More About Visual Language

 In a previous post and in earlier writings, I've ruminated about the conceptual veracity involved in the use of the term 'language' as it applies to art and aesthetic subjects.

I'm not the first person, artist even, to be confused by and even perplexed by its slippery quality. In a new Lex Fridmen podcast, Edward Gibson a researcher on the this and many other such subjects adds some clarity.

At the heart of Modernism was and is a special interest in color and color theory.  In fact, color may be the most empirical source of truth for the claim that a visual art language exists. Yet as Gibson compares and contrasts Western language usage with that of other cultures, color as a backbone of artistic language becomes dubious. Color concepts are more likely constrained by the culture they are used in - a cultural range of aesthetic identity. This can be as sparse as simply black and white or dark and light to a handful more labeled colors. In the West that number is far greater.

And what's more interesting is the current scientific understanding of the brain that language processing is a dedicated function in the brain.  Gibson asserts that "language is a communication system" and that meaning, the payload of meaning that language form, is both separate and an open, ongoing scientific body of study. 

To me, and this is a first (Kahneman's system 1) draft of thinking about this, is that the use of the word language to describe what a visual artist (for the sake of example) is creating is not a communication system at all. Pardon the pun, but there's no two ways about it. You can look at an object and legitimately claim that the object speaks to you but can you speak it back out to anyone intelligibly?

In the aesthetic sense, what can be communicated are self-referential (art about and from  art) object-oriented relationships. Aspects of mutual - seemingly communicative - recognition of object relationships to the observer can include a shared historical context, image recognition, subject interest, space, place, and time considerations, and so on. Rather than a communication system, all of this is more accurately a mutual comfort zone or maybe even a safe intellectual space that the viewer intuitively recognizes.

The challenge for artists is to map and locate a community meeting place such as galleries, eateries, clubs, and all kinds of local cultural spaces that complements the exhibition of the work.  Unfortunately, galleries are often co-opted by special interest groups who claim the space for social interactions often far removed from art appreciation and understanding. This can create an asymmetric relationship between the artist's intent and its interpretation.

Gallery shows can be the most desirable venue for emerging art. And its fair to ask why galleries promote identity politic and social engineering show themes. There is no visual language dedicated to that purpose.  I recently surveyed a gallery whose theme had to do with climate change and the gallery walls were lined with representational landscape art. Virtually none of it had originally had anything to do with climate change.  But in this show, an activist curator co-opted and appropriated the work for an entirely and, quite honestly, inappropriate exhibition. 

When this happens, when artistic intent is held hostage to activist or ignorant environments - the illusion of artistic language can be inferred where no such thing exists.  This is a byproduct of the intersection of special interest political rhetoric with an art object that may or may not have any direct relationship to that vernacular.

Orwell's newspeak, mistaken a language, is extended to the aesthetic. Color can be equivocated to violence or hate or racism.  Every aspect of a work of art suddenly is assigned a call to action.  Visual newspeak is a language of political or social urgency and despite what its activist followers may claim this has nothing to do with art.

Agitpop is nothing more than an aesthetic rash created by an idiot, full of sound and fury - signifying nothing. And galleries and museums are saturated with it. De-accessioning and rejecting this stuff will go a long way in restoring the integrity and respect of art.

A Penny for Your Artful Thoughts

 As I research government art funding, something (aside from the illicit use of taxpayer money) that is suspiciously curious is the difference in funding levels between different kinds of artists, writers, and so on.  This raises a true question of equitable funding - in other words, you're a writer, I'm a visual artist both seeking a grant to produce 'art' over the same period of time. Is the funding the same or different?  Let's take a look under the covers.

In the wake of the 9/11 victim death toll, the government had to determine a fair compensation to those whose loved ones were taken during that event.  A equitable fiscal calculation had to be made and it was.

Similarly, with recognizing that National Arts funding exists (and there is plenty to discuss about that fact), what is the value of a grant that will speculatively produce something of human societal value?  

The argument I will explore involves the difference between a visual artist and a fiction writer. Both artists need time to create their work and the first drafts or experimental prototypes may need refinement so an arts grant of, for example, $1000 just for subsidizing living expenses for a few weeks is equitable - a visual artist and a writer on a day to day basis have common expenses.

