Essay: NEA "Research Agenda" - Another Money Pit

This essay references The National Endowment for the Arts Research Agenda - FY 2022 - 2026.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds an Office of Research and Analysis that claims to keep and report statistics about the arts ecosystem. It becomes increasingly apparent that arts ecosystem refers to a slew of government agencies that suck the soul and funding intended to advocate arts and artists for themselves.

The agency heavily relies on the usual suspects - "the design and conduct of studies addressing priority research topics through the social and behavioral sciences" - in other words academia unrelated to, well, the arts.

This paper cites concerns about

• health and wellness for individuals; cognition and learning; and U.S. economic growth and innovation
• healing and revitalization of communities
• diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts
• adapting and responding to social, economic, and technological changes and challenges to the sector

In other words jack shit concerning artists, art, or artist issues - a wholesale end run around actually promoting the welfare of artists and their ability to create excellent art. My ongoing research into the NEA's policies and practices exposes lots more of this.

These agendas come and go, nothing more than academic ATMs that finance NEA junkets and worthless, disposable research papers, one after another.  Burp (cha-ching)!

 The research started over a decade ago and this latest batch of DEI infused wisdom is only in its second year of the latest "5 Year Plan". 

The NEA has just hosted a junket for research authors who apparently were funded above and beyond their academic salaries to create - not a public document - but a privately owned and distributed book of their -cough- "research" findings.

As usual, my interest is piqued when the discussion has to do with education of artists, MFAs, and the visual arts in general.

Here Joanna Woronkowicz talks about her book, Being an Artist in America: How Artists Build Careers and What Society Can Do to Support Them.

I couldn't help but look her up on Rate My Professor.  She apparently is paid to instruct a course on Statistics that she - based on the ratings - doesn't show up to teach and whose teaching assistants are clueless to act as proxies. She also accused some students (who plead innocence) of plagiarism.

Putting that into context already raises suspicions about the quality and veracity of the book (unpublished to date).

In the YouTube documentation of the NEA Meet the Authors event she talks about the unintended consequences of Arts policies over time. Assuming this observation is true and based on fact, why has it taken over twenty years for the NEA to continue to fund and practice the creation and administration of these policies.  Why aren't these people being fired and why aren't corrections being made?

When it comes to the mass production of students graduating with MFA degrees and life altering debt, she has this to say, Art School Loans. This is all well known material and if her concern about bang for the educational buck were sincere she might consider performing her own teaching duties - just because $$$.

Most disturbingly are her policy recommendations that include this; Cost and Benefit. I suspect that art students are not the only ones straining government welfare programs. 

Given this research, it seems to me that an easy and obvious recommendation might be to fine each and every current employee of the NEA immediately and start fresh.

And part of starting anew  must include independent studies of arts and artists in America. Enough of the self-serving academic community whose quality of work is manufactured to be ignored by everyone aside from tenure committees.

https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-research-labs

Propositional Zenthetics

 Artistic practice in the Zenthetic are not the same as aesthetic practice. In other words, the concept of defining *beauty* and beauty itself are co-incidental by-products of the practice and not a primary or motivating factor in the creation of the art.

In my study of MetaModernism, it has become obvious to me that the duality and incestuous relationship of illusionism and abstraction is insufficient both conceptually and in terms of their limited vernacular in rationalizing their existential artistic hegemony. The territory of illusionism illustrates the agreed upon world and the projections of mankind's dreams, myths, and man's imagination of existence itself into conversational consciousness. Illusionism is, by definition and by craft, abstract. And (formal) Abstraction is the recognition that in a creative composing and decomposing of the elementary aspects of illusionism, an aesthetically pleasing or conceptually plausible argument can be made that these objects define a push-and-pull/binary aesthetic canon.

Artists anticipate art, not reality or abstractions. Yet everything is shoe-horned into the insatiable black hole of the philosophy of aesthetics.

So the question is, can art exist outside of aesthetic consideration and absorption. This being a quantum existential space that successfully repels the aesthetic appetite for the next want-to-be exception to the rule? I think it can.

 

Just as chaos theory informs us that multiple infinities exist - opportunity cracks in mathematics - so too are there artistic orphans whose intellectual parents have no aesthetic DNA, they slip the ties that bind.  The art material defined by Propositional Zenthetics are construction of an artistic proposition, this AND that, this OR that - not yet in time, not yet formed, just maybe -may BE. They are instantiated as worldly objects, yes - but in substance a suspended, wrapping material for a dance of cosmic possibility like a vision of universal dust so far away in time and space that the image is not real - a snapshot of unformed vision - so what is it?

