The art world responded by repeating the same joke, with slight variations, over and over, while pretending to take itself seriously in the process. Much money was made by selling random objects to rich suckers. Now the whole joke may finally be starting to fall a bit flat.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it —even before they could put their love into words.

I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet the National Endowment for the Arts was conceived as some sort of middlebrow self-improvement program—sending Pablo Casals LPs to schools, helping small towns put on “Our Town,” subsidizing museums so they could put on challenging works like gigantic Calder mobiles, and paying off the survivors when the damned thing snapped a cable and carved a tour group in stir-fry slices. I’m sure it still funds good things. But let us risk a headache and try to think of a few art forms we managed to create without its assistance:

Jazz

Blues

Rock and Roll

Every movie made in America

Skyscrapers

Painting that looks like something

Sculpture that looks like someone

As it happens I like modern art, so this isn’t some philistine sneer at funny pitchers what don’t look like Whistler’s Mama. I’m not even opposed in principle to state funding of the art, for two reasons: 1) the monarchs and the church did a fine job of it for millennia, and 2) if some small town wants to help defray the cost of a play in the school gym, fine. But I have to draw a line, because if I say it’s good to support orchestras in large cities with Federal money, then anyone gets to support their favorite kind of art, even if it happens to be guillotining paper-mache replicas of the Founding Fathers on Presidents Day. You get your art, I get mine.

“Yes, but yours stinks” is not a useful reply. Accurate, but irrelevant.

Read the whole cranky thing and the Huffington Post article he’s responding to.

I am personally suspicious of art that is picked by a committee and requires government funding. Of course, that could be sour grapes, as the kind of art I do hasn’t received any government funding in the U.S. since at least the 1930’s.

Feel free to add your thoughts in comments.

By coincidence, just a couple of weeks ago I had dinner with a friend in Mortonville, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles from Chadd’s Ford. So I’ve been thinking about Wyeth the last few days.

Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say in its obituary:

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

All of what the mainstream press has to say about him is pretty much meaningless. The obituaries relate mostly to the business of building Wyeth’s public persona, a construction that created mass audiences and eventual sales of well over a $1 million for each major painting. That was good for Wyeth insofar as it made him and his family very rich and pushed his work into the public eye, where it could be excoriated by critics who had no ability to comprehend it.

As far as I’m concerned, Wyeth was the easily the most important artist of the 20th century. In part that’s because of his towering skill: his abilities with regard to technique, form, composition, and rendering were comparable to the finest artists in history. But that is of course only part of the story, as many past artists with superior technical skills but the absence of greatness have demonstrated. Beyond his technical skill was his ability to communicate his complete immersion in what he chose to paint. Critics liked to complain about his sentimental, dreary subject matter, his “fecal” palette, his obsession with detail, the repetitive nature of his work (as if what they liked was any less repetitive), his unapologetic dedication to an American visual tradition, and (most important in the modern art world) the complete absence of irony in his work.

None of that matters. Wyeth was utterly in love the places and people of a few small parts of Pennsylvania and Maine, and he knew how to convey that love. He wasn’t interested in working with any other subject matter, in any other way than what felt right to him, no matter what the critics or anyone else said. That kind of love, with the ability to communicate it, is what all good painting is about.

A few quotes:

“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”

“I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it drives me mad.”

“God, I’ve frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!”

Godspeed, Andrew.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Why was that necessary? These paintings were not pornographic or even explicit. They were of a man and a woman posing in the nude.

I’m not criticizing my wife, of course. She responded appropriately, especially since their mother hadn’t been warned about the possibility of them seeing paintings of naked people. I think it kind of disturbs me that this was necessary, however. We didn’t discuss the issue with our friend—we just assumed that she would never allow her children to see that kind of art.

This is especially interesting when we compare modern attitudes to those of the Victorians. We think of Victorians as absurdly prudish, even to the point of considering it proper to do things like put books by male and female authors on different shelves and cover up the “limbs” of roast poultry with paper covers. We can laugh at that, yet I’ve read that Victorian children were routinely exposed to nude art. It was considered educational and uplifting. Obviously, not all people in the Victorian era had the same values, and I’m sure some found the idea of children looking at nudes to be inappropriate. Yet I’ve seen images of museums from the period, with throngs of both adults and school-age children looking at nude paintings and sculpture.

