How the Contemporary Art World Lies To You

 

Cut the Bull: 

Damien Hirst’s Postmodern “Art,” A Box with a Rotting Cow Head, Maggots, Flies, and a Bug Zapper 

 

The cult of Postmodernism is a toxic current flowing through our culture. Postmodernism is a kind of Cultural Marxist magical thinking among our indoctrinated-not-educated establishment. They have convinced themselves, and each other, that language shapes the world, and by controlling the social Narrative, they can force the universe into obedience.

Postmodernism is now the consensus worldview of the ruling elite. Cultivated in the carcinogenic breeding grounds of universities, this deceitful and cranky way of thinking has metastasized, and has become the default position of administrative professionals in government, business, the media, and especially the arts. People are suffering due to this unsustainable hoax, which is being inflicted on us all by top down activism. It has even soured our personal relationships.

Art provides great evidence of Postmodernism’s absurd, pretentious poses. Occasionally in my studies I find a piece that really exposes the rot. The reason the article below resonated for me is the writer sings the praises of some key Postmodern “masterpieces” and “ideas” which I’ve also written about.

ARTICLE: How to Look at Contemporary Art by Christopher P. Jones

Mr. Jones packs many rationalizations and NPC tropes into his brief commentary. He begins with the patronizing Postmodern assertion which blames the audience for not embracing the suck presented by the establishment art world. He proclaims the public doesn’t accept shallow junk as a legitimate replacement for real art because they are not sophisticated enough.

Then, as an illustrative example, he hits the bricks.

A vintage photo of Carl Andre’s “Equivalent VIII”

 

This is what passes for art in Postmodernism. Jones writes:

“There is an American artist named Carl Andre, a very renowned figure these days thanks to his influential minimalist sculptures. Back in the 1970s, the Tate Gallery in London purchased one of Carl Andre’s works, a piece called Equivalent VIII. The event caused a storm, since the artwork consists of nothing but a series of bricks arranged into a rectangular block on the floor. It had newspapers and critics up in arms, asking why public money was being spent on such an artwork. The term ‘just a pile of bricks’ stuck in the collective memory as shorthand for the dubious product that contemporary art sometimes appears to be.

“It is common for visitors to a contemporary art gallery to wonder if the objects on display are perpetrating some sort of hoax, or at least sharing an inside joke that the rest of us are not allowed to understand.

“In fact, Carl Andre was trying to make a sophisticated statement about the calm beauty of rational order and simplicity, and the relation of earthly materials to actual space. He wasn’t trying to trick anybody. Unfortunately, his wider conception of what a work of art can be didn’t match the public mood.”

I’ve written about this travesty before, in The Great Tate Bricks Controversy of 1976. Where Mr. Jones hallucinates sophistication, beauty, and order radiating off a heap of misplaced masonry, I see something else: “...the limitations of material as message render the piece itself as dull and inert. Without lots of art blather to support it, the piece is simply a stack of bricks out of its normal context, without any inherent interest of its own.“

As the rebellious art movement Stuckism observed: “Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.”

Mr. Jones goes on to leak out an infamous anecdote about the puerile Postmodern role model,  French con artist Marcel Duchamp.

Fountain: Down the Drain 

 

 

“…In 1917, Duchamp presented a readymade that would have great and lasting significance on the story of art. The work was called Fountain, and consisted of a gents’ urinal made of porcelain from a factory. There is little else to say about it. It’s a urinal. Expect that Duchamp had the temerity to submit it to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists as a work of art.

“The idea that a porcelain urinal could be considered art was, naturally enough, deeply disconcerting. For centuries, art had consisted of hand-crafted paintings and sculptures. Not surprisingly, the show’s committee decided that Fountain was not art and rejected it from the show.

“Of course, Duchamp wasn’t trying to compete against painting and sculpture with his readymades. Rather, he was making the provocative claim about what art can be. If something is presented as art — if the artist says it’s art — then who is to say whether or not it qualifies? In this way, Fountain addresses the wider questions of cultural tradition, habits of thought and the role of museums in regulating what we as a society deem noteworthy or merely ordinary.”

Mr. Jones either ignores, or does not know, that Duchamp probably stole credit for the urinal from a mentally ill female artist friend of his.  In the exposé 1917: A Shattering Discovery from the Year Art Went Into the Toilet, I took the piss out of it:  “Fountain has been used as the justification for turning art into an ironic elitist assertion, rather than an uplifting communal experience. It’s a truly nasty legacy.”

