18 August 2006

Challenging the Viewer

I believe humans are on the planet to learn and grow and expand their minds. The whole of human existence has been moved forward by artists, writers, scientists and thinkers pushing on the boundaries of what we think we know. Without that pushing, striving, challenging, would we really be human? Would we have ever found fire, even?

Some of my favorite artworks I hated on sight. I'll admit it. It was through being challenged, through having my brain prodded and expanded a little, that I grew to "see" those works and appreciate them.

Frankly, I like to use my brain, but struggling to survive in the world doesn't always afford the opportunities to use it in the ways I'd like. Thank god for artists that shove me in that direction. And pushing my art, the same way, keeps me excited about it, and keeps my brain cells engaged.

That, or I suppose I could just do the New York Times crossword puzzle to stretch my head -- just not as interesting or fun, though.

16 August 2006

Artists in America

The history of art is like rungs on a ladder. To understand Conceptual Art, for example, you need to have come up the ladder and worked through understanding Pop, and Assemblage, and Abstract Expressionism, rung by rung. And it would be impossible to understand Post-Modernism without those movements before, too.

The rest of the world, the "civilians", stopped on that ladder at Social Realism, the Ashcan school, right around there. When Pollock and all those crazy Ab Ex painters came along, they made a crucial mistake that has affected the rest of us forever -- they said, "It doesn't matter if it makes sense to anyone else, it makes sense to ME". (Paraphrasing, of course.) In other words, "you can't get it". Of course, it wasn't so much a "mistake", it was speaking to a personal vision and very much a reflection of the times, but it was a mistake in the public's eyes and came off as elitism.

Life Magazine took the picture of the Irascibles in 1950, and art was still important to Americans then, but it was the beginning of a divide. Suddenly, people felt uneducated because they didn't understand what they were looking at, and no one took the publics' hand and helped them to understand. They stopped climbing the ladder. So they didn't understand what came next.

Anyway, that's my extremely half-baked theory, thus far. We live in a time with an extreme number of artists graduating from school, and what's more, an extreme number of people graduating from school. All of a sudden, having a degree doesn't make you special anymore. And there are artists everywhere, although the attrition rate from art school hovers around 97%. Why? Why are so many kids choosing art school? It's fairly easy to see why they drop out -- there aren't a lot of rewards and it's difficult to survive. But why do they choose it in the first place?

My alma mater (Metropolitan State College of Denver) now boasts that the 4th largest department on the campus is the Art Dept. They recently graduated 900 art students, or as I like to call them, the future unemployed. The chair of the department is so proud, and I keep thinking: why? The level of talent doesn't appear to have increased, if anything, the department has been decimated by the clearing out of the tenured profs. (a horrifying trend that appears to be infecting universities everywhere -- the trend towards cheaper part-timers and adjuncts.) There appears to be nothing remarkable about these students coming out. When I was there (let me put on my crotchety old woman hat for a minute) the department was small, but a high number of students graduated were very successful, and very good. Now? I see a couple of shining stars, and a sea of mediocrity. Obviously larger class sizes and disinterested part-timers who are struggling to pay their bills aren't equalling better art students.

And all of these art students are heading into a world where art, although ubiquitous, is misunderstood, almost reviled. Art is thought of as an elitist pursuit, a luxury purchase, and not terribly relevent in people's lives. So where are the art students headed? Madison Avenue, Microsoft, game design, and a fair number of them away from anything even resembling art. And if they're real artists, they'll stick it out, but many face a life of frustration and obscurity.

Wow, that was a little bit of a downer, sorry! But I guess you have to understand the beast to change it, and I'm at the stage of trying to pick it apart and understand. I do think I've been changing things in my little corner of the world, but of course, I've got those damned, grandiose "change the world" scheming thoughts running through my tortured little brain.

It occurs to me: this is what happens when I don't get into my studio enough!