Dialogue on Contemporary visual art

September 19, 2012 at 1:54 pm (Uncategorized)

(This is part 1. Part II is here)

A: So, you’re a painter, do you follow any other contemporary artists? I really like the work of Tom Goldenberg. Have you seen it?

Painter: I can’t say I’ve seen him, but there is so much good art out there now that it’s hard to keep track of everything. Have you seen the Art Renewal Center?  Just look at the winners of their annual competitions: there’s art as good as has ever been produced there.

A: I’ve never seen anything like this. This isn’t the art of the headlines. Still, do you get the sense that painting is going anywhere? Is it moving on to some new style or is it just a catalog of the past?

P: I don’t know that I can answer that. Art just isn’t about that.  Take what I do, painting. The point of it is just to interact with the subject. The point is not to make any new style, or even to imitate some old style. We were just talking today about Wheatfield with Crows. Look at it. Whatever you say about it, Van Gogh didn’t look at the field and say “Aha! A perfect opportunity to advance Post-Impressionism!” He just interacted with the field or the image. Some part of interacting involves contributions from the self and the culture and all that, but the point is just to interact.   Styles change because cultures change, and artists are cultural. It contributes something to the interaction. But it’s not clear to what extent we even are a culture, so it’s not clear to what extent we can even have a style.

A: Or maybe the most significant thing about our culture is its massive size mixed with its absence of content, and so the only art that can express what we are is massive artworks that have no content.

P: Right – a friend of mine says as a half-ironic answer to “what is art” that “if it’s big, it’s art.”

A: In that sense all the giant, vacuous art would be a mirror held up to culture, just as Baroque art was a cultural response to the Reformation.

P: Maybe, but there is another element in it too. That contemporary, headline grabbing art you’re talking about isn’t just frequently big and self-absorbed when it should be interacting with a subject – It also muddles the difference between art and fashion. Art strives for something permanent or timeless, even if this permanence can only be actualized through the lattice-work of things that must change: styles, media, preferred subjects, etc. Fashion has no interest in permanence at all, and it even finds it repugnant. Permanence would be the death of fashion.

A: I’ve always wondered about that! Take cars. I’ve never understood why, if you made a beautiful car, that you couldn’t just keep making it forever.

P: Well, Harley-Davidson did something like that. The bikes look like they did in the ’40’s, and you have to sacrifice some speed and handling to keep the design, but they stuck with it. But it’s hard to see how a vehicle can wholly separate itself from the world of fashion.

A: So Fashion seems to belong to physical necessities: clothes, transport, food.

P: I’ve never thought about it that way, but yeah. Fashion is the art of things that can never be art, since they can never simply be for itself.

A: Be for itself?

P: Yeah. Art has to be for itself. Not in the old “art for art’s sake” sense, but just because it has its own value. It’s not some tool to get something else. This is what bothers me more than anything else about the contemporary art scene. If you want to get a grant, you always have to put it in terms of art and : so art and global warming; art and childhood education; art and global oppression; art and Obama is a socialist; art and Jesus loves you. What is all of this saying? That the art isn’t of any value.

A: The art is just an instrument to end global warming or alert the masses to the death of freedom or whatever.

P: Exactly. But it’s really about interacting with a subject with an eye to the permanent.