I don't think I'm an artist never have. Even though like you, and everybody else I've been doing bleeping one kind or other of creative mayhem all my life. Still I don't fit any description of them guys,...not one.
It could be that the only descriptions I've ever run into are about semi-existent white guys doing weird shit then getting insanely rich, and or dying. I think everybody has this problem.
The artist caste is as insular as any other.
However unlike any other everybody more or less is one kind of artist or other.
So a few guys figured out the only way to make the racket a going business would be to limit membership.
Which they did with amazing completeness.
Okay sometimes they get a bit guilty about it, and clear a few square inches.
This for "Outsider Art" or Comix book guys, but that's about all.
Meanwhile Seven Billion folks are out there creating stuff all the time all over the place. All unrecognized.
Maybe our stuff is unrecognizable as art to official artist. Much as they're stupid shit is utter nothing to us. Like that guy who literally makes ten's of millions of bucks,...for painting poka dots.
Well he doesn't paint them. As he puts it,...
"I hire technicians to take care of all that nonsense."
He said the on Charlie Rose before old Charlie became a non-person thanks to the "Me too" fanatics. Granted he was a total shit, and abused women. But a person should have a day in court before they're burned at the stake
Where was I?
Right art is shit, and artists are untalented con-men.
They dump piles of literal garbage into museum halls. Then call it art, and collecting big buck for it.
The business of being a "Genius" has a similar limiting culture.
Clearly you can only be one if you invent some weird shit that kills people. That or can be sold for zillions. I mean just look at who we call geniuses.
Btw there are Seven Billion unofficial geniuses too.
Using their creativity to develop all manner of swell jazz. You don't know about them because none of it makes mega money or no one yet knows how to apply it.
'Course there are Seven Billion jerks fanatics assholes morons, and complete idiots too. Thanks to them we live in a world of mass delusions religions wars, and customs that spill oceans of innocent blood as a matter of course. ...all day everyday.
So to conclude the sermon.
We're a world of brilliant creative artistic geniuses with a strong habit of grand delusions vicious stupidity extreme cruelties, and murderous violence.
Yep made in the image of da Gawds alright.
Life just fucking Sucks.
What we suffer from is a debasement of the meaning of the word "artist." We are artists, sure enough; they are fakes.
ReplyDeleteSomething about the modern age has made people cynical and caused them to reject timeless values like beauty and harmony. I think the mass brutality of modern warfare, notably as embodied in WWI, has something to do with it. They have nothing to replace those values with except various soulless ideologies, typically characterized by scientistic materialism and thinly veiled nihilsm.
Speaking of materialism, profit motive has a lot to do with it. It's much easier to make big profits out of rubbish paintings that took half a day to daub than to market works of exquisite craftsmanship that might take months to produce. Gresham's law comes into play: the bad drives out the good, as nobody wants to deal in gold when they can more easily market a currency whose debasement is absolute.
Cliqueshness and modishness also play a role, as you suggest. Additionally there is "prestige suggestion," where art establishment figures with fancy credentials insist that a painting made of elephant dung is just as a good as a Rembrandt, and that anyone who disagrees must be a philistine.
We've got to get our tradition back. This will have to come from ourselves, as the universities and the establishment generally have betrayed it completely.