger in the back of your throat and making yourself gag, an automatic reflex. It’s happened to me twice I can think of – once in front of a Picasso in the LA county museum, and once in front of a Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Didn’t feel sad, but each piece caught me unexpected, and I had to sit down – made my eyesight blurry. Except for that, it really wasn’t so bad.

Now, it might sound whimsical to those who haven’t experienced it, but another crew pads through every art museum they come to, and checks out the galleries, hoping to find the artist who has something personal to say just to them. Tears will probably come under control, but being open to a path of information which goes into the brain direct, without translation, can broaden the insights that shape the words. Mostly, what I feel but can’t explain is an acknowledgment of fundamental connection -- like finding a friendly island in the seas of modern times.

school days

2011-01-28T11:14:00.009-05:00

What if art school was sabotage? Maybe not a conscious effort to pull up the ladder, to cripple future competition, to strangle a serious voice, an authentic art, the possibility of a self-sustaining career; it would be more like an unseen institutional imperative, an inbuilt self-preservation mechanism, a poisonous coating of goo around the profession of being an artist.

How does anyone expect to learn about becoming an artist from people who have never sold art for a living, never paid for their own studios or art supplies, and have no life experience beyond the insular confines of campus? It’s sorta like going to a priest for marriage counseling. What they know about is keeping their head down and progressing, year by year, toward the department chairmanship – art is their day job.

The awful truth, kids -- Duchamp was pulling a prank, and had the dumb luck to be taken seriously. Art is about finding hidden places in common with others, and it’s not the same thing as just hiding. Everything they told you is wrong.

abstract truth

2011-01-23T07:30:00.002-05:00

Peter Schjeldahl, resident visual art critic for the New Yorker stated while reviewing a MOMA exhibit of Abstract Expressionists from the fifties, “They embraced abstraction as the shortest route to universal meaning and significance.” It’s a patent absurdity, one that undermines our culture, our thought, and our integrity.

Visual art, like music, has been a manifestation of human expression since the beginning, and while flutes and drums have been lost to time, paintings still survive on rock walls. Visual art preceded writing by millenia, encapsulating and conveying meaning, and representing us, one to another. It isn’t tool-making that separates us from the rest of the animals, but the making of art, and these days, it separates us from the machines, too. Only humans make art, and only humans recognize it.

Abstract art is a negation of meaning, and its early practitioners were nihilistic, disappointed because art is difficult, and because life is hard -- lessons learned at the open end of a bottle. Suicidal drunkenness ‘in’ isn’t going to yield anything pleasant coming ‘out’ – abstract expressionism is ugly. The rise of abstraction paralleled other fundamentalist reactionary movements seen since, and the destruction of the twelve hundred year old sandstone Buddha by the Taliban embodies the early abstractionist’s attitudes toward the foundations and heritage of visual art.

After a devastating purge, life usually returns chastened and different, brighter and with new vigor. Time to jettison the whole mess – the enormous state apparatus of schools and grant agencies, the celebrity status of cynical hustlers, and the gallery system with its dollar rankings based on some invisible consensus and sheer mystery. Time to wake up. Time to start over.

blame art

2011-01-14T07:53:00.005-05:00

It isn’t Rush and Sarah caused the violence – they’re just bumps on the log. The awful fact is that art is real. It shapes our perceptual net, tells us what the world’s about, and it forms the reality we share. Can anyone face the idea that it’s our entertainment that makes it seem natural to carry instant mayhem in the coat pocket, in the purse, under the front seat? Our gun laws are bald-faced irrational, and it’s because crime shows have been substituting intimidation and violence for our own natural memories, which have become seriously diminished while we’re watching crime shows. Avid TV watchers, action movie addicts, video gamers are all here to testify they don’t feel safe outside without a gun.

Why would art do that to us? It’s because this art is in bondage, sold into slavery and prostitution, destined to give us distorted visions of life because it’s being used to sell us something – spotless kitchens, the suburban pickup truck, medicine for the dreary lives we lead, unable to relate to each other while dodging phantom spies and dope dealers in every parking facility. Well, we can say we didn’t know we were poisoning ourselves, our culture, the future of the planet and everything on it, with just a little vicarious ultra violence, but the proof is in the way we pass out real guns and ammunition.

The fault is not in our stars, but in our taste for art – most popularly a pastiche of gun violence and pornography, or maybe just gun violence pornography. We don’t think art is real – we say all this gore is cathartic, an entertainment, an honest depiction of anyone's life, and we’re fooling ourselves. If you want to think better thoughts, look at better art.

words can't follow

2010-12-17T09:09:00.007-05:00

Art works because each of us feels alone, and art is the way back to a friendlier place. Nothing is much friendlier than sharing a deeply held truth about yourself with others, even if it’s only you and the artist. Thoughtful people look for and sometimes find themselves in art. Maybe they find the art they would have made if they’d just given up their career and devoted themselves to art for decades, or maybe they feel connection, an empathy for a piece – they don’t know why. Now if someone else, maybe a total stranger, seems to like the same piece, chances are better than average they’ll have other things in common – a fondness for ethnic food, a tendency to drive too fast, a preference for city life, even though they may not speak. Whatever it is they’re responding to can’t be talked about directly. That’s because words can’t follow everywhere pictures can go – it's the reason we have art around.