These are not pictures nor objects but a gaze into a visually transcendent abyss, a desolation angel's scribble.  The abyss does not gaze back, it has swallowed a fraction of your existence for its own. The agency of Proposition Zenthetic material is to flush the mind's attention of aesthetic considerations and pose a memory hole of ambiguity for *what if* . When someone sees or observes such material, it is the unrecognizable, zen stillness of thought - peering into artistic desolation - a trajectory without beginning or end - a suspended fall away from traditional aesthetic notions of craft or importance that is a glimpse of god's proximate tinkering with a view of eternity.

Essay: Bionic Aesthetic Fixations

 I'm going to attempt to triangulate a number of ideas about reading [decoding], thinking, and aesthetics that may or may not make for a new hypothesis about viewing art.

I just recently encountered the invention of Bionic Reading a few weeks ago. The link introduces the synthesis of font bolding into the narrative flow of reading material with the effect of increasing the speed of reading the material.

Another category of interest is found in a Lex Fridman podcast with Edward Gibson, psycholinguistics professor at MIT on Morphology - the relationship of words to one another.  In the context of words, a morpheme is the smallest unique linguistic unit.

Comparing the Fixation notation of Bionic Reading with Morphology, even at face value gets very interesting. Fixations aren't the same as morphemes, they're simply a visual recognition shorthand for reading faster. So what happens to morphemes either as autonomous units or in more complex configurations?

And before attempting to answer this rather obvious question, also consider that Gibson talks about the belief that assigning meaning to what is read [not just visually processed but what is holistically being cross referenced] is separate from the parsing [e.g. either traditional OR Bionic Reading] of the material. In the case of text or listening, a language network is activated to make it make sense.  But this is different for, say, music or art.

And the last piece of this exercise involves the late Daniel Kahneman's  ruminations on Thinking Fast [system 1] and Thinking Slow [system 2]. And this has to do with control of attention and confidence in memory recall.

All of that is a lot of information but it all has to do with how we, as humans, comprehend information and we are constantly bombarded with information.

Let's start to unpack all this and, if I'm successful, maybe map reading text to "reading" a piece of art.

The reason Bionic Reading grabbed my attention is that I'm currently reading Suzi Gablik's The ReEnchantment  of Art and I usually read when I'm at the Community Center on an exercise bike. Someone walked up to me there and asked what I was reading and I quickly showed them the cover of the book that had the title in embellished lettering. "Oh, so you're reading The Reinvention of Art, how interesting."

The mistake the individual made is an understandable one - we all think we are getting the whole of the material we read quickly but at times its a big fail. I thought about this in the context of Bionic Reading which emphasizes and strongly hints that the whole word is the most familiar word you'll assume. The immediate issue with this is that morphemes, for lack of a better conceptual model, post-process the nuanced meaning of the a priori [Bionic Reading] "Fixation". I can't help but think that, left unchecked, this mismatch of the intended word and the expedited reading of the word may account for a large body of [system 1] memory recall confusion. In other words we internalize information we think is correct based on our own uncorrected misreading of the text.

And if this is the actual cause of misunderstanding, it may be that the cognitive bias that is so often attributed to an individual isn't bias at all - just an untrustworthy cache of immediate gratification, system 1 factoids.

We can re-purpose the concept of fixation from Bionic Reading and invent a speculative aesthetic equivalent to use with artistic material. Morphemes already map to words and biology with a heavy inference of the concept of the form of the thing. Let's add another usage to the term that relates to aesthetics, morpheme as the smallest, unique recognizable unit of sensation experience that includes vision, movement, feeling, and so on. For example, to answer the question of "What is a chair?",  we might answer, "Something/anything to sit on.". An aesthetic response might be, "Something/anything comfortable to sit on.". The arrow of additional aesthetic nuance moves in the direction of fine art or fine craft and it is the look or feel of a chair candidate object that becomes the aesthetic morpheme.

What is true about Bionic Reading and aesthetics is that the process can only work if the richness of understanding is already in place. For reading, a large vocabulary is important. For art a rich and sticky exposure to the range of imaginations who have solved the problem at hand, say, "What is a chair?".

