I Have A Soft Spot For Art

I Am All For Art's Finding A Large Audience. But The Way That's Happening Now, With Big Works Filling Big Galleries And Bigger Shows, Is Mostly Stopping Statements From Being Made. Or Heard. Or Talked About. Or Really Examined. It's Watering Things Down.

Lucian Freud's Career Affirms That The Only Thing An Artist Can Do Is Remain True To Whatever Vision, (lack Of) Talent, Or Ideas That Happened To Pick Them In Order To Be Made Known To The World.

Probably Only An Art-worlder Like Me Could Assign Deeper Meaning To Something As Simple And Silly As Tebowing. But, To Us, Anytime People Repeat A Stance Or A Little Dance, Alone Or Together, We See That It Can Mean Something. Imagistic And Unspoken Language Is Our Thing.

Art Schools Are Partly The Villain Here. (never Mind That I Teach In Them.) This Generation Of Artists Is The First To Have Been So Widely Credentialed, And Its Young Members So Fetishize The Work Beloved By Their Teachers That Their Work Ceases To Talk About Anything Else. Instead Of Enlarging Our View Of Being Human, It Contains Safe Rehashing Of Received Ideas About Received Ideas. This Is A Melancholy Romance With Artistic Ruins, Homesickness For A Bygone Era. This Yearning May Be Earnest, But It Stunts Their Work, And By Turn The Broader Culture.

Auctions Are Bizarre Combinations Of Slave Market, Trading Floor, Theatre And Burlesque... A Lot Of People Are Going To Be Making A Lot Of Excuses Or Maintaining That They Were Never Part Of This.