The defensive redefining of the purpose of art from a gratifying visceral engagement into a game of deflection and one-upmanship exposes the Postmodern hole in what should be the soul of art. What Postmodernism is presenting is not art. It’s a form of psychological warfare, designed to erode clarity, wisdom and sense of purpose.

George Orwell knew the technique back in 1948, when he wrote 1984. It’s easier to dominate the disoriented and dispirited. Socially enforcing the acceptance of lies is meant to break the mind and the spirit, reducing individuals into easily manipulated drones. To join the elites one must swear 2+2=5. Claiming a toilet is art is exactly the same thing.

Postmodernism believes in nothing but it own insatiable appetite for power. Returning to “How to Look at Contemporary Art,” Mr. Jones parrots the party line.

“Postmodernism takes as its starting point the fact that culture and society have changed a great deal over the past hundred years or so, and that mass media, consumer society and global communications are an integral part of that change.

“Our understanding of fundamental things, like identity, value, progress, meaning and even reality, has been reshaped by these changes.”

It seems more likely that instead of fundamentally remaking man in a matter of decades, technology has just provided a cabal of shitty control freaks with more tools to enforce their will, and better methods of deceit to obscure what is actually going on.

“To arrive at a single point of view seems inadequate. Change is everywhere about us, so our perspectives must continue to change too. Contemporary art has these ideas at its heart.”

Is this a serious claim that change is a new phenomenon for the human race? Postmodernism wants us so focused on what is in flux that we forget about what is eternal.

“An obvious example is the idea that ‘history is written by the victors.’ To realize this truth is to understand that narratives are not necessarily (if ever?) descriptions of truth, and that sometimes there are voices and stories that we don’t hear. Narratives are perspectives, with their own biases and limitations.”

Seeing the world as only an extension of their lust for control, Postmodernists deny objective reality, the endless chains of cause and effect. Instead, they worship The Narrative, a fairy tale version of the universe conjured up by their own relentless wish casting. They desperately need us all to cooperate with this hoax. They want us to have no precedents, principles or traditions that they can be measured against, so they claim there are no such things, or that they are somehow tainted. These days calling out someone for bias is like calling someone a witch during the Inquisition. Just the accusation is considered proof of guilt, and it better be followed with confession and repentance.

But then Mr. Jones hits the sweet spot: the Big Lie that enables the corrupted culture industries to continue to churn out such dysfunctional offerings.

“If you haven’t realized it by now, contemporary art likes to ask lots of questions. In fact, it prefers to ask questions than to take a definite position. That is the influence of postmodernism. It likes to probe the ways of the world and ask if our habits and expectations ought not to be questioned too…

“So when looking at a work of contemporary art, try asking yourself these questions: ‘What habits of thought is this work questioning? What assumptions is it over-turning? And how do I feel about the provocation it is making?”

“There are not right or wrong answers. Just perspectives. Yours, mine, everyone else’s. This is what contemporary art wants to explore and celebrate.” 

Such a predictable and tedious gambit, to claim art is just another aspect of the smokescreens Postmodernism emits.  The art world follows the Critical Theory tactic which uses incessant,  ideologically-driven questioning not to enhance knowledge, but to prevent it. In my book, Remodern America: How the Renewal of the Arts Will Change the Course of Western Civilization, I address the Questioning question.

Let me tell you what the biggest lie of all is in the art world, what enables this farce to continue. If you read or listen to commentary from many artistic types, you will hear lots about how art is all about questioning.

Duchamp got them yakking a century ago and they still haven’t stopped. It’s a tiresome litany. The artist or the art is questioning something: values, perceptions, expectations, whatever. The viewer’s reaction will alter the piece. These are the default assumptions of this tainted age.

Postmodernists are so proud of this deconstructive approach. They think it makes them look clever and insightful. They’ve got it exactly wrong.

Questions, we’ve got. Life is already putting more questions to us than most people can handle.

Art is not about questioning. Art is our response.

If you attempt to deflect the questions life demands of you by asking another irrelevant question, you are just swirling down the relativistic drain. You end up endorsing a rotting cow head as art. You end up lost and ridiculous. And it is lost, ridiculous people who’ve been running the art scene for years.

