The Good, The Bad & The Beauty

My Mud Is More Important Than Your Mud

I have been reading a lot of plein air and representational art blogs lately.  One thing that has come up a couple times is the notion of how there is a real art and a “museum" art and the latter is not looked upon too kindly by some painters.  This brought about an interesting feeling for me that I hadnt thought about maybe ever.  I had forgotten that at one time I also thought that art was being misrepresented by museums and even the big galleries of say Chelsea or Soho.  Before you read further know that I have smooshed what I read into a homogenous point of view in order to branch off into some perspectives that I feel are useful to discuss. 

Children: Gods Of Abstraction

Over the years despite holding the belief that some art wasnt art I drifted without realizing it into a fairly infinite definition and love of art.  I can even pinpoint this paradigm shift to right around when I was a full time middle school art teacher in a public school.  I witnessed how intuitively and freely Kids gravitate towards expressing themselves abstractly.  This is partly due to a lack of skill but also (and more importantly) it is due to a lack of cultural programing, they have no system for one form of representation being of more value than another until they learn it from someone.  I tried to teach them that they could create their own art value system and it was fascinating to watch them grow and develop this way.  There was a very diverse range of systems that came about, unique to each student and each overlapping to varying degrees based on social conncetions. 

What I realized from the amazing spirit and freedom of watching kids make art is that there is quite an enourmous continuity of what the human species can create and categorize as art.  We develop in such a way that abstraction is natural to us due to our mind’s perception and its untranslatability.  We try so hard to translate our experience and when we are young this comes out very abstract.  I think as we get older and our ability to observe and transcribe experience evolves then this abstraction schizms into quite a spectacular spectrum.  What starts to happen though is that some groups begin to believe and say this part of the spectrum is art and that part is not which is akin to saying blue is a color and red is not.  I think this comes from people’s tendency to become invested in and identify with a particular part of the spectrum.

Conceptual Art: The Great Liberator

I mentioned that I learned from kids that there is an enourmous continuity of what the human species can create and categorize as art, this is not the full story though.  With teaching kids I learned from them to let go and express myself more freely as I wanted or felt instead of how I thought I should.  However there is another layer that I learned on a much more cognitive level through studying and learning to appreciate Conceptual Art (the biggest target of those who scorn the “art world").  This understanding developed by chance alongside my studies of Buddhism.  The most interesting parallel between conceptual art and Buddhism is that both endeavor to free our preconceptions about our perception and understanding of the world.  Conceptual art is in part an antogonist or even a stand up comedian; it finds something that is held as a standard, a hypocricy or just something that is narrowly understood and it explodes it in our faces.  This ironically, but not regretably, is why many people dislike conceptual art.  As any practitioner of Buddhism intimately knows it’s the things we hold to the strongest and rely on for our understanding of our life that we dont want to confront or have presented to us.  

Another fascinating characteristic that conceptual art mirrors from Buddhism is that it started with itself.  Often it is forgotten that conceptual art was not some new creation, it is more akin to the first steps that Art took towards attaining its own enlightenment.  The first emergences of conceptual art were aimed at Art itself (early on at least) using its own traditional platforms to quite thoroughly dismantle our preconceptions and narrow views of art until moving on to deal with all of human experience which is where we find conceptual art mostly exploring today.  If you can liberate yourself you have liberated everything.

Representing Representational Painting

None of the above points negates or even diminishes the value of representational painting in the slightest.  It is important to consider that in thinking that one art form is fairing better than another we are essentially placing the artform we identify with in the role of the victim.  Representational painting for example is far more resillient and independantly valuable than the whims of an economic system and what that system chooses to value.  Sure we would all like to make gazillions of dollars but this is not about economics, it is about our soul.  These are spiritual endeavors we are engaged in and a poem should not feel any less valuable than a plein air painting nor a plein air painting any less than a formaldehyde filled tank with a dead shark in it.  

May All Our Stuff Shine On

Before I finish I want to clarify some points about those who criticize the art world, conceptual art or contemporary art (however those terms may be understood since they are themselves just vague categorizations at best).

I think the issue many people have is more with the tendency for institutions to dispoportionately value a certain kind of work over another.  I agree that this is a valid concern but I just caution against thinking that the proper value is the opposite or any value at all.  The main problem is that the value is placed by economics and reputations that can be attached arbitrarilty to any work and would be equaly concerning if it were attached to a more traditional form of art.

This leads to the idea of value in general which is a whole other beast to tackle for another article.  I will just say that to properly understand art it is necessary to remove the idea of communal value.  This is not something I am directing at culture, I am directing this at each individual.  It is up to each person to decide if they want to indoctrinate themselves with other’s values or to realize that each artwork and each object we encounter has something we can appreciate and learn from on a personal level.

Be well

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