IN 1913, THE ARRIVAL IN AMERICA of a simple idea drastically revolutionized the Art World. The occasion was the Armory Show in New York, the first exhibition of Modern Art in this country, and the simple idea was this: The proper role of the artist is to express himself.
That was utterly new. It turned all the preceding centuries of Art History on their head.
Fast-forward to the end of the same century: that same simple idea, that the proper role of the artist is to express himself or herself, was being taught as gospel in virtually every college and university in America, as well as in the art departments of essentially every high school, middle school and elementary school across the country. All major art publications accepted that idea as an unassailable given, as did virtually all art critics and art writers. And virtually every city council with a public art program anywhere in America supported that same idea, using tax money for the purchase of public artworks that were, almost always, examples of the artist expressing himself. By Y2K, in other words, that new, revolutionary idea had become entrenched and established-something that everyone had repeated for so long that nobody even questioned it anymore.
Meanwhile, Modern Art1 set about claiming the Art World for itself. Any artist who refused to believe that idea was simply excluded from galleries and not shown; any art reviewer who refused to voice the new truth was fired; and vast collections of art that predated 1913 were sold off or hidden away in basements and closets, having been rendered quaint and obsolete by the new idea's artworks. And in the spotlights of places like Sotheby's and Christie's, Modern works began to sell for millions of dollars each, thereby establishing the godhood of the best proponents of that simple idea, including Picasso, Rothko, Pollock, Kline and Lichtenstein.
Thus nobody thought it particularly unusual, much less bizarre, when a dead (stuffed) horse dangled from the ceiling fetched more than $2 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York in 2004, or when an anonymous buyer paid $5.2 million for a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling a chimpanzee named Bubbles, or when Steven Cohen, founder of a Connecticut-based hedge fund called SAC Capital Advisors, LLC, spent $8 million for an adult tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde.2
Such mega-sales stand as the ultimate proof that, during the 20th Century, that simple 1913 idea effectively took over the Art World in America (as it concurrently did in the rest of the world).
And what's wrong with that idea?
There are three things wrong with it.
The first is that when you have the mindset that anything an artist does is art, credentials replace talent. Like this:
MODERN ART ADVOCATE: "Artist Joe Schmo is a great artist!"
IMPARTIAL HONEST INQUIRER: "Cool. Can he paint?"
MAA: "He attended the Haystack Mountain School of Art on Deer Isle, Maine, from 1980 to 1981."
IHI: "Oh. Can he paint?"
MAA: "He received a BA in Art from Yale University in 1986!"
IHI: "Can he paint?"
MAA: "He completed his post-graduate studies at the Stowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture."
IHI: "Can he paint?"
MAA: "He studied with Mauirizo Cattalan!"
IHI: "Can he paint?"
MAA: "He's had dozens of solo and group shows in New York City and his works are in corporate and private collections all over the world."
IHI: "Can he paint?"
MAA: "What kind of a question is that? Boy, you sure don't understand the Art World."
IHI: "Guess not."
The second thing wrong with the 1913 idea is that when all the focus is on the artist, his or her choice of subjects is finite. If your focus is, instead, the beauty and power of the natural world, then your subjects are infinite; but if your focus is yourself, then there really isn't a whole lot to say. To coin a phrase, the world is much bigger than any one artist.
Which is why so much of Modern Art is "derivative," rephrasing, reiterating, appropriating, and outright copying, all to spackle over the big whole where originality should be. For example, Frederic Church (1826-1900) painted landscapes that portrayed the majesty and grandeur of nature in places like Niagara Falls. Frank Moore, a Modern Artist, paints pictures like Niagara (1994), which was a direct copy of a Frederic Church painting that Moore framed with copper tubing and a faucet. This was to convey the fragility of the planet's water supply. "It's terrifying and awful when you realize that billions of tons of pollutants are flowing down the Niagara River every day," Moore said.
Originality v. appropriation, infinite v. finite, painting the glories of America to inspire love and wonder v. constructing paintings to scare people into environmental awareness: that's the second thing wrong with the 1913 idea.
But the third and by far worst thing wrong with that idea is that it trivialized the public clear out of the Art World. That idea turned the spotlight squarely on the artists, leaving the public in the dark. As the artist became all-important, the public became unimportant, even irrelevant.
