Essay: Defining Need in Connecticut

 I recently saw this Facebook posting that i found interesting.

"Art Access: New Britain

CALL FOR ART

[Link in bio]

One of the primary means emerging artists have to build their exhibition resume and gain the attention of curators is to participate in juried art shows. Not only is substantial time and effort involved in the process of creating art and applying for juried shows, but most require a fee for application. For many artists with extraordinary work, their opportunity for significant exposure is limited by their financial ability to apply for more publicized shows involving known jurors. An application fee can be a significant amount to artists with lower incomes and often many cannot take the chance that a juror may not even select their work for display.

Most juried shows charge these entry fees to support the organizations they are part of and those fees are often integral to their budgets and operations; however these fees are keeping out a subset of the artist population. With generous support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Art Access: New Britain is a juried art show focusing on artists living in households with income at or below the approximate state definition of “lower income” ($80,000). This juried show will collect no fee for application, involves a well established juror connected to a prominent museum, offers assistance to those who cannot afford to transport their artwork to the show, and involves juried prize awards.

This exhibition will be held at Gallery 66 in New Britain from August 12 to October 11, featuring an opening event and artist discussion, in addition to regularly held events at Gallery 66 such as monthly artist discussions and regular open mics."

What caught my eye here is the fact that that the Connecticut Office of the Arts has read the premise for this show and has decided its worth sponsoring. It's worth unpacking the assumptions being asserted here because nobody seems to have put an ounce of critical thinking into what problem this is going to solve or whether there are better ways of staging juried art shows.

Presumably the intent of constraining the household income of the artist to less than or equal to $80,000 will somehow limit participation to lower income artists. But this makes little sense. A single person and a married artist or an artist with kids or legal obligations makes hard capping an income profoundly unfair and could preclude true need and include individuals with no real hardship. In other words, its pointless.

And need isn't always an absolute condition. For the immediate few months I may be dead broke but in a few months that fiscal condition will change. Opportunity cost is often conditional.

The logical argument being made about juried shows is also flawed. Income has nothing to do with getting accepted or rejected from a juried art show. Ideally, the quality of the work is what gets a piece accepted or rejected. And the quality of the juror (e.g. de facto curator) is key. In either case, the artist's work IS "exposed" to the juror.

Any show that decides the identity of the artist is more compelling than the quality of that artist's work is playing with fire. The criteria of judging this show becomes the evaluation of the financial status of the individual rather than the work itself. Is the curation of the show intended to lower expectations based on something other than artistic merit? The point of juried shows to begin with is the assumption that your best work belongs in a show of selected best works.

And because the framing of shows like these emphasize identity politics, the chances of the work being taken seriously is eroded.  It's one thing for a patron or juror to find a diamond in the rough at any gallery show and its completely another to find that unique talent in a blizzard of artwork from an identified  class of "victims". Do the prizes go to the most needy, the most politically compelling or sympathetic, or to the identity artist of the month? Its unclear if participation will elevate or stigmatize the participating artists.

A far better way to help artists in need is for the CT Office on the Arts to support local Art Galleries all over the State by subsidizing gallery memberships for needy local artists - full stop. They all sponsor juried member shows. Such sponsorship might involve the basic membership fee and an additional group stipend for occasional transportation assistance.  This promotes fiscally sound galleries, community goodwill, and transparent artistic participation.  

My guide to gallery art show expenses and consideration are here.

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.

Whitney Biennial 2019 - A Critique

The Whitney Biennial of 2019 is an institutional and curatorial failure. Four museum floors of it. The effect isn't new but the scale and audacity of exhibition is.  Its managed to weaponize political correctness on an institutional scale.

The show is largely a rarely interrupted, mind-numbing procession of  aesthetic victimization screeds.

As a patron of Fine Art, I found myself groping for something/anything that could quench a thirst for aesthetic satisfaction.  Instead, one installation of woe-is-me-and-mine art after another.  And how could it be any other way.  When shows are curated like a house of cards relying on satisfying the long tail of identity political affiliated groups of patrons, what can we expect but *this*?

The tropes employed by each artist are nothing new. The attempts to shock any sophisticated viewer are unshockingly unsuccessful.  We've seen this all before. So much so that this show may signify many tipping points in the institutional evolutionary calendar.