Where there is a difference however is in material expenses, visual artists (generally speaking) have expenses that writers (even digitally leaning) simply don't have. Browse the cost of paints, brushes, or home depot materials required to create something and this fact is obvious.  Yet there doesn't seem to be any recognition of this difference at any level of government arts funding at all. In other words, a request for arts funding should solicit the size of a requested grant AND an expenses stipend. 

In a previous essay, I commend the National Endowment for the Humanities for objectively soliciting, describing, and dispensing their funding.  But something else they do that is different from the operations of the Arts Funding apparatchiks is that their grants have a temporal duration.  In other words they fund humanities scholarship for months or even a year.  Its not the same as tossing a small lump sum at a writer and wiping the administrative dust off their hands.

The NEH can (if they desired) make an argument that NEH research writing is different from NEA fiction writing. Here I'm using NEH and NEA as a allegory for every ladder rung of administrative entity that funds their respective grants.

My counter argument (and I've been making art for over a half century) is that creating original work as opposed to curating, refining, and synthesizing existing research is every bit as time-consuming and exhaustive as research.  The NEH's grant framework makes perfect sense and the NEA has nothing comparable (at least in my survey).

To clarify the difference, an NEH researcher can solicit a $6k/month funding for whatever duration they choose within funding guidelines and NEA grants have no such funding option. To understand the insulting indignity of this difference compare and contrast the CT State artist grants of $5k, $3k, and $1k awarded here. Keep in mind that NEFA has NO visual artist options to even apply for a Regional grant at all. NEFA launders national arts funding to exclude everyone aside from special interests from accessing those funds. 

The State of CT's cluster muck of arts, humanities, "development", and "tourism" entanglement is an administrative masterpiece of wasted energy, money, and legitimacy. Somebody, somewhere/anywhere really needs to audit these mofos.

In previous essays I questioned how a dead artist, Sol  Lewitt somehow managed to become a statewide money sink for arts funding.

Then there's the evaporating wall mural on the Lewitt building in New Britain.

So imagine my surprise when I'm looking up the individuals responsible for handing out the funds.

Presumably, anyone with conflicts of interest recuse themselves from participation but I can't help but feeling that ensuring accountability in CT is as difficult to grab hold of as a greased pig. 

  

April 2024 ALNB Solo Art Shows - An Appreciation

 The Art League of New Britain has three modest Galleries that are going to host individual Solo Shows.  This is something different and new from recent years.  And its a welcome curatorial innovation.

Photographer Bruce Ferraris, Material Designer and Printmaker Bruce Blackman and Photographer and Watercolorist Ursula Coccomo are the stars of these shows.

As a matter of disclosure, I'm a long time fan/member of the ALNB and both Bruce's are friends and artistic peers who I have a long term familiarity with.  For that reason, the following remarks are an appreciation of the work rather than a criticism.

Bruce Blackman has long been working with the lint fibers that are a byproduct of everyday laundry. Bruce's process is additive and transformative. He creates a visual design that he then overlays with select swatch of lint that he arranges and adheres there. The result is an assemblage whose look and feel will remind the viewer of a Milton Avery painting.

The work is ecclectic and compelling.  Bruce's show includes fine prints and drawings as well.

Ursula Coccomo's show features a variety of romanticized photography whose American lineage can be traced back to Hudson River School roots. These are idyllic scenes from nature that invite patrons and visitors an opportunity to explore and enjoy nature as refined by Ursula's vision.

Her show includes a collection of watercolors - many of the outdoors and some that are simply special interest topics.  All of them nicely crafted and presented.

Ursula's show mutually complements the Stable gallery which is perfect for small and medium sized works and the thematic arc of her work against the rustic wall and floorspace makes for a warm inviting experience.

  

Bruce Ferraris is an enigmatic fellow.  Yes, he's a photographer but his real interest is in a Warholian kind of serialization of "the" image. Instead of repeating an image with the same point of view and allowing for the imperfections of the reproductive process to reveal itself, Bruce floats around that point of view and mixes it up a bit. The result is a drive-by cubist image.  Bruce creates a collective set of these photographs and aesthetically blends a shaken, not stirred final image - kind of like a photographic Margarita.

All of these assemblages are 4 x 4 - some autonomously hung, some are immutably attached to a backing.

Bruce's subject matter in this show is largely to celebrate the taken-for-granted interior stuff of everyday life and make it fresh and interesting.  Pots and pans, junk drawer treasures, and god-knows-what that stuff is is the subject.  Good stuff.

What I love about this new format of one gallery/one artist shows is that, unlike scattershot group shows, an artist can show a range and depth of artistic growth that simply is never otherwise available. 