And just like the individual misreading the title of my reading book, an individual grazing through an art gallery must also have an aesthetic set of fixation forms. Studies have shown that most gallery attendees spend an average of 5 seconds or less actually looking at a museum painting [obviously high recognition pieces among other objects of interest get more]. It is obvious here that immediate gratification [system 1] memory is kicking in - "I don't  [or do] think this object is worth my attention.".

Maybe this is worthwhile information about how art appreciation should be nurtured. What aesthetic fixations are worth cultivating to instrument an individual's taste in art, craft, or performance? This is much different than promoting art history artistic achievements or museum merchandise best-sellers. If an individual is going to rush past a piece of art, shouldn't they be armed with a quick and dirty, drive-by sense of why they ignore it?  And is it possible that art students can be armed with sufficient, quick and dirty aesthetic morphemes that enable them to make better personal curatorial choices about what they consume and experience?  i think this is worth exploring in greater detail.

If we accept that all sensorial arts are experienced with some kind of a priori aesthetic fixation response then the chronic criticism about Modern Art [and after] is unfairly selective. Every museum object requires a minimal understanding of its reason to exist, Modern or not, abstract or not, beautiful or not.

Back to our original question, what happens to morphemes in the context of being fixated? I think the assumption has to be that is the Bionic Reading results in an accurate interpretation of the text then morphemes maintain their veracity. However, it seems to me, that morphemes can get stepped on by the Bionic Reading notational font enhancement.

Because aesthetic fixation is an invention that starts here, further development of the concept will need to be wary of creating a shorthand of expectation about experiencing art that is illegitimate.

 

NEFA's Common Ground - A Mass Grave for Artists

Creative Ground has become the defacto warehouse being designated by the New England Foundation for the Arts as a registration destination for an artist's profile of availability. The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) claims it "uses it to find artists for projects, including public art opportunities".

Creative Ground is a NEFA "project" which, as you can easily imagine, is a cluster-phuck of bad ideas shoehorned into a website that features a handy-dandy database of  [Norm Macdonald voice] "the world". 

By the "world", I'm euphemistically referring to every possible art related person, place, or thing in New England relating to art, humanities, education, health, child care, merchandise, or identity politic grift that they could identify. This is the short list, btw.

I was recently sent an email telling me to update my profile and I did. I already had one from years ago when I probably got a similar message to create a profile because it would ensure being seen by the state as an artist with work to sell.

You quickly find out that the completeness of your profile is used to rank your position in the sequence of search results that is returned to a user using the database.  I'm being kind in calling it a database.

As of May 20, 2024, the database contains approximately 32053 database results. 

Having spent my career working with developing and designing databases, I wanted to test the hypothesis that an architect from CT wanting to locate an artist who would qualify for the 1% arts money in a new construction. This, after all, is the pretense of the exercise.

Being a visual artist, I searched for "Painter". On the first page of 10 search results, there were 3 individual painters returned, 2 retail stores, and 5 professional associations. The next page returned 4 painters and 6 associations of painters. Subsequent pages devolve into community organizers and dancers who "work with painters", and dross.

To make a long story short, this database is worthless when it comes to locating, say, a fine arts painter whose work might satisfy decorating the walls of a University Humanities building.  An architect or arts associate would need to slog through pages of search results whose ranking is not based on relevance but on a misguided completeness metric. And although these search results yield a link to a fairly attractive looking profile page, the lack of uniformity of content is maddening.

The search problems are both in the database design and the parsing of search material. And root cause analysis goes even deeper to reveal that the problem is in the people creating the database specifications.

The NEFA administrators are unqualified to design databases, they are infected with the woke mind virus , and they subscribe to institutional arts special interest kickbacks.

The largest group represented in Professional Discipline is Visual/Crafts a category that NEFA provides no grants or funding for individual artists. Yet fine art and crafts are not the same thing at all. Yes, a cohort of Contemporary Art individuals do their best to entangle the categories this adds no value to a database that is intended to be used by individuals to identify very specific requirements.

The 32053 search results number is a drop in the bucket. In the Visual Arts/Crafts category, over 49% of the individual profiles are tightly coupled to teaching.  Furthermore, of the 159 profiles, only 20% are men. In other words, NEFA's database is virtually devoid of any kind of regional visual arts representation at all.  And those who are represented are an ingrown cohort of educators who as a profession are largely women.