The first tipping point is that Fine Art in as much as "Art for Art's Sake"  has any contemporary meaning is no longer welcome in museum spaces that are now held hostage to generations of academically programmed curators whose myopic marching orders involve curating shows based on identity politic bingo cards.

The result is that this show represents a regressive transformation of artistic merit for the work that's accepted.  Its *intent* was never "art".   Its intent is politics and its creation is CRAFT.  With few exceptions this biennial promotes cottage industry, political arts and crafts as Fine Art.  It fools no one.  This stuff saturates and intellectually lobotomizes any one who cares about art.

The result is that the exhibition exposes the large body of work as well-made craft.  And it exposes each political interest as being ignorant of the fact each victim, in turn, victimizes all the other neighboring victims - a cacophony of mutual indifference.  Like highway drivers with me first attitudes, these artists - thanks to a curation from hell - desensitize the patron from giving a shit about any of them.

As an artist, I attend shows to inform my own practice.  Where is my work in relation to *this*.  And is there a thinking worth applying to my practice.  I left uninspired and in many cases disheartened.

I'll leave it at that for the moment.  I'm working on a study of the idea of *language* being used to describe art and artworks and a few artists in this exhibition caught my eye because "I don't think it means what you think it means".  But that's better written about as a separate piece.

Art Review of the UConn 52nd Annual Studio Art Faculty Exhibition

This show is taking place at the Benton Museum on the Storrs campus of UConn and it runs until October 14, 2018.  It features work by (presumably) all of the studio art faculty.

Shows like this are always hard to gage.  Is the art being shown serious or is it academic - that is, is the faculty member a gifted teacher but not so gifted artist or are they an artist making a living by teaching (either well or well-enough to stick).

This show closely follows last year's show.

This show features a rather tedious by-product of an art faculty "project" (maybe a junket) having something to do with the interview of Indian (as in India) artists. If memory serves me correctly these are the remaining fumes from last year's show.

Another thread of work seemed to center around the use of new technology dedicated to printmaking - as much an exercise in manufactured effect rather than artistic innovation.

Likewise the photography seemed stale to me - again, maybe a hangover from last year's show and exposure to the MFA show.  Rather  than pushing any photographic envelope the work seemed to mail it in.

In touring the show I settled on a set of work from three faculty artists.

Ray Dicapua apparently always attracts attention for his oversized drawings. He's UConn's 'art of the spectacular' entry to these shows.

Here is this year's entry;

Done in vine charcoal!  Impressive stuff.  How these things get stored are an even larger mystery.

The second piece worth mentioning is by Brad Guarino - The Appearance of Balance and Perspective (2018).  Its the first piece I've seen recently that speaks to manhood.  Here's the piece and how he speaks to its intent;

Finally, there's the acrylic work of Pamela Bramble which was like a breath of fresh air for me, a fellow painter.  I found the innovative use of material, size, and nature of the work to be, at the very least inspiring.  The work is playful and full of cryptic surprise, often mimicking fine art print grounds.

It is hard to be impressed or disappointed in faculty art shows.  Faculty art is always a mixed bag.  But what I look for is innovation, risk, skin in the game of pushing the envelope and in this regard I don't think there's enough showing to write about.   This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it simply isn't on display.

This is not an inspiring show by any means.  One can only hope that this faculty's calling is teaching where inspiring students is the masterwork.  As they say in baseball, "Wait until next year."

The Weaponization of Juried Art Shows

Americans are well-aware of a concept developed by our rival global antagonists of using American freedoms, social norms and expectations against us.  For example, extremism can effectively hide behind religious freedom of expression against criticism or legal remedy.

The curation of Art has been under political attack for decades usually by politicians who extort concessions by withholding funding and claiming to be guardians of a public constituency needing protection from the indecency of the latest art sensation.  The soft fascism of threatening public funding of the offending institution was often enough to discourage another such sensation getting exposed *there*.

And though the Art World would be loathe to admit it, art in America has been self-constrained for decades.  Art curators, like dogs trained not to break their way across and electronic fence, are rarely suicidal enough to promote anything too risque for fear of their jobs and a tarnished CV.

However, the object of the contention was always the quality of art and not something else.

Today, we see disruptive mutations of this idea being played out nationally, and to some degree internationally. The variation is a logical one.