And shows like this are the finest example of "community" representation.  These are not identity politic advocacies.  Nobody is mirroring skin color, sexual preference, or any other such private triggering mechanism.  These are also artists who volunteer routinely to keep these places healthy, vibrant, and open to *EVERYBODY* both as participants and viewers.

There is no excuse to claim you don't have the opportunity to see, meet, and break bread with great artists if  you don't show up.

GO and enjoy.

Tip-Toeing Through CT Arts Grants

 In researching *how to* apply for government arts grants (my art career plan B), I started with local grants and that exercise exploded in my face and escalated to Regional and Federal levels of interest. It is unavoidable. And it's circular.  I'm back to the CT State mosh pit of Arts funding.

As a software engineer there's a conceptual framework that ought to apply to the awarding of Fellowship grants or institutional funding is "As above, so below". For sports enthusiasts this translates to "The goalposts shouldn't be moving." In CT anything can happen.  Let's dive in.

The CT Artist Fellowship Program 2023 Recipient List is here. The accuracy of the information appears to be approximate on closer inspection. My interest as a visual artist was to attempt to identify some kind of pattern of award and what I found was a rich, superficial diversity of identity politic types. Any discrimination in that regard appears co-incidental - I poked through a number of years. I had no real ability to speak to viewpoint diversity.

What I did find are a few backdoor things that imply that the rules for Fellowship qualification are not rigorously enforced.  One problem was actual residency (being a New England artist isn't someone necessarily paying CT State taxes) and the second problem is the greased pig identity problem of whether or not such a person really exists.  Later.

Of the 69 Fellowships awarded, I teased out that 31 of the 69 artists listed had something to do with the Visual Arts - my particular special interest. So I really took a close look at those and sampled a few others to confirm the problem I found.

And that problem involves the fact that 15 of the 31 Fellowships went to instructors or employees in Higher Education institutions. Six of those 15 are associated with Yale and 9 in other higher ed schools.

I think a similar ratio of Fellowship particulars will play out with the rest of the non-Visual artists listed.

As feedback that could and should alert the DECD that the system is broken. If a quarter or more of the Fellowships being awarded are going to the graduates of the world's richest University and another quarter to graduates of exclusive institutions, then Federal and State money intended to promote equity is in fact being money laundered back into the pockets of the rich.

What my research has helped me to do is conclusively define who the "underserved" CT artists actually are.  The underserved community consists of anyone who did not graduate with an MFA from Yale or other exclusive institution.  This is worth unpacking.  It is not patriarchy, racism, systemic government breakdown or any other popular victim narrative that suppresses a livelier arts culture in CT (and maybe New England), it is social class education.

The total amount of money at the end of the spigot for actual artists struggling to create a maker budget is half of that more or less $200K yearly payout. ALL the rest of the arts funding is administrative overhead - we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

But we can't be done yet,  What about institutional funding?

"The pandemic and COVID-related restrictions have hit these organizations hard. Theaters and other performing arts venues were recently given the go-ahead to open to the public as part of the state’s Phase 3 reopening plan but only at 50% capacity, further undermining their ability to turn a decent profit.

In a news release, Connecticut’s Flagship Producing Theaters, a consortium of theaters that includes Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Goodspeed Musicals, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Westport Country Playhouse and Yale Repertory Theatre called the grant program “a welcome step toward helping theaters recover.”"

So what the hell is the Yale Repertory Theater doing in this mix? Make this make sense. Was there ever some doubt that F'n YALE was in danger of going under?  And the State put some qualifications on this funding that YALE, of all places, would have absolutely no problem maxing out should they so choose.

Google:

And about 5% of that is spent funding Yale:

So what condition is Yale Rep in these days?

"“I think her legacy is already operating out there in the field,” said James Bundy, who as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Rep has worked alongside of Nolan for 17 years. “It’s in all the leaders that she’s had such an important role in training.” Nolan, who announced her decision back in October and is succeeded by Florie Seery, has seen the theatrical landscape evolve first-hand from her multifaceted position at Yale. As a shrewd managing director and innovative educator, Nolan is as responsible as any one person for how theaters operate across the commercial and nonprofit spectrum countrywide.

Naturally, her influence started in New Haven.

“We were a $16 million operation then,” said Nolan of Yale Rep’s operating budget, “and $40 million now."