Also see "The More Things Change, The More Art Remains True." Published in Business Lexington, December 24, 2010: http://www.bizlex.com/Articles-c-2010-12-20-96436.113117-The-more-things-change-the-more-art-remains-true.html

published in Bizlex

2010-12-06T15:40:00.007-05:00

It’s been a while since I blogged. For one thing I had an article published in Business Lexington, a mashup of two previous posts called “Putting Creativity on the Payroll”, suggesting that CEO’s put an artist on the payroll just to be an artist, and one on buying from local artists, "Art Destinations Need Patrons Who Prize Hometown Art". (See links below.) The intent is to foster an indigenous movement which supports working artists and recognizes their contribution as members of a progressive and humane community.

I think art movements begin with awakening audiences, not with genius artists, and why not here and now is my question. We look around to find ourselves in a desert, miles and miles of seamless walls and nothing but decorator prints and couch paintings. Information and exposure is all the water we need.

The way we were……….

Essentially I think there are artists everywhere, and the variable factor is audience, which has been suppressed by both commercial and academic interests. The business side wants to narrow and control the product producing artificial scarcity, while the state-supported side wants to avoid the scrutiny of just about everybody while getting paid. They both promote an exclusionary art which justifies itself through a consensus of self-interests, and each affects a manner aloof and condescending toward the general public. This isn’t the time to argue with them, and prove them wrong -- it’s time to do something else.

http://www.bizlex.com/Articles-c-2010-10-14-95608.113117-Putting-creativity-on-the-payroll.html

www.bizlex.com/Articles-c-2010-11-24-96181.113117-Art-destinations-need-patrons-who-prize-hometown-art.html

actual censorship

2010-09-04T12:13:00.007-04:00

Where is the art you don’t get to see, haven’t had a chance to own, that will probably never be made? It’s been censored. No, not because it was obscene or unwholesome, heavens no, but because it was accessible, direct, and might appeal to the general public. The very people we hire with our tax dollars to decide what art is worthy of our notice have been hanging out a carrot on a string, getting a free ride, and the donkey has been us. They do this by staying slightly ahead of the curve, out toward the cutting edge, and if too many people start to like it, they move on. They sponsor a stable of artists who would be completely unsustainable on an open market, and promote them as being superior to artists who might be able to support themselves if they had access to the galleries, the grants and prizes, the press attention currently monopolized by the non-profits, the universities, and all other entities supported with public money and not by the dissemination of art.

They exert control through blatant censorship and call it being progressive, contemporary, and not limited to the narrow provincialism of the people who buy their lunch. Oh, they pretend to promote art, but artists don’t thrive in their communities. They’ve made art an amputee in everyone’s hometown, a sacrifice to charitable events, and expect artists to decorate various street utilities around the town for degrading pittances. Maybe that’s not the visibility for art we need. Original art direct from the hand of an artist who has something to say about the world, has acquired the ability to say it, and who wants to find common ground with the viewer, might appeal to a lot of people. It might supply something they’ve felt missing in their lives, given the chance. Let’s give it a chance.

Instead of handing over your money to some guilt-driven fund drive, for which you receive nothing but the assurance they’ll be back for even more next year, buy a piece of art from a local artist you like, and hang it where you’ll see it every day. Simple as that.

artists are stuck

2010-09-01T11:31:00.003-04:00

Artists are stuck in menial jobs all around you. They started out devoting their main efforts to making art, and tried to earn a living with what was left. This technique, known as “earning a living with the left hand”, has been a common device of long tradition among artists. Some bail pretty quickly, finding sustenance with diminished aspirations in advertising, if blessed with degrees they teach, and still others dive into the state-funded, non-profit art apparatus where they crush the dreams of others for meager but regular pay. They most all flirted with the notion of life as an artist early on, but sensed the butter was on the other side.

Some artists took up a manual trade, figuring they’d be tired but could save their mind for reading and thinking about art. “Just another construction worker with an art degree” the last time I saw a friend. Some became cooks, clerks in art supply stores, whatever it was, they went home and made art, at least they did in the beginning. Soon they found the wide-open territory of visual expression was narrow and restricted, after all. Their straight-ahead sincerity was casually dismissed by academics who favor the stylish offhandedness of art made on a salary -- derivative, contrived, good enough to get paid.

