Art for $^@%’s sake

One winter evening back home in Findlay, I stood at the reservoir with Steven and Phil, soaking in the season’s crispest stargazing with full constellation tutorial. It was, granted, bitter-cold but so silent and halcyon.

Quite the anathema to earlier that evening. My scattergraph of home friends are, on the whole, wicked brilliant and sew tropes like there’s no tomorrow. Language is sport and ideas are ecstasy. They’ll go at them like dogs strip meat off of bones because bones are what they want. They want to collect bones of knowledge; bones don’t decompose, and truth is marrow. If that sounds slightly unpleasant, well.

The subject of that particular evening in December was a/Art. Big A. Little a. To re- or de-construct, briefly:

An artist obscura come up in conversation. Then another. Soon, the art students are in a heady discussion about big-A Art, leaving some of our party at a distinct disadvantage. Non-art students note the inclination toward snobbery, both with the specific-academic-speak and the obfuscated “meaning” of the art by these obfuscated artists.

Point: Art students (creating it, not remembering it) argue that Art-as-Institution is accessible to the masses, and even if it’s not, why should it be? It’s striving to not be derivative or un-evolved, artists are trying to transcend and create something new, and therefore can’t appeal to the lowest common denominator (the woefully uneducated).

Counter-point: (backs arched, “Moi? So you think I am a woefully uneducated plebe?) What does Art matter if its point, message, idea stays locked in your jerk-off ivory tower and hardly anyone sees it? It never becomes part of dinner conversations or collective consciousness?

So, I’d like to tackle this problem. I think I’m the perfect person to do it. I like to make art (really, I prefer to call it crafts, as my only objective is visual pleasantry) but I’ll never put it in a museum. I worked at the Contemporary Art Museum-St. Louis (camstl), I think I sympathize with both demi-theories.

You could say Big-A Art is a subset of little-a art. It’s like an applied science, or British literature, or the Major League: still science, still books, still baseball. You could, however, say that they are separate entities that occasionally overlap: art is only sensory, while Art is experiential and imbued with meaning and historical/philosophical context. You could have Art that exists only as an idea; not sensory at all. You could have Art that is visual, audio, appealing, ugly, scary. You could have art that exists in your basement that remains purposeless. That scale depends on who decides, and how much the rest of the universe cares about their opinion, and it gets especially touchy when artists repurpose kitsch art or prescribe meaning to everyday objects, or give an aesthetic form to something functional.

Place = meaning

When I worked at Camstl, I was a gallery assistant. I watched people and made sure they didn’t touch or photograph or endanger installations. They hosted a range of artists, from graffiti artist Dzine to Cindy Sherman to Andy Warhol; photos, paintings, multi-media, video and even performance art. The question posed to me most often by visitors was “What is this supposed to mean?” Even the most art-illiterate guest understood that by walking into a museum, you were supposed to see (or hear) something and ‘get it’. If they didn’t ‘get it’ they’d feel stupid, think they had missed something, and generally conceded ‘I just don’t get it’ or ‘I could do that’. No one ever said “I don’t like this,” because someone much more ‘knowledgeable’ than they had chosen this piece and, if they disliked it, they assumed they must have missed the point.

Camstl did a good job of posting descriptions and printing gallery guides to explain what was going on with a particular show, and to describe why this or that piece was significant (a good word to avoid quality judgments). They strive to explain what the artist was attempting to say. Many of the skeptical guests didn’t read about the art, and I believe those types came in expecting not to ‘get it’, and after staring for a while resigned happily to the limitation they set for themselves. Other types “loved!” pieces I didn’t really care for; they “loved!” everything because they thought they were supposed to. When I stared at the same works of art for several months, I came to learn what I liked.

My answer to the question “What is this supposed to mean?” varied, depending on my mood. Sometimes I’d explain what I knew about the art or artist, sometimes I’d say “What do you think it means?”, sometimes I’d just say “I have no idea”. I think I was partially complicit in feeding apathy by shrugging and shaking my head to affirm someone’s confusion/disdain. Probably because I didn’t make much money.

Some artists throw twinkies on the floor and because it’s in a museum, it becomes art, not litter. Some paint graffiti and the public doesn’t realize it’s art until it’s in a museum.

Context provides richer experience

I am convinced that while art has been treated like a “higher” pursuit, it’s not much different than literature, or baseball. The job is considerably more esoteric than baseball, but the way the public experiences it is fundamentally the same. A bunch of guys running around a diamond doesn’t mean a thing to you unless you know the rules. Your experience is richer if you know baseball’s history, so you know when a play is significant, unusual. Same with art. If you know some history, you can say “Hey, that’s referencing this movement, and I know what that’s about!” If you know the rule of thirds, for instance, or chiaroscuro, or self-portraiture, you can identify it. Like literature, art is about a lot of things not housed within the strict study of art history or art creation, but the history of society, political movements, fields of thought. Understanding those aspects takes investment, but it enriches your experience. It gives you handrails. You can still dislike a work, but at least you can say why. Caution, though: being discomforted or challenged does not make a work ‘bad’.

So, with that background, I have several questions to pose about the Institution of Art: universities, museums, patrons, and even artists themselves.

First, what responsibility, if any, does the Institution have to make their art salable to the masses, i.e anyone who might happen across Art.

At what point does Art become not Art, either because it is pedantic and carries no meaning/value, or because it has become too obscure and caries no relevance?

Can art become Art through no intention of its creator?

What is the purpose of Art in human experience?

Can Art be purely aesthetic? Can Art be devoid of aesthetic?

Is the critic or the viewer or the artist the expert on the value and meaning of a work of art?

Stay Tuned.