Occupy Art
By Clay Wainscott
“I have more important things to do than to go around copying nature.” This boilerplate refrain has been a part of standard boot camp indoctrination in art schools for the last fifty years, and after a while maybe it begins to make sense. Instruction then proceeds from the assumption that making art look like anything is retrograde and restricted, indicates a lack of talent and imagination, and is in the end seriously, hopelessly naïve and out of touch. I am here to suggest that this institutionalized pursuit of obscurity and pointlessness has been a sham and a racket all along. Let’s see it for what it is.
Tax laws are written so that a really big donation to an art museum puts gas in the yacht. So, if someone buys and donates a piece of art no one could love for a million or so, everybody wins. An exorbitant price is established for an empty trademark, and the museum director stays on another year. Prestige accrues to the institution, moving it up the ladder for blockbuster shows and those federal building grants, curatorial grants, expand the parking lot grants. The artist who recognizes this appetite and fills it becomes famous, probably rich, and finds unlimited inspiration in self-loathing, apparently. It’s all a jolly ride on public money, ultimately, and the only ones screwed turns out to be everybody else. Still, it wasn’t done for the money.
This machine was constructed to neuter the political potential of visual art, and to not be oversensitive about collateral damage. Art is universal and uncontrollable, and they, those who link order with control, had concerns. They knew visual art respects no boundaries or borders, needs no translation, and that it expresses directly what diverse communities care about and have in common. When Colin Powell made his disgraced UN presentation, a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, a permanent fixture of the hall, was covered. No matter the script of the headline on what side of the world, Picasso would have spoken to them all, but he was censored. Of course if the artwork had been abstract covering it would have been unnecessary, and so much more convenient.
Today is the day to withdraw from the cult of contemporary art – call it an intervention. Just leave it and its well-financed media advocates, and look for art with more personal significance to the artist and to you. Artists in your community, doesn’t matter where, have been producing heart-felt art all along but they’ve been pushed aside, denied gallery access, and dismissed by local charity art franchises seeking money from above. Simply disregard their grant-driven biases, their dark silent galleries. The brutalizing paranoia of cold-war mentality will eventually loosen its grip, and art will begin to regain a voice, whether political or deeply personal.
It won’t be easy at first, but the artists are already in place. Serious independent artists where you are have been working day jobs, buying supplies at sacrifice, stealing studio time to work. They may not be that accomplished just yet, but it hasn’t been easy. If you or any of your friends buy something, chances are by the time you want something better the artist, all the artists, will have gotten better, too. Springtime promises energy and life after a long winter dormancy, and if Lexington begins to value the art made here about, everybody wins.
Clay Wainscott also blogs at www.owningart.blogspot.com
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