In years to come, that single fact - the exclusion of the public - will be shown to have been far more profoundly important than the new role of the artist. It is therefore worth explaining and emphasizing: for all the centuries before 1913, the single idea that governed the Art World was that the proper role of the artist was to express art. Not himself. Something far bigger and much grander: art. And in all those centuries, the role of the public was to view and admire artworks so as to be inspired and uplifted.
The 1913 idea totally changed that. Thenceforth, the public was irrelevant except as a source of tax dollars and as a target-the goal was not to uplift and inspire but to offend and incense. The mindset was this: "I am an artist, and therefore if you do not like what I create then you are anti-art and stupid and therefore desperately in need of the art I shall give you which you then obviously must pay for."
A classic example of that mindset at work occurred in Australia in 1997, when the National Gallery of Victoria opened an exhibition of works by Andres Serrano. One was Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucified Christ submerged in a jar of the artist's urine. After immediate violent public reaction, the museum director, Timothy Potts, closed the show, for which he was then promptly attacked by the artist: "As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Potts has no future, and anyone who agrees with him is a fool," said Serrano.
The ideas at play couldn't be clearer. The public's idea: This art is offensive. The artist's idea: The public needs to be offended so as to be paddle-jolted from their complacency and ignorance into enlightenment. The director's idea: The public's feelings should be considered. The artist's idea: That director needs to be fired, since he clearly doesn't understand that what counts is not what the public feels but what I, the artist, want the public to feel.
It is highly instructive to watch what happens when a Modern artist is attacked: he or she smirks and labels his or her attackers as uninformed fools. But then watch what happens when their access to tax dollars is cut off: they go ballistic. Their reaction is shock and outrage, as if someone has stolen their birthright, if the public refuses to support them.
In 1998 Karen Finley went ballistic - that is, she sued the National Endowment for the Arts, which had had the audacity to turn down her grant request. Finley's "artworks" consisted of anger, nudity, profanity and chocolate-smearing her nude body with chocolate while screaming obscenities at an audience. Despite the art critics who had praised these "performance works" as "a provocative brand of artistry," the NEA turned down her application for more tax dollars. So, joined by three other "controversial artists,"3 she sued, challenging the NEA's "decency and respect" law as violating her right to Free Speech and accusing the NEA of Communist-style repression: "That's what they do in China," she said.4
Finley and everyone else who unquestioningly accepts the 1913 idea about the proper role of the artist all say this very clearly: artists must have the right to do anything they want, and to deny them that right is censorship. In other words, what the public wants is insignificant and unimportant compared to what the artist wants - and if the public tries to cut off the tax-money supply, then the artist must sue, becoming a valiant freedom-fighter struggling to protect the First Amendment from the American public.
And so the last bastion of offensiveness in America today is the Art Establishment, meaning those individuals and institutions who support or have been built upon that 1913 idea.
The rest of us hope and strive always to avoid offending people, and displays of extreme offensiveness, like hate crimes and racial discrimination, are vigorously prosecuted. But artists who offend people - by, for example, pasting elephant dung on a painting of the Madonna, or by hanging statutes of lynched children from the branches of real trees in town squares, or by painting pictures of young girls, their dresses raised, being probed by octopus tentacles5 - are praised by the Art Establishment for their originality, their vision, their genius.
JOHN CURRIN IS A PAINTER whose works hang in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. After his depictions of women sparked outrage among more than a few women viewers several years ago, he said: "When I paint a breast or a woman's body, it's almost a joke to be formal about it, because half of me is the kid in school still drawing on the bathroom wall. . . . But I don't think my works are offensive. If it is offensive, my reaction is kind of, well, whatever."
Art Establishment advocate Gavin Brown was more blunt about Modern Art's harmlessness: "Paintings aren't offensive. They don't kill people." The depressing thing is to think about how many highly intelligent people wouldn't immediately see how bizarre that statement is. Spray-painting swastikas on synagogue walls doesn't kill people either.
But the Modern mindset, in which the public exists only to serve artists by funding them and taking their punches, is that it's all just a game anyway, no harm done. As one of the most-praised Modern artists of the 20th Century, Francis Bacon, confessed: "Painting has become, all art has become, a game by which man distracts himself. And you may say that it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game." And the Art Establishment's strategy for this game is first to offend us, then to pretend to be incensed that we're offended, smirking at our discomfort, but ready always to fly into a rage if we cheat at the game by trying to withhold our tax money from their pockets.