They found the cost of studio space, the equipment they needed, the stuff to make art – canvas, paint, brushes are all bought at the sacrifice of everything else beyond bare necessities, when earning a living with the left hand. If they wanted the companionship of another person, that person had to make all the same sacrifices – a lot to ask. So, most of them gave up – see previous post ‘upside down’. They’re out there now, cranking out some semi-functional craft, stuck in some meaningless job, defensive and self-conscious around professional siblings at Thanksgiving. But they aren’t the hurting ones……..

It’s you, and all your fellow citizens – new houses, endless floor plans, neutral colored walls to the horizon, and what are you putting on them? Tired animal prints, florals to pick up some color from the drapes? You’ve been robbed. All the art those people would have made, if your local art authorities had not closed doors in their faces, isn’t there. The living they might have made, not as flamboyant international celebrities, but as respected contributors to community life and well-being has been diminished, diverted, didn’t happen, and they aren’t the only ones poorer.

artist-in-residence in industry

2010-08-23T08:04:00.002-04:00

As an employer with office staff, production people, break rooms, reception areas, offices and conference rooms do you think it's possible art acquisition would be more economical, of greater investment benefit, and more fun for you and the rest of your company if you had an artist on payroll? If you’ve seen previous posts – most particularly ‘art and the private sector’ and ‘reasons to own art’, all of them really, you might consider answering ‘yes’. Yes, it would be a practical, business-wise and publically responsible decision to hire an artist to be an artist.

In terms of community benefit, the ultimate objective is to nurture a functional art market capable of sustaining dedicated area artists, and distributing original art to homes, offices, and public areas in the central KY area. The first step would be to support the development of individual artists, allowing them the studio time to find their own voices, and in a mutually beneficial exchange with the members of your very grounded, purpose-driven enterprise. This private initiative to jump start a latent art awareness in the community is necessary since years of publicly funded, non-profit efforts on behalf of art have left art weaker, less accessible, and ever more in need of public support – predictable really. By shifting the responsibility of finding, funding, and displaying art from career bureaucrats to the private sector, in this case you, an organic connection is reestablished between the artist and patron, and everything changes – most of all, the art.

The artist, as your employee, feels an urge to connect with staff and production personnel, and their art will be influenced by your support. A working artist benefits from the positive and negative feedback of a varied, unbiased audience, and would welcome the opportunity to explain their objectives in common terms, all in addition to essential time in the studio. Regular employees would have something to talk and think about directly connected with their workplace, and might soon begin to realize art’s values are something like their own. You would acquire original art, a worthy vessel of company tradition in years to come, would be presenting a progressive public image, and by way of your patronage the community you live in might become known nation-wide as a nice place to live and a good place to buy art.

art in a time of shrinking expectations

2010-08-17T11:03:00.001-04:00

Less -- it’s the new more. Can’t go back is what they say. The pre-2008 economy was hyper-inflated, a period of reckless consumption, and more, more, more, without real assets, nothing but plastic, to back it up. It won’t come again. For one thing, consumers can’t be coaxed into maxing out for all that non-essential stuff again, another generation having learned to be more responsible, to take life more seriously, to buy just what they need.

The art market really went nuts, maybe even more than other financial systems, since its prices were pure speculation, fanned by the delirium of acquisition, the adulation of fame. A new order is taking over, with shifted priorities and new sensibilities. These days we don’t have the same money to spend on pointless stuff, and soon we’ll stop envying those who do. In times of contraction, people learn to travel light, to possess less stuff, to concentrate value. They begin to think of art in a brand new way. Ask yourself – would you rather move to a new city with eight works of art, or two vans of furniture? Would you rather tie up your assets in common possessions constantly wearing out, becoming dated and obsolete, or in a few unique objects which never change, which give constant pleasure, and which may even increase in value in the time you own them? These same questions are finding new answers these days.

art and the private sector

2010-08-14T09:55:00.001-04:00

Business can lead the way. Let’s change things, do it differently – see if we get a different result this time. Instead of automatically giving money to the local arts fund, pushed from behind by the accountant, pulled by a sense of community obligation, let’s consider how much the same money might buy.

Suppose you were to hire an artist, put them on the payroll, keep half the art. Frankly, what you pay for is studio time, but demonstrations and office discussions are also a possibility. Art goes up in your offices, your conference room and reception areas, and, for variety, you might trade around with other companies doing the same.* Not all artists would be compatible, but you get to review, hold interviews, borrow and hang the art while decisions are being made. Employees could participate, building a sense of company identity, and inspiring pride in personal performance. The art you acquire could eventually become valuable simply because you allowed an artist to find their feet, to build a body of work, to become productive and self-sustaining on their own.