Why the gender bigotry? And why is this database, assuming it imported all of each New England's State's individual databases of artists, so sparsely populated?

As this database scales, if it ever does, the interface will become impossible to navigate or make sense of. imagine being an artist on page 30 of the ranked search result? Or page 130?  Today, the database is a fool's enterprise meant to distract artists from the misrepresentation NEFA inflicts on visual artists. It is an expensive graveyard of misguided arts administration.

Criminalization of CT Artists by Proxy

I ran into the administrator from a local arts organization and the issue of soliciting government funding came up. "All I want to do is put a coat of fresh paint on the walls and I'm forced to fill out applications requiring all this Woke shit about diversity, gender, and on and on.  The building just needs a fresh coat of paint!"

There's a particularly obscene set of grants given by the Connecticut Office of the Arts called Artists Respond because of the dysfunctional and functionally malicious application of the National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) organizational criteria for Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence to the criteria for grant evaluation at the individual artist or fellowship level. Both Merit and Excellence are wholly bleached out of the equation in favor of "Community" (e.g. Woke social issue engagement) criteria.  The result is that artists requesting funding are pledged into laundering public arts money into progressive (Woke-Democrat-friendly) issue advocacy. 

On a statewide basis this violates ethical and legal conventions by misappropriating these funds for political advantage.

Let's unpack the scope of duplicity, incompetence, and outright disingenuous bad intent involved.

In Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea documents how by the mid 1990's capitalism transformed the product made by artists into  Projects (Operational Business Units). Reputational Networks of Art collaboratives began to supersede the ability of artists to self-promote or compete with the cost of legal representation required to establish a business footprint.

And this appears to be the origin of the NEA's usage of the term. And this is important for artists to understand.  The vernacular for describing art is no longer merely that you are creating a worthwhile piece of art or craft or performance.  The individuals evaluating these grant and fellowship applications think in terms of project-speak. The expectation of the star chamber judges is based as much on your good standing in an exclusive reputational network of fiscally incestuous relations.  For example having Yale on your CV even as a one-night-drive-by provides plausible credibility. 

When asked about the multitude of religions on earth, mythologist Joseph Campbell remarked, "There's a lot of ways to get it wrong." At the national level, the NEA establishes Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence definitions that are primarily tailored for organizational requests for funding.  Tightly coupled to arts organizations are communities they may serve with specific requests.

The first way that the pretense of Merit and Excellence goes sideways is when the assumption is that all organizations are somehow community ambassadors for a cause. Many organizations just need to paint the walls.  There's no real political or social spin that is necessary except that it is coerced with increasing intolerance by the application expectations at every lower level. And at every lower  level of funding administration are ever more incompetent, cover-your-ass midwits.

Not only are organizational requests for funding nuanced yet treated with Kafkaesque indifference, these evaluation metrics are applied to individual artists who in no way shape or form are responsible for, representative of, or otherwise likely to engineer social change objectives for a vaguely-woke-ambiguous social cause, say, *climate*.

At the national regional level I have already documented how badly broken the New England Foundation for the arts is.

Let's look at how badly those NEA quality metrics get mangled in CT using the Artists Respond biyearly arts grants as an example.  If you open the FY23 (latest) Grant Recipients list, you'll see the damage.

There are 81 artists who got funded and all but one had to pick a social justice cause to frame their request for an art grant.  The claim made about these grants is that they serve a "community" interest but that's an obvious lie.  The vast majority of these pre-seeded categories are progressive social justice advocacies driven by Democrat special interests.

In other words, assuming that arts funds should ever be subsidizing the interests of political parties, why aren't there categories for safe borders, lower taxes, deregulation, right to life, and so on? All of these are equally legitimate and maybe even more so.

And as a fine artist my larger problem is why aren't these categories based on art and aesthetics? Why not Promote Abstract Art, Art for Art's Sake, PostModernism for Everyone, or a million other art related advocacies.  After all, Everything is not Art - if it were, nothing would be art and artists themselves become anybody with a social axe to grind.

The use of cognitive bias to coerce artists to distort their art to conform to politically expedient objectives is a criminal enterprise - extortion.  

A Grants Writing for Artists, April 2024 document contains another subliminal suggestion:

Step five on slide three is ominous. Artists who don't "look" (conform) to that above woke profile may as well pound sand.  This is an exclusive club and you're not in it.

There's a lot of ways to administer art funding wrong.  This is just a teaser.

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.  

