Buttressed by the mushier flavors of critical theory divorced from
its humanistic core, this view of art in this NYT article, an old, Post-Warhol concept of the conceptual as supreme, elevates what are basically fussy
collectors as artists while Artists become mere "fabricators," patronized as heroic. It that now our
meaning of what is supposedly contemporary?
This view of this NYT
article about what Art is, is very common in museums and especially in
the high end of the art market; I think it often reflects a worldview
not only doggedly amoral but hostile to that very process of creating
meaning from all of the senses and all of the materials to signify what
matters, art-making that has been part of the human experience since
the very emergence of our species.
The "contemporary" view - at least a century old at this point -
marginalizes poetry, the human hand and eye, dismisses both
individuality and community and empathy. It's hostile to the value of
creativity itself, and utlimately, by methodically eliminating why
actual Artists- artists by any historical standard- would have any
worth, it demands compliant enthusiasm for the dominance of rich people
as the final arbiters of the human experience.
Ironically, it
is often justified by a wholly degenerated form of pseudo-Marxist
critique whose main point seems to celebrate the commodification of
absolutely everything, particularly all the processes by which capital A
Art is created.
You can always tell this view by the tired
trope of "well Reubens/ Rembrandt/ Your Momma had assistants," or the
ceaseless war on painting as a bourgeoise activity- so "bourgeoise" that
every human child has an instinct for it, and you can see yourself up
with a painting kit for about $30.
Museums now fill so often
with half-art, cold, impoverished, 2nd tier illustration created by
uncredited artists. This mirrors some patrons' Social Darwinism, Art as
spectacle, as the wholly branded self, broad, empty, interchangable:
parts that might as well be made by robots and sold on Amazon.
The mission to dismiss Artists as art makers seems a hell of a lot like a
bid to erase Art that varies from a nihilistic world view: an erasure
of deeply humanistic ideas/artworks born of the building and deepening
interplay of material, hand, eye, senses and mind.
At real
musuems and galleries, I take comfort in watching museum-goers
invariably linger far longer, and engaged far more deeply, in the rooms
of artworks sweated over and loved and credited to the people who not
only thought of them, but earned the fully flowered refinement of their
idea by the work of their hands and minds and senses, their whole being,
physical and mental and spiritual wrapped inside the creation of the
work.
That is a human being, seeing and making, in balance with
the world. Why any feeling human being, let alone entire Art Schools,
work so hard to destroy this is despairing