Stating art is all about questioning is a self-serving bias that covers up a lot of incompetence.  What these charlatans have been pushing for decades isn’t even art at all. It’s artifice, an empty mimicry of the outer appearances and gestures of art, without partaking in any of its true substance and significance.

Note that I am not suggesting art is about answers. Real art incorporates nuances that can’t be made to act like a formula of A means this and B means that. That’s a hack academic approach. 

Real art stirs a sense of mystery that is beyond any quantification. It is just experienced. Great artists manage to transmit their own unique experience of the mystery into a form which others can partake in. This accomplishment can only come from a position of decisiveness and authority. 

In “How to Look At Contemporary Art,” Christopher P. Jones tries to defuse our skepticism.”Let me assure you, contemporary art is not trying to trick you. It’s time to leave that idea behind,” he pleads.

Sorry, I won’t leave valid insights behind in order to be a better servant for a totalitarian scheme like Postmodernsim. But I do somewhat agree; contemporary art’s primary purpose is not to trick you.

Elitist contemporary art’s primary purpose to poison you.

In my book Remodern America, I tell the story of Remodernism, the cultural reboot that will wipe out the sophistry and abuses of Postmodernism.

From the Remodern America Manifesto:

This is our moment in the mighty continuum of art and life. Real art knows no boundaries; it communicates across all times, across all cultures. Art is as much an aspect of our species as the opposable thumb, and just as prevalent. The art world can be as big as all of humankind, if we do it right. Remodernism accepts responsibility for the art of our times, conveying the wisdom of tradition into the opportunities of the future. Remodernism is love made visible. 

Postmodern Art:

Beat It 

 

 

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AGAIN WITH THE FECES: THE ESTABLISHMENT ART WORLD SOILS ITS CREDIBILITY

Forget Jumping the Shark: The Establishment Art World Has Leapt into the Lavatory 

 

I get so tired of covering the art world’s pathological fixations on our biological secretions. But I also believe it’s important to expose what these sickos are up to.

It started in 1917, with the submission of a urinal as a sculpture to an art show. Con artist Marcel Duchamp ended up stealing the credit for it from a possibly schizophrenic lady acquaintance of his.

The Icon of Postmodernism 

 

Ever since then, the art world water closet has been a crowded place.

We’ve been treated to Piero Manzoni’s 1961 series “Artist’s Shit,” which is supposedly his canned crap.

Shit-canned 

In 1987 hack photographer Andres Serrano hit a blasphemous bonanza when he submerged a crucifix into a jar of urine. The art world lionized him because he upset those deplorable Jesus people.

 

Andres Serrano “Piss Christ”  There goes your taxpayer funding

In 2010 Marcel Walldorf won prizes with a sculpture of a peeing policewoman. Way to sock it to the Man! Or, er, the Woman, in this case.

No Relief From Art World Potty Mania

 

And in 2016 the prestigious Guggenheim Museum installed an actual functioning golden toilet estimated to be worth $2.5 million dollars. It was a piece credited to Maurizio Cattelan, called “America,” of course. Because that is what the people who make curatorial choices for the Guggenheim think about our country.

Golden Showers 

I could go on, and on, and on, with these contemporary art examples, as well as other icky oozes like spit and sperm. The so-called sophisticates that dictate our cultural identity seem to have a real hang up with scatology. But a good stopping point seems to be at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the final word in excrement excitement. The pictures speak for themselves.

 

The End of Postmodernism 

The museum actually commissioned the Vienna-based art collective Gelatin to make this. They spent 6 months on it. Seriously.

“The shit as we present it is a sculptural subject, it’s not a joke,” Wolfgang Gantner, one of the four artists making up the collective, told Euronews.

We’ll be the judge of that.

For an extra level of insanity, patrons are expected to wear nudist costumes while they look over the leavings:

Peak Art World: Try a Little Trendy Gender Dysphoria While You Look at Shit  

Where Does the Art Exhibit End, and the Child Endangerment Begin? 

Because I understand what art can do for people, it makes me heartsick to see this abuse perpetrated by the elitists.

This is not art. It’s psychological warfare.

In my upcoming book, “Remodern America: How the Renewal of the Arts Will Change the Course of Western Civilization,” I identify how grotesque displays like this literal shit show demonstrate the ongoing collapse of the Postmodern globalist cabal, from the vantage point of the United States:

 

The elites had a great vision for America. They would wreck our culture and trash our heritage, and be the managers over our decline. They’ve been implementing their program for at least 100 years. However, in their long march through the institutions, they overlooked part of what makes America unique. We aren’t compelled to follow our “leaders.” We definitely aren’t going to follow them off a cliff.

