There.
I drew a crowd.
Problem solved.
Posted on 06/04/2005 12:26:47 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The arts are essential, everyone seems to agree. Seventy percent of Californians say artists make for a better community. The state mandates the arts as a "core subject" in public schools. San Francisco arts organizations, with an aggregate budget of $350 million, attract more patrons in a year here than all sporting events do. So why is it getting harder and harder to pay the bills?
"Crisis" may be too easy a word to throw around, when it comes to the perennially dicey business of arts funding, but things are at a pretty bad pass now. The once vibrant California Arts Council has all but disappeared during the state's fiscal free fall. Very few public schools can actually afford to meet the state arts-education mandate. Shrinking city and county arts budgets around the country mirror the problems. While federal funding has held its own, the Bush-era National Endowment for the Arts has become centrist and highly risk-aversive in its grants.
Corporate, foundation and individual giving, meanwhile, has not recovered from the dot-com portfolio meltdown and merger mania that followed. Who knows if the stock market-driven bounties of the late '90s will ever return? The recent crash-and-burn of Alberto W. Vilar, a munificent donor to New York's Metropolitan Opera, Chicago's Lyric Opera and others, is an extreme but emblematic sign of the times. Unable to meet his pledges, the fallen tech- stock titan was arrested on fraud charges last week for filching $5 million from a client. That story must have induced a few shivers and nervous sideways glances in arts boardrooms around the country. It's not only the will and wherewithal to give that can erode arts funding. Social needs, priorities and sensibilities change.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
There.
I drew a crowd.
Problem solved.
the arts are not well funded when times are lean....in California...on many levels....times are lean.
Ping to the art ping list.
Let me (or Sam Cree) know if you want on or off this list.
You post some interesting art articles. If you could ping me for those, then I could ping the rest of the regular art ping list.
And I would also find your articles sooner than I might otherwise.
Thanks.
Yet Cali has the most overheated real estate market in the country.
The problem isn't a shortage of money. I think that the real problem, at least in terms of the sort of artwork you hang on walls, is that for the last fifty to seventy-five years, the art world became pretentious and self-indulgent, deliberately scorning the patrons. You can't produce garbage, hang it on the walls, tell everyone how wonderful it is, and that they're idiots if they disagree. If they had set out deliberately to destroy the whole concept of art (and some did, like the guy who hung the urinal on the wall), they couldn't have succeeded any more thoroughly. Ordinary people don't trust art or artists, and I don't blame them a bit.
I have a favorite fantasy: someday, all of the museum curators are going to have a GIANT garage sale of 20th century garbage-- they'll call it the "What Were We Thinking?" sale. Then they'll take the proceeds from the sale, all $200 or so of it, and maybe buy a little something beautiful.
Art keeps some of us busy and out of jail
"For me I think "art" has been hijacked by people with no talent."
I believe you are both correct; however, I'd go back a little over 75 years. While I generally appreciate Impressionist art, it is also generally responsible for introducing the values of rebellion, shock and innovation to the art community. Up until the mid 19th Century, most if not all high art in the Western world was purely representational and the only "innovation" that was appreciated were those techniques and media which could add to the realism of a piece. Beginning with the impressionists a trend developed toward increasingly abstract, non-representational art. Some of it did have a driving credo with an intent an purpose and were generally executed by artists with a well developed foundation in the traditions of art. For example Cubism began as an effort on the part of Braque and Picasso to render multiple perspectives of an object on a two dimensional surface. Both men were exceptional artists and understood the traditions they were growing out of. As increasingly abstract art became accepted, the talentless with no grounding in the classical traditions (other than perhaps P.T. Barnum) were able to justify pieces of absolute garbage.
My passion is medieval art, manuscript illumiination, calligraphy, etc. I have given presentations to Bible studies and other groups regarding signs and symbols in Christian art. When I do this, I draw a graph with the X (horizontal) axis starting with the year 1 AD on the left through 2000 on the far right. The Y-axis (vertical) on the left is literacy percentage, going from 0 - 100 (bottom to top). In western civilization, the first 3/4 of the graph (from 1 AD - app. 1500 AD) the percentage is extremely low as reading and writing were the exclusive domain of clerics and nobles. After the Gutenburg press (1453 AD) facilitated the reproduction and dissemination of the written word there is a gentle upslope, and as western society placed an increasing value on economic freedom, and the industrialization of society allowed for wider education and Enlightenment ideals started to manifest themselves, there is an increasingly sharp rise as you move toward the present day.