DECD funds Yale Rep approx. $43325 per year (2018 - today, likely long before 2018 as well). These Directed Local Funds got even funkier in 2022 and 2023 when some kind of 2 year state carry forward windfalls were added $129,975 and $86,000 were added to the funding. SWEET. Go Yale.

Compare and contrast.

Friends of mine compare applying for arts funding as a crab bucket exercise.    There's no such intention here.  This process is highly flawed and needs fixing. I hope these essays clarify some solutions.

My first recommendation is that if funding is going to involve residency then that residency have a threshold of three continuous years in the State. Residency less than that limits the grant to its lowest possible award.  This rewards long term resident artists and limits academic drive-bys.

Second, add aliases. The gaming of identity masks the number of applications, awards, and residences that craftier agents use to obfuscate their history.

Encrypt all personal characteristics of the applicant. Let the quality of the art speak to the virtue of the application and the individuals involved.  Nobody wants their awarded funding to be diminished by the innuendo that they "didn't earn it" (DEI).

 

Federal Art Funding Done Right

 In the 1960's Major League Baseball expanded and added back another New York team, the New York Mets.  Needless to say as an expansion team the talent was razor thin and their colorful and entertaining coach Casey Stengel quipped, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"

That sense of humor is not lost on any artist attempting to locate and apply for a arts grant or other funding opportunity from the State of CT, the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), and to some degree the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Aside from the clusterMuck of confusing and misleading website and - cough- "portal" interface problems, it is a full time chore for anyone who is not already associated with a mainstream arts organization, a University, or otherwise inside track to simply navigate, recipe-wise, 'how do I apply for the damned thing and how can I be sure my application will be treated fairly'?

I'm chipping away at making sense of this stuff in a series of essays and inquiries that I hope will concise road map that any artist can follow.

What has caught my attention and has answered the question of "Can the Federal government do a good and truly honest job of creating opportunities for creatives whose instructions are reasonable, whose solicitations are free of cognitive and political bias, and who advocate and practice an even handed evaluation process?"

The improbable answer is YES.

In researching arts funding you will inevitably encounter cross references to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sometimes that cross-reference is misguided.  In a couple of cases, an arts administrator or political advocate for funding wants to co-opt or deflect responsibility for funding something having to do with writing or related matter for funding as a Humanities project. NEA and NEH serve two autonomous and unique cohorts that only co-incidentally share some of the same creative juices that applicants are looking to exercise.

On the NEH website there's a webinar that's been recorded with tons of very useful, specifics about who the Humanities serve and what the scope of that stuff is as this slide shows;

Taken at face value, artists such as myself can claim some of that territory as our own but what NEH makes clear throughout their material is that the generation of art is out of scope - that stuff belonging to the responsibility of the NEA, NGOs, and private parties

Again, as an artist, I find comfort in this kind of clarity. This means that funding opportunities for stuff I do or hope to do is in the scope of the NEA and not here.  HOWEVER, my expectation as an artist is that everything that applies to the Humanities in terms of an expected field of neutrality WILL apply at the NEA.

Let's compare and contrast what i found in the NEA budget and performance plan:

Wait, WHAT?

I'm going to analyze the NEA's malfeasance in this regard in a separate essay. Obviously, every single form of psychological intimidation appears to be "the plan" at the NEA.

But this post is about doing it right and for the sake providing how its done right let me provide additional references and links from NEH that conclusively prove that government can work responsibly and fiscally soundly.

The NEH grants webpage is a breath of fresh air - lots of truly well-developed recipes for successfully submitting an application for the funding you hope will be chosen.

The YouTube channel for NEHgov is rich with additional videos that make life easier for funding applicants.

Art as Intelligent Alien Being

 I have been interested and studying the use of the word 'language' in art criticism and conversation for quite a while now. There's something condescending about someone using it out of the blue when you're looking at a piece of art.

Why don't I see that?  Am I stupid?  WTF are they talking about?  Language? Is this just bullshit warmed over?

I took a communications course decades ago. Sender and receiver are two necessary components for communication to take place.  Language is tightly coupled to this. Whatever a sender is sending needs to be decoded into meaningful substance and acknowledged (received). Implicit in this exchange is the mutual coding of information into a transmissible language or set of reusable, recognizable notation.

When I'm observing an art object, I rarely sense that an artist is transmitting a message in a language unless its already just using an existing written code.  This doesn't mean that art objects can't emote sympathy or triggered emotion based on the composition and aesthetic material used to generate those responses. To me that's a call/response reactionary impulse.