Picking your artist might be easier than you think. Many of the mature ones have had a broad work experience, and may have touched your area or something similar before. Younger artists have fervor, and talk more about art than about themselves. In any case, their real resume is in the art they produce. Do they already put in as much work on their own as you would pay an employee, with a couple of raises, to do for you? If you come up with a yes, think with your pocketbook, and learn to like the art as you get used to it.

*see prior posts, ‘art and self expression’, and ‘authenticity”

gangsters and art

2010-08-12T09:56:00.005-04:00

When I first heard HBO was going to make movies for tv, I expected low-budget, b-grade soapers, which is what made-for-tv movies had always been on commercial driven broadcasting. This is probably because the essential ethic of advertising is that people are like sheep, and can be led by their insecurities, their longings and delusions into buying non-essential stuff. Entertainment for sheep is pretty simple – guns, confrontation, some implied intercourse and you’ve got yourself a winner, i.e., you’re going to sell lots of stuff. HBO produces the Sopranos for subscription, a different business model, and they go about it in a different way. They used all their technique, all their talent, all their artistic integrity to make something that looked like real life. Tony has trouble with his kids, gets food poisoning, tells his therapist about his mother just like a real person might. This expanded dimension allowed the viewer to use their own life experience to see into those characters, and to see a bit more of life through their eyes. People like good art – the Sopranos sold a lot of subscriptions to HBO. Not only that. Other production companies began to find support for better stories, better art, even on commercial tv. There continue to be ripples throughout the medium.

It isn’t necessary to call a glass dirty, goes an old bit of rhetoric, but only to put a clean glass up next to it. Someone has to have a clean glass, along with the means to get it on the same shelf, something that wasn’t possible in broadcast drama until HBO came along. Still, it’s clear we have an appetite for something better when it’s available. We need a new business model, one where the private side of our economy takes responsibility for finding, displaying, and promoting local art, and then we may actually begin to realize all those benefits the non-profits claim when fund raising, but never quite seem to find. If business people took responsibility for the art hanging in their own offices, for finding and becoming patrons of area artists whose work they admire, and for making art a part of the conversation at social gatherings, they would find life and business more rewarding, more productive, more profitable, and, in ripples, so would everybody else.

do you have too much money for art?

2010-08-05T07:45:00.005-04:00

Could write a novel to hint at it, wealthy insensitives on horseback chasing foxes through peasant crops, but we see it in the news everyday. Might construct a pithy poem, record an insightful song, do a little dance, but let’s just say it out. If you haven’t stood on the edge of a two lane highway late at night in front of the only gas station in miles with seventeen cents in your pocket and one direction as good as another, you’re probably not ready for art. It’s a place you might get to from several directions, and it may not always look just like that, but if you’ve been there you know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean to sound heroic. We’re born into a stormy sea, most of us, and parental expectations, cultural norms, and our own natural limitations are the bare and jagged rocks we cling to. It takes some adjustment, and art helps with that.

Wealth, in this or any time, is about frolicking in warm sunny pools. Royal lines declined without the constant tempering of war because only the immense cost and the strategic realities of battle could penetrate the cocoon of convenience and comfort their wealth provided. Without the strife of daily living – changing tires, making beds, stretching paychecks, several rooms in our personal attic are never occupied. Artists who make art for the ultra wealthy understand their overriding emotion is boredom, having never gone upstairs at all, and they connive to amuse and distract them with giant chrome puppies, diamond encrusted skulls, and such. They’re not like you and me.

We work hard for the money, and with unemployment up around ten percent, we all probably work a little harder. Before we take some of that money and spend it on art, it has to mean something to us. What would that be like? Maybe we like the image, and maybe we like the color, and maybe we like the way our expectation is always fooled when we look at it. Maybe we’ve met the artist, and are following their career as they sell art to friends and neighbors, and we get to see other examples of their work when we visit. Maybe we see in a sincere work of art an old friend in the making, an image and its attendant memories that will always be there, unchanged, wherever life takes us. Whatever it might be, really rich folks won’t get it. They think art is about collecting famous names on stuff -- there are very expensive ink blobs for them.

art is the measure

2010-08-02T11:12:00.008-04:00

Art is the measure of regard one has for one’s self. Obvious for the artist, but it actually applies to everyone. It’s true for the art you look at, as well as art you might make. What else is art about – anyone with a better answer step to the front of the line. The artist makes a statement – this is the best I can do, this is what I think you want to see, this will make me famous, and it’s right out front for anyone to look at. At this point the artist is completely honest, or at least can’t hide anything, because if they’re a grant-sucking, art regurgitating camp follower, it’ll show in their work.