 

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.

On the Politics of Contemporary Art (Why Modern Day Art)

 1. The conceptual ecosystem of  Contemporary Art has been saturated by political messaging.  

2. It forms and deforms the meaning of Contemporary Art.

3. The signifying message of Contemporary Art requires that the art itself pay a virtue signal  tax for being allowed acceptance to the genre.

4. The Contemporary Art ecosystem constrains and governs its aesthetic territory by rejecting alternative art expressions from self-signifying differently.  

5. Its authoritarian stranglehold on the art vernacular creates and distorts cultural discourse.

6. This political aesthetic Kafka Trap operates as a cultural sensory deprivation mechanism.

7. The Contemporary Art ecosystem entangles and engulfs all currently produced art into an inescapable framework of political polarization.  You cannot choose a side.  The side chooses you or NOT.

8. Abstraction and other more esoteric territories have been co-opted. Play or perish.

9. The social politics of Contemporary Art are aesthetically cancerous.  Contemporary Art is a money sink for political and social special interest groups whose promotional interests have nothing to do with art.

10.  Contemporary Art is a self-serving, self-perpetuating system that demands absolute conformity.

This is where artists such as myself fork away from this madness to create a new stream of expression that is called Modern Day Art.

It's a cohort of artists whose byproducts are not described by Identity politics or any other form of political bigotry.  Art for Art's Sake on a planet whose insane asylums have open borders.

Bound By Creativity, Imprinted with Victimhood

 On page 112 of Hannah Wohl's Bound By Creativity book, the assertion that women and others are under-collected because they are under-represented in galleries is made without any further evidence.  The author, claiming deep and thorough research of the subject matter, is wholly imprinted with the meme that women are and have been victims of gallery neglect.  Its an assumption as certain as the sun rising the next morning.

Readers of this blog can do the arithmetic for themselves.

The lie is far too profitable to investigate or accurately report.

 

The Gerrymandering of Art Museums by Gender

Since the election of Conservative governments in the cultural West, there has been a screaming siren about the politics of Museum art.  Using rudimentary arithmetic, activists have counted the number of pieces of art that belong to major museums and have discovered that men are historically (to date) more highly represented than women.

This lonely, unrepresentative of any context save provincial politics, factoid is sufficient to provoke an aesthetic Sherman's March on the collections of major museums.  Numerology and not historical context, quality, nor even a sense of decency is driving one museum after another to make these numbers match population demographics (gender only of course).

The fact that these collections were largely donated by wealthy collectors and connoisseurs whose cultural ecology was ambiently patriarchal is immaterial.  The cult of Numerology in sexual politics is both profitable, politically satisfying, and culturally toxic.  Museum shows now pander to a mass of contemporary female artists whose claim to recognition starts and often ends with genital equipment however installed.

I recognize that I'm - excuse the expression - pissing into the wind by pointing out that a historically accurate museum should be imbalanced prior to the mid-nineteenth century and be correcting its acquisitions to the degree that they can control gifts from then on.

In 2020, the Baltimore museum will only but women's art.  What's the rush?  Why isn't a healthier balance of acquisition just good business every year?

WE ALL KNOW that this will not be followed by a year dedicated to buying only men's art. After all what sin have today's male artists committed to be flogged for years with womens only shows, economic boycott, and  suicidal worthy neglect?  Are there sociological studies that recommend these kinds of remedies?

And although museum collections are mathematically imbalanced, women dominate juried gallery shows  on the order of 70% women acceptance and 30% male artist acceptance.  I've been doing the arithmetic in this blog and it goes back years.

Gender advocates have been distorting art in Western countries for decades.  They can rewrite history but they cannot undo it without ruthless indifference to inescapable cultural heritage.  Museum walls are being wallpapered over with politically motivated aesthetics rather than artistic merits.  It hurts everyone and turning museums into political battlefields is unacceptable political damage.

Yesterday *this* arrived from the New Britain Museum of American Art:

Shameless pandering.

Shredding the Banksy Narrative

I've been shredding artwork for a few years now.  Its a reductive form of creating something new.

Recently, at an auction of one of Banksy framed illustrations the frame apparently shredded the illustration.  The more I watched the video in its various incarnations on the internet the more I believe that Banksy's performance piece is a magic trick illusion.

IMO. there are two illustrations in the frame.  One, the whole cloth piece is rolled down while the second, pre-cut illustration is slowly unwound to shredding noises.

