The Modern Day Art Manifesto

 The Modern Day Art Manifesto - (a work in progress)

Modern Day Art is an evolutionary succession away from Contemporary Art.

It can be referred to as #mdArt, #mdA, #notContemporaryArt, #nCA, or #modernDayArt.

Two aesthetic subsets of Modern Day Art are #postContemporary and #newModern. Both refer to esoteric Modern Day Art ecosystems. These obvious manifestations do not preclude more existing and future sub-genres.

All art creation exercises additive, subtractive, transformational, spiritual, temporal, theoretical, cognitive, and other forms of artistic agency.

In the case of Modern Day art as an aesthetic ecosystem, it subtracts from Contemporary Art - Identity Politics and the hubris of toxic academic entanglement. Consider its relationship to Contemporary Art's Art World as an orthogonal social entity wholly disengaged from those trappings and expectations. The creation, quality, and intent of Modern Day Art is not to satisfy an Art Market but rather an Art future while mindfully acknowledging the importance of providing the artist's means to a dignified living.

Modern Day Art promotes an exclusive Art for Art's Sake aesthetic.

The subtraction of political identity virtue signaling neutralizes holding galleries and art patrons hostage to the discriminatory tribalism of gender, age, moral superiority claims, "saving______" platitudes, and so on. The Art is intended to feed aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual hunger.

- Frank Krasicki, May 2021

Guerrilla Girls 2020 EOY Cumulative Body Count

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 14 from CT, VT, RI, and New York.  All shows whose counts are used here were previously cited in earlier blog posts most of which provided audit trails.

This year's Juried Art Shows come in two categories:

In Juried Art Shows that I have no piece count for, 4 shows accepted the work of 95 male artists and 181 women artists.  That's approximately a 65% acceptance rate for women in those shows.

In 7 Juried Shows in which piece counts are available;

236 pieces by 163 men were accepted
380 pieces by 305 females were accepted

38% of all pieces were by men
62% of all pieces were by women

34% of all accepted artists were men
66% of all accepted artists were female

In all 11 2020 shows represented, 35% of all selected artists were male,

For 2020, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 

Only three of eleven galleries in 2020, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

In 2020, politically obligatory, women-gender-only shows were routinely scheduled at almost all of the galleries studied.  No such male gender specific gallery shows exist to my knowledge.

Herb Gerjuoy, Our Friendship

I first met Herb in the late eighties.  We were both Software Engineers hired by the now renamed Northeast Utilities.  We ate lunch together almost always exclusively.  We were hired to create a test emulator to simulate Millstone.  Seemingly the entire staff was *very* Jesus religious.  As such, faith often trumped reasoned discussion.  The China Syndrome movie was fresh in those days.  We had each other to talk to.

We talked about raising our unacknowledged concerns about the veracity of certain tests with a [German co-incidentally and darkly humorously] manager who claimed to have an open door policy.  Herb helped talk me out of walking through that open door.  The building we worked in on the Berlin turnpike was simply identified by a number and set into the landscape so as to feel like a bunker once inside.  So along a side wall of managerial offices, our manager had arranged his office so that his back was to the door opening and his daily gaze was at an undecorated  far wall.

Herb cautioned me as to the subliminal significance of the manager's back to the door.  The "open door" policy was someone else's idea unless you happened not to get the signalling going on.  I left a few months later and arranged an exit interview in which I gave Northeast Utilities an earful.  Herb left soon after.  Many years later, Northeast Utilities invited back their critics - I never bothered going back - remembering the experience as not ever being worthwhile.

I didn't know what to make of Herb at first.  Intellectually, he covered a LOT of ground.  We were both interested in everything but Herb not only had breadth but he had unusual depth of knowledge.  Our interests were so perfectly aligned that I thought I was being fooled.

In college, when I was training to be a teacher, I had read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock as part of the curriculum. By cosmic co-incidence, Herb had been interviewed and quoted by Toffler in the writing of the book and Herb's contribution was the education specific substance.  To this day, the most famous quote that the book is known by originated with Herb, "Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."

So a year or two later, Herb called me about a teaching position at Mohegan Community College (later renamed to Three Rivers) in Norwich, CT where he was teaching at the time (1990ish).  He convinced me that the long-distressed community needed  good instructors and that based on our conversations, he was convinced I was it.

Sold.  I taught there part-time for approximately six years.  There were young policemen, nurses, and laid off Groton shipyard workers all there to learn personal computers.  That's what Herb and I did. They left knowing their stuff - maybe better than individuals being -cough- "trained" by their corporate sponsors.

Along the way, Herb and I continued our dialogues.  One Holiday season I wrote a Christmas card to my Studio art mentor from the University of Nebraska, Richard Trickey, some time later I got a card from his wife telling me that Richard had died tragically in a car accident and thanked me for the card and memories it contained.  We talked about this.