For everybody else it’s pretty simple, too. What art do you have on your walls -- at home, in the office, and how important is it to you? Do you see yourself in the art you choose to own, choose to look at, even to notice. Maybe not. Public money has been trivializing and demeaning art for over half a century, and by now the general population doesn’t seem to care – what a surprise. The first artists to be supported, promoted, made famous with public money, grants from foundations and public institutions, were the abstract expressionists after the second world war – art’s Taliban. Instead of firing squads they used ridicule, ending careers, driving established representational artists into menial occupations elsewhere, pissing on all of art history – the way fundamentalists tend to do. More extreme than most, they banned the depiction of anything, and it went on for years and years. You still might hear some old art professor fading into retirement absently mouthing the words –“I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature” for the million-billionth time.

Public money turns art into the idiot pet we walk twice a day and otherwise ignore, and that’s its job. Built into the distribution of public money are enough filters for mediocrity to ensure a public thirst for self-verification and redemption will have to look elsewhere – politics or religion, perhaps. The poison in the well are the decisions of self-serving bureaucrats who don’t know or care anything about art – check the walls in their houses for verification. Artists with self-respect may turn away, and find themselves turned away from, with no access to grants, commissions, and the resulting public recognition. (see previous post – 'upside down') Public institutions -- non-profits, state commissions, public university art schools all expend vast resources, the public's own money, to commandeer the public’s attention for their own benefit, not the benefit of art, the public or its culture.

It’s time to see past the vast public art enterprise, so dependently attached to the veins of our political structure, and look for independent art and artists who express, in some unspeakable way, the seriousness we have felt, or would like to feel, in our own lives, day to day.

can’t get there from here – Kroger bakes art

2010-07-25T00:34:00.010-04:00

Kroger wants to do right by their customers, wants to give them what they want at a fair price, but they get tired – tired of people complaining about the bread. It’s refined and processed, reduced to the lowest common denominator for taste and nutrition, and has no personality at all – like cotton candy that turns to paste when you touch it to your mouth. Sick and tired of hearing it, so they decided to give those so-called art bakeries, the ones producing traditional breads with character, texture, and taste, a run for the customer’s money. Deep in stainless steel labs late into the night they tested and baked until they had an array of breads to rival any family-owned, neighborhood bakery. There were seeded tops and different shapes, all looking really diverse and wonderful, but all made from the same regular old white bread dough. All the different kinds of bread tasted the same, and not a bit better than their regular bread. They found the look, they had the technology, but they couldn’t produce a good loaf of bread.

The very process of finding and funding public art provides the look of art, the sensation of something new, but it’s a generic, one size fits all, bleached of meaning copy product – glitzy and clever on the outside, but all the same white bread on the inside. It isn’t anyone’s fault – it’s the process. Constructing cool stuff to conform to guidelines and parameters, figuring markups and materials, delivery dates and installation constraints turns artists into culture vendors and fills a city up with things that eventually rust, fade, and collect debris. Does it add to the quality of life – maybe. Mediocre in gives mediocre out – it’s like a law or something. Artists line up to receive a drop of public money, in the form of direct commissions from city or state, or the tax-deductible sponsorship of business, while myriad non-profits grow glossy. The city is left with stuff to maintain forever and ever, or until the thrill is gone.

It isn’t the art that’s the problem – it’s the backward set of priorities that puts it there on the corner, in the median. The Picasso in Chicago (see prior post, July 4), often cited as an iconic example of public art, wasn’t chosen by committee, wasn’t paid for with public money, didn’t fit anyone’s parameters.

one art

2010-07-18T15:13:00.007-04:00

There is one art. Scholars who explain it all to the rest of us don’t see it that way. They divide art up with fences and gates, categories, periods, schools. They do this because that’s the way they’re taught – so much easier to score the tests. By the time they’re done, representational painting and abstract painting are different things, modern and contemporary are separate realms of expression, every year in SoHo has it’s own stars. Actually, the idea of making marks on a flat surface which somehow create 3D pictures in the mind stretches back thirty thousand years we know of, and it’s been going on continually since. Languages require a lot of learning and divide up humanity into regions, tribes, nationalities – the obvious source of many of our problems. Art goes in directly. Fifty percent of the brain interprets vision and eighty percent of the circuits connect in some way, according to tv documentaries. Art needs no translation.

Art has been used to pull many wagons. Early on we think it had to do with hunting, the Egyptians made it talk, the church used it to shape and condition human experience, and we sell stuff with it. Behind it all is this mysterious ability of human perception to animate line and shape on a page. Our purpose here is to deal with the pure stuff, and it doesn’t really matter which box you pull it out of. There are artists all around with something to say, and some create visual images as deep and wide as you have eyes to see.

inception

2010-07-17T19:45:00.002-04:00

Seems like a novel idea, planting seeds in the subconscious to grow and bear fruit in the inner workings of our heads – actually, it’s happening every day, but instead of attacking us in our dreams they use art, and call it advertising. The power of art, the persuasiveness of art, and it’s all focused at getting us to buy something – toothpaste, motorcycles, ED medicines. Does it change behaviors? They sure make a lot of money claiming it does, with charts and graphs.

upside down

2010-07-16T23:01:00.002-04:00

Just sitting thinking about people I knew, committed artists living and breathing it, who have gone other directions, given up, settled for less. A couple were landscape painters who loved the countryside, loved their brushes and tubes of paint. One had a studio down the hall – his high school buddies would fall in on Friday night from their different professions to drink beer and engage in old familiar conversations, and the other lived up the stairs. Doing other stuff these days. A ceramicist who had a studio across the hall was making free standing figures, finally clock faces and trivets – she knew all the formulas, understood the chemistry, watched the kiln all night while it slowly built up temperature, and she’s gone, too. I’m not making this up.

