Why The Current Art World Youth Obsession is Completely Asinine

I've been meaning to address this issue for quite some time; the reasons I haven't are 1) that I've been in the studio, producing work that dealers and collectors ought to be scratching each others' eyes out over, and will be someday, hopefully before I'm eighty; and 2) this is not a hugely influential blog, anyway. I'm shocked that I still have four or so readers who put up with my long silences, interspersed with bouts of random rambling.

But anyway. I've just happened across an awesome John Scalzi post: Whatever: On Teens, and the fact that their Writing Sucks.

Most teenage writers, for various reasons, aren't particularly good writers (I wasn't). I thought it was important to get that bit of news out of the way, because among other things, the fact that teenage writing sucks isn't a bad thing (that's point number 2), and because I think it's not a bad thing to be honest with teenagers about this stuff. They might not listen (I probably wouldn't have), but they deserve the truth nevertheless.

I recommend reading the entire article, as well as the comments. My contention is that the same thing is true of the vast majority of artwork produced by persons under thirty, and for the same reasons. It's just that the art world, as Franklin puts it in a legendary comment which is already making the rounds, has its reasons for denying this fact:

But for several reasons the current milieu of contemporary art is predicated on visual quality as a subordinate concern. There is heavy philosophical investment against the primacy of visual quality; people actually become angry if you suggest it. The market has to justify a lot of inferior work in order to function in the grandiose way that it does. This climate pushes superior work into the background. It doesn't celebrate greatness - it flatters inferior taste in a manner that lets it think of itself as superior taste. Taste and talent, particularly in high concentrations, remain rare.

The fact is, most artwork by Young Persons looks like most other artwork by Young Persons. There are the obsessive, flamboyantly colored Self Portraits; the boys do Self Portraits as Jesus Christ, and the Latina girls do themselves as the Virgin Mary. There are the Stream Of Consciousness Messes, with random words interspersed over random, layered images. There are the Experiments in Multi-Media Assemblage: see all of the last Whitney Biennial. There are the thin, outraged, obvious, literal Political Pieces, and the Aids Is Bad pieces. There is the graffiti. Have I missed anything?

(If I sound flip and bitter, it is because I myself have produced great piles of most of these things, in a decade where artists under thirty were mostly ignored. I will sell anyone the key to my storage space for thirty thousand dollars.)

As Scalzi says, it is not that this stuff is just bad, end of story. It is a necessary phase in the process of learning a craft. However, it still sucks. What makes a true artist with staying power is not youthful obstreperousness; it is commitment, perseverance, honesty, craft, depth of consideration, and perhaps a certain amount of talent.

And you do not, cannot see who has these things until you have been observing them for a couple of decades.

So let me say it as clearly as I can; anyone who fetishizes young artists merely for the sake of their youth is a fool. Moreover, they may be ruining the very artists they set out to invest in. Too much easily attained success for merely being a jackass creates monsters, not great artists. Look at the later careers of former child actors if you doubt me.

Healing

I had a Bad Client Experience recently, which nevertheless led to some new insight.

It must be said that most of my clients adore me. They adore me so consistently that I don't realize how used to it I have become, and how integral a part of my working life it is. I work really hard, physically hard, and barely get by financially, but that relieved, grateful 'Thank you' that nearly every client breathes at the end of a session keeps me going. (Tips are even better.)

So when one client fidgeted during her session, particularly during the energy work, refused to look me in the eye, did not say thank you, bolted without paying, then emailed to say she was 'creeped out,' it was quite a shock. As I told her in my reply, some people just don't resonate. But it was a good thing for my self-confidence that the next six clients were adorers, old and new.

As I also said in my reply, I try to be respectful of people's boundaries, first and foremost. Over many years it has become clear to me that trying to 'fix' someone is not a healing activity. Mostly what I'm doing is simply being present, sensing currents, and allowing them to balance by themselves, if they so choose. I often worry that when it comes to 'energy work,' I'm completely deluded, and that nothing is actually happening--except for the consistent feedback I get from clients that a whole lot IS happening, and 95% of the time it seems to be for the good. And on the rare occasions that people fidget and completely reject it, I am never clear whether they're frustrated that I'm doing nothing, or that they're feeling something major which freaks them out.