Many compare the United States to earlier empires that declined and fell. The familiar pattern is happening here and now. Elitist mismanagement and ennui is encouraging social breakdowns. History demonstrates it’s only a matter of time until the barbarians overrun their dominion. The existing society will be overthrown by primitives from outside the complex system of assumptions and niceties cherished by the ruling class.

The great news is, here in the United States, we are our own barbarians.

Understand the current upper echelons are predominately not representative of the American way of life. They’ve been compromised by Postmodern delusions about their own omnipotence, and it’s ruined them. They should have studied Classical literature. It clearly warns about the perils of hubris.

To these upper crust pretenders, nothing is more backwards and uncivilized than their own fellow citizens, who cling to such notions as God, guns, and honor. Yet these traditional Americans are exactly the people who are best positioned to put an end to the current elitist shenanigans for good. Far from not understanding their Postmodern poses, we understand them all too well.

It will be traditional Americans who rise up to clear away the rubble of the establishment’s failures and decadence. America has an amazing record of achievement, when we put our values into action. We have the wisdom which Postmodernists thought they were too smart to need.

America isn’t dying. It’s the artificially imposed Postmodern worldview which is disintegrating. Americans will carry on, better than ever.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! Please visit other posts for more commentary on the state of the arts.

ARTICLE: Another Big Lie of the Contemporary Art World Revealed

John Latham “Time Base Roller”

Make some effort to try to understand the works, you bumpkins

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IT’S HARD TO MISINTERPRET SOMETHING WORSE THAN ART CRITIC TABASH KHAN DOES, IN THIS ARTICLE: Fad Magazine’s What’s Wrong With Art? Conceptual Art Is Complicated.

“So why are people put off by conceptual art? Often it’s because the artist or gallery hasn’t taken any steps to explain the concepts behind the work. Most visitors to galleries would happily make some effort to try to understand the works but are often only provided with a convoluted press release that includes a line about the work speaking for itself — when it clearly doesn’t.

“For these reasons many visitors will often not engage with the works and be snootily labelled by art world insiders as ‘not getting it’.”

In case you haven’t followed the stultifying degeneration of the contemporary art scene,  you might not know Conceptual Art has been the Next Big Thing for about 50 years now. In Conceptual Art, the idea is now an “artist” only needs to have an idea. The actual object can be made by someone else, or be an already existing common object put into a new artistic context,  or maybe even not be made at all, but only exist as a documented thought. If a new tangible object is produced, it’s likely been farmed out to anonymous technicians who have actual skills. But it’s the name brand artist who takes the credit and the big money. The lack of actual ability and accomplishment is disguised by lots of pseudo-intellectual academic jargon, designed to obscure rather than illuminate.

Writer Tom Wolfe, in his classic take down of the art world, The Painted Word, had these pretenders pegged back in 1975:

“…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. …Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…”

Khan gives the game away in his article, but does not seem to realize it:

“After all, the godfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s concepts weren’t particularly complex. By placing a urinal in a gallery he was questioning how you define what art is, and whether the artist and the setting give weight to an artwork. Philosophical questions which are still relevant today.”

What Marcel Duchamp did-besides probably stealing the credit for his most infamous work from a mentally ill woman artist– was twist art from a vibrant, visceral experience into an ironic elitist assertion. The date of R. Mutt’s toilet in the gallery was 1917. It’s literally been a hundred years, and the establishment art world is all in on simply creating variations on the same old tired shock tactics.

Conceptual superstar Damien Hirst

This is different because it’s a toilet and a dead animal

Khan nails it when he says Duchamp (or whoever it really was) was not complex. Where he gets it so wrong is assuming that words can be used to justify the inadequate offerings of our corrupted cultural institutions.

Khan obviously believes art needs an enlightened priest caste to transmogrify and translate art for the ignorant peasants. It’s an arrogant assumption very prevalent inside the art world bubble. The Postmodern creative class blames the audience instead of looking at their own failures to communicate and connect.

Art does have a philosophical element to it-but it is so much more than that. And words can never act as a substitute for a visual experience which moves and inspires. Ultimately art is a mysterious, timeless expression that cannot be reduced to language. If we could say it, we wouldn’t have to show it to you.

