#28 Tortured Soul For Sale
As someone who loves art and creativity, I have recently found myself cringing when I hear the term ‘artist,’ especially when it is applied to me. I think this word has over-expanded to include too many pursuits, to the point where it’s quickly becoming, if not already, an entirely meaningless word. It seems to me that these days, anything that anyone creates can somehow be called art. For example, I don’t know when the last time you went to a Subway sandwich shop was, but if and when you did, did you realize that according to Subway, you were purchasing food that was made by a ‘sandwich artist?’
Don’t get me wrong, I love art, and I appreciate the arts more than I appreciate almost anything else in this world, including food, beer, and sports, but I also have to admit that I think a lot of artists out there are no longer creating art because of a need to express themselves, but instead, that they are producing art as a product, to be bought and sold, and also in a narcissistic attempt to receive accolades and validation from other people. This makes me feel sorry for the truly passionate artists; those who can’t help but to create art, but who don’t aggressively promote themselves, because they are too busy being creative. These honest artists often take a backseat to the eager beaver ‘artists’ who create art as an occupation, and who create trendy art intended to profit from recent fads.
I’m not going to pretend that there should be rules to creativity or art, nor how and why people create things, but at the same time, as a resident of Portland, OR, I’m getting a little tired of seeing people trying to sell complete crap on the side of the street for upwards of five hundred dollars, under the rubric of art. Portland is a beautiful city, a city full of artists and dreamers; this city has more art shows, art walks, and art fairs than any other place I’ve ever lived (there is at least one art walk per week in this city, and sometimes there are more!). But lately, I’ve noticed that a lot these art walks are filled with meaningless, intentionally obscene and offensive gimmicks that are so abstract that they clearly have no meaning, and are using their abstractness and shock value to convince potential buyer’s that they are the by product of so-called “tortured artists.”
When it comes to art, personally, I’m more of an auditory than visual kind of guy. I’m a good listener, and so my favorite form of art would have to be music. But the music industry is probably worse off than the artistic painting community when it comes to productivity versus creativity. (The fact that it’s become an ‘industry’ should have been my first clue.) Almost all music moves me, it controls my moods, and directs my emotions, my thoughts, and thereby my life. But I’m tired of turning on the radio only to hear a song that was composed in order to be popularly accepted and liked. The audience should not be controlling the creativity of the artist; the tail should not be wagging the dog. And I fear that this same thing is happening in the visual art world as well.
I think that most famous paintings are really interesting, and deserving of their fame and attention. The record holder for the most expensive painting ever sold occurred this past June, when “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” by Gustav Klimt sold at a private auction for $135 million. That’s a lot of money for a painting, but what’s odd, is that Klimt died in 1918, and so he never saw a penny of that sum in return for his own work! At the height of his career, Klimt was commissioned by the University of Vienna to make three paintings, but he was never paid, and they were never hung at the school, because they were considered too pornographic. I appreciate the fact that Klimt didn’t sell out, and refused to redo his paintings to receive his commission, and he instead shrugged his shoulders at the critics, and stood by his creative efforts; which is precisely what I want to see in art; someone’s honest creativity, unbounded by others’ opinions and desires.
Interestingly enough, on the “Top Ten List” of most expensive paintings of all time, (which is adjusted for inflation), there seems to be a trend. Out of the 10 paintings, some guy named Pablo Picasso created four of the top ten, and another dude, Vincent Van Gogh, made three of the top ten. This leads me to conclude that either these two men were truly exceptional, and so their average art is worth more than most other artists’, or that the art world is a trend-filled popularity contest in which various artists become famous based on name recognition, as opposed to the merit of their own creative efforts. Because if people buy art simply because they recognize the name of the artist, then in theory, if Picasso, during his blue phase, had written “fuck art” on a canvas, and some moronic, filthy rich art buyer were to buy “fuck art” for $136 million dollars, then “fuck art” would be placed at the top of the ‘ten most expensive paintings ever sold’ list, and then uninformed idiots like myself would do a quick Google search, see “fuck art” at the top of the list, and assume that it was a great painting. And I think that as far-fetched as this idea may seem, with the help of the NEA, this could someday actually happen.
For example, the NEA recently used close to $250,000 of your and my tax money to pay an artist who created “a crucifix submerged in a vat of his urine.” A similar endowment was commissioned for a work featuring “images of [the artist] being penetrated anally by a bullwhip.” And last, but certainly not least, more money than I’ve made serving and bartending in the last four years was given to a man who painted “a nude man strapped beneath heavy weights that are suspended above his head by means of a pulley chained to his scrotum,” which is titled “Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Crushed Face.” Now I’m not trying to get all neo-conservative, and claiming moral outrage at the images or themes I just described, but seriously, if I can get over $250,000 dollars in grant money for throwing a religious symbol in a vat of my own urine, then pass me a few beers, a vat, and a rosary, ‘cause I’m quitting my job and becoming a professional artist!