The reason I do this is to illustrate how few people throughout western history have been able to draw anything from the written word: The vast majority of their input was through a well developed visual vocabulary, and in a Christian context, this means iconography and the representation of Biblical events which communicated the lessons within. Go to a medieval village in Burgundy or the Rheinland. Not a single person in the village (other than the priest) could read Genesis. Most would probably not understand Genesis if it were read to them in Latin. All but the blind would identify and intimately understand the stained glass window depicting a man, a woman a snake and an apple.
In the present day, about all that is communicated through modern art is the artist's incompetence and the collector's gullibility.
"incompetence and gullibility"
That is pretty much the way I see abstract artists and their patrons too, and I am an artist.
Impressionism did introduce the value of rebellion, but I think that was purely incidental to its real purpose and contribution, which is a much greater understanding of light and color. So, I think the contribution was enormous.
But, I think Picasso was a fraud, and that he really, deep down, hated women. So, I can't stand him. ;)
I personally could not, and still can not see how you can have one without the other. The studio artist has to have a firm grounding in precedent regardless of whether they choose to perpetuate it or rebel against it. The historian or aesthetician, on the other hand, can not fully appreciate the true worth of a piece without at least a basic comprehension of the media and technical skills, involved in its creation.
I didn't say that it wasn't...Monet, espoecially was all about light, and even decades in advance of the particle theory of light was playing with the idea of light as having material properties. It was unprecedented at the time and that's where I pretty much see the sowing of the seeds for what became the 20th Century's virtual worship and adoration of the avant-garde. Monet's goal was not shock or defiance, but alas, that's what the art world values most of all today. I agree that Monet's goals and objectives regarding the properties of light and it's interaction with physical objects were his primary if not sole raison d'etre and the revolutionary aspect of his work was incidental, if not accidental. Curious how the contemporary view is to embrace the mutant, unintentional outgrowth of his work while it's primary intent has largely fallen by the wayside.
"Curious how the contemporary view is to embrace the mutant, unintentional outgrowth of his work while it's primary intent has largely fallen by the wayside."
I see two completely separate art worlds running side by side these days. The world you're talking about (and most of the museums) is indeed all about rebellion, all about nihilism, really. But the other, less visible art world is carrying on the representational tradition, and real and wonderful art is being created there. (Check out these: http://www.p-a-p-a.com/ and http://www.oilpaintersofamerica.com/ )
So, maybe we'll see the tide turn in upcoming decades. Some people look around today and believe they see the beginnings of another Great Awakening, a real revival of true Christian faith, in this country. Maybe they're right, and maybe that will feed the revival of true art? I sure hope so.
This I cannot understand either. Where I teach, we have artists teaching both art history and studio art and sometimes we bring the other discipline into our main class such as exercises in perspective in a Renaissance art history class as well as a great deal of art history into the studio classes. How can you not understand the greats?
Perhaps this is part of the problem with contemporary art: there is a rejection of art history, or just a clever manipulation in a postmodern way. (Add Mickey Mouse with a naked woman and a huge Budweiser in the background; it makes no sense, but it's supposed to reflect our media-and consumer-driven lives.)
To me, much of the contemporary work is just empty. I don't mind abstraction; in fact, I like it. But it has to move me emotionally, and so much of the recent work just leaves me cold. I used to visit about 100 galleries in NYC on my trips there; but I felt so spent and empty afterward that I soon gave that up. There was nothing inspiring there.
And I think others of you hit the nail on the head: when the art starts to move viewers again (instead of being academic exercises understood only by the elite), then we may have a resurgence of decent art and arts education.
Of course you're right, and I also try to exist in "that other world," (funny isn't it how the traditionalist torch bearers of culture have been driven underground)?). I'm fascinated by the photorealists (Chuck Close et al.) purely from a technical standpoint, the trompe loeil humor of a Magritte, or more recently Bev Doolittle, etc. Even 20th century surrealism with it's strong anchor in mannerism can be edifying, attractive and aesthetically pleasing.
I'm aware that there's some great art being done out there, and most of the "good stuff" is not being done on the public dole! The *artists* who are obsessed with rejecting the influences of society are precisely those who are most likely to be subsidized by it.
I'm sure there are some dynamic realists, but they have to take me somewhere new. There is a show now at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH of James Aponovich. At first I was tempted to dismiss his work, but I keep thinking about it, because I haven't seen anything quite like it. These still lifes were done during a trip to Italy, the landscape of which you can see in the background.
What I am really looking for are artists who have developed a new kind of abstraction that is very personal to them (and not just the cool art world thing). For current research, I am especially interested in contemporary artists of the American west.
So send me a link if you know of someone in this vein.
So true, and quite contradictory, I think. The artists who really feel the need to say something will continue to do so, with or without public funding. And they may be the ones who are not "recognized" per se. But I think time will sort out the best, whether we know them now or not.
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