The art world rebels the Stuckists know the truth. At the core of their principled stand for an art of the people, by the people, for the people, they state a truth we can hold to be self evident:

“Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.”

-The Stuckist Manifesto

 

Edit: Welcome Instapundit readers! Please visit other entries for more on the state of the arts.

1917: A Shattering Discovery From The Year Art Went Into The Toilet

What happened to R. Mutt’s “Fountain”?

For the last few days, inside the cocoons, there is much shock. As out-of-touch elitists in the would-be ruling class are processing an historic rejection of their presumptions, it’s worth revisiting a defining and divisive moment in elitist art history.

Recently, in some random reading I was doing, I came across a surprising story that may actually solve a genuine art world mystery.

I’m very critical of the nihilistic stylings of the contemporary establishment art market. I’ve written at length on its dynamic as both an elaborate con game and as an insidious effort at social programming and control.  Conceptual Art is the official art of the New World Order. Talentless cynics like Jeff Koons and Tracey Emin are promoted as pinnacles of achievement, and showered with elitist money and accolades. These conceptual artists claim that just having an idea is good enough to be considered art, as long as the right people agree.

The conceit of conceptual art, like most of the abuses of this decadent Post Modern era, comes from a thirst for power. Anything can be art if the gatekeepers say it is, and you better submit to their superior opinions. Contemporary art has become a wedge, a means for primitive tribal virtue signalling. You can divide the population up based on savvy insiders who prattle on about a dirty, unmade bed in a museum as a fascinating comment on normative functionalism, versus those mundane types who recognize a feeble failure when they see it.

A certain segment of the glitterati like to flaunt their ability to see shit as sophisticated art as a badge of honor, for some reason.

We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of the totem these poseurs use as credibility for their if-it’s-in-a-gallery-it-must-be-art attitudes. In April 1917, New York City’s Society of Independent Artists had an egalitarian idea for an art show: anyone who paid the fee could show their art, which would be hung in alphabetical order. But the organizers were shocked when they received an anonymous submission, called “Fountain.” It was a sideways urinal, signed “R. Mutt 1917.”

Marcel Duchamp, sporting a reverse mohawk

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One of the organizers was French artist Marcel Duchamp. When the committee balked at showing the urinal he resigned in a huff. Years later he spread it around that it was actually his piece.”Fountain” was a Dada assault on taste, a rejection of artistic skill, an undermining of the noble purposes of art. Duchamp and his advocates like to say it poses philosophical questions about what art is. Regardless, the piece can be seen as the harbinger of the whole empty, alienating, transgressive mess the contemporary art world has become. “Fountain” has been used as the justification for turning art into an ironic elitist assertion, rather than an uplifting communal experience. It’s a truly nasty legacy.

But did Duchamp even make the piece? Evidence suggests he stole credit for the piece from a female artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an wildly eccentric friend of his. She was part artist and part public nuisance, an exhibitionist, kleptomaniac and poet, who often dressed herself in food and utensils. The urinal would have been just her style.

The real R. Mutt? Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

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On April 11, 1917, Duchamp wrote in a letter to his sister: “One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.” So it seems while he may have submitted it to the show, Duchamp was not the one who came up with this iconic gesture. By the time Duchamp started to claim “Fountain” as his own, the mentally ill Baroness was long dead and forgotten.

It would match Duchamp’s character to perform such a swindle; he lived his adult life sponging off of, using, and abusing a series of women. He really was a cad.

It is so fitting the impetus of our contemporary establishment art world is most likely based on lies, theft, corruption and exploitation. But the originator of the piece is not the mystery I’m writing about.

What happened to the original “Fountain”?

Avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz snapped a picture of it, but we are told the original was lost. The versions of “Fountain” now on display in museums around the world are “replicas” Duchamp commissioned in the 1960s to cash in on the notorious reputation of the piece.

I just found a surprising clue to what happened to “Fountain” in an unexpected place, while I was reading about a very different type of artist.

William Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was a significant painter in the early decades of the 2oth century. He got his start as an artist journalist. Before there were photographs in newspapers, illustrators had to create the imagery. They had to work fast, and since they were covering the news, they were used to depicting the common people as opposed to esoteric artistic subject matter. Glackens’s most notable journalistic work occurred in 1898, when he accompanied Theodore Roosevelt’s troops to Cuba during the Spanish American War.

