The Future of Art

On Sunday, I wrote some harsh things about the direction the modern art scene had gone in my article The Painted Absurd, in which I pointed readers to Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word. Wolfe's real adversary is not the artists, however. He was attacking the art critics who decided for others which works should have value and which were tripe for garage sales.

In truth, I still like to frequent the galleries, and I certainly understand where some of the modern movements came from. I like to see what is going on in the art scene as well as its manifold expressions along the periphery. It's a great source for ideas if you make art yourself. And if you imagine yourself making enough money to be a patron of the arts, it is a good way to see what's out there.

For the same reasons I peruse the art mags.

The March 2009 edition of ARTnews caught my attention because it had a cover story titled, "Where Is Art Going?" The feature collected an range of perspectives from museum curators and the like, thus it deals more with high art than just art in general. "A New Creativity" by Ann Landi postulates that because the economy has been trashed, the art market has been altered as well.

“Difficult times bring out the best in the best artists,” says David Ross, who was director of the Whitney Museum during that biennial and is now director of Albion New York, a SoHo affiliate of the London gallery. “When the economy falters, there can be a remarkable growth of seriousness in art.” But others see the notion of an art-market meltdown leading to new forms of creativity as specious hogwash. “I’d say the bohemian fantasy is sweet and sentimental, but rather insulting to artists,” says Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times. “In my experience, artists do what they do, market or no market. During the ‘80s boom, terrific work was being made by artists who barely got the time of day, and some of them were artists we simply started to look at in the ‘90s as the dust settled from the crash. That will happen again.”

Further along Landi writes:

The very nature of the way artists are perceived changes when the price tags cease to be that important. “In a downturn, artists are no longer validated according to their market value,” says Mary Sabbatino, vice president of Galerie Lelong in New York. “You’ll have an end to the quote-unquote critical description of Marlene Dumas, for example, as the most expensive living female artist.”

The one statement I liked in the article was that artists are going to make art no matter what the economy is doing. And it doesn't need to be validated by being in a gallery. Yes, even Dr. Seuss's drawing are now gallery pieces, but he began by making children's books. Much of what I'm doing right now, for example, is for illustrative purposes. Occasionally I like framing my work and plan on some larger, more serious endeavors again this summer now that my garage is converted into the three season studio. I don't need Federal funding to paint, draw, make music.

The thing is, when some people talk about art, they're talking about the art industry. The art industry may be hurting, but from where I sit the creative urge is alive and well in this country. It may be hard for poets to get published because no one reads poetry magazines much, but this does not stop poetry or music or other forms of creation from happening.

My time is up for now, so this is a theme I will have to return to yet another day. What's your take?

NOTE: The picture of a bear that you see here is a painting that we saw at a gallery in Sedona. The seated boy was produced this past week here.

The Painted Absurd

I originally saw excerpts from Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word in Harper’s magazine. (I may still have a copy of that issue in my garage.) His cannon blasts against the absurdities which have presented themselves as “art” in the past half century were deafening. My guess is that some people celebrated and many were appalled, but for sure it became a stimulating read for at least one former art student, myself.

Wolfe essentially relates and dissects the process by which the art world evolved from visual artists creating paintings and sculptures to conceptual artists who had no product whatsoever except the theories surrounding what they were “saying.”

The argument culminates thus: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes.… Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”

Many young art students loved it because it did not require any skills to make “art” any more. You just had to have a cool idea that was communicated in a manner in which other people “got it.” Or twist your head around the zeitgeist of wonderfully new ideas like “ugly is beautiful” and “talentlessness is talent.”

The opening lines of my 1980’s short story Terrorists Preying, which in 2008 was translated into French, summarize some of my feeling about my personal struggle with these issues:

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

Eventually every creative artist wrestles with how much to play the game. Each alone must decide for him/herself who they are and what they are about. For me, my fine arts background has blended into the foundations that support my advertising career, but on the side I still make “art” for various purposes, both illustrative and therapeutic. And I also continue to follow the arts scene by visiting galleries and reading magazines like Art News, ArtForum and Art in America among others.

Which leads me to this article that I stumbled on about conceptual artist James Lee Byars. (Nov. 2008 Art in America) Frankly, I never heard of him, but he was someone influential who did some big work which evidently seemed important to someone (most assuredly the critics whom Wolfe lambasted.) The article asks an interesting question: when your art career produces no product, what have you left for posterity?

Thomas McEvilley, author of the piece "James Lee Byars, A Study of Posterity", wrote, "Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial." In short, Byars perfectly exemplifies what Wolfe in 1979 was talking about.

To be honest, my college art career began with philosophy classes. After three or four, I felt that since philosophy leaves no product, I should make art, which was also philosophical but left you with something to look at afterwards. Besides, I'd been drawing all my life since my classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art when I was five. The irony is that artists likewise went the way of the philosophers… at least, those who bought into the notions of Happenings and Conceptual Art as the next evolution.

If you’re interested in a good short read that answers the important question, How did we get from Rembrandt to a guy painting seal skins white and nailing them to his apartment wall in Boston? Pick up a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.