I could be wrong of course but I suspect this may be true.

Looking for my shredded work?


Lake/Ice

Reflections on Mirror Lake

Broken Glass

Representational Ambivalence #1

to mention the most recent examples.

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.

21st Century Art, contemporary yes, Contemporary no

The New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) has added a new wing to its facilities that includes the McKernan 21st century Art gallery. Susan Dunne, the Hartford Courant's art reviewer wrote a sneak-preview piece about this additional space in the August 23, 2015 Arts section of the paper.

I grew up in New Britain and I'm familiar with the museum and its many incarnations. But for decades the museum has operated with a discomfort and disdain for non-representational, (let's generally call it) abstract art. Yet the art that made American Art globally recognized is difficult to find and when you find the trace material, it is usually unrepresentative of the best or iconic work of the artist.  The one Jackson Pollock painting is a tiny seascape.  Even Pollock is reduced to the scenery painting that is near ubiquitously collected and curated by the museum ad nausea.

Susan Dunne writes that finally, "There are now dedicated spaces for surrealism, abstract expressionism, conceptualism, photorealism, pop art, photography, even 'bad art'. The museum has owned Warhol, Wyeth, Man Ray, Nevelson, Indiana, Gottlieb, Sage, Avery, Tooker, LeWitt, and more. Dunne writes, "while it is invigorating to see the work of time-honored masters - many of the artworks haven't been exhibited in a long time" without the slightest hint of irony. The masters have been in mothballs and the museum instead served up decade after decade of kitsch and geographically provincial absurdity and the museum has the gall to dedicate a gallery to presumably even worse art. Hopefully they're only recycling what's been on the walls too many years. If that's the case you can be sure it will be carefully guarded for the inevitable retrospective of the good old days when the masters were in mothballs.

The true subject of this essay is not the lack of vision that has plagued the museum in the past, it is the lack of vision described by Dunne in the Contemporary Art category. I know. You can see it coming already, can't you.

The McKernan Gallery is dedicated to 21st century art 2000 - present. The idea of categorizing Fine Art by year is absurd at face value. Historicity is a very outdated way to even think about past art, so we are already in troubling waters. A gallery dedicated to the Contemporary and PostModern is no more evident than the masters in mothballs pieces were all these years.

Dunne describes what will be in the history-biased gallery and it is little more than a litany of political commentary, "The exhibit offers an energetic array of styles and media, and the 40 works, installed side-by-side, point out a common thread in the NEW/NOW series that might not have been obvious in each artist's individual show; its longtime dedication to presenting art that makes a social statement". If your eyes aren't rolling yet they will be soon.

Some of the pieces Dunne describes, "Hung Liu's 'Relic 12' shows a bored woman with bound feet, a commentary on the limited role of women in traditional Chinese society". Dunne understandably misses the point just as the museum does. The bound feet are not about lack of opportunity, an American feminist meme - the bound feet are more likely about China's birth control issues (the last thing American feminists might complain about).  Not all Chinese women lounge around.  Visit on a search engine a high-tech manufacturing plant in China and take a look at their deformed hands sometime. There's no lack of opportunity in the sweat shops. But that American angle to the work isn't there.

Dunne goes on to list a litany of politically charged subjects, feminist statements, over-saturation of commercial imagery, immigrants trying to navigate the United States, post-911-ism, internment, pop-Christianity, guns and video game statements.  Taken as a whole, its a show of over-sized political bumper stickers collected as "statement art". FIFTEEN YEARS (or more) of statement art! Its enough to make a grown artist cry. And it explains why the art is categorized as it is by the politics du jour.

The most American thing about this state of affairs is that the museum has become a collection of stuff, lost causes, causes that never were, causes that bored us into inaction like a cluttered basement of a political activist with an obsessive love of kitsch.

American Art is more than this and the museum needs to re-evaluate the myopic obsession with representation, politics, and intellectual intolerance for Modern and Contemporary Art. I'm not optimistic. Graydon Parrish whose Cycle of Terror and Tragedy (yet-another-911-memorial-commission) is holding a discussion about his piece with a group of other artists who paint in similar style.  They call themselves PostContemporary artists.  What are PostContemporary artists? Well the work is an awful lot like pre-Renaissance, Cartesian-subject matter. You can't make stuff like this up but never confuse the label with the thing.

- Frank Krasicki, 082715