But more and more I am convinced that it is the latter, and that it's not my fault. Because I've had my share of bad bodywork, and most bad bodywork won't kill you. It is usually safe to give your practitioner the benefit of the doubt through at least one session; not all healing procedures are comfortable at the time, and you need to be open to the process in order to derive any benefit from it. I've had my sciatic nerve stripped nearly raw, borne the brunt of projecting, incompetent neurotics, and suffered a lot of substandard rubdowns. But every time I've gotten at least minor relief, learned a thing or two (if only what techniques NEVER to use on a client), and occasionally experienced a wholly unanticipated miracle.

What I realized, after working on some regular and adoring clients, is that the healing process is a completely collaborative one between client and practitioner. For a client to get anything out of a session, they have to allow it. The longer I've been working with someone, the more they get out of a session, because they trust me; one long-term client mentioned that she now feels herself relax as soon as she gets to the top of my stairwell. It's like Pavlovian conditioning.

Thus I am fairly convinced that the bolter was not 'creeped out' because of bad bodywork, for the simple reason that she did not experience the bodywork. She blocked it. Which was certainly her prerogative, although it strikes me as rather foolish to book a session with someone who clearly advertises 'energy healing' and then get upset when you feel energy starting to move. I suspect that, despite the fact that she was a bodyworker herself, she'd never experienced anything similar, didn't trust it, and leaped to the conclusion that I was trying to impose some occult agenda on her.

This theory was borne out in her reply: "What a good nice response. Not what I'd expected."

I've worked on a number of people who blocked the work, both complete strangers and people I knew extremely well. What they all seem to have in common is a need for control at all costs, whether this control is of the direct or indirect variety. Much as they might pay lip service to the idea of 'love and trust and brotherhood,' fundamentally these people are unable to trust anything, whether it be a person, a situation, or God. They literally only feel safe when they're suffering.

This is one of the reasons I've decided never to give a bodywork session as a gift again. Having to make an appointment and pay for a session weeds out a lot of the resisters, because when you're paying for something, you're conscious of making an investment, and thus open to receiving a return on it. It also cuts down on the number of instances where people might suspect that I'm trying to 'get' something from them by 'fixing' them. Because when I look back, I see that a disproportionate number of sessions which went awry were of the 'gift or barter' variety. So not any more. I'll continue to offer gift certificates, because when someone else buys a friend a massage they don't want, the friend usually just doesn't show up. And I'm fine with that, so long as I've been paid. :-)

Before I embarked on actually learning to practice a healing therapy, I read oodles of books which said, in various ways, 'healing begins in the mind.' Now that I've been practicing for years, I understand firsthand how completely true this is. It is axiomatic that I can never 'heal' anyone. I can only assist them in healing themselves, if they so choose.

Also, healing is not always physical. I know many people who are mentally, emotionally and spiritually thriving, whose bodies should have died about ten times over from their various ailments. I also know people who are as physically strong as oxen, whose souls look like shriveled-up snakeskins. There is no judgment incurred when someone does everything they can, and still their body doesn't get better.

Finally, it should be noted that one does not heal oneself by willing it to happen. This misconception is the source of a lot of snappishness on the part of sick people who bark, in response to all well-meaning comments, 'I CAN'T JUST GET BETTER, YOU KNOW.' Of course they can't; that's not the point. You start to heal yourself by allowing the possibility of healing to dawn on you.

This can only occur when one respects oneself enough to 1) listen to the messages from their body without judging; 2) set appropriate boundaries and hold them; and 3) then, and only then, learn to trust that there is a larger force which promotes healing, whether you call this force God, or love, or medicine, or massage therapy. If your core belief is that the universe is a hostile entity which is out to crush you, your body sooner or later responds accordingly.

The wear and tear of Conceptual Art

My friend RA, an astonishing photographer, has posted a harrowing tale of how he installed a camera obscura in an abandoned belfry in Pennsylvania last weekend. Check it out.