Herb spoke about something he had once read that essentially said that knowledge was a baton that gets passed along.  When a mentor of yours expires the baton is passed to you and you are expected to expand and extend its scope.  In other words, like a game of mortal tag, *you're now IT!*.

In another conversation, I had been deeply reading the Joseph Campbell and Elizabeth Pagels work on the Gnostic  Gospels and followed that with concentric circles of cross-reference material.  Herb, upon hearing this siad that if I thought the Gnostic Gospels were interesting then I should also read the Jewish mystics and he pointed me to The Tales of Rabbi Nachman which I subsequently devoured.

Herb knew the map and the territory like few others I have ever met - a brilliant man in a dimly lit world.

He wrote many, many poems that I advocated he self-publish. He wrote a prayer book and many many other topical essays that I hope don't get lost.

A typical email correspondence between the two of us looked like (and this is curated Nov. 2011 content):

"Herb, I'm doing some research on post-modernism. what can you tell me about Isaac Luria?

hydrargium@comcast.net	Nov 1, 2011, 10:21 AM
to me

Hi, Frank,

As always, it is good to hear from you.

-snip-

I assume you Googled "Isaac Luria" and learned that he was a 16th-century kabbalist of the Safed school, known as the Ari (lion).  I would be pleased to chat with you about him in some live interactive format, such as telephone.  However, I probably have little or nothing to add to what you would find online. "

Later:

"Hi again, Frank,

1.  I think the most interesting aspect of kabbalistic thinking is its cosmogony.  It is an unusual take on the classical philosophical conundrum: How reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God with the presence in the world of suffering and evil?  In that connection, I'll quote an excerpt from commentary in a Jewish prayer book I have been writing:

Starting with the seventh line [of Psalm 92], the psalm addresses a (perhaps the) question for those who believe in a good God: how can an omnipotent good God tolerate injustice, that at least sometimes the wicked prosper and the good or innocent suffer? There have been many answers. Philosophers Epicurus and David Hume argued that God is either not omnipotent or not good. Some gnostics maintained that God is not good. Other philosophers, e.g., Plato, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Henry Huxley, suggested that God is not omnipotent. Philosopher William James concluded God is either not omnipotent or not omniscient. The psalmist asserts that prosperity by the wicked is, at most, a temporary aberration. Rashi suggested that the psalmist was referring to the time after the coming of Messiah, the “Great Sabbath,” when indeed there will be no injustice. Hindus and Hassidism's founder, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698-1760), the Good Master of the Name, believe justice is achieved by reincarnation; many Christians believe it is achieved by afterlife in heaven or hell; many Buddhists believe suffering, just or unjust, is transcended by learning to detach from life's lures and distractions. Some Jewish mystics suggest that injustice in the world reflects flaws or “bugs” in God's creation that we humans were created to remedy [tikkun]. Philosopher F. H. Bradley had a similar view. Thomas Aquinas, the eminent thirteenth-century Catholic theologian, argued that injustice makes possible good aspects of God's creation otherwise impossible. For example, suffering by the good or innocent gives them an opportunity to exhibit the virtue of faithfully and trustingly enduring their misfortune. 

Some Jewish kabbalists attributed injustice and evil to the misfit between an infinite God and God's finite creations, which at the time of Creation caused God's infinite creative energy to shatter those aspects or portions of the nascent finite universe closest to God's infinity, thereby partially reducing to chaos the universe's initial orderly beauty, and thus, by randomly intermixing Good and Bad, making the entropy of the universe higher. Consequently, God, the Great Separator/Divider ("Who separates darkness from light," etc.) is the Source of entropy reduction, and God wants humans to participate in this cosmic task, despite or notwithstanding the presence in humans of intermingled Good and Evil.

Note: the above viewpoint is a thoroughly pre-modern way of treating Good and Evil.  They are, in this view, attributes, much as in medieval thinking even existence was considered an attribute (so there might be things, e.g., centaurs, that did not have the attribute of existence but otherwise were in the universe).  For more on these last comments, you might want to read some of my currently favorite philosopher's writings -- Raymond Smullyan.

Wittenstein wrote in Latin in part because he wanted to discourage his ideas being read by those he considered philosophical amateurs, who, he was convinced, could not possibly understand his ideas.

Tune in later for the next thrilling episode of "Reality Faces Philosophy," in which we will hear Ma Reality say, "The older I get, the more memories I acquire that I am at risk of forgetting," and her (tor)mentor reply, "The simpler something is, the easier it is to remember. So, I am going to teach you something infinitely simple, and therefore you will be unable to forget it."

-- Herb G.

Over the decades we would meet and attempt to meet every few years. It was always hit or miss.

In recent years his grand children consumed his schedule for a while and my latest attempt to contact him garnered no response.  That's when I knew something might be wrong.

I'm going to miss him.

