This exercise in putting together a complete history of my professional and artistic adulthood helps me describe what I have accomplished. But it's also asking me to try harder to define who I am as an artist. It is telling me that I get to say who I am. And I have to do it. As the fates keep reminding me. Last night, I attended a talk by an internationally-renowned artist. Sitting not far from the stage in a small auditorium, we listened to her describe her creative path. She said not to wait for anyone to ask us to share our art because no one will—we have to ask the world to receive it. We have to take action and make our way. She said not to let the art police tell us what our role is. She said to define ourselves.
So let's delve deeper into what it means for me to be a contemporary artist. I have a number of concerns with the present state of art, and I anticipate a number of solutions. Normally, I leave my feelings about the art world to guide my work without railing about my disappointments to the public. However, on this occasion, I think it may be helpful for me to sort out my ideas. I can boil down my dissatisfaction with recent art to several points that I will address individually in future posts. Then I'll post what I think are the solutions. I'll pull no punches with this.
Every failure of art, right now, mirrors a failure of American society. Art, for example, has become separated into the same progressive and conservative divisions that polarize other areas of American culture, economics, and politics. Riding along on the growing divide between the super rich and the rest of us, art has also been polarized into extremely expensive art and art that sells cheaper than socks. When paintings sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, it doesn't raise the value of art, it demeans it.
I already addressed the growing nationalism in the U.S. One of the problems with our national self-love affair is the blind patriotism our critics have demonstrated toward our art ever since the CIA dropped planeloads of Pollock postcards on the Soviet Union (or something like that). The Wikipedia entry for 21st century art, for example, romanticizes the "crisis" and "syndrome" of post-modern ambiguity and claims that we have "every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently magnificent and important works of art continue to be made in the United States." In true liberal economic fashion, the writer leaves it to the marketplace to judge the merit of postmodern art. It's a very American attitude. In contrast, the best critics, I think, are English—they call it as they see it and don't care whom they offend.
Much of today's art, like our culture in general, lacks poetry and humanity. Before World War Two, you can find more poetry just about anywhere, from supermarket ads to political speeches. Immediately following the war, abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism flourished. Since the late seventies, though, things have changed. Since I started college, language has deteriorated at a rapid rate. Art, a form of language, has deteriorated, too. And this deterioration has gained momentum. Ten thousand days ago, when I was a young artist, I was taught differently. We were deeply affected by the poetry and the psychological depth of the modern art we studied. We were taught to respect the work—to be bold but to be diligent. We were taught not to place our self-worth in the art, but to step away from it and be as objective as possible. We had respect for the muse.
But the Art Department at Tri-C East was a little building in a big world. I earned my undergraduate degree in the dying days of the Cold War, studying in the shadows of demolished missile silos across Harvard Road from the art buildings. By 1991, we are told, the Cold War had ended. In 1992, I headed to Seattle in the hopes of making some art in that city. It may have been the worst time to try to forge a career. A current museum show posits that the early 90s, twenty years ago in particular, were a pivotal time for art. My feeling is that this art was a new framework for our orphaned Cold War fears. Art quickly gravitated to worries about AIDS, for example, which was the new atom bomb when I was an undergraduate. Now, licentious children scoff at it, but in other aspects of our lives, then and now, we find fear. Fear, self-advancement, and short-term solutions dominate our politics. And our politics seep into our art. And when we do not indulge in fear, then we indulge in superficial gratification. Along with our courage, we have lost our modesty. We do not celebrate the muse like we should. Too much art is now about self-indulgence and ego.
In Ancient Greek mythology, the wind deities often punished the heroes for their boastfulness or disregard of the gods. Perhaps my generation, like our teachers' generation, was fated to continue to be blown off course by the 600mph winds of the summer of 1945, when America, in arrogance and jealous fear of it's best ally, abused nature and humanity to our own detriment. Maybe it's just a case of getting worse before it gets better. Placing my feeble ten thousand days in this context, I can see that I will do well to stay my own course, to continue my quest, to realize that my public success is a culmination of my personal successes, and that I have only to courageously hold out for the winds to change.