And, I'm not the first to comment on the subject.  My own interest was intrigued by James Elkins book Why Art Cannot Be Taught. In a section on Critiques, he refers to a concept called theory speak - that of a vernacular tightly coupled to a material, theoretical, or otherwise esoteric aspect of aesthetic practice that acts as a common ground for discussing the subject (the art, the practice, the artist's trajectory, and so on).

In another example he talks about critiquing a painting by a student who claims that the painting contains a language. After asking the student how Elkins might say something in the language, the student more accurately explains the painting as a personal narrative describing a camping trip.

For a long time that was my hangup.  The use of the concept of language that referred to someone's art was something I automatically assumed was an attempt at one-up-manship regarding a recognizable pattern, style, or esoteric component of any given artist's canon.

And I have studied Wittgenstein's work implying we can't/shouldn't talk about art - a notion that has a romantic appeal but also leaves us with the unintentional consequence of being mutual aesthetically mute and dumb orphans. We can and do talk about art - tfb.

With all of that as intellectual baggage, I am reading Thierry de Duve's Pictoral Nominalism (On Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade). TdD is one of the most insightful Duchamp historians but its never an easy read - he demands a lot of attention and the subject matter is dense and deep. I'll not attempt a literary swim in the deeper waters.

There's a short bit about Kandinsky that I want to appropriate as a complement to a theory I want to propose.

Nominalism is a philosophical construct that asserts that the abstract doesn't exist - that every single entity is it's autonomous self (I'm generalizing but stick with me for the ride).

Alright, buckle your seat belt. If the abstract doesn't exist - let's buy the argument - then what the hell are these "...self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject that also leads a material life: it is a being"

Let's play with that idea. TdD's book follows Duchamp's investigation and re-theorization of language itself. Both a decomposition of how reality is cognitively managed and objectively how it comes to *be*. Here, Kandinsky - maybe because of spirituality blinders that he shared with Hilma af Klint - misses the opportunity to solve a universal question. Is the work of art that "rises from out of the artist" an object or an alien being - the very intelligent life humankind has searched for from the days of primal soup?

Art objects defy everything we associate with searches for intelligent life yet if we squint our preconceived notions just a bit and apply a nominal lens to our focus, maybe we are sharing our planet with galactic stuff we don't yet recognize or acknowledge.

As for artistic language, TdD extends our (my) original presumptions about language with these thoughts.

Ah, "a fiction of a language".  That's really interesting given how loosely so many art critics use the concept.  In reading this book, language doesn't come cheap to artists and never arrives for most. I was warned by Richard Trickey at UNL not to allow myself the mistake of assuming that discussing art was just bullshit, it's not.  

But buyer beware when critics claim an intellectual fast lane into the language of a given artist.

You've taken the ride this far.  Here's a TED talk that complements the idea that art objects in a nominal world may in fact represent a form of alien life as aesthetic memes.  

 

NEA First Inquiry -NEFA Concerns

 NEFA Concerns

Fromkrasicki@protonmail.com <krasicki@protonmail.com>

Topublicaffairs@arts.gov, oig@arts.gov

CCkrasicki@protonmail.com

DateThursday, April 4th, 2024 at 12:17 PM

Yesterday I called the NEA and spoke with someone who advised that I send an email to document my concerns.

I am semi-retired at the moment, a lifelong artist, I've dedicated quite a bit of time to unpacking and disentangling American Arts funding nationally and at local levels. I consider this the first of what I expect to be more correspondences as the feedback cycle will generate additional questions and areas of research.

Today I want to address two specific areas of inquiry and concern. One is the governance of NEA's regional affiliates. In my case, the New England Foundation for the Arts.

My understanding from yesterday's phone call is that 40% of all NEA arts funding is distributed to these regional affiliates. If I assume that to be true, then as an artist I can apply directly to the NEA for Federal grant money which is sourced from 60% of the total NEA budget allocated for that purpose and that I can apply to my regional Arts affiliate for grants sourced from some percentage of the 40% of the budget made available to a specific region. Importantly, in order to apply for such grants or opportunities,

I must somehow both navigate to and through the application process AND be provided some set of understandable instructions for successfully doing so.

