EDITORIAL: Art or What?

From today's Fox News:

An abstract masterpiece by a Mexican artist that was found in the trash by a woman who knew little about modern art has been sold for more than $1 million.

The painting Tres Personajes by Rufino Tamayo was discovered in 2003 by Elizabeth Gibson, who spotted it on her morning walk on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She said she took it home because "even though I didn't understand it, I knew it had power."

The brightly colored abstract work was purchased for $1,049,000 by an unidentified private American collector bidding by phone at Sotheby's Latin American Art sale Tuesday night.

[Moar]

Re the painting above: The Tamayo is actually not a bad piece. (It does kind of look like a Dave Brubeck album cover, though.) I like it better than anything Diego Rivera did, the communist bastard.

But it's a throwback, a monument to a bygone age.

If I'm honest, I think that visual art may have run its course. Once one takes painting from an act of worship to storytelling to allegory to depiction to impression to abstraction to dreams visualized to paint-on-canvas to blahblahblah, there's really no place left to go. Dada was the Punk Rock of visual art; just as the Sex Pistols were the End of Rock 'n' Roll, so Duchamp and Magritte wrapped it up for Western Civ's deconstruction of cave painting.

And just as "rock" since the Sex Pistols has been nothing but pastiche and dance music, the visual arts after Dada have been little more than styling and profiling. Post-Dada, what did we see? A whole lot of nothing, in my opinion: de Kooning scrawls, Stella boxes, Rothko stripes, and that stupid Jasper Johns flag thing. In other words, a bunch of people jerking off. With nowhere to go post-punk, rock became either pure commercial product or went over to theater (e.g. Hair Metal). With nowhere to go post-Dada, visual artists either went pure commercial (Pop Art) or went over to pure shock theater — dead animals, messy bedrooms, etc. Rock Star, Art Star — there's really not much difference.

So where are the visual arts going? Don't ask me. There's a strong retro movement out there at the moment, but I'm not sure if simply going back to twee Victorian renderings of cute kids and saintly old people is the next wave we're all waiting for. I admire the pugnaciously backwards spirit behind artrenewal.com, and I also like some of the works featured there. (For example, I think this work is a fine example of craft painting. It is sentimental, yes, and breaks no new ground, but even so it's a powerful piece, well-executed and beautiful.)

However, I fear that today's art "renewal" movement is more nostalgic than truly revanchist. The sort of folks who buy Thomas Kinkade's wet-cobblestone Main-Street fantasy paintings are not doing so out of any intellectual bent towards the culture and values of the past; they just think they're pretty. (And that's okay: if pretty is what one wants, one should have it. Still, as a reactionary of the Altar-and-Throne school, I can't help but wonder what an artist's brush in the hands or a real hard-ass Right-winger might produce.)

A few more words on Kinkade: I admire Thomas Kinkade as a businessman, but his self-stated goal is to "bring to millions of people an art that they can understand", and I'm not sure that pure mass appeal is the most important aim when creating a hamburger, much less a work of art. To my mind, art (of any kind — painting, music, whatever) is an intellectual activity, not an emotional activity; art should proceed from the artist's true self (that is, his reason) and should be understood via reason. ("Art" that can be immediately grasped on an emotional level is called "entertainment".) Putting on Bach in the background while folding shirts is fine, but one does not truly listen to Bach except by sitting quietly and focusing one's mind upon the music. Bach used as background music isn't really Bach at all. In like manner, a "purty pitcher" may please the eye of the Average Joe, but the Average Joe is cheating himself out of the true esthetic experience if "purtyness" is all he wants out of a painting.

Again, I think art is an intellectual activity, and should be born from and perceived through an act of intellect. The intellectual pursuit of beauty and truth is the called esthetics. Esthetics is a branch of knowledge based upon Reason, not emotion, and as such must be taught to people just as every other branch of knowledge must be taught. In other words, one must be educated in order to be able to truly appreciate art. (Please note that this education in esthetics, while necessarily rigorous, need not be obtained at one of our expensive diploma-mill colleges.) To grow up without a proper education in esthetics is to grow up blind to the beauty and truth that lies beneath the surface of art — and a person blind to beauty and truth is a profoundly crippled soul.

(This is why art education from elementary school on up is so important — but don't get me started on that subject.)

Anyway, I don't want to harsh on Kinkade too much. He's skilled, and he sells a lot of paintings, but James McNeill Whistler he ain't. Let's leave it at that.

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Have a great Thanksgiving weekend, everybody!

EDITORIAL: Bienvenue

Hi, folks. My name is Bruce Lewis. This is my new website — much like the old one, except constantly updated and in easy-to-read blog form. The primary purpose of this site is to serve as a centralized access to all things Bruce. Psychic Guy Sketchbook is back, featuring new drawings, doodles, and other graphic odds and ends; you can find links to my books, the TV shows I'm in, and my friends here as well. Besides my art, writing, career, and latest activities, this blog will also on occasion feature my thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics, which you should feel free to ignore.

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