First, the exposure of certain kinds of art can be constrained is well-established.  One way [using copiously by government] is to threaten or deny funding.  Soooo... one way to exercise control over what gets shown is to seize control of the agency of what gets funded. And so, under the special interest banner of "diversity" - [as defined by minority status, geographic origin, and cultural [no matter how dubious] background] - the micromanagement of art funding is being controlled.  This is the first form of the Identity Politics effect that eliminates the quality of art as a metric of artistic merit and elevates the individual nuances [no matter how contrived] of the artist and their constituency.

The second mutation is cultural vigilantism. To understand the ease in which juried art shows can be fixed I need to briefly explain the game pieces.

Art has no formal definition.  It has a number of categories, all of them fair but soft. In other words, no one can authoritatively claim something isn't art.  Within the working artist community, there's a trust relationship that what is submitted as art is intended to be worthy of consideration.

The second gaming piece is that jurors of art shows are also trusted to use their best judgment in evaluating the body of submissions and to honor the subject to which the work was addressed. The juror is rarely held accountable for the selections they make.  As an artist, you take your chances and it always costs money - you are subsidizing the show this juror selects as a matter of trust that its curation is trustworthy.

So these two gaming pieces offer plausible deniability for the eventual selection of art for juried shows.  Artists trust each other to submit authentic art and they trust [implicitly biased] jurors to put their biases to one side and objectively curate *the art*. And everyone in the art community is aware that the final selection is used to always be an aesthetic sausage for better or worse.

But all of these trust presumptions cannot be taken for granted any longer.  Any simple arithmetic applied to juried art shows in the United States going back years exposes an alarming fact. Juried art shows are more often than not juried by women who ore often than not favor female artists with statistically improbable regularity.

It is empirically obvious that the quality of art, the metrics by which art is judged, and the veracity of prestige associated with curators and their politically endorsed art beneficiaries is the equivalent of artistic malware - a denial of service attack on gallery institutions.  And its being performed by presumably well educated, credentialed individuals who seem to believe they are being asked to punish contemporary innocents for the crimes of historical ancestors.

By being disingenuous as to their intent and by taking money from individuals they have no intention of judging objectively, they are committing fraud on a class action scale. They and their educational mentors need an intervention.

In the meantime, choose your juried shows carefully AND publish the scorecards of local jurors so we can all triangulate this kind of information.

Key pieces of information;

How many entries to a show, then by gender.

How many accepted pieces, then by gender of artist.

Note that the names of male sounding names are often deceptions. 

How to Submit Art to a Show in the Era of Identity Politics and Curatorial Scorecards

The cost of showing work as an artist consists of many things

• the cost of the materials to make the artwork with
• the time to make it
• the cost of entering art shows both open and juried
• joining the gallery usually discounts the entry fee for shows
• not joining the gallery usually adds $5 to $10 per entry piece for the show
• the cost of transporting/shipping the piece to and from the show
• satisfying the show obligations
• gallery sitting or a $5-ish buyout
• Show opening contribution in helping to set up or food contribution
• manufacture or distribution of show/personal marketing artifacts
• repair of damaged work/frames (its all on you)

As if all of this wasn't enough, all galleries require a commission fee on anything sold.  This can range usually not more than 50%.  Thirty percent is more common. So, the artist must factor in that discount to their final remuneration.

A common complaint about the commission structure is that frames (an expensive cosmetic value add) are included in the commission even though the artist's final take is less AND in order to even out that double-jeopardy these pieces must be adjusted cost even more thus making them less likely affordable.

So far so good.  But the subliminal message here is that art is not cheap to make nor show.

Okay. So the next consideration has to be what shows are worth submitting work to.

Here we have to triangulate the cost of showing as calculated from the show-based costs identified previously against show duration, anticipated show attendance, and opportunity cost.

IMO, shows that last fewer than a full month must be inexpensive to submit to or incredibly attractive in terms of sales potential or prestige.  And every show ties up the works involved for the duration of the show. That can be an opportunity cost in certain situations.  The other opportunity cost is limited arts funds being dedicated to *this* opportunity.

As far as all of this is concerned, there is nothing discriminatory in terms of identity politics.  You, the artist, whoever you are or think you are or have been told who you are play by these rules.

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Things that are out of our control as artists are the conventions and practices of the gallery owners/organizers. Somebody ALWAYS has an upper hand in what they deem acceptable.
Raging on about that is a different blog entry.