Are we more prudish about art than the Victorians, for all that advertising and other media are filled with sex? Is it inappropriate for children to see nude art?

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this topic, but I do know that if there were a nude in my living room, some uncomfortable situations would occur from time to time.

Comments?

At the New York times, an article on a show exhibiting modern interpretations of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.”

These are posters depicting subjects such as bird pooping “democracy” onto the earth and an obese person with the caption “this is abuse of the freedom from want.”

I hate this kind of pseudo-ironic, self-absorbed, visual bloviation. Because the academic art establishment is just about entirely leftist, this kind of art almost always presents ideas of the political left. I’m very very independent politically, but I hate this kind of stuff regardless of whether I am in agreement with (or indifferent to) the ideas being expressed.¹

Elliott Earls’s reinterpretation of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” practically screams. A little girl seems to be crying, her eye bruised, with an American flag in the background and two words framing her figure: “Liberty Weeps.” The color scheme is red, white and blue, but patriotic pride has been supplanted by sadness.

How tiresome.

My reaction to anything like this is one of visceral contempt. Art like this likes to pretend that it is “dangerous.” Yet none of the “artists” participating have any fear of having the government take any interest in this work. They aren’t going to be carried away in the night and never seen again, as an artist expressing “inappropriate” ideas might have been in Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or nowadays in a place like North Korea. (This is particularly well illustrated by the picture by Chip Kidd, depicting a burnt U.S. flag and the caption, “Freedom of Speech”—made with the full understanding that no one will ever consider censoring it.) No one who might affect their careers is going to refuse to hire them, because anyone who might hire a political artist is going to at least pretend to like this kind of crap. Instead of having their careers destroyed by bravely “speaking truth to power,” these mediocre hacks get written up in the New York Times. They are expressing entirely mainstream ideas, better expressed in other ways. This work adds nothing to discourse on freedom in modern society. Yet these artists, and the writer of the article, indicate surprise and disappointment that the show doesn’t garner much attention. People just walk by and ignore it. They are demonstrating not a dislike of art, but a disinterest in vapid garbage. Good for them.

I would hate any picture that depicts George Bush looking into a mirror and seeing Adolph Hitler. I would hate any picture that depicts Barak Obama as a hand puppet of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It doesn’t matter what the politics are. Such pictures are banal, idiotic rubbish. They require no thought or creativity. If you seen one, you can think of all possible variations on the theme in about five minutes. They are political cartoons—bad political cartoons. They are not art.² They are not even interesting.

</rant>

Do you agree? Disagree? Are there kinds of political art that are good? If so, what distinguishes good from bad? Feel free to comment.

Note: there’s not going to be any discussion of politics here; just the badness (or not, if you want to disagree with me) of this clumsy approach to political art. Any explicitly political comments will be deleted. If you want to discuss politics, you won’t have any trouble finding places on the web for that.

¹ I might respect an artist slightly more if he or she were demonstrating a little bit of chutzpah by making non-leftist art and presenting it to the leftist art establishment. But not much.

² I don’t mean to imply that a cartoon or illustration cannot be art. It is only to say that this specific kind of cartoon, by and large, is nowhere near to being art.

I know, that ‘Art Therapy’ subject is quite loaded with different meanings and, probably, not free from controversies too. Yet, from what I can see browsing the relevant pages, this kind of psychological (medical) therapy has flourished in the US, with AATA (American Art Therapy Association) looking quite fit and professional.

At the same time it remains relatively exotic in Europe and especially in Ireland. My college was first in this country to introduce Art Therapy MA degrees (based on BA Hons. in Fine Art) - they are available from 1998, became quite popular, yet it’s still far from ordinary to see Art Therapist working in institutions, schools or hospitals.

I haven’t personally met yet with any sort of this practice and know nothing about its factual effectiveness. I’m interested especially in any record, experience related to the ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), since one case of it has been diagnosed in my family. Have you met with an art therapy “in action”? Are you yourself qualified and practicing? Do you have any opinions, thoughts or experiences on that subject, on how it works (if at all) on autistic children? Thanks for sharing.