And that is the state of affairs in America today after nearly a century of the mindset formed by that simple idea as it hardened from new and revolutionary to old and entrenched.
But these are the end days of that mindset. The Art Establishment's days are numbered. As surely as a simple idea changed everything in 1913, so a new simple idea will change everything again. In Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens wrote that, "There are only two styles of portrait - painting, the serious and the smirk." Before 1913, artists were serious; since 1913, artists have been smirking.
But the Age of the Smirk is already ending.
The handwriting is on the wall, and it's the same text as in the Book of Daniel in the Bible (which is where the expression "handwriting on the wall" comes from): "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin," meaning "Your kingdom has been judged as wanting and your days are numbered."
The engine of this new titanic change is not anything so grand as the hand of God; it is instead, again, a simple idea. This new simple idea that will soon rupture the Art World as we know it today is that the proper role of the artist is to express art, and that the public should be treated with the respect they deserve as the legitimate beneficiaries of art.
Sounds familiar. Of course, it is. Just as the 1400s saw a rebirth, or renaissance of respect for the glories of the past (Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome), so we are again, at this moment-not just in America but worldwide-on the threshold of a new renaissance of respect for artworks from artists who don't view themselves as little gods or rock stars.
In 2001, English artist Jacqueline Crofton was banned for life from the Tate Galleries after she threw two eggs at an artwork in the Tate. The work, by Martin Creed, was an empty room in which the lights went on and off, and it was titled The Lights Going On and Off. Crofton egged the room at a moment when the lights were off. Later she told the BBC, "I have nothing against Creed. . . . What I object to fiercely is that we've got this cartel who control the top echelons of the Art World in this country and leave no access for painters and sculptors with real creative talent."
But that cartel's days, again, are numbered. As long as public outrage was being confined to individuals like Crofton throwing eggs, or like another English artist, Ray Hutchins, who dumped a load of manure in front of the Tate and propped up a sign reading "Modern Art is a Load of Bullshit" - as long as the outrage was confined to individual acts by offended people, it could all be laughed off by the Art Establishment with knowing winks and elitist elbow-nudges for blithe reminders that what else can one expect from such a sadly unenlightened public.
But two things have now happened that cannot be laughed off. These are the two things that foretell the end of the Art Establishment, the final total rejection of that 1913 idea, and the triumph of the new simple idea. If you imagine the massive edifice of Modern Art and all its manifestations as vast herds of dinosaurs, then these two things are the great world-killing comet that is speeding toward them to cause their extinction.
The first of the two is the Art Renewal Center, founded in 1998 by Fred Ross of New Jersey, and the second is PleinAir Magazine, launched in 2004 by Eric Rhoads of California. Both the ARC and PAM are world-destroying threats to the Art Establishment's status quo that cannot be laughed off. And they cannot be laughed off, much less ignored, for this one singular reason: they are both the voice of the public, of all the millions of decency-appreciating art-loving men and women who have been pissed off for a very long time now.
One woman throwing eggs? That's a meaningless minnow of protest for the Art Establishment to scare away; but these two, ARC and PAM, jointly representing millions of people, are more like those prehistoric sharks that swallowed whales for appetizers.
One of those millions, art-lover Jim Kalb, posted this comment online in 2004: "Are you finally sick and tired of feeling you have to pretend to like modernist 'art' which you actually think is lousy/laughable at best, outright garbage at worst? If so, check out the ARC site." More than 5 million people are now doing exactly that every year - checking out www.artrenewal.com - and that number is growing exponentially as the word spreads around the globe that if you find Modern/Contemporary art offensive, you're far from alone, and you'll soon be vindicated.
Fred Ross himself in turn welcomed the magazine: "PleinAir Magazine is fast becoming a major addition to the 21st-Century Art World, joining the Art Renewal Center in its call for a return to standards and training in the pursuit of excellence, truth and beauty."
Plein air is French for "fresh air," and plein-air artists are those who paint outdoors rather than in studios. And while the magazine proudly presents the finest in outdoors painting (which happens to be the fastest-growing and most avidly collected form of painting today), the name PleinAir has also come to mean a breath of fresh air in the prevailing Modern Art smog.
Publisher Eric Rhoads makes it very clear what his magazine stands for: "I am not opposed to 'modern' art in any knee-jerk way. I am only opposed - firmly - to any art of any era that is a sham, a ruse, or a mockery, that uses shock value to hide the artist's total lack of talent and the complete lack of any firm artistic foundation. My daughter can bang her hands on a piano, but that doesn't make her a pianist; and the fact that someone can slap paint onto a canvas doesn't make him a fine artist.
