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WHEN A DARK HORSE CAN BE A RIGHT COW.
I’d be the first to recognise that the audience provides at least fifty percent of the meaning of a work but questions of beauty, not being given to sentimentality personally, is enough to give you a headache.
WHY ARE WOMEN ARTISTS TURNING TO ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN SUCH DROVES? RITUAL, MAGIC, MISGUIDED CULTURAL IMPERATIVES OR ART AS ESCAPE AND THERAPY?
But why a dominance of women? To loosely quote Yuval Noah Harari, if you put 1000 chimpanzees in a room [our nearest evolutionary ancestors] you get chaos. If you put 1000 male artists in a room more than likely it will end up as war. 10,000 artists, on an internet site though, most of them women, and the mythical glue of creativity takes over in an atmosphere of communal conviviality. Art as self-expression? Art as therapy? Art as a social imperative? Art as a reiteration of hunter-gatherer society and the control of magic and ritual? Perhaps. The collective power that erected pyramids was the result of a collective belief and sense of community purpose but the uptake of a current course on Abstract paint application may leave no such legacy but you can’t deny that one exists.
DIVISION, DIVERSITY AND PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS
No matter what selection committees deem to be the representative art of the day to hang or be installed in a Biennale pavilion, there is no guarantee that they have ‘got it right’ or that the artist/exhibit will even be remembered once the exhibit is over let alone become a beacon of cultural representation – unless a book is written about it. What is more likely is that being hung as the representative artist will be forever emblematic of a time, a place and art thinking that seeks to draw artificial battle lines.
MYTH, HYPERBOLE, THE CULTURE WARRIOR AND THE THREE METRE FIVE YEAR OLD
If you don’t want this culture warrior father and his precocious five year old turning up at your next opening you’d better either consult him and his progeny first so that you’re all on the same page artwise or gird your art loins in preparation for the trial in the court of public opinion.
THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE AND THE SEEDS OF QUIET REVOLUTION
It seems to be part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events happen we find it hard to see how they were anything other than inevitable.
THE DEATH OF ART VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
…….the plethora of social media sites offering lessons in Abstract painting [with guaranteed success]. Learn to paint like Pollock, or de Kooning, or Picasso or Hoffman in six easy lessons and take on the art world.
AS A SELF-CONFESSED ART [AND GRAMMAR] NAZI I CAN ONLY BE APPALLED AT THE DEPTH OF COMMUNITY INDIFFERENCE TO LANGUAGE.
Using language may never be an acceptable way of defining anything and when the audience for a work of art is so poorly equipped in terms not only of language but in coming to terms with their own emotional of intellectual capacity to respond to a work of art without resorting to deconstruction of meaning and semiotics, then the every-increasing divide between artists and their public will only grow wider.
GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES – OR IS THAT STRAIGHT LINES? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT REFERS TO.
In my own case, I worry about lack of development in that I don’t have a string or wives or mistresses; I don’t have major changes of style every few years; I don’t have a philosophy based upon grandiose ideas or a philosophy based on philosophy such as that of Wittgenstein or Sartre.
I COULD CHANGE THE COURSE OF ART HISTORY TOMORROW – YOU NEVER KNOW.
Gino Severino the Italian Futurist wrote in 1946
‘ It cannot even be said that peace has come after the war……few people…have faith in their fellow man…ill-will and superficiality are so widespread…that disbelief in men seems justified and the truth is so twisted by private interests that one can hardly believe in truth….’
THE REBEL YELL FALLS ON DEAF EARS BUT WE STILL WANT IT NOW
Plato, that man of words who dreamed of an ideal society had no use for poets or artists. Banning them from Utopia was high on his social agenda.
EXPERIENCING NATURE AS CLICHED REPRESENTATION. WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THIS?
After a century of experiment in the visual arts, the dogged landscape tradition, far from giving up the ghost, is still as strong as ever.
FAME AT ANY PRICE. WHO NEEDS IT?
I’d be the first to admit to my ambivalence about both fame and the art market.