Since despair is not conducive to making good art, I normally do my best to avoid reading about the goings on in the art world. Occasionally, however, I end up seeing something without meaning to. While preparing a citation in preparation for my last blog post, I came across the following statement, which was published in “Art Journal” in 1998:1,2,3
One of the first van Gogh [sic] scholars, Julius Meier-Graefe, wrote in 1900, “It is improbable that the time will ever come that his pictures will be appreciated by the layman; it is more conceivable that pictures should cease to be produced altogether than that [V]an Gogh’s should become popular.” Hell has frozen over, conceptual art has made pictures afterthoughts, and [V]an Gogh’s fame is blinding.
The writer is an art historian. Not an artist. Not a painter. I am sorry to sound like a broken record, but why is it that a person who does not paint can make a statement like this, have it printed in a respectable publication on visual art, and have it be made available online for posterity?
There are millions of people in the world who paint. If “conceptual art has made pictures afterthoughts”, are those people all wrong? Most of those millions paint as a hobby, but there are hundreds of artists in the world who paint professionally and produce good work. How is it that their existence and their work can be denied and erased with one pompous sentence?
Looking around on Reddit and Quora, I see people asking questions like, “Why does good art not exist anymore?” and “Why are there no more paintings like there used to be?” Many of the answers given are based on the assumption that I, and others who paint, don’t exist. (Those authoritatively answering the questions by regurgitating the self-serving arguments of the art establishment, by the way, are almost never themselves artists. The majority of artists who are alive today hate “contemporary art”,4 although most of them shy away from admitting that too loudly.)
Those in the art establishment have a vested interest in making people believe lies: that creating paintings like what the old masters painted is easy; that the artists who produce abstract paintings or conceptual art are perfectly capable of producing paintings to match the quality and brilliance of the great paintings of the past but choose not to; that talent is commonplace; and that anyone who questions all this is either uneducated, unsophisticated, or a conservative. (In case you were wondering, I am not a conservative. I am as far left as one can go without being a communist. In any case, the idea that being on the left side of the political spectrum should make one more likely to believe the claims of an industry that serves a small number of extremely wealthy people makes absolutely no sense. It would be much more consistent for a leftist to champion small, obscure artists rather than the top tiers of a market in which approximately 65 billion U.S. dollars exchange hands each year.)
The reality is that there are few people who can produce great art. It has always been this way. It is not easy to produce such work, and only a small number of people have the talent, intelligence, work ethic, patience, and circumstances to allow it. Even the work they produce is not always “great”. The art establishment does not want to be at the beck and call of a small number of temperamental artists producing a limited amount of excellent art. They want to be in control. They want to be able to choose whom to promote as the next big thing, and they want to be able to convince rich people to plunk down large amounts of cash for limitless quantities of junk. Their claim that art has no intrinsic value is self-serving: it allows them to be independent of art and artists and instead sell meaningless words and cheap concepts. Just as cryptocurrency markets aim to replace money with something that has no intrinsic value, the art establishment aims to replace valuable art with objects and ideas that have no intrinsic value. Just as it would help cryptocurrencies if the monetary system were to disappear, it helps the art establishment if art that has intrinsic value disappears.
It does not surprise me that the art establishment propagates lies that serve its interests. What surprises me is that the public believes those lies. People seem hungry for authority figures to tell them what to think and believe, even when it defies common sense and goes against their interests.
Do people believe the lies of the art establishment because they trust money and assume that if something sells for a lot it must be a great work of art? There is nothing about money that confers its holder an ability to recognize good art.5 Just because some rich person thought something was a good investment does not mean it is a great work of visual art; it just means they believe there are people out there who will pay more for it. And it is the height of cynicism to use art, which, at its core, has always been about truth and honesty, for the purposes of money laundering; no genuine art lover would support or condone something so disrespectful of art.