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Generally speaking, open gallery shows will accept as much work as they can show within wall/floor space constraints.

And in deciding whether or not to enter a show all candidate entrants need to study the aesthetic bias of the juror involved.  Representationally opinionated jurors are generally less likely to select abstract or contemporary work and vice versa.  You want to pick a juror at least sympathetic to your practice.

The Identity Politic Tax kicks in for juried and blatantly discriminatory shows that sell themselves as oppressed, special interest group promotional vehicles.

In recent years the number of woman only gallery shows has become a floodwater.  In browsing open calls for artists its rare that a month goes by without at least one of these advertised close by.

This is the first erosion of art shows evolving from being quality-of-object specific to identity politic specific. Its unclear who this truly benefits.  Its anti-democratic nature removes a degree of prestige from the work involved and the self-imposed autonomy of the enterprise is as likely to generate animosity as promotion of anything more than hate politics.

Maybe the intended by-product of these tactics is to simply reduce the exposure of anyone who doesn't qualify and hope the public's taste is socially-engineered to believe the quality of art has an artistic identity preference.

The more pernicious effects of juried shows comes into play when the juror or the gallery put their thumb on the scale so that, as previously mentioned the show is no longer about the quality of the art being juried and instead some kind of socially engineered conclusion. The rationalizations are endless to justify this stuff so let the recriminations make their way into the comments section.

But to be more specific, in recent years,  juried art shows increasingly reflect disproportionate female representation.  Furthermore the remaining entries often favor tightly-coupled gallery members, supporters, or associated figures.  Some of this is to be expected.  But that leaves but a small fraction of eligible entry spots.

For men, there's an economic consequence.  Their work is less likely to be selected, they are more likely to be subsidizing an unspecified and unwelcome discriminatory practice, and contributing to the deterioration of the community's artistic reputation.

The sober reality is that the Identity Politic war has deeply polluted the art community worldwide amounting to nothing less than cultural appropriation not only of the present but the past.  This is an unregulated affirmative action program - aesthetic vigilante-ism in the professional ranks.  Its by-product is an archaeology of myopic mediocrity elevated to a seat of importance not even the village idiot artist can salute.

The most obvious personal solution is for male artists to simply be far more awoke about who the jurors are, what their agenda is, and what the track record of the galleries are.

To the degree a more general solution must be a scorecard for jurors that includes the Political Identity arithmetic involved  in their jury practice. This must include all the politically motivated algorithms being used to bludgeon the artistic community into yet another polarized political institution.

It shouldn't be long before, on a scale of one to five vaginas, any gallery or museum ranks or how genital friendly any gallery call for art will be.

The 48th Nor'Easter Juried Exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art

Out of curiosity I went to see and review the show.  I was in town early for an open drawing session at the Art League of New Britain so... what the hell?

I don't always submit my work to this show.  Sometimes finances get in the way.  But this year I saw who the juror was going to be - Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the  Norman Rockwell Museum - and decided right then and there that submitting my work was a fool's errand.  My work is light years away from Norman Rockwell and in choosing such a juror my gut instinct was that the result would be predictable.

My other concern in not submitting was whether or not this was yet another of the parade of identity politic shows I've observed in recent years in which female jurors favor (justly or unjustly) female work.

I know the Guerrilla Girls are holding their breath so here is the math.

Seventy pieces are being shown.  Nineteen are by men, Fifty-one are by fifty-three women.

And although there are plenty of differences in the work here are some dollar figures.

I averaged the prices of the work for both men and women strictly on the number of pieces that were for sale.  NFS were excluded as was a piece with a $1,000,000 price tag by a male artist because it absurdly skewed the more typical price ranges.

The total asking price for fifteen pieces by men came out to $91,650, an average of $6,110 per piece.
The asking price for forty-eight pieces by women came out to $185,896, an average of $3,872.83.
Make of it what you will.

Now that we know who has what in their pants, let me review the show.

My worst fears were realized  after walking the show carefully to ensure I wasn't just rushing  through.  What struck me most was the obvious volume of representational work. A handful of something other than representational work was scattered her and there and of that lot, mostly derivative pieces.

Curatorially, this stream content is typical of local gallery shows that are curated by landscape and portrait painters who have yet to understand or acquire an understanding of Modernism let alone Contemporary Art.   Shows such as these are to Art what Trump's administration is to America - dross served up as aesthetic caviar.