Since my partner in the above-mentioned chat was far from being an average, junior, intelligent guy who finds “fashionable” to talk post-modern slogans (no matter how out of place they are), we’ve managed to make a way for some deeper observations. Yet everything seemed to slip through our fingers - any sense, any understanding of each other. Why is it so difficult to communicate on a level, where any social game must to disappear in the presence of truth? Why in the age of gutsy exhibitionism, omnipresent “display” of human “values” we are mute and/or extremely amateurish when it comes to formulate, understand and convey basic reflection on our existential condition? I wonder what was that ancient Greek spoke about, or people of 18th century France, or even contemporaries of Hemingway, Kafka, Dostojewski? Have they been taught the art of communicating oneself to others or maybe times they lived in encouraged it in the most natural fashion?

So we talked about beauty which became something terribly old-fashioned, neglected and misunderstood. After Picasso and the modern rest ridiculed classical rules of harmony and pleasure it seems to be quite trendy to make art that disturbs, wipes out smile and joy; art of dark colours, sad faces and deliberately nonchalant in appearance. Even if beauty occurs it’s very often accidental, has nothing in common with beliefs and aspirations of an artist. Majority of work in my college is like that, my own work oscillates between “blue” and darkness of being alive here and now… What a waste of a pair of healthy hands. Why not to aspire to be the next Cezanne or Canova? Why not to aspire to make the happiest, the most beautiful paintings/sculptures ever? Why even these questions sound ridiculously?

It was the eternal beauty of art in Paris that grabbed my mind and heart. Who knows - maybe it’s the right time for a new Renaissanse, for rediscovering once again value and sense in our human condition? That could be even interesting…

Just for the classical taste, few shots of The Louvre’s treasures I took during my trip to Paris:

So, today few loose reflections on what I consider as an experience of being ‘a contemporary artist’. First of all, I must say I’m intensely reluctant to use the word when referring to myself and my identity. And it isn’t merely due being ‘just’ an art student, but it seems to be rooted in my deep belief that, what a human being undergoes in a long, complex process of making (creating) of what art critics will call ‘an artwork’ cannot be expressed in a one, semiotically distorted and culturally misunderstood and abused (just have a quick surf around ‘artistic’ pages - anything now can be called ‘art’ and anybody ‘an artist’) term. Who am I then? - somebody studying, making, dealing with art, somebody struggling with artistic means to find myself - that belief will (hopefully) never change. If so called ‘art-world’ (art lovers, critics) will name me eventually ‘an artist’ one day I will feel recognized and appreciated, but it always be a sort of a simplification of my activities, putting ‘a label’ in order to ‘classify’.

Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favourite poets had tried twice his poetically non-compromising definition of what does it mean to be ‘an artist’; and his understanding, both quite romantic and yet classical, is worth to be displayed here. So, first of all, it reminds of being a child in a world made by adults and consequently - to be always vulnerable and ready enough to hear their indulging laughter… And secondly - it’s a decision (a sane one yet transcending the ‘common sense’ level) of letting oneself to be the land of demons that rule here as if they were at home and speak numerous languages - it means to be like an always open house, without a key in the doors, so your invisible guests get in and leave with an ease…

An artist (should write ‘a genuine one’ but there are no ‘fake artists’, just like an Art - it’s true or isn’t art) then would be less a strong, self-confident individual of the personality sharp as a knife and being driven by an above-average ambition and ingenious ideas (Picasso’s , Damien Hirst’s type) but more - an extremely sensitive, open, always curious, innocent and naive in a sense (as a deliberately adopted attitude) character; so complex that appearing as simple, so powerful that letting himself to be a sort of ‘a medium’ for what is transcendent, supernatural (Mark Tobey’s name comes to my mind). Does one have to be born this way, or - is it possible to ‘made’ an artist out of nothing preexisting in him/her innately? How does it all translate into functioning in this very world of “dead” God, ‘thirsty’ dealers and agents, traffic jams, mortgages, hypermarkets, rip-off mentality? Self-deceiving, compromises, psychological disturbances?
No, I don’t want you to get an impression that I pose for a martyr or a victim… More I think about me and others being luckily ‘condemned’ to art more I believe that the game is worth all the investment and much, much more… It’s this sort of a challenge that, living in the ancient times when gods were still alive and kicking, you would say: ‘I’ve been touched by something that is greater than me, and I will never be the same man again. And it’s like a burning fire sometimes, but I wouldn’t exchange that for all the wealth of this world’

Sorry if sounding sentimental… Greetings to all art-aficionados…

Almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them.