The Art of Illiterates

After Labor Day in Grand Rapids, MI the "next big thing" is ArtPrize. I've commented on it before. This usually gets me thinking about art qua art. (And saying hifalutin words like "qua.") My wife remarked at breakfast this morning that one of the profs (who teaches movie-making) repeated this quote: "Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

I believe the point he was trying to make was that film naturally puts few demands on the viewer.

Keep in mind that illiterates are not necessarily stupid. There have been some very clever people who never get around to learning to read or write.

Film, by presenting brute imagery and sound to the consumer, is consumed without necessarily engaging the higher cognitive functions.

I suppose this means the screenwriter must strive to represent the mythic or iconic in her screenplay, because that is how it will be best consumed.

Conversely, the author of Russian novels realizes her readers have strong arms and great upper-body strength to lug around those long, heavy tomes. The author of Victorian novels realizes her readers have long attention spans. And the contemporary author expects her readers read at at least a sixth-grade level.

The gallery viewer of walls-sized canvases brings different expectations to the art than the comic book reader who sees virtually the same thing.

When you produce art, there's more than just "the medium is the message." Each medium brings a different audience.

The different audience brings different eyes and ears to the work depending upon their expectations. We all should work to understand our audience and work with their expectations as opposed to against them.

There is a time for the mathematics lecture that you can find in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And there's a time for breathless action scenes as you can find in Larry Correia's Monster Hunters International. Your job is to sense who is buying your books and produce the time they are expecting.

Apology: i fear you might draw the wrong conclusion from my choice of pictures from Roy Lichtenstein and Tony Abruzzo. Though I question the intelligence and common sense of those who spend big bucks to fill modern art galleries, I do NOT want to demean any comic book readers and intended no slight toward Mr. Abruzzo by juxtaposing his art with a derivative copy.

Making Art

If you read the Make magazine blog, you'll see a lot of folks making stuff. Lots of technologists and craftsmen are putting together neat stuff and setting up maker spaces. For instance, there's the folks at GRMakers who have set up the maker space in my hometown Grand Rapids, MI. This is also the home of Art Prize.

And then there's Pablo Picasso. Of all the folks you'd call modern artists, I respect him the most. He was a prolific artist and he did a lot of it. I heard that he did a lot of doves. He said that he refused to draw their feet, because he'd had to draw so many of feet when he was younger. Why would he be forced to draw a lot of bird feet? Because that was the way he was taught.

Before Pablo Picasso produced abstract modern art, he had to master his artistic technique.

When I experience the various entries in Art Prize, I see several Taxonomy of Art Prize Entries. Each entry manifests a separate mastery of some technique. Whereas the Old Masters knew how to put paint on canvas, nowadays artists are also glueing seeds or wine corks to a substrate, or welding, riveting or bolting together bits of metal. Or any of a zillion other techniques.
sorts of work I've described in my

The ones that get me excited generally involve wires and electronic components. And most exciting include some logic switching electrons around.

And this puts a great stress upon the artist, because folks can conceive art works that exceed their inherent skill sets. Some art pieces require a fusion of artistic vision and technological craftsmanship.

This is why some of the neat stuff you see on the Make magazine blog are art projects. You'll also see in maker spaces an easy marriage of the technologists' expertise and the artists' vision.

In fact, one of the leading entries is a dragon from a Detroit maker space. Gon KiRin is awesome.

I figure that maker spaces are going to become a key contributor to culture. If you can hook up with one, or with the maker movement in general, by all means do so.

Camille Paglia Needs To Get Out More

When you live on an island, it is easy to think that the world ends at the shoreline--particularly when that island is named Manhattan.

A week and a half ago, Camille Paglia wrote an opinion piece in one of that island's local newspapers.

With a title like "How Capitalism Can Save Art" Ms. Paglia piques the interest

Ms. Paglia cites a decline in the visual arts, particularly painting since the 1970s. She goes on to state that the avant-garde is dead while citing execrable installations masquerading as art. If that is what art is, then art is dead. She further laments the fact that in recent years young people have become disconnected from the manual trades, and thus lack the technique to pull off artistic expressions.

This is contradicted by the "Maker Movement" something you can see on display if you pick up an issue of Make magazine or haunt any of the "hacker spaces" popping up across the country. I think her observation is correct--as far as it goes.

True, today's kids are not going to get summer jobs in shoe factories or learn about steel making from besooted parents--unless those parents are artisans making hand-made shoes or smelting metal in backyard forges.

As technology creates new forms of expression old forms don't necessarily die so much as become art forms--like the blacksmith I watched on Nova last night forging a Viking sword in his shop in Door county Wisconsin.

Blacksmithing is art? It's more art than taking snaps of a crucifix in a jar of urine.

There is a limited amount of creativity in the world and there are many more modes of creative expression than smearing paint (or feces) on canvas. Perhaps this generation's Pollock or Mondrian are happily building fire-breathing dragons to drive around Burning Man.

I've said elsewhere that rich people can be stupid, filling museums with overrated junk and in so doing they are disclosing a naked-emperor groupthink unmatched by anything except perhaps the Obama presidency.