I have a friend named Susan. She's an architect, but really she's an artist. She will end up being a full time artist, maybe even one that gets remembered in the history books. But she's not an artist like me. She's the kind of artist whose work will either be totally unsaleable or will be going for millions. In the meantime, she'll get by on grants, fellowships and residencies while I hussle to sell my photos.
...

I said to Susan: "This feels like 12th century Christianity." She gave me a confused look and I thought maybe I had offended. I added, "terrible earthly toil, for a heavenly reward."

The Contemplation of Things Past

That was quite a long silence indeed, wasn't it. The good news is that I have shaken off my year-long inability to face the monumental task of upgrading my website; the bad news is that I'm not posting any pictures of new work until it's done. Instead I am going to bore you with pictures of old work, work that only a mother could love.

Oftentimes I find that I can't decide what I truly think of a painting until I've lived with it for awhile. Some of the ones I'm thrilled with at first, don't hold up over the long haul; some that Other People seem to love, I can't stand to look at. Those are all out in the hallway with their faces toward the wall.

And some of them are the ones I painted for me, myself, and I, because I'm the only one who loves them. Those tend to end up hanging in my living room.

"Crater," 2006, oil and wax on linen

This one, I freely admit, is weird. It is the sort of painting that, at first glance, causes many artists to dismiss me as an incompetent, delusional twerp. Some of them change their minds when they look at my old portfolios and discover that ten years ago, I was painting things like this:

"Above the Laundromat," oil and wax on panel, 48"x 32", 1997
Private Collection

I'm not offended by this. I think there is a qualitative difference between a painting that sits as part of an exploratory trajectory, and a random daub presented on its own, isolated in its pretension. That's what irks me about 'artists' who paint one painting and then trumpet it all over town. "Look at me! I painted A Painting! Isn't it great? Are you going to give me a show now?" That's also why I avoid putting pieces in non-curated group exhibitions. Context is everything.

Anyway, from my perspective, I see the 'Laundromat' painting as a successful study in light, shadow, texture, composition and mood, and this 'Crater' painting as an insouciant experiment in radical streamlining of those same principles, which makes me happy enough to put it on my wall. Or rather, now that it's on my wall, it's making me happy.

What's making me happy about it are the colors, the texture, and the radical contrasts of line quality, value, and form. They're hard to see in a photo, no matter how close up:

With the layering of golds, pinks, whites and blues next to the dark earth shapes, every bit of it seems to vibrate and glow.


A lot of people see this as a 'volcanic eruption.' That, in my opinion, is ridiculous. Can't they see that it's pink? Volcanic eruptions are orange and red and black and gray. This is an eruption of pink light from the crater of my heart; the little silver thistle thing is the ghost of heart-chakra blockages past...

...and all bad poetry is sincere, too. I can't say the same for bad painting; some of it is tremendously insincere. But I don't see this as a bad painting. I see it as a necessary painting, which helped me get to the better paintings of present and future, and a piece of controlled chaos in my living room, where it creates a nice tension with the decorative formality of the Oriental rug.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Cheers!

Silence

I have officially declined to participate in this years' Park Slope Studio Tour. I kept delaying about sending in the application, until finally I realized that I don't want a bunch of strangers trooping through my studio in May. In fact, I don't think I even want my friends trooping through my studio right now. Strange and mysterious things are beginning to happen, and they need to happen in silence and in solitude. I may post detail shots, but I'm not sure.

In other news--God bless Peter Schjeldahl.

...Ryman stays fresh and taut. Even out of date, his conscientious integrity ought to abash today’s hordes of careering youngsters, whose idea of the future of civilization reaches little beyond the next art fair. But to be shameable, under present conditions, may be an unaffordable moral luxury.
...
...Two other artists contribute negligible works with arbitrary political associations.

Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recent vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes. What’s lost—while being barely preserved, with monkish zeal, by the likes of Ryman—is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention.