William Glackens artwork from the field of battle

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After he left journalism, Glackens continued to make an art of the people, as compared to an art of the Academy. He was a key figure of the early American art movements The Eight and The Ashcan School, realist painters that rebelled against the stuffy elitist attitudes of the art establishment of their era. Glackens and his colleagues were considered controversial and gauche at the time for their depictions of everyday life.

William Glackens “The Shoppers”

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I love reading artist biographies. So when I was recently at the library and saw on the shelf William Glackens and the Eight: The Artists Who Freed American Art, I was very excited. I knew about him and the Ashcan School, and I see the art movement Remodernism as fulfilling a similar role for artistic renewal now.

The book is by his son Ira Glackens, written in 1957. It is full of amusing and affectionate anecdotes about both of his parents; William was married to socialite and artist Edith Dimock. She is the central figure depicted in the painting of the shoppers above.

As William Glackens was one of the most important artists of his day, he was involved in many major events. I was thrilled when Ira Glackens wrote about when he was a little boy, during the legendary 1913 Armory Show that introduced Modern Art to America. He met visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder there, one of my favorite artists. But I was stunned when he recounted a story about 1917.

William Glackens was the president of the Society of Independent Artists committee that received “Fountain.” Another artist on the committee along with Duchamp was Charles Prendergast. Here are Ira’s words about how the  “Fountain”  situation was resolved:

It would be difficult to visualize W.G. [William Glackens] in an executive capacity, but nevertheless he proved a very valuable man, especially when an impasse was reached. The story of how he solved a great dilemma that confronted the executive committee was later told by Charles Prendergast, and he laughed so hard telling it that the tears ran down his cheeks… Everybody perhaps knows the story of the “Fountain” signed R. Mutt, a nom de guerre of Marcel Duchamp which the creator of the “Nude Descending a Staircase” submitted as his entry. This object was a urinal, a heavy porcelain affair meant to be a fixture, and it caused a great deal of dismay in the executive committee…The executive committee stood around discussing the thorny problem. Presumably the best art brains in the country were stumped.

Nobody noticed W.G. leave the group and quietly make his way to a corner where the disputed object d’ art sat on the floor beside a screen. He picked it up, held it over the screen, and dropped it. There was a crash. Everyone looked around startled.

“It broke!” he exclaimed.

By the 1950s when this book was written Duchamp had appropriated credit for “Fountain,” but it had not yet become the cultural touchstone it is now considered. I see no reason why Ira Glackens would just invent a story like that, or why their family friend and fellow artist Charles Prendergrast would say such a thing about the mild mannered and low key William Glackens for no reason.

We now have some hearsay evidence about what happened to the original “Fountain,” which has been overlooked for decades. There’s no way to prove it, but it’s a compelling conclusion to a sordid tale. As far as I’m concerned, William Glackens was on the right track and did the world a favor. If only it had ended there.

The pissy head games of elitist art need smashing, now more than ever.

11/22: Welcome Instapundit readers! Check out some of my other posts to see more about the state of the arts from a Remodernist perspective. -RB

ARTICLE: Michele Bledsoe in “The Labyrinth Beyond Time”

Creatures Great and Small: Michele Bledsoe with her painting “Under the Pillow”

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I’ve written a number of times on the amazing creativity of my wife, artist Michele Bledsoe. 

Michele was recently the featured artist in an article in The Foothills Focus, a weekly newspaper focused on life in north Phoenix and its environs.

Read the article at this link: “The Labyrinth Beyond Time,” by Shea Stanfield.

The writer does a great job summing up the spirit of Michele’s painting by referencing a quote from Marcel Duchamp: “To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.” Stanfield goes on to relay significant details about Michele’s experiences and attitudes towards art:

“She filled tablets with sketches and ideas that bound through her imagination. Creatures great and small would eventually be rendered in paintings as she taught herself the techniques. By all accounts, Michele has been successful on all fronts. Today, she paints in her home studio in Central Phoenix, her canvases supported on an easel her father gave her for Christmas 25 years ago. His passing a few months later added an extra portion of meaning to his gift and confidence in her, as well as Michele’s inspiration.”

The art of Michele Bledsoe does indeed navigate a special vision, her own enchanting world apart. It was a pleasure to read this article’s commentary acknowledging her achievements.

