BLOG 602: is the latest project from Keep Alex Weird, an effort to write a 900-word essay a day until Jan. 7. This is the first entry.
I hate art because it is an establishment that doles out success and failure based on seemingly random variables. It’s a world where a four-year old throwing paint on a canvas can become a superstar based on… on what, really? Art’s some weird, indefinable thing and there’s no way to get a handle on what good is.
There are two ways, I think, of defining “good” art, and neither of them really satisfy me. On one hand, “good art” is whatever you think it is. The other day, I was headed to the BSU Atrium and swung into the art gallery and saw some stuff done by my first “girlfriend,” in that non-really-girlfriend sense you sometimes mean your freshman year of high school.
I really like her stuff. She does photography, and it’s stuff I can’t really explain other than the way Adam and I did when we saw it, “This stuff needs to be the liner art for an album.” And it does. It’s good.
But that’s just my opinion. If you’d see it and think otherwise, it’s not good art to you.
Unless…
The other way to define good art, the less “beauty-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder” approach, relies on the “art community,” some nebulous group of people that have swanky parties with open bars where they drink white wine and Heineken. (Heineken is in the spell-check of Microsoft Word 07, by the way.)
Anyway, the “art community” pretty much makes the “good art” decision based on cold, hard cash. If it’s good art, it’ll sell. Of course, any piece of art (or anything really) is only worth what some fool will pay you for it, so it’s a little more complicated than that. Art seems to be good if you can sell it, better if you can sell it for more, and best if you can sell it for more, and do it at Christie’s.
It’s a totally arbitrary system, and it’s based, like so many things are, on a feedback cycle. The buzz gets started, someone’s tagged as the next Warhol or Basquiat, and that machine just feeds on itself until you’ve got the drummer of a certain Metal band getting drunk at an auction, proud of the fact that his five-million dollar sale set the record for the most ever paid for the work of a certain artist who passed because it turns out mixing coke (little c) and heroin might not be the best thing for you.
Andy Warhol built a ridiculous amount of fame based on the fact that he painted a soup can. It’s the argument everyone uses against the “art scene” and I think it holds some water. There’s nothing special about Warhol’s soup, it’s the same cans people have been staring at in their neighborhood grocery store for years, it’s just that he was the first to paint it, and for some reason, the feedback cycle got started.
John Kincade sucks. Vera Bradley sucks. But that’s just me, and they’re minting cash in they’re respective fields. But… it’s not “Art,” not in that Christie’s sense. And yes, I know Vera Bradley isn’t a person.
And so… there’s no way for us to define what’s really good. There seem to be two ways we develop definitions, but they’re often so diametrically opposed we can’t draw any real consensus.
But, okay, let’s be honest now. I hate that first aspect of art, the one where anyone can basically define what it is for themselves, because it removes by ability to plead innocent. The only reason I’m not an artist, since we live in a society that, to some extent lets me invent my own definition of art, is because I choose not to be.
It wouldn’t be all that difficult for me to drive up to United Art Supply in Fort Wayne, buy a canvas and some oils and get to work. I could then paint something, and if I liked it enough, call it art and myself an artist. Or, I could take my (horrendously underused) video camera and come up with something new and inventive, call it art, and myself an artist. Maybe it would even catch on, and someone would pay some cash for it and validate my status as an artist.
But… I don’t. And because I don’t, the reason I can’t call myself an artist is only my fault. And that’s why I hate art. I hate it because it’s a system designed in such a way to seem impenetrable, to seem big and scary, because I can’t make it to Christie’s, and I buy into it enough to keep me out of the art world.
The kicker, of course, is that I deep-down, long to be a part of that art scene. I got the slightest, slightest taste of it in Chicago, a publisher’s party after-hours in an art museum with an open-bar and hors d’oeuvres and it is amazing.
So, I’m at an impasse.
Art allows anyone in, and I hate it for that because that means the only thing stopping my from joining is myself.
Art is also incredibly exclusive, a world that I don’t stand a chance of breaking into, likely ever. And I know I should hate that.
But, in some masochistic way, the same reasons I hate art are why, deep down, I can’t get enough of it.
I’ve never liked Lars Ulrich more than watching him stumble over himself, tipsy off champagne, after selling that Basquiat for five mill. It’s a world I know I’ll never me a part of, and I love it the same way half my friends are obsessed with Payton Manning and the Colts.
But, there’s a big difference between them and me in one aspect, at least in this situation. I could do this. I could be an artist.
The scale would be different, yes, but it’s always right there, and I’ve decided not to embrace it. I could be an artist, but I’m not, and maybe more than hating art for that, it’s really just a little distaste for myself.
Slacker.