About a year after I graduated from art school, I realized that I could either follow art fads, and hang out on the Scene, and critique and discuss and schmooze and opinionate--or I could try to make some art with integrity. I could not do both. At the time I thought that this was a temporary state of affairs; I figured I'd work for a few years, produce a solid body of work, get grounded in who I was and what I had to say, and then re-enter the Scene.

Come to find out, I think my Scene-aversion may be permanent. I don't just love Art because it's Art. I love really great art, and am supremely indifferent to the rest of it. Moreover, having to address the rest of it produces so much brain-chatter that I can't be still and listen to my inner voice, which is the one that makes the paintings.

However, I am very pleased to report that my bodywork practice is doing so well that I can now afford to be shameable, at least through the end of April. I raised my prices at the beginning of the year, and now I note that I am getting a lot more calls from Google hits to my website. It seems that people are more inclined to trust a person who charges more. I knew this was true in theory, but I was still gun-shy after experiencing a precipitate drop in business the last time I raised prices, when I was working in Williamsburg. That, I see now, was probably just due to the fact that artists are cheap.

I'm still here

Sorry for the hiatus, there. First I was working on a Creative Capital Letter of Inquiry (thanks for the editorial assistance, You Know Who You Are), then I was taking stretcher bars apart, turning failed canvases over, re-stretching and re-priming them, scrubbing down and re-priming other failed canvases, and working on this one, which is in danger of being overworked and over-complex, but which can possibly still be saved.


Sometimes I wonder if I will ever reach a point in my career where I don't wreck most of my paintings halfway through, and then drag them back from disaster by scraping and re-thinking and trying twelve different things until something works. I keep thinking that someday, I will just put it down, and it will be perfect, and I'll put the next one down, and the next.

But then I'd just be working on autopilot, and it wouldn't be fun anymore.


Look what I discovered about the proportions of a scorpion, as relative to a circle with the focal point moved exactly half of the distance from the center to the edge:


Nifty, huh? I know that scorpions are more or less proportioned like this, because I spent several months while living in Mexico, drawing and painting the scorpions that lived in my house. I was also dating a Scorpio at the time, and it was going badly.

But that's probably too much information.

Yes, I know, it's too busy. It's also too wet to continue messing with, this evening; also the hues are too homogenous. But I SEE it in my head, I swear. It WILL be better in the morning.

Okay, that thread was getting too damn long

Pipe down, you guys, okay? Take your Gamblin war outside. I mean it. Life is too short.

First, an observation. The painting "Curtain" intrigued me, and I made it my desktop wallpaper for a while a couple of weeks ago. Although I certainly can see the curtain contained in the painting, with the yellow floor it resembled to me the edge of a forest, suspended in a dusk sky. It would take a long time to explain this, but certain cirrus cloud formations sometimes (to me) look like broad swaths of deserts with snowcapped peaks. It's merely a matter of perspective shifting, the orange sky is the sand, and the clouds are the mountains reflecting in the distance. It takes effort to see the sky in this way, but while I sound utterly insane it is possible to see this given the correct meteorological conditions and an open mind. Even with the removal of the orange floor (sky) it still looks like a fantastical yet spooky treeline, to me. I guess a lifetime spent looking at and traveling along treelines will do that to a man.

Actually, I intended the 'orange floor' to give you the feeling of light, just light, flowing up under and behind the curtain, blocked by the dark heavy line at the bottom, glowing through the top. So I guess it's not a complete failure, if you're getting 'sky' from it.

I look at treelines, too; in fact I have spent my life staring at all things organic, and growing things, and moving around with them as though I could get inside and become them, with the result that now any random mark I make tends to follow some sort of organic pattern, more or less. I'm still not hugely happy with the painting, but after slapping a 'brown-pink' glaze over the bottom yesterday, which somewhat intensifies the glow, I've come to the conclusion that it is what it is, and trying to make it something else will only make it worse. I'm glad you like it.

Ok, for the questions. I have driven past an art school once or twice in my life, and that is the sum of my training. That said, why is it necessary to use canvas, as opposed to other materials to paint on? I understand the material itself is resilient, but isn't it possible to paint on some other surface and achieve the results you want? Aside from black velvet Elvii (is there a plural for Elvis?) prominently displayed at the finer east Texas trucking establishments, I cannot recall anyone using alternate materials for the backing of their work. Is there a reason?