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From the article:

“Michele, over the last 20 years, has exhibited in various art galleries and venues.  Recently, she was invited to participate in an art show, at Skolkovo Art Gallery, in Moscow, Russia. The exhibit featured a number of international artists involved in the Remodernism Movement. As Michele would put it, ‘Who would have believed my painting “Forever,” a painting of a snail, is the one piece, out of all my work, that has ironically traveled furthest!’”

ARTICLE: Is A New Golden Age Coming to The Art World?

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: Will the real R Mutt Please Stand Up?

 

I’D SAY IT’S BEEN A LOT LONGER THAN THAT: The Art World’s 60-Year Rut: Could A New Golden Age Be On The Horizon?

In which the author of the article produces this key quote: “The fact is, golden ages don’t happen when exclusivity rules. Just the opposite. They come when the gates and chains controlling consumption, competition, production, barriers to entry, and innovation have been smashed to pieces, allowing more people to participate in more ways—both as producers and consumers.

“So, as the art world dogmas appear increasingly quaint in our era of disruption, here’s hoping that a new time for artists, art and design to flourish, generate an excess of delight for the many and spark a broader conversation, still lies ahead.”

We’re coming up on a significant anniversary in 2017. It will be the 100 year anniversary of when the piece “Fountain” appeared-the sideways urinal submitted for consideration in a juried art show. Famed artist Marcel Duchamp appropriated the credit for this gesture much later, and so is lionized as the father of our contemporary art world. Oh, so irreverent, daring and clever!

In reality it seems very likely Duchamp stole the so-called glory for this piece from a female artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an eccentric  friend of his. The establishment is too invested in Duchamp’s reputation at this point to take a realistic look at this troubling situation. How fitting an act of deception and disrespect festers at the heart of what has driven elitist artistic concerns for decades.

I want to build momentum to use this impending centennial anniversary to force a reckoning on the art world, and to hold them accountable for their failures. There’s nothing novel in the tired shock tactics of the culture elitists. Dada is a dead end well past its expiration date;  ironic art fails to fulfill the function of art at all. It’s time for something new, which is actually something very ancient and enduring.

Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, founders of Stuckism, called this situation accurately in 2000, in the coda of their masterful Remodernism Manifesto:

“It is quite clear to anyone of an uncluttered mental disposition that what is now put forward, quite seriously, as art by the ruling elite, is proof that a seemingly rational development of a body of ideas has gone seriously awry. The principles on which Modernism was based are sound, but the conclusions that have now been reached from it are preposterous.

“We address this lack of meaning, so that a coherent art can be achieved and this imbalance redressed.

“Let there be no doubt, there will be a spiritual renaissance in art because there is nowhere else for art to go. Stuckism’s mandate is to initiate that spiritual renaissance now.”

The Golden Age can come, if we make it happen.

ARTICLE: Post-Postmodern Art

Marcel Duchamp: “Snow Shovel” for a snow job

ARTICLE: Post-Postmodern Art  Key quote from the article, and words to live by: “Duchamp and the others have become the iconic figures of recent art history. Through them, the story of the art world is a story of self-conscious disintegration. Once, however, everything has been disintegrated, every artist has a choice. He can choose to play the current game of cynicism and despair, hoping, at best, to introduce a minor variation here and there. Or he can look afresh at the world and rediscover in it the potential that earlier great artists pointed us toward.”

The savvy can already see the inevitable collapse of the current establishment art system, which was built up over a relatively recent time frame. It exists as a fragile bubble, kept inflated by its own hot air hype and wildly reckless speculation by well-moneyed but clueless dupes.

The vapid circus the elitists favor can only exist as a monopoly. Create a viable alternative, and watch the stampede for the exits, away from the banal trash the cultural institutions have been inflicting  on an increasingly alienated and disengaged populace for decades.

Question the assumptions that drive the power brokers. Today’s stellar careers, reputations, and investments will be tomorrow’s obscure footnotes, wiped out by the merciless but objective judgment of ever progressing time.

The current art world echo chamber is crumbling.  Lots of what gets made these days and presented as art cannot survive outside of the shrinking cultural institutional enclave. However, this is not the end of art, it’s the end of an adminstrative model that has failed to perform. It is being out-evolved.

This is not a cause for fear, it’s a cause for celebration. We are taking part in a major periodic shift of consciousness: exciting times. Remodernism, which recognizes art as an inclusive, spiritual, DIY activity, provides one path forward. Doubtless there are others. But art is about to take an incredible leap forward, and reengage with society in a way it hasn’t in decades.