Official-dom

Officialdom verses how an artist really lives? Our whole edifice of contemporary art, all the rationalization that keeps the modern museums humming, the outlandish prices, the culture of hipness, the elitism, the mystique, all these things are founded upon a mistaken notion concerning 19th century French art.

As the myth goes, all the really important artists of the late 19th century (Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, et al) were misunderstood and unappreciated because they were ahead of their times. The official art of the era belonged to the Salon with its academic entrenched habits of thought and sight. And so far as that goes, it has its kernel of truth. From this premise arose the idea of the artist as the bête noire, and Picasso in the 20th century was to have epitomized the type: the artist genius who lives by his own rules. Fast forward a bit, through various mutations, and one arrives at the present dogma of the church of high art where it has become the stock notion that if art is "accessible" it cannot be very important. Hence, the viewer must be scratching his head wondering what the object is if it is to be genuine, "edgy," avant garde, etc.

The only problem with this notion is that it's wrong. Otherwise, it's grand. It just happens that the audience for the French Impressionists (as the first group of "bête noires" were called) was probably there all along. The paintings they made are ravishingly beautiful and full of touchstones to the art of predecesors. But the Salon had a political lock on the art market of the 19th century (though that was beginning to change even then as private dealers gained prominence).

The problem is that the intelligent, ordinary person whose experience of life and whose taste was being sought in these very humane pictures was not an audience that was easily captured. There was enormous variety in the kinds of art being produced, but there was only one official and lucrative outlet for making a career. And the niche market had not arrived in its full splendor, and the means of communicating to potential audiences was limited also.

But look at who loves French Impressionism now, and you get a glimpse of the natural audience for art. Just as ordinary people love the tenderness, the loveliness, the elegance of French painting, today's real life-affirming art appeals directly to people. Such an appeal has nothing to do with fashion. Indeed, art that deals in the real sensations of living goes contrary to the foppishness that characerizes elites today and in eras past. Real art appeals to the senses, to beauty, to memory, to intelligence, to curiosity -- all things that a person of sensibility possesses and uses to make judgments.

In Byzantium, during the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in China and elsewhere, art has appealed to intellect, to the senses, to the sense of divinity, to the narrative of mythologies or the Bible or other cosmologies. All these sources address a deep, living awareness in us. Real art always makes appeal to life. And ordinary people are more in touch with life than are people who move through their days as poseurs. Why should it be otherwise now?

Still, dogmas die hard. And money talks. And money and morality do not always go hand in hand. For the entirety of the 20th century the "isms" have had the day. Of course real artists made real art (one need only consider Matisse, Bonnard, and yes even Picasso, Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Andrew Wyeth, numerous others).

A real artist living today has to be true to oneself. You have to make the things that your own life presses you to make and not cave into meaningless and ephermal trends. The Spanish Guitar Player at the top of the page was a drawing after a ceramic figure that I bought impulsively for my daughter when she was very little. It never became hers, it's always been mine. But somehow a certain magicalness of a ceramic guitar player with a few nicks here and there (I found it in a thrift store) enchanted me as something to transform in drawing. It was something I wanted my daughter to see. I don't know why. Just to see how someone made a ceramic image of a romantic idea, which I later turned into a different idea through drawing.

She is a real woman in the drawing, not a statue. And she is also lines, a figure composed of lines.