Their expectations weren’t that high – no one expected to be famous. Their only ambition, and mine, too, was to pay the rent, to buy the materials, to keep going. Not only did they finally find themselves defeated, the artwork they would have made in their maturity never happened. The people who might have owned their work, lived with their art, and enhanced their lives with it settled for less as well. Artists I know who struggle on have learned how to hang sheetrock, how to repair furniture, how to live with old cars, while non-profit arts groups suck up grant money, pass out favors, take home regular paychecks with medical and retirement. Art is upside down in central Kentucky.

public art

2010-07-12T20:59:00.001-04:00

This is a discussion about public art which began with a Facebook posting by Ide Bouldin advocating for public art in Lexington, citing the Picasso sculpture in Chicago as an example. This began an exchange about public perception vs. artist’s intentions, the role of public art, and art in general. Click on 'Conversation' above.

goldfish art

2010-07-12T08:32:00.001-04:00

Recently a posting on an art blog reported an exhibition in which goldfish were swimming in blenders and patrons were invited to push the buttons. Sounds like something severely abused children might do, unsupervised. Participation in violence isn’t going to be my favorite arts activity, and seems, in certain respects, to be bald-faced unwholesome. On this blog, in this mode of thinking, we ask that people consider taking money that could be spent on other stuff and buy art with it, instead. The major argument we have to make is about mental health, psychic well-being, individual realization, and much of contemporary art, including pureed live fish, doesn’t seem to help with that. Art has great power in the human mind, and trivializing dark impulses might be counter-productive is all I’m saying.

attention span management

2010-07-07T08:26:00.001-04:00

Does the internet give us access to all the information while making it near impossible to think? Well, yeah, so it seems -- people have been doing research. It has to do with dwell time as much as anything. Being smart, it turns out, isn’t so much about brain power as the ability to focus what we’ve got in one place long enough to gain traction. Surfing is screwing it up. The reason print media is losing relevance is because fewer and fewer people can get to the bottom of the page. Is that bad? – probably. When slogans are seen as philosophy and sensationalism is called the news human potential starts way behind, and politics turn atavistic.

Art doesn’t cure it, but it can offer some relief. Art fortifies the attention span by expanding the moment. Instead of a flickering universal search, one teapot sits next to a cup and a lemon ever since you bought it, inherited it, were given it as a gift. On the first day a painting is seldom a match for the most modest of home entertainment centers, but it gains slowly, catching and holding our notice over days, months, and years. Owning interesting art is an investment in attention span management in coming decades, and it’s becoming a better bargain every day.

Starving dogs and public art

2010-07-04T10:00:00.002-04:00

Most public art seems little more than quirky decoration, compared with that thing in Chicago in a square of its own, right downtown. It’s worth noting Picasso couldn’t get a visa to visit the US, and Chicago, not NY, always seemed to represent America’s brutality to European artists. Even so, when Chicago accepted it for free they didn’t bother to think it might mean something. Though they won’t admit it, they’ve come to suspect implied criticism of some sort, and have been trying to figure a way to dump it in the lake for years. I wouldn’t pretend to know what it means, either, but it has the hunched shoulders, the bare ribs and splayed pelvis of canine starvation – humanity’s own notification of serious bad times. I’ve actually seen the homeless sheltering underneath to soak up the residual heat in the steel, as if it had been intended. I don’t agree or disagree – I’m just awestruck.

art and sports

2010-06-30T10:08:00.003-04:00

Art, like sports, is in the experience of playing the game. The reason color commentators at sporting events are former players and coaches is because we naturally give more credence to those who have had the experience. Without them all the stadiums, sports publications, and all the experts would be out of work. The game of art is simple. The participants are the artists who make it, and the people who look, buy, and own it.