I don't think my hometown's billionaire is stupid, because he started ArtPrize a few years ago. Art experts squealed like pigs that the prize would be awarded on the basis of popular vote instead of expert judgement. Indeed. By crowd-sourcing art evaluation as was done with ArtPrize entries, art experts can be disintermediated.

Dangling a quarter-million dollar prize in front of the public caused a lot of talented people to think about what sort of art they could produce. And--for better or worse--they manifested a diverse spectrum of creativity as I've describe elsewhere. But don't take my word for any of this, look at this year's winners for yourself. The 2nd and 3rd prize winners are illustrative of this diversity of creativity: in the former case, hundreds of little robotic birds danced and flew about the room in a dazzling show of technology, while in the latter case, the artist put paint on canvas in a way that would please the Dutch masters of old.

The two trends both falsify and confirm Ms. Paglia's thesis.

First, the maker movement gets creative people back in touch with the hands-on matter of making thing. And they're spreading their creativity across a broad spectrum of artistic expression as they design circuits and software to create new forms of beauty while mastering techniques unimaginable a generation ago. I believe Ms. Paglia is no farther than a subway ride from some of the preeminent hacker spaces in the country. Are these folks capitalists? Maybe in an Etsy.com sort of way.

Second, by bringing hundreds of visitors to the Grand Rapids downtown area, the ArtPrize organizers have brought a lot of business to restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. ArtPrize is capitalist. It is as capitalistic a happening as an Amway presentation. Art may be dead in Manhattan, but it's alive each autumn in Grand Rapids, MI.

So, Ms. Paglia, if you want to see art that is not dead, look in Brooklyn for a hacker space. And if that doesn't satisfy, drop by Grand Rapids next fall.

Rich People Can Be Stupid

One of the things about the local ArtPrize competition this year is that they open up the Grand Rapids Art Museum for free. It's a beautiful facility, but it gets too crowded during ArtPrize. Since I wanted to avoid the crowds, I went into the regular art museum's non-ArtPrize floors. What I saw was remarkable.

Remarkably bad.

It's my opinion that beauty inheres within the object. This is a minority opinion, because we see lots of cases where one person regards something as beautiful when another regards it as ugly. My reply to this is that tastes need to be cultivated. When I was a child I thought coffee tasted horrid, and Tabasco was painful. As I grew older, I acquired a more sophisticated palette. If beauty inheres within the object and tastes are subject to cultivation, then a wise individual will try to cultivate virtuous tastes and eschew vicious ones. That doesn't happen much in today's society.

Instead rich guys of dubious taste hire art experts. These art experts proceed to curate art collections and to acquire pieces that will enhance the reputation of the collection. It's all a matter of reputation and unlike the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, there's no little boy to point out the ridiculous.

Thus I went through the collection at the Grand Rapids Art Museum marveling at the pieces that had been donated by this rich guy or that rich guy. "You paid good money for that?" I thought. "Stupid."

That's the subversive threat of ArtPrize. People can see a hundred times more art in a few weeks than they'd otherwise see in years. Anyone can enter anything and quite frankly, a lot of stuff is put out that should be tacked to the refrigerator. Yet, there's a lot of beauty on display and the public is more inclined to vote for beauty than for ugliness.

Once you get an eyeful of ArtPrize entries, you can look at the high art in the museum and I for one have found it woefully lacking. The experts are caught in a groupthink where they only listen to similarly credentialed experts. And because they're experts, rich guys take them seriously.

And that's how Rich People Can Be Stupid.

A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Venues

If you don't know what ArtPrize is, you're not from Grand Rapids, MI or you've been in a cave for a few years. You can read the details here. Last year I blogged about ArtPrize for the first time. I noted patterns in the ArtPrize entrants and presented A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Entries.

This year I noticed my prior taxonomy held up so well that I couldn't think of anything useful to add to it. I think you may someday see a rise of ArtPrize Hacks, but that's another story.

Instead, I noticed something about venues and how they differ. Some venues are absolutely amazing and others are less so.

Crowded and Possibly Overrated

There are venues at ArtPrize that are just a pain to deal with. My first impression of ArtPrize this year was the guard at the Fredrick Meijer Gardens telling me that photography was not permitted. OK, I won't vote for anyone at this venue. Besides, there wasn't one entry that I would have voted for, too. Pity.

I also made the mistake of going through the Grand Rapids Art Museum on the Saturday afternoon of ArtPrize. Big mistake. It had two monumental pencil sketches that looked cool, but not so cool that I want to brave the crowds for them. And besides, didn't we do monumental pencil sketches in earlier years?

Someday I'll blog about why Rich People Are Stupid. But that's for another day.

Unserious

I walked into Brann's on Leonard and looked around. There was some kid's project where he'd glued Tootsie Roll Pop labels to a bit of poster board in a pleasing pattern. That's nice. "Anything else here?" I asked the manager. "No."

A lot of downtown watering holes have a few items they put up and I'm glad they do, but I wish some of them would take it more seriously. It irritated me when venues weren't open when everyone else was, or had closed early.

