When I was a kid, smart but quite delinquent, it wanted to grow up to do something really hard, something so challenging that nothing else would quite equal it. I decided on art because it was something I vaguely knew was all but impossible to do (how could anyone paint that Velasquez I saw at the museum?) and because I could already draw better than any of my peers. For a long time that has sufficed. Art is hard, not because of the technical mastery involved, not because of its quizzical relation to the material world and monetized culture, but because of the issues of meaning and content it invokes. As a mature artist and several decades later I came to recognize that questions of meaning and content, to say nothing of what artworks are considered good or not good, belong to the domain of art confabulators, the court of critics, star artists, the dealers, the curators, collectors, and all the greater and lesser nobility of the realm. They define content meaning, value, and quality. I'm usually not too troubled by this, not any more than Velazquez -- as I finally learned -- was troubled by the requirement to paint the haze of divinity around the head of his monarchs or to coarsen the colors of their servants. However...
Nowadays I am deeply troubled by that band of art courtiers, their coming and goings, their whisperings and gentle manners, their learned words and machinations. They are dumb. Their ideas are naive and outmoded. They have faulty concepts and give bad advice. They are simply not smart enough for me. Take, for example, the critical notion of meaning and content. Almost every critic will speak of the meaning that an artwork has, what it expresses, what it "says". Almost every teacher of art theory will grill his or her snot this or that shape is the best sign of such meaning. What thinking person can agree that these modes of inquiry have any value? What remains of the ancient idea that some direct and limited correspondence exists between a word and an object, or between a concept and its manifestation either as a metaphor or as a phenomenon? When did art people get the idea that abstract art, the so-called non-objective art, was free from provoking associative meaning and content, by which I mean the metaphorical reconstruction of conflated experiences and feelings? Why is the populist view of abstraction limited to a regard for its design and optical sensation? Why do so many art critics and fellow outsiders -- the curators, etc. -- go along with the ludicrous oversimplification of Greenbergian thought in saying that the artwork refers to itself (as if that is possible)? Nothing at all is merely experienced as itself. Everything, all that is experienced, is the mirror of collective and personal memory and desires, beliefs and fears. In itself a thing, like a painting, is just a thing, meaningless. On the other side, why do these clowns fill up the world with babble about referents, as if anything at all signals a particular referent that's more significant than any other that can be imagined? Why, for instance, is conceptual art about one concept rather than another or none? To make the claim that a concept will necessarily induce recognition of this instead or that is absurd just as my finding a coin on the street will cause me to spend it on a newspaper is absurd. Why is the artworld so damned dumb? I could go on (and you know I will somewhere, someday) but I simply what to know why the artworld can still get by with outmoded notions about form, content, meaning? If they are deeded to decide the fate of art, why are they so dumb about it and about current thinking in allied fields -- like neurology and linguistics, and even art history? I still think art is one of the most challenging of human endeavors but I doubt that the value of art will be decided by the usual courtiers much longer. As a class they aren't interesting enough or curious enough or interdisciplinary enough. They have joined the hucksters union. They have embraced the commonplace vulgarity together with its ineptness. No wonder they say art is irrelevant. Yes, they still have the power; they can send artists to the dark Tower and doom them to obscurity but they are also drunk with that power, woozy, blurting incoherence, blinking and stumbling, unable to function in the intellectual and artistic daylight some artists enjoy. I don't want a prissy curator or artworldly buffoon lightweight in my studio or deciding my future. I want a huge-minded thinker. One who struggles with the only question that counts at every breath and moment: Why? That person is always welcome. wc