But let’s talk about this Van Gogh guy. I have a friend out here in Portland who moved to the U.S. from The Netherlands about twenty-five years ago. The other day, I asked him who the most famous Dutchman of all time is. His answer took less than a second, and was quite succinct: “Vincent Van Gogh.” So I looked up Van Gogh on the Internet, and really tried to give the guy a chance. I must admit, for someone who doesn’t “know anything” about what is supposed to make art good or not, I really enjoyed almost all of the works of Van Gogh. His art looks both pretty and sad, two emotions that don’t often mix well together in reality, and most of his pieces are interesting to me, because when I look at them, even on the internet, they invoke in me a sense of (and I think this term is French), “Whoa, man, that’s one seriously disturbed dude-ification”. Spell check that.
And Van Gogh, much like Picasso, was a seriously disturbed dude! I think Van Gogh is Western Europe’s first “weirdo celebrity.” Michael Jackson might be famous for creating great pop music and re-shaping his face with play-dough, but give it up to Van Gogh for being the first famous person to do something crazy with a prostitute: the guy chopped off his own ear and offered it to a prostitute as a gift. Eat your hearts out, Robert Downey Jr., Hugh Grant, and Eddie Murphy! Without Van Gogh, I don’t think our culture could so easily accept celebrities like Ozzie Osborne, who once bit into a dead bat on stage. And Van Gogh used a shotgun to end his life well before Hemingway or Cobain got around to it, so he’s truly an innovator in the ‘tortured artist’ community.
But there is more to art than the artist and their lives; there are the great, time tested artistic works that surpass their creator’s legacies. I consider the Egyptian Pyramids to be one such example. In the world of sculptures, I consider Michelangelo’s David to be one of the grandest things I’ve ever had the privilege to see in person, and there are even great photographers, like Ansel Adams, who can turn the real world into a surreal world, via a camera, various lenses, and their skills in the dark room. But my favorite visual art would have to be the art of film. In particular, I love the films of film noir, because of these films’ careful attention to shadows while using black and white film. I also love the way that films can turn visual images into expressionistic techniques to convey a thought, a motif, or a concept without uttering a word. Being a writer, I envy this skill, since it’s quick and powerful. And it reinforces the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.
But is a picture worth a thousand dollars, let alone 135 million? I’m just not too sure. Personally, I don’t care what some private auction buyer pays for anything—that’s his business. But I remain a bit perturbed that our government has decided to get involved in the arts, and has created the National Endowment for the Arts. I mean, our government handles money about as responsibly as Mike Tyson or M.C. Hammer do, the only difference being that when Uncle Sam runs out of money he just prints more and continues to happily spend it. But I’d rather see our government funding art programs in schools, or helping artists buy art supplies (not including penis choke chains), than see them arbitrarily cutting pay checks to the artists who can write the best grant requests. Because individual works of art, and proposals to create them, are far too subjective and unique to be funded and managed by a bureaucracy like our spendthrift government.
My current beef with street artists, who produce crap, and the art world in general, seems to mirror my favorite artistic debate that I learned about in various history classes in school. This is the famous Supreme Court trial in which the court was trying to determine how to legally differentiate between obscenity and art. At this pivotal moment of US Justice, in 1964, Justice Stewart uttered his famous phrase about pornography, saying: “I’ll know it when I see it.” This is how I feel about “real art” versus “crap that people have thrown together in their garage and are now trying to sell as art;” I’ll know it when I see it. The Mona Lisa may not give me chills, but it’s an earnest attempt to capture the human spirit on canvas, and to that extent, it’s art. But the fact that in famous galleries around the world, you can find “art” that has sold for over $25,000, which are composed of human waste and animal byproducts, seems to me to be kind of absurd.
But I’ll support bad art in galleries long before I’ll support bad art on the streets. And this is because art openings and art galleries are great fun if you’re a cheap, hungry, wino like me. This is because at art galleries, you usually pay nothing to get in, and once you’re in, you get to pig out on delicious snacks like cheese and crackers, and get drunk for free on decent wines. All you have to do is pretend that you are reflecting on the art, by rubbing your chin and saying “hmm” a lot, and then you pick out a work that if asked, you claim to be your favorite. Other than that, it’s just like a wedding; you can’t get too drunk and say anything offensive, because many artists are sensitive, and easily offended; but it’s these very qualities that torture their souls and turn them into creative geniuses!