His blog:  http://nexialistics.blogspot.com/?zx=fe72f4870f816c91

Some remembrances:  http://www.kehilatchaverim.org/wp-content/uploads/KC-Newsletter-May2019.pdf

Guerrilla Girls Body Count: 2019 Year End Artistic Participation Arithmetic

This year's Juried Art  shows numbered 14 from CT, VT, RI, and New York.  All shows whose counts are used here were previously cited in earlier blog posts most of which provided audit trails.

This year's Juried Art Shows accepted the work of 297 male artists and 520 women artists.

For 2019, more than 63% of accepted artists to juried shows in the Northeast were women. 
Last year, 69% of all accepted juried artists were women. 

Four of the fourteen shows, listed the total number of pieces accepted.  In these four shows, the number of women accepted was 107 and the number of men 75 (55% women on average).

In these four shows, 255 pieces were accepted, 149 by women and 106 by men (58% by women on average).

Only two galleries in 2019, featured juried shows that accepted more men than women.

I requested data on the Guilford 2019 Juried Show and received none.

Late update: Real Art Ways Artists Chosen: 5 Women, 1 Man


Interestingly, in 2019, the Connecticut Office of the Arts employs 7 women and 0 men.

In 2019, politically obligatory women gender only shows were routinely scheduled at almost all of the galleries studied.  No such male gender specific gallery shows exist to my knowledge.

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.

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.

The Veracity of Guerrilla Girls Arithmetic

In the following essay, some very interesting number crunching calls into question the claims of the Guerilla Girls.

"The research, titled “The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States since 1850,” was published in February by Karol Jan Borowiecki, a professor of economics at the University of Southern Denmark. Borowiecki, who previously studied careers of famous composers and visual artists as an economic historian, used American census data collected between 1850-2010 to identify trends in social mobility and racial and gender inequality crossed with data on the geographical location and socio-economic background of people in creative fields (visual arts, literature, performing arts, and music). The findings are tested against parallel metrics in the census group of “non-creatives,” meaning people who are not professionally involved in the arts.

The US census data permits the identification of occupations that fall within the creative professions (i.e. artist, musician, author, actor) and provides detailed records on the socio-economic background of each individual, including the geographic location.

Women’s Visibility

With all the professional and societal hindrances in their way, the study interestingly observes that American women’s share in creative occupations —relative to men — has typically been higher than in non-creative fields. That trend starts around 1890 when women’s involvement in creative occupations increases and remains clearly higher than in other fields.

“These results challenge the conventional wisdom that the arts are predominantly a male domain,” Borowiecki told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.

According to the study, females are more likely to engage in a creative occupation than males. Being a woman increases the probability of having a creative occupation by 18% if isolated from other variables (including race, location, and family income.) The highest female presence is among musicians. Authors, visual artists, and actors follow in that order."

Guerrilla Girl Body Count: 2018 Summary

For over six months, I've tracked the metrics on as many juried shows as my feeds expose me to. The data is limited. I don't know how many total men and women submit work . Its important because, artists of both genders *pay* to submit work in the good faith that it will be judged on its artistic merit and nothing else.

I did the arithmetic on 9 juried shows - all that Provide sufficient data - no cherry picking.

In those 9 shows, 69% of the accepted work was by women artists representing 68% of the pieces shown.

432 women

198 men

Six curated shows had similar results. Forty-one women and eighteen men were represented. That is 69% of artists represented were women.

Throughout the year numerous women-only shows were exhibited [presumably because of their under-representation in galleries and museums].

Men had no such shows.

Juried shows included here were exhibited at Guilford; Clinton; Lyme; Stamford Art Assn; Mystic; West Hartford Art League; Bowery Gallery, NYC;  and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

The Intersection of Rancid Political Correctness and Bat-Shit Crazy

The Director of the Brattleboro [VT] Museum was pressured to issue this apology the other day via email,

"November 2, 2018

To the recipients of BMAC's e-newsletter:

We recently sent out an e-newsletter that contained the image below alongside the announcement of a forthcoming panel discussion on addiction and recovery in our community.



It was subsequently pointed out to us that our use of that image in connection with that event could perpetuate harmful stereotypes about people of color. We regret not realizing that ourselves, and we apologize for our mistake, which we appreciate having been brought to our attention.

We will try not to make similar mistakes in the future.

Sincerely,
Danny"



I guess the question I would have is what color hands could be used without potentially creating the racist incident du jour.  This image of two black people expressing support and need of support would be racist in what way?  I mean wouldn't the person who objected to this already have a racist agenda.  And if so, how will not publishing images of caring somehow perpetuate the make-believe "we aren't racist" stereotype so carefully cultivated by the system?

I guess one solution would be to have hands of every color person represented like some kind of happy go lucky superhero group that is a Noah's Ark of racial representation.

OR, and I like this idea a lot, the art community needs to re-establish its autonomy.  In recent decades Art has become co-opted by the social services to the degree that museums are no longer about art but about therapy, local politics, and its funds diverted away from artists and into the hands of State Social Services Agencies.

The Arts in America have become politically diseased.  I have little hope that in my lifetime this will change.

Sad.  Sad. Sad. 

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."