In the course of my career, I have painted on:
canvas
burlap
plywood
construction palettes
scraps fetched out of dumpsters
masonite
lids of tin cans
muslin
bedsheets
lauan (high-quality plywood veneer)
linen
various other types of fabric, including silk, velvet and prints
walls of buildings
dead flowers

Each of these materials takes paint in entirely different ways; it's like a completely different activity, with a whole different set of results. Therefore, once you get good at something and like the results, it's difficult to switch to something else. Perhaps a major reason that most painters paint on canvas, then, is that we're creatures of habit, and basically lazy.

However, I can also tell you that burlap, muslin and bedsheets are for shit; they disintegrate within short order, and the burlap has too loose a weave to hold any detail at all. You have to prime them all, of course, but even under an acrylic primer that could survive nuclear war, they still rot.

Metal is good, except that the paint peels off it. Glass and plastic have the same problem. I know a few people who paint on aluminum.

Wood is great, except that it's heavy. I once made a piece on a construction palette that weighed about forty pounds; it was a nice piece, but schlepping it around was a real pain, and it was impossible to hang on a normal wall. It ended up being a sort of standing sculpture. You don't want your entire oeuvre to be like that; life is difficult enough.

Also, when you paint on a rigid surface like wood, the painting is much easier to damage and much harder to fix. You whump a canvas painting into the corner of a table, it gives. You do the same with a piece on plywood, you get a nice lovely triangular scratch, and the paint color that matches is back in Mexico.

The benefit of wood is that you can use rigid materials like encaustic (wax paint), oil sticks, and collage. It's also much easier to get a perfectly smooth surface.

Cotton duck canvas is the preferred student-grade medium, being cheap and durable. I hate the stuff. It's ugly, and the machine-woven texture is a cliché on the order of a Thomas Kinkade print-on-canvas, pretending to be a real painting. During the many years I used it, I put on so many coats of gesso by hand that the texture was completely eradicated, replaced by a subtle texture made by the marks of my hands. That texture became the basis of the vibratory energy in the painting.

Now I use linen, and a whole lot less gesso. A piece of linen is a gorgeous thing, all by itself; it is organic, irregular, rich and poetic. You put one stroke of paint on it, it already looks like a Degas. So that is what I'm sticking with. Even though it's $150 a roll.

My second stultifying question is style. Dig if you will the picture that does not fall into any of the known "schools" or is an amalgamation of two or perhaps more styles - does this negate the piece because it was not strictly Impressionistic or combined Realism with Surrealism? In addition, if the artist is completely ignorant of both of these schools and yet paints within the confines of a few varying styles does that automatically render his burgeoning masterpiece into a festering piece of shite?

Painting in a non-named style, in this day and age, does not 'negate' the piece, unless you mean 'disqualifying it from a plein-air kitsch art fair,' which is a GOOD thing, in the context to which I (and the other artists reading this blog, hopefully) aspire. If you are painting in a recognized style, such as Impressionism or Surrealism, in this day and age, you are not considered an 'artist' by anyone who writes for, or reads, Art in America, Art Forum, the New York Times, or anything in the art blogosphere. You are considered a commercial craftsperson, if you are considered at all.

You see, the one required quality of anything regarded seriously by the avant garde art world is newness. (Do not even get me started on Jeff Koons. Just don't.) The nastiest, most dismissive thing ever repeatedly, snottily said to a struggling art student during critique is, "That's been done." (Or, "that's kitsch," which comes almost to the same thing.) You may, of course, borrow from the vocabulary of recognized styles out of the past, but if you're just making an Impressionistic painting, welcome to Hotel Rooms, Inc.

If the artist is ignorant of style, period, he is termed an 'outsider artist,' ignored while alive, and lionized after he dies, penniless, in a mental institution. See Henry Darger.

I wonder if the lack of training or knowledge would provide the painter a unique, fresh perspective or merely damn the fledgling artist to a life of noisome craft shows and loving renditions of the King?

Yes.