AND, implicitly, anyArtist should not be coerced into political loyalty oaths, political identity litmus tests, illegal constraints on the creation or content of my proposal, or other illegitimate expectations. Equally, implicit, is the clear and unambiguous understanding that the art being proposed or advocated for consideration will be evaluated strictly on its own merit and accepted or not based on those metrics. Presumably, American citizens over the age of 18 is the only qualification and that the solicitation for grants or whatever is for art​.

Please do correct my understanding of how the NEA funding operates is any of this is wrong or sadly mistaken (and I'm not naive enough to believe that, in practice, there's a broader range of interpretation by certain individuals administering the programs).

Assuming that as a context that anyArtist can expect and given that the only​access to NEFA arts funding is through NEFA's web portal, anyArtist has absolutely no other alternative for application for funding, grants, and so on.

However there are differences between the NEA's broad spectrum of art opportunities and NEFA's regional subset. I documented those differences in on my art criticism blog; https://artscrub.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-criminal-negligence-of-new-england.html

Nothing has changed. In essence, the NEA - instead of ensuring a consistent funding distribution model based on professional practice, say Visual Arts - distributes funding opportunities by geography and geography is implemented on that local level by funding power brokers who can constrain (or more accurately operate a money laundering operation) because they abuse the system to empower themselves to. The corruption of opportunity is contagious to even finer grains of more local funding on the State level (a different discussion). Numerous categories of professional art activity are missing.

And this speaks directly to my first empirical complaint - the NEFA site is a, for lack of a better term, woke hellhole of political advocacy, racial and identity politic litmus tests and more. There is nothing balanced and there is no avenue for a professional anyArtist to navigate a neutral, unbiased, nonconformist application process. Conservative or disinterested artists are wholly discouraged to apply or even think that their applications - barring a word salad of magic associations - will ever be taken seriously. This is a big problem.

The problem gets even bigger when anyArtist examines the NEFA Terms of Use for the (reminder) only portal to apply for the 40ish% of regional funding. The TOU is self-referential as a legally binding agreement yet contains numerous passages that are entirely capitalized. In digital form, the convention of using all caps is to be screaming - needless to say, not a typical legally formulated convention to my knowledge.

More to the point, the TOU is unusual in that it attempts to insulate NEFA from all and any accountability for their implementation and administration of federal (and State) arts funding. Many of its assertions appear to be, at face value, entirely an attempt to subvert the legal rights of artists to engage in legal remedy. Only one other region, the South copies the TOU (badly - misspellings and maybe other quirks).

Section 12d, essentially eliminates your ability to access the funding opportunities:

" BY ACCEPTING THESE TCU, YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS NEFA FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY NEFA DURING OR AS A RESULT OF NEFA’S INVESTIGATION AND/OR FROM ANY ACTIONS TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER NEFA OR LAW ENFORCEMENT RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES. IF YOU BELIEVE THAT CONTENT REMAINS ON THE SERVICES WHICH VIOLATES YOUR RIGHTS OR THESE TCU, AS STATED IN SECTION 15, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY AGAINST NEFA SHALL BE TO TERMINATE YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES."

I don't know why no one reads or realizes that this amounts to intimidation and the normalization of the abuse of the legal system by this arts organization.

OTOH, other regions (see MidAtlantic Region) acknowledge the legal rights and remedies available to artists in their TOU for geographical domain portals.I will publish this as an open correspondence on my blog artscrub.blogspot.com and update it with your feedback. My long term intent is to create a HOWTO set of instructions for anyArtist to follow to apply for funding opportunities so this is a work in progress, one small step at a time.

regards,

Frank Krasicki

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

2024 CT+6: Guerrilla Girl Body Count

 Jurors: Eric Aho, artist and Brian Galloway, Owner/Director of the William Scott Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Work by 76 Women and 33 Men accepted

Essay: Art and Social Risk

 There's an increasingly troubling political weaponization of art shows. Numerous mainstream art media channels increasingly normalize taking advantage of the art ecosystem as an exclusive and private political echo chamber and sandbox for an intolerant cohort of "collaborators".

The opportunity for true terrorism to be staged in the subterfuge of a Contemporary Art show is growing and may be breaching a dangerous critical mass.

The concern falls into a number of categories;

• The use of art shows by political cohorts to communicate, co-ordinate, or orchestrate illegal or terrorist activity 

• The use of art shows by political cohorts to smuggle or otherwise exchange weaponry or other materials to disrupt social stability 

• The use of art shows as a means to trigger or otherwise alter the behavior of a patron that results in a spontaneous reckless act of aggression or trauma

 The show and artist who inspired these observations is Tania El Koury who talked about her work in a Brooklyn Rail "New Social Environment" zoom call event.  