There is nothing to think about here.  The stuff on pedestals and on the walls is a simulacra of an imagined aesthetic in which the patron is expected to only use their eyes and their familiarity with nostalgic memories.  The work as Art is breathlessly empty.

However, what fails as Art succeeds as Fine Craft.  Everything here is meticulously crafted and well made.  Everything here is functional like all good craft.  This work is antiseptic enough to display anywhere.  And, thankfully, it is devoid of the identity politics that the show itself cannot shed.

If you like pleasing, stylized landscapes, portraits, linen, and fruit or colorful pseudo-abstractions, this show is for you.  The warmth of familiar subject matter divorced from any of the messy PostModern, Modern, and Contemporary influences will either totally relax you or put you into a coma.

And, as one of those cosmic coincidences, I need to leave you with one final anomaly. Of the twenty or so artists who attended the nude drawing session only one was a woman.  Go figure.

Review of Paul Baylock, New/Now, Museum of American Art

As a matter of disclosure, Paul is the President of the Art League of New Britain where we both show and share friendly and respectful,  peer and professional friendships.  We both grew up in New Britain, CT and Paul's uncle relative was my Jr High School Gym instructor - so our roots run deep.

- updated 05/15/2024

Paul is a consummate craftsman.  His paintings and sculpture are highly refined and pristine.

The artwork that is represented in the New/Now show is tightly coupled to Paul's experience as a lifelong New Britain native, high school art teacher, and boyhood imprints.  Much of his work employs both stencil and collage/assemblage techniques. The subject is often the effect of the industrial revolution on a town synonymous with manufactured hardware.

While the gallery narrative suggests the work has a relationship to the ubiquitous artistic trope of memory, I disagree.  These pieces individually and as a whole are a super-fiction kitsch - a manufactured nostalgia. Less memory than a narrative of longing for an alternative history. One in which the trappings of the industrial revolution were still in play.

Contrast Paul's snapshot of industrial Americana with Thomas Hart Benton a few galleries over.  Benton's America is about people, Paul's about location and things. Its a stark contrast. And Paul's work is most meaningful to the few individuals who similarly lament the passing of the twentieth century.

Many of Paul's sculptures and paintings invite us to peer through factory windows that obfuscate the reality that exited outside the window and the reality that existed inside the factory window.

As the son of a factory worker, I know first-hand the missing context.  Yes, making hardware was honest work and grew a middle-class - good work for those whose calling in life  was working with their hands, or back, or providing unquestioning compliance. And they made great tools and hardware components.  This is what Paul's work celebrates.

What is missing are the worker's strikes that families suffered through, when stress resulted in physical violence at home, or scenes of workers in winter minding a warming fire while striking at street corners.

Nor does his work speak to workers who would sacrifice a finger to the machinery to pay a bill, feed a hungry child, or provide a down-payment on a better home.

The workers inside those windowed factories were men AND women whose hands and backs were sometimes deformed by the work.  There is no identity politic literature that cares to speak of the conditions.  Paul's work leaves it to your imagination.  Maybe too much so.

I highly recommend seeing Paul's show.  Its authentic and wholly contemporary - a pseudo-narrative by a New-Britain-as-every-industrial-town native who, like all of us, wonders where it all went to.

The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, the Graydon Parrish Gallery Talk

The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, the Graydon Parrish Gallery Talk

Thursday evening, Sept 10,2015, New Britain Museum of American Art

Considering that I had written a preview review of the newly reconstructed NBMAA galleries, I wanted to visit them first hand and also attend the Graydon Parrish gallery talk to attempt to understand what he might be referring to when he labels his work Post Contemporary.

His large canvas called The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy is something I had encountered in previous visits. It's a memorial piece eulogizing the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and it was commissioned by the NBMAA and the parents of someone who lost their life in the events of that day.

Art takes on significance in many ways and memorial works acquire emotional and sentimental value for those who express their grief and orphaned love through them. It's important to respect those emotions as projected into the symbol such a memorial represents.  That said, I want to offer a wholly artistic critique of the work.  This critique is not a critique of those who are emotionally coupled to the piece.

In my previous visits, I simply disliked the piece because it failed to connect with me.  I didn't like the scale, the painting style, nor could I decipher the obvious narrative elements it contained. I had hoped the gallery talk by Parrish might change my mind.