It's really nice when a venue has arrows directing people to the art. If they do a good job of making non-customers like me feel comfortable and welcome, I'll be more likely to come back as a customer the next time I'm hungry or thirsty.

Last year Coit Elementary school had this marvelous 3-story high painting that I mentioned. Sadly, Coit Elementary has only two entrants.

Confused

If you're an "art expert" you'll say the old museum, Site:Lab is a great venue. OK. It's confusing, because it's hard to know where the detritus of the old museum ends and where the art begins. The site is across the street from a big church with a lot of art in it, too. By some odd coincidence there was an entry that from a distance appeared to be a church bulletin board.

Diamonds In The Rough
There are several churches that host a number of entries like City View and Monroe Community. They are pleasant spaces and have a surprising mix of good pieces, message pieces and refrigerator art. These venues generally lie beyond walking distance from downtown.

The best exemplar of this type of venue is Baker Tent Rental. The best part of Baker Tent is their "didn't get into ArtPrize" reception this Saturday that showcases artists who didn't make the ArtPrize cut. They plan to serve snacks to starving artists!

Lemons Into Lemonade
The recession has caused some large commercial office spaces to remain unrented and unfinished. One such is High Five. They've taken a huge open space on the fifth floor of an office building and filled it with art. They have benches set up in front of art that are made of boards resting on cinder blocks. They have large windows that allow people to see some of the huge installations in adjacent parking garage stairwells. Finally, they have a wonderful dynamic light sculpture using LEDs suspended from CAT5 Ethernet cables. The best part of this installation are the recliners that let me put up my weary feet. Good show guys.

In addition to having tough economic times High Five has a tough location. It's hard to find and easy to miss. So, they put up helpful signs leading to the elevator in the parking garage and hired a pleasant girl to welcome & direct visitors.

By all means get downtown and see ArtPrize.

A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Entries

I've devised a crude taxonomy of #ArtPrize entries.

(If you don't know what ArtPrize is, come to Grand Rapids, MI and find out!)

1) The unkind title of the first category is Refrigerator Art. Some people took Garrison Keillor seriously when he said all the children are above average. And the unhappy truth is that some people have no business entering their work in ArtPrize. Though everyone is God's special unique snowflake, not everyone is able to produce something worthy of display. I'm not saying anybody should be excluded, but maybe loved ones could stage an intervention.

2) The second category is the Monumental. Some artists have genuine talent and they deploy this talent in the service of The Cause. In Soviet Russia, these would be larger than life depictions of the New Soviet Man, working in a factory or driving a tractor. In China, you'd see a five-story Mao leading the Long March. But in Grand Rapids, MI we've got a number of competing religions, like Sorting Recyclables, Empowering Disadvantaged Youths, and Restoring The Ten Commandments. Each of these partisan interests inspire larger-than-life submissions.

3) The Propaganda category combines the worse elements of the first two. It beats the Propaganda drum so furiously that it never gets around to executing any good-looking art. It's just there, declaring some message in the most heavy-handed way imaginable without the slightest breath of humanity or humor. It can be produced by a crowd of 6-year-old draftees or by some too-earnest "artist" toiling away in his garret. Is it Art? I dare not deny that, but you can't deny it's propaganda.

4) My favorite category is the Science Demonstration entry. The Good Lord put some really beautiful phenomena in the laws of Mathematics and Physics, and some boffin will find a way to render that tangibly in an ArtPrize entry. Bravo to you. You've got my vote, because I'm a boffin wannabe myself. Same goes for the engineer who lashes together software and hardware to make some pleasant interactive blinking lights and sound effects. These guys are like the Wizard of Oz, tweaking their balky devices to make them work while saying, "Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain." I salute the man behind the curtain.

5) Then there's the Crafty Art category. What can you make with an unlimited number of toothpicks, ten-penny nails, coins, legos, cigarette butts, win corks or push-pins? Anything! And they usually look wonderful. They're a gimmick and I love gimmicks.

So far, I've described categories of ArtPrize entries that have varying chances of winning. Now I'll describe the one category that is a Sure Fire Loser

6) The Sure Fire Loser category is different from all the other categories. Entries in this category reflect something appealing in nature or humanity. And they do so beautifully. But what makes them a Sure Fire Loser is that they could easily fit on a wall of my house. Nobody is going to vote for this over a 10-ton flying pig, or a 50-foot woman. I could never put a Public Service Announcement over my couch and entries in this category won't attract the partisans' votes. I don't want to dust a million toothpicks formed into the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog no matter how cool that would be. But that painting of a bucolic pasture or that stained glass rendering of dogs playing poker would be welcome additions to my home.

That's where I think #ArtPrize is the best. It takes guys like me who would never consider buying anything from an artist, and it puts the notion of Buying Art into the realm of the possible. The artist who executes a Sure Fire Loser will give his or her card to someone like me. I'll never be able to buy a Rembrandt, but Rembrandt is dead and there are starving artists who'll benefit if their universe of customers expands to include fellows of questionable artistic pedigree such as myself. These artists should be numbered among the winners of ArtPrize.