Sports requires athletic ability and special physical attributes – jockeys are small and football players are big. Few of us qualify. Art requires looking and thinking, which should include almost anyone willing to try. Lectures and demonstrations won’t make you a better tennis player, but getting out on the court, maybe being embarrassed at first, will. Nerves and reflexes, muscles and joints will eventually know the game. Try looking at original art, in due time buy something appealing, and hang it in a place where you’ll see it every day. Mysteries will fade, and you’ll begin to know what you like, why you like it, and where to get it. You’ll be in the game.

seeing truth

2010-06-30T08:53:00.000-04:00

Jackson Pollock, his paintings are famous and so is he, a seminal figure to be sure. Besides being famous, his paintings are unbelievably expensive, and just in case you wanted to buy one, here’s what you get. Jackson couldn’t do representation, so you’d acquire a revolutionary form of painting, one that profoundly embodies despair, frustration, and futility. Some said at the time that Jackson’s work wasn’t art, but you wouldn’t hear that from me. I see the spontaneous, totally authentic expression of monumental social unease and self-doubt turned aggressive and belligerent through the medium of alcohol. Beyond rendering his inner existential tantrum, the work, itself, has also been gloriously self-destructive, commercial paint solvents eating away at raw canvas, and museums keep his paintings on constant life-support. Pure genius, that.

The question is, if you’re not a terminal alcoholic verging toward suicide, why would you want to own one of Jackson’s paintings, or even spend much time in front of one at a museum? The awful truth about art is, it’s really true – art reveals the artist at whatever level you care to look, and sometimes you find yourself in there, too.

other people's eyes

2010-06-16T14:43:00.005-04:00

Some people aren't sure how the world looks around them until they check other faces to make sure everything’s ok. They dress, not to suit their own taste -- whatever that might be, but for other people’s sense of what’s cool this year, this month, this time of day. Some people, it turns out, seems to be most of us, and it isn’t hard to understand. We swim submerged in advertising which constantly promises to make each of us more acceptable to everyone else, and even though we know they lie, some part of us believes them. They know we'd all like to be liked, to belong, to go along with the crowd.

It’s in the purity of art where the dross of any tangible value burns away, and all that’s left is an impossible price for some sanctified master's offhand gesture, sustained and justified only because someone else, somewhere, would pay that much and more. If no such buyer is available, an anonymous phone call to the auction floor enters a bid for them as if they existed. The value of art, according to industry bluebooks, is an accumulation of prior approvals, the consensus of qualified authorities, and, at the top, artificial prices established in bogus auctions. Looking through the eyes of other people has its drawbacks.

For one thing, it’s very hard to see art that way. Actually seeing art requires looking through one’s own eyes, and as a fact that’s part of it, just in itself. Picasso said, “Art is a lie which helps you to see the truth”, and if you can actually see what the artist made, without reference to fame, or price, or what anyone else thinks, you have a chance of seeing everything else that way, too.

change

2010-06-10T09:25:00.000-04:00

Google changed last night, again. They didn’t tell me. I just found it this morning doing something different. Change is becoming unpredictable. The youngsters stay on top of it for a while, but they’ll go spinning off, too. Art as a life-saver ring tossed to the person over-board makes sense – more every day. Art, itself, doesn’t change. Fashions come and go, but a worthy piece of art becomes more interesting, more potent with age. Even mediocre work gains in stature simply by being original, as charming frontier portraits down at the courthouse attest. What changes is how we see it, although it doesn’t happen overnight. An original painting owned forty years will become something entirely real, as furnishings and gadgets flicker and change all around it.

art and self expression

2010-05-27T09:35:00.002-04:00

With our new success in business, in a profession, what have we got? There’s more money, and that certainly can be convenient. There’s a better car and a bigger house or apartment, but does that satisfy? The opportunity to grow as an individual doesn’t come to everyone, and finding the authentic self, living life to the fullest, is the real reason we’ve been working so hard. There are shortcuts.

Art is not about the self-expression of the artist, one of many myths concerning art. Art, in the home, in the office, is about the self-expression of the owner, the person who pays. If that sounds peculiar, it’s only the world turned right side up. A home with seven or eight pieces of original art, in different styles, from different places and times, helps us to know the person, and helps that person know themselves.

Personal taste – it’s a process

First look at a lot of art, maybe meet an artist or two, and finally buy a piece of art. Sad but true, to make this method work best you have to spend a little too much, whatever that means for you. From that point on, art won’t be meaningless anymore. Anything you notice in an exhibit or gallery, in an office or home, will be compared with what you have already, and from there you find your way.

empty calories

2010-05-23T11:07:00.002-04:00

Fast food is bad for you. Politicians are preparing legislation – no more toys in happy meals in California, fewer sugary drinks in the vending machines. The franchises, themselves, are upgrading their menus. People are beginning to notice what they put in their mouths. They demand more nutrition, less fillers, a more profound food experience. A new health-consciousness blossoms in the community mind, and everything changes. Quality improves. The food is better and people are healthier, presumably happier, and we wonder how we could have poisoned ourselves for so long. Still, these same people, us, will look at anything.