Graydon Parrish looks very much like a prima donna and his demeanor is punctuated by humorous quips that have been vetted in previous talks.  A search of YouTube produces a near identical monologue delivered some years ago in the same venue. During his talk, I warmed up to him a bit. He's forever saddled with a beast of his own making and there's a real burden in that.

A lot of his gallery talk sounds very patronizing to his bread and butter audience - the true believers. They refer to the piece as a masterpiece and to Graydon as a genius.  Graydon is more than happy to milk that sentiment and compares aspects of his painting to Picasso and Michelangelo.  In both cases, the similarity is wholly wishful thinking but hey, you have to kill time somehow in these gallery talks.

As I listened to him explain the painting I found that I disliked it even more after the explanations than when the thing merely confused me.  Parrish uses the painting as a blunt instrument. He claims (and promtional material echoes) the idea that the painting is "allegorical" - representing a historical snapshot.  He also claims it is complex. And he has a cultist fervor for its realism, "beauty", and old-fashioned aesthetics (I'm guessing this is what he calls Post Contemporary).

Parrish is a fine, skilled technical painter and his painting is filled with dozens of examples of academic virtuosity.  Young and old human figures, flowing cloth, atmospheric effects are all abundantly represented. It is the kind of realist illusionism that was common hundreds of years ago when Western Art's central theme was Christian scenes and more Christian scenes. In the context of a memorial painting about an event that often used Christianity and the Muslim religion as counterpoints and given the cultural diversity of the victims, the theological implications of the work are dubious.

And Parrish is correct in feeling uncomfortable as a Contemporary artist. Both his narrative layers and his black and white religious kitsch are difficult to logically reconcile.  Unlike well curated PostModern appropriations of symbol, icon, and metaphor, Parrish's piece is a mishmash of self-promotion ("postContemporary" advocacy), misunderstanding allegory for fabulism, and in his fabulism he conflates the cycle of life with the political invention of a "cycle of terror and tragedy". This reduces the piece to little more than a monumental visual gravestone whose sentiments are not universal but slapped together to satisfy a grieving audience.

The narrative of the piece, rather than representing a natural cycle of life interrupted by a sudden tragic event asserts that the cycle of life is little more than a sequence of innocence, terror, tragedy, then wisdom and a reincarnation of the cycle yet again.  This is a philosophical Stockholm syndrome in which victims embrace victimhood as an explanation for all of life.  Parrish claims the scene of three grieving women (likely lifted from just about any illustrated crucifixion painting from the golden age of crucifixion paintings) in fact represent the three Greek fates (destiny's beginning, middle, end). His audience finds this profound to one degree or another but the conClation of Christianity and pre-destiny is little more than oxymoron.  To make matters worse these destiny symbols are grieving (instead of just observing and saying "that's what I'm talking about"). To add insult to philosophical injury, Parrish points to the woman with the handkerchief to her mouth and says that has to do with the chemical/biologic attack.

The narrative is a victim-hood fiction, start to finish and it contains flourishes of Disney-like fable. To the very right in the painting is a yellow smudge that stands out of the chaos like a Tinkerbell, "That", Parrish asserts, "is the glimmer of hope!" as he rolls his eyes and twists away for dramatic effect. Just below is a ribbon that shapes the infinity symbol ("Infinity AND Beyond!"). The color palette is red, white, and blue. There's a black woman and white women. The men are the towers and the women (in classic realist glory) are supporting props. There's an hour or more of Parrish explaining all this and its jaw-dropping in many more cases.

The ultimate failure of the piece however lies in the choice of choosing Grayson Parrish as the artist. Parrish is an evangelist for a return to realist painting and claims to allegorical painting in his own work.  The attack of September 11 was not an attack on individuals or even the United States, the attack was an attack on Modernity - technological progress, Contemporary Art, religious differences, human dignity that transcends class of birth, and so on.

The irony of the piece is that Parrish's evangelism is the same cultural attack on Modernity and in many ways his audience are philosophically more coupled to the terrorists than they imagine themselves to be. It is noteworthy that in Parrish's painting the narrative concludes with a survivor whose lesson from the event bestows wisdom.  This fiction conveniently ignores the fact that the terror of 9/11 was followed by a decade or more of random and directed vengeance and retribution, not wisdom.