The art establishment claims that beautiful paintings are a thing of the past. We are supposed to consider ourselves vastly more intelligent and sophisticated than our forebears, and our intelligent sophistication is supposed to make us find lies and ugliness more profound and meaningful than truth and beauty. We are told to accept that a work of art is only valuable if it does something new, something no one has done before, no matter how shallow and vapid. We are told to see visual art as a kind of philosophy that questions the nature of art, asks what is art and what is not, and expands the definition of visual art to include everything from empty picture frames to unmade beds. We are expected to believe that shocking and disturbing a sensitive person is a worthier pursuit than causing the eyes of an insensitive or hardened person to well up with tears of empathy. But if that is all true, why are the sections of major art museums devoted to old representational paintings the most popular? Are people looking at beautiful paintings because they are interested in history? Is it so hard to see that humans naturally have a desire, even a need, to look at beautiful paintings?
If the art world doesn’t change, there will come a day when there will be no beautiful paintings in museums. A painting can last for centuries if cared for properly, but it does not last forever. The molecules in the paint layer are always vibrating microscopically. Over time, they migrate, and the different pigments meld into each other, so that the painting disappears. One can see this in some paintings from the 18th century, where people and objects that were added in a thin top layer of paint have become transparent. Do we really want no new works of similar quality to be made to replace those paintings? Shouldn’t future generations, like us, have beautiful and moving things to look at?
If you walk through any major art museum and look at European and European-derived art, you will notice a glaring gap of over a thousand years. After the sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome, what comes next in time is religious paintings from the 13th century. The art of East Asia encompasses that time, but I find it interesting that no European art remains from the Middle Ages. Do we want our time in history to be another dark age? Is there any logical, objective reason why our period should not produce great paintings?
This blog is an attempt to stand up to the lies. It is my attempt to show at least some people why I am doing what I am doing and why it has value. Frankly, I am not sure it will succeed. Being an artist always required a leap of faith, a willingness to go out on a limb and risk appearing foolish and wasting one’s life. I feel that it requires an even greater leap of faith today.
If you are someone who laments that artists are no longer making beautiful, meaningful works of art, please open your eyes. Stop believing self-anointed authorities and go out there and see for yourself. There are many artists making beautiful, honest, inspired art who are being kept invisible by the art establishment. If you want your world to contain art that makes you proud to be human and happy to be alive, stop looking down on small artists who are making and selling one-of-a-kind treasures. If you cannot bring yourself to buy an item that was not mass-produced in a sweatshop, if you think that artists don’t work hard enough to deserve your money, then you have only yourself to blame for living in a culture that considers human feces in a can to be the height of visual art.
I invite you to take that leap of faith with me. We don’t have to leave the future of visual art in the hands of a small group of ultra-wealthy people who dominate the art market. The masses, combined, have a lot more money and power than the wealthy few. If you want our age to produce great art, support artists making the kind of art you believe in. If we stop being silent in the face of lies, the lies will collapse under their own weight. I am doing my part. Will you do yours?
- James Gaillard Romaine, Jr., “Van Gogh’s Dilemma: Caught between Mythology and Art,” Art Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 84. ↩︎
- The “V” in “Van Gogh” is capitalized when just the last name is used. In other words, it is “Vincent van Gogh” but “The artist Van Gogh”. ↩︎
- It is ironic that the writer quotes something pompous that has proven to be nonsense and immediately goes on to write new pompous nonsense. ↩︎
- Calling a specific form of art “contemporary” is the art establishment’s attempt to erase the existence of artists who are not cheerleaders for the art establishment. I suggest we not give in to them. Please don’t use the word “contemporary” or “modern” to refer to movements in art. Use the precise name of the movement, or, better yet, refer to the artist by name, since no good artist fits neatly into one movement or another. ↩︎
- If you want to be convinced of this, please watch The Mona Lisa Curse (Robert Hughes, The Mona Lisa Curse, directed by Mandy Chang, London: Oxford Film & Television and Channel 4, 2008), currently available for viewing here. ↩︎