There is nothing about Koury's art to indicate anything but sincere aesthetic considerations but the implementation of her installations is worth examining in the context of this essay. 

This piece, Cultural Exchange Rate, is of particular interest.  It consists of locked Cabinet spaces that are opened by patrons with a key that's distributed by whoever is responsible for sitting the show on any given day. Khoury's work deconstructs some personally archival material that is distributed piecemeal among these cabinets. 

The patrons pictured have a relatively autonomous and personal experience but, obviously, there is no transparency as to the contents of any of these containers.

Given the global aspects of shows such as these shows - international special interest groups promoting their own agendas - the potential for ethnic and geopolitical intrigue is certainly a consideration worth discussing. In a violent world, Contemporary Art shows that feature coded political agendas or provide hidden opportunities for the exchange of contraband, or can co-ordinate private, exclusive access to designated spaces is problematic.  The list of abusive examples is much longer than my shortlisted items.

The artistic ecosystem needs to re-calibrate its attention to artistic concerns and reject the normalization of art as politics as religion in a world so polarized as to promote mutual distrust and harm. 

 

The Avant-Grind - Making Sense of Juried Art Shows in the 21st Century

It is a long standing convention for Juried Art shows to solicit a call for artists to submit their entries to the show based on work realized in the past, say, three years. The temporal requirement will vary and may be based only years or social event such as the Covid social isolation period. 

I bring up this topic because of the assumptions that never are questioned about the practice.

In a society in which individuals are living longer and more capable lives, artists who are older often have a large inventory of material to choose from with the last n number of years representing but a small fraction of their intellectual contributions, curiosities, and development.

Last century which was dominated by the romantic notion of the "avant-garde" - the notion that each professional artist is willingly or unwillingly enrolled in a race that represented progress as establishing a unique stream of theory or practice both different and theoretically plausible than the next artist. Furthermore, the act of being a professional artist was neither as crowded an occupation as it is today nor as fiscally viable. Compound all of that with uncertain health and lifetime expectations and often artists of that time became hostages to the choice of aesthetic rabbit hole "ism" they decided to pursue and call their own.

And as a consequence, galleries, curators, dealers, and patrons became accustomed to uniformly demanding the latest, greatest progress along these lines.  The "new", the "cool", the avantiness of the work is what everyone was tapping their foot waiting to be delivered.

By the end of the last century though the avant-garde had largely run its course, intellectually burying with the widely hailed "Death of..."  all things Modern. And today with the smoking fumes of PostModernism still fresh in the air, galleries still cling to and promote juried shows whose metrics and expectations are artifacts of a culturally unfamiliar past.

Unlike museums, galleries that solicit calls for art are precisely where local communities can find and freely access the diverse cacophony of artistic talent our political identitarians claim to look for.  

Contemporary Art is a big tent that straddles fine art and everything else that somebody/anybody considers "art" and heaven forbid you question any of its worthiness.

The pretension of an avant-garde in the 21st century simply has lost its veracity. Art is less a matter of developing an "ism" as it is a cult like devotion to believing one's identity cohort is in need of a space so safe as to deny any and all forms of discussion or criticism as unwelcome or even an assault on their personage.

And this brings us back - in a roundabout way - to questioning the virtue of requesting that artistic submissions to juried art shows conform to a newness metric - something completed in the last n years.

Today, the result is not a harvest of originality or innovation.  The result is both politically correct and politically policed conformity. The galleries are aesthetic echo chambers of empty virtue and antiseptic craft competitions.  The temporal constraints on these shows artificially create a bubble of illiberal conformity.

If an avant garde exists today, it is practiced not with ideas but in aesthetic delivery systems - digital, virtual, and augmented technologies abound.  What is persistently a vacant opportunity is the ability to present new ideas, thoughtful  contradictory musings, or -gasp- original material that has no Contemporary comfort zone.

Let's spitball some alternative curatorial possibilities.  How about juried shows that ask for a current piece and a piece from ten years ago to compare and contrast. Or why pursue temporal bounds on show entries at all?   Long practicing artists have plenty of unseen and underappreciated work worth presenting.

Guerrilla Girl Body Count- ALNB - After the Flood

 Curator, Kenneth Carifa

46 pieces by 41 women accepted

32 pieces by 28 men accepted