Posted on 06/11/2021 3:56:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
When I was a kid, I collected Wacky Packs — a series of stickers inside packages of gum. The images were well illustrated but crude satires of familiar products and brands. For instance, instead of Gillette's Right Guard Deodorant, the Wacky version was Killette's Fright Guard, the can depicting a thug proudly unleashing lethal B.O. This raunchy spoof and others like it thrilled my kindergarten boyish sense of humor.
Fast-forward a few decades, and such shenanigans aren't a childish novelty in the candy aisle anymore. Now cheap-shot rip-offs of corporations are supposedly groundbreaking art, and tools for social change. As Art and Object states:
Whether you call it artistic activism or artivism, the compound word keeps gaining traction. The use of creative expression to cultivate awareness and social change spans various disciplines including visual art, poetry, music, film, and theater. To make their points, artivists cleverly employ parody or satire through culture jamming and other forms of subvertising — a portmanteau of subvert and advertising — to change the original meaning of a well-known image or corporate logo.
"Cleverly" is not a word that applies here. An example of subvertising would be creating and distributing as art a feeble graphic where the word "McDiabetes" is inserted into the Golden arches logo.
What Art and Object is promoting as cutting-edge are progressive activists using Wacky Pack–level discourse, while preening as if they were brave rebels artfully skewering The Man. In my ongoing art market research, it's becoming rare to find any efforts that don't aspire to partake in misconceived ideology. Artist statements are sociology lectures. Landscapes preach on climate change; portraits must feature hot takes on racism. Left-wing proselytizing and conformity are mandatory conditions for advancement.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s book “The Painted Word”. Although not everyone agrees with the premise, Wolfe pretty much said that the art criticism — which was ideological — was the whole point of modern art. The art itself didn’t much matter. You could do anything. As long as an influential critic decided to pay attention to your work and use it as a springboard from which to pontificate, you were golden.
Leftwing and transgressive ideas have dominated art since before I was born. Most of the work is crap. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not about the crap art. It’s about the Leftwing ans transgressive ideas.
In modern America, conservatives, who claim to operate with the objective of conserving culture, have completely ceded this battlefield to the left, and have shown little to no interest in it. Indeed, here on FR, when I tell people I double majored in History and Art History, it's often met with ridicule and derision.
I do agree that it's very likely that any current college student majoring in those areas, particularly art history, is going to be bombarded with leftist theory and marxist-deconstructionist approaches to aesthetic interpretation. But quite frankly, this should not be a surprise in as much as any conservative who pursues interests in these areas is often met by criticism from both the leftists that infest the field, and fellow conservatives who, for whatever reason, deem the field unworthy of serious consideration.
Making a living in art is based on grants, and the trust-fund babies have the grants all sewn up, so if you want to do art and not starve you need to either be a business/marketing saavy outside artist or you need to have another source of income. The current system seems to be based on big money/money laundering. You’ve got some good people, and occasionally one of them will speak up only to be shouted down, but mostly they aren’t dummies and as comprehension dawns they will keep their thoughts to themselves.
What is culture? It is the set of attitudes regarding what is virtuous, what is evil, what is worthy of contempt.
Think about violent hip-hop, and the values it communicates and instills in young people.
Art serves to mold and shape the attitudes of those who observe it. The Left has worked hard to seize art, as a means of molding culture.
The left has made seizing art a top priority, but they did not have to work hard at it. The right simply ceded the ground. Many conservatives simply don't see it as an issue of merit, and ignore it.
Glenn Beck and Mark Steyn (like Breitbart) do, I think "get it," and regularly discuss current art, architecture, cinema and music, but when they do their audiences tend to receive it as a break from "serious," conservative topics. Rush, to an extent would discuss a new show or movie, but strictly in the context of it's reflection of a current topic or trend, rather than in terms of it's overarching socio-cultural relevance.
The man behind many of those Wacky Packages won a Pulitzer Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman (/ˈspiːɡəlmən/; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman.
Spiegelman began his career with the Topps bubblegum card company in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and the Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book-length Maus, about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991. It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work, responsible for bringing scholarly attention to the comics medium.
Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of Raw from 1980 to 1991. The oversized comics and graphics magazine helped introduce talents who became prominent in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, and introduced several foreign cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple worked for The New Yorker, which Spiegelman left to work on In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), about his reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001.
Spiegelman advocates for greater comics literacy. As an editor, a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and a lecturer, Spiegelman has promoted better understanding of comics and has mentored younger cartoonists.
>>The left has made seizing art a top priority, but they did not have to work hard at it. The right simply ceded the ground. Many conservatives simply don’t see it as an issue of merit, and ignore it.
The CIA had a hand in promoting “modern art”.
Generally, artists are now and always have been parasitic on society.
Art is icing that is not actually required if you have cake
Oh well, you’ll be just fine with the commie block architecture that looks like stacked up cardboard boxes, which is where the Left always ends up.
I sort of agree with the sentiment of the essayist, but he misses so much. Adbusters, an artivist movement/magazine for decades, goes unmentioned. Banksy goes unmentioned. We have Sabo, and maybe a few protégés, and they also should have got a mention for being a ray of hope.
I suspect what the essayist means by good art is ham-fisted, over-the-top landscapes and portraiture. But that died with the onset of photography. I'm a big fan of photorealism and surrealist painters who intermix realist representations with fantastical images. Something besides a pretty picture of the Grand Canyon or Washington crossing the Delaware is needed today. Washington crossing the Colorado might just do!