Food is physical, has weight and texture, while visual images are only mental, ephemeral, easily manipulated and supposedly private. Seeing is conditioned by expectation and experience, which means we see what we’ve seen before, and not much else. If our visual diet is rush hour traffic twice a day and crime drama on TV at night, our ability to get much out of leaning over the rail at the grand canyon will be limited. Art is about visual nutrition, vitamins for the senses. The reason to own and live with art is to open the mind to real-life experiences, situations, decisions that have to be made.

Does it work? Probably wouldn’t fit on a scale or graph, but listen to the testimony of ordinary people who have made sacrifices to own art. They’re not willing to trade back because of tangible differences they feel in broader areas of their lives. Digital reality is a long strip mall of empty calories, enough to live on but insubstantial and fleeting – the thumbnail Picasso no different than the thumbnail moon landing. An actual work of art direct from the hand of an artist has more juice in it than all the virtual tours of all the museums in the world, and it’s never consumed – it just gets stronger, more vital, more healing.

paying attention

2010-05-17T06:06:00.001-04:00

“I think, therefore I am”, is a famous quote, spare and efficient, positive and weighty. Nevertheless, just existing is becoming an ever more tenuous concept, and just by itself doesn’t count for that much. It would be better to say, “I’m paying attention, therefore I am here.” That’s a concept with traction, the first stone on a path that leads somewhere. As living organisms it’s what we were made to do, but it isn’t always easy. Babies resist sleep, some do, as near as we can tell because they don’t want the lights to go out. We’d pay attention all the time, ourselves, if it wasn’t all so boring.

Our dilemma is fairly simple. We’ve inherited a survival program hard-wired – an antiquated operating system balking at modern applications. It’s primary feature, so-called habituation, dictates that any information which doesn’t lead directly to eating, fornication, or our possible immediate demise is constantly pushed toward the back of the line in our heads. We become civilized when we learn how to work around it, in varying degrees. We sublimate and substitute, but it never goes away. Repetitive anything without tangible reward or punishment on the spot tends to lose focus, colors fade, other thoughts crowd in – it’s hard to pay attention.

Just the same, we like paying attention. It gives us pleasure. Bored people around the planet fill up their leisure flirting with danger, just to “feel alive”. Returnees from the world’s combat zones suffer rueful nostalgia for the smell of anything in the morning like over there. Closer to home, many of us enjoy travel, mainly because seeing something never seen before offers the simple joy of using the equipment we came with. Still, there's only so much we can do. Louder gadgets just seem to amplify the problem, pounding evolution's finely-tuned senses back into our heads, as next morning bleakness attests.

Art is about paying attention. There are more elaborate theories, but this one rules them all. Whatever style or school, whatever time period, art’s main function is to focus and condition the attention of the viewer. As every other possession begins to fade with familiarity, a successful work of art compels attention, becoming more of a presence in a room, in a home, in a lifetime, the longer it’s owned. Beyond that, owning and living with original art also makes the blue of the morning sky more pronounced, the sound of birds more distinct, and makes good food taste better – all that comes with just paying attention.

authenticity

2010-05-07T09:21:00.000-04:00

We believe the primary function of art is to be owned and lived with, but that isn’t all we mean by owning art. About the middle of the last century vast amounts of public money began to influence what art was taught in colleges, what art received public recognition, and which artists were granted public support. The inborn imperatives of bureaucratic careerism has led us to an art that is obtuse and distant, a hothouse variety unable to support itself on the local level, and most usually associated with charities and non-profit activities.

We assert that decisions made with out of pocket money, with an intention of long-term ownership, leads to a different art, one that embodies the values and aspirations of our culture more authentically. When the community truly begins to support working artists by buying and owning their work, sophistication and taste, along with the quality of the art produced, can gain ground rapidly together.

reasons to own art

2010-05-01T12:22:00.000-04:00

There was a time not long ago when our every possession bore the imprint of its maker, yet these days nothing we own was made by human hands. Everything is extruded or stamped, designed by computer on some other continent, issued in hundreds of thousands, and we get one. Not only is nothing we own really personal, it’s about to be superseded by even newer technologies. A work of art, now more than ever, is the distillation of what’s been left out – it’s the tincture of humanity that makes houses livable, makes work environments more humane, that helps us find our better selves.

In the workplace, original art sets an example that can inspire more conscientious work in the shop and sanction more creative thinking in front offices. Art in reception areas and conference rooms projects a serious maturity that is noticed by customers, vendors, and even the competition. At home, works of art become old friends, reflecting the personality of their owner, while recalling the past more vividly than a drawer full of photos. They move from place to place with their owner, claiming each new dwelling as familiar territory, a personal sanctuary in a world of impermanence and change. Finally, works of art endure, so that even after generations, when everything else has been discarded and replaced, over and over, they will look the same, although the world might find them more valuable.