"What I do stand for," Rhoads continues, "is appreciating and promoting the art of any era in which the product is an expression of talent coupled with training and discipline. As it happens, one of two places where you can find such artists in great abundance is the past before the 20th Century. We can learn from, and build upon, the classics, the academic masters, the truly great painters in whom prodigious talent was coupled with sound training and great discipline. And the other place where you can find such artists in great abundance is all around us today-real artists creating phenomenal works that the Art Establishment ignores or belittles.
"But that's why, in every issue, we feature both deceased masters and living ones. Our April 2005 issue, for example, had in-depth articles about the Hudson River School, and about Asher B. Durand, who was born the year before George Washington died; and we also had articles about the New Hudson River School and two great modern-day artists, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams of New York and Frank Serrano of California." Rhoads' May issue of PleinAir featured the Fred and Sherry Ross Collection as well as Eugene Boudin, Sydney Laurence as well as living artists Dennis Doheny, Todd Reifers and Quang Ho. Most historical features show a Plein air link to great masters since on-location painting and sketching has been an important part of academic training for centuries because of the need to learn light and color from the source itself.
"That's what PleinAir stands for: not merely outdoor painters but also any and all painters of the past and present who consider art to be a serious, even sacred endeavor, as opposed to an activity to perform with a smirk for hoodwinking the masses."
For the time being, PleinAir is the only art publication anywhere in the world - the only one - whose publisher has the clarity of thought and the courage to tell the truth about the Art Establishment's century-long reign since 1913. For telling it like it is, Rhoads has suffered financially. In retaliation for the magazine's editorializing about the whole Modern Art scam, subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, and advertisers have withdrawn.
But simultaneously the word is going out that "Eric Rhoads" stands for truth about art in the print media in the same way that "Fred Ross" stands for truth about art online - and the new subscribers climbing aboard are far outnumbering those who jumped ship. When PleinAir first began newsstand sales in 2005, for example, the response was not just far in excess of the national average for new launches, it was in fact unheard-of for any new magazine's newsstand launch: 50% in the United States and 70% in Canada.
As the saying goes, money talks. So watch for more art publications to catch on to the fact that the Art Renewal Center and PleinAir Magazine are perfectly in tune with the vast majority of people on Earth, who for decades have been muttering their discontent but who now, finally, have found as their champions two megaphones of the 21st-Century media, one in cyberspace and the other on newsstands everywhere (or at www.pleinairmagazine.com).
So what does the future hold for the Art World?
Two things for sure.
First, inevitably, the future holds great changes. Those who have spent their lives smirking at the pathetically unenlightened public should maybe take a crash course in Art History, because if there is one constant in Art over the centuries, it is that when things change drastically, they change very quickly. Just like in 1913.
For those who can't be bothered to study Art History, here in a nutshell is the rule that it teaches repeatedly: drastic change comes not in a gradual tide, but in a tsunami.
The second absolute certainty about the future of the Art World is that America and the world will suddenly see a tremendous outpouring of masterful artworks, which in fact are being painted right now. Artists like Andrew Wyeth and Richard Schmid are internationally known for their personification of the new idea that is set to wash away the flimsy world of Modern Art in one titanic cleansing. But there are tens of thousands of highly trained and prodigiously talented artists like them only waiting to be recognized-painters like Will Wilson, for example, and any of the others represented by San Francisco's John Pence Gallery, and the far more numerous younger painters like Chelsea Bentley of Utah, Matt Smith of Arizona, Anthony Waichulis of Pennsylvania, and all the others seen in each issue of PleinAir Magazine.
Count on those two drastic changes happening soon: a new renaissance of respect for art and for the central importance of the public, and a virtual tidal wave of talent producing truly great artworks.
That means, for one thing, that the $8 million dead tiger shark in Connecticut suddenly will be worth less than the formaldehyde it's floating in.
In 2001, there was a symposium at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The urgent subject was how curators and conservators could deal with artworks that were deteriorating badly, since these works were created from things like latex, lard, bodily fluids, and banana peels. Word to the Guggenheim: Don't worry about it - in the very near future, all such works will be recognized as refuse belonging in a Dumpster.