I was fortunate to attend college in the 80's when art history and even modern poetry were taught without a Marxist twist. I was introduced to modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" which showed how conservatism could be channeled in new and compelling ways. Southern writers such as Tate are also compelling as they detailed the massive social changes occurring in the South. There was no need to fall back on old modes and methods to communicate their love for the past and concerns over our future.
There are many smaller movements that generate art that the essayist is most likely keen on. There is the plein aire movement encouraging people to go out into the open air and paint landscapes. There are individual artists who paint on contract only for private citizens. Photorealism is still going strong. It has even become a form of video art as the artists film as they paint so we can see the entire process.
Among conservatives, however, I really do think art is dead. The types of movies or art that conservatives claim to like is really not art at all. Superhero movies? Really? Or those over-the-top portraits of Rush Limbaugh, et al crossing the Delaware? Really? If conservatives ever did regain control of the art world it would only mean the return of the kitsch and pastiche.
“>>The left has made seizing art a top priority, but they did not have to work hard at it. The right simply ceded the ground. Many conservatives simply don’t see it as an issue of merit, and ignore it.”
I’m a Freeper with an MFA in fine art and taught art in a large university. I’ve shown my work in many places. You are correct that the right, in general, tend to ignore art. This tends to push artists and those associated with art to the dark side. Many on the right stay away from art as they see it as a bastion of the left, but their attitude certainly contributes to some finding solace in leftist places.
Oleg Atbashian, the People's Cube guy, probably deserves a mention, and Michael Ramirez the cartoonist.
The traditional American Republicans valued art, probably because they took to heart the values of the Founders, and the Founders valued Western culture, the same Western culture that is under attack by a Left that has nothing to contribute culturally but architecture that either imitates bygone Western art (like Cuba’s Art Nouveau public buildings in tourist areas) or commie block architecture, like everywhere else they have actually built things.
The author said that art is a very old human impulse that goes further back than our culture, and that is true. The way its set up is that elites set the tone for what is good art based on what they fund. The oldest way around that is to go back to outside art, so think Grandma Moses. She was an outside artist who got her start in a far more democratic way before she was deemed to be important. At some point the elites will rebel from the Left unless they go too far and sell us all out to China. Where art can help is by bringing a truth home that changes our trajectory.
There are artists and then there are artisens
There is graphic design and fine art. We are surrounded by graphic design in this country, with even simple cookware items in your neighborhood Walmart displaying design elements that got their start in the Bauhaus. Its hard to see what we’d be missing until its gone. Art has a bad name in conservative circles, and I’m not really sure where that comes from because so much of Western culture is art. Walk around DC’s old buildings, look at any of our currency, go to the homes of people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Well, ok, I can’t resist telling the tale.
About 10 years ago I attended a week long workshop in metals held at a fine arts enclave located several miles from the main campus of a university. I have learned to work in silver.
We were given a tour. The head of the glass studio asked at the first words he uttered...... “What’s the difference between a large Domino’s pepperoni pizza and a glass artist?”
“The pizza can feed a family of four.”
But I digress.
Each evening the various work shop heads made presentations and had extensive presentations of their work
The wood work shop was hosted by the out going resident artist in the wood work studio. She showed the pictures and some showed beautiful work in furniture and boxes I think. Most was devoted to her calling however. Her calling and reason for being was to express the dialogue between lines and dots.
She would make door frames and window facing and all sorts of architectural fenestration from wood that received a wash of tempera paint onto which she took an HB pencil and made a dot from which a line extended. The dots were more or less uniform but the lines mostly at right angles were of various lengths. This meticulously applied pencil work was a dialogue between lines and dots.
She was very upset and complained through the whole presentation. She had to leave the security of the wood studio where she had dwelled for about 8 years. She came as a freshman Fine Arts Major, spent 2 more years getting a Masters of Fine arts and then was granted 2 more years as Artist in Residence, Wood Working Studio. At 26 she was kicked out into the hard cold world. She was wonderfully talented and made beautiful stuff. She was hung up as an artist however.....lines and dots.
It was realized that she had to make a living and the solution proposed was a production item. That is artist code for something you make over and over rather than just one at a time. The buzz is “do you have a production item”.
Well she developed one. Mirror Frames that were about 3 “ wide painted in the yellow milk tempera and containing the wonderful hand applied dialogue with lines and dots. So all was well. She had the production item and sold one.
OOps.....there was a problem. It had to be shipped. She could find no box the right size to ship the frame in. Turns out to get a box or boxes, the frames had to be dimensionally fabricated to a size determined by the box manufacturer. Time for crying...... literally. Her whole artistic world came crashing down.
The box maker destroyed her artistic freedom and thus her integrity and thus her being.
The story had no end. Her final days at the school including the summer workshop gig granted in total pity was at an end. She had no job. She had no prospects. The wonderful production item was distasteful because of the loss of artistic freedom and integrity.
I don’t know what happened but know that she at 26 thought the world was nearing an end
Until you can find an agent to promote your works, you either need a day gig or well funded sponsor/patron.
Collectors who connect with the artists and buy works (even if they don’t like the works).
As to day gigs, Marcel Duchamp did editorial cartoons and worked in an office where he didn’t try to draw attention to the press he was getting over Nude Descending A Staircase (it was notable in America but he was working in Europe).
Andy Warhol was doing commercial illustration (advertising and album covers) before he adopted “pop art” represtations of commercial products AS his art. He was doing record album covers in the 1940s but didn’t become a name until the 1960s.
Being an artist means keeping at it.
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