The Case For Shitty Abstract Art

   Oftentimes the simplest answer is correct. While we may heap nuance on any subject, constructing a logical scaffold to prop up any flawed idea, it is frequently the outside perspective that cuts through the noise. Like a laser beam of folksy common sense burning through a shield of arcane, academic jargon. You know it when you see it, bullshit.

   Elitist bullshit too. The artworld is full of it. When people whose entire life is work walk into a museum and see a bunch of scribbles hanging on a wall, why shouldn’t they bristle with bitterness when someone whispers that it cost more than a hundred accumulated lifetimes of their labor? It is unjust. It is obscene. And why should they not squint and wonder how hard it actually was to create? How long did it take? Many come to the same conclusion, My kid could make that. 

   And this perspective is chided by those within this secret club. The artworld connoisseurs and academics drolly explaining why that perspective is uninformed, base, ignorant. Borne of the ignorance that tethers them to their caste. The laymen.

   So what do these working class people do? They go see what else is to be found in the museum. They climb a set of stairs, turn a corner, and bam. Now this is art. They’ve stumbled upon the massive treasures of past centuries. Priceless artifacts of oil and sculpture. Hyper realistic jewels of masters, whose decades long dedication to their craft has withstood the rise and fall of nations. Timeless. Too beautiful to die.

   The museum’s very architecture has led these people to a conclusion. A conclusion that I believe to be a dangerous one. That art is dead. It peaked in the renaissance, the decline beginning when we turned from realism. When we stopped trying to capture reality. When technical skill became secondary to lofty, grasping statements written by artists trying to see how far they could take this ride. They gaze up in wonder at the enormous depictions of leaders astride leaping horses or landscapes of glorious beauty. Then they look at their phones and see some asshole taping a banana to a wall. Bullshit.

   I hate modern art. They say. 

  You hate contemporary art. The snobs correct.

   So here lies the danger. This conclusion that they’ve understandably stumbled upon is not only limiting, misguided, or hurtful. It is a fascist tool. A mechanism of control. The idea that only art that triumphs beauty and technical skill is valid and that all conceptual work is bullshit, is a narrative promoted by authoritarians, religious extremists and famously by Adolf Hitler himself. And he should know, he was a painter. Modern (Contemporary) art sucks.

   This point of view is growing. It is exploding on all forms of social media. The algorithms that shape our world view favors content showing eye rolling clips of corny performance art or bad paintings juxtaposed with some masterpiece of photorealism. Beads of moisture glistening with captured sunlight on the face of a gorgeous woman, rendered in oils, worthy of the timeless acclaim of the old masters. A marble statue, stone chiseled into supple perfection reminiscent of Michelangelo. And then, scribbles on a wall.

   The billionaires who control these platforms push this agenda. It is plain to see. What they want, as I see it, is to flatten art into a competitive sport. To reduce the infinite directions of human thought art can lead us into a simple, flat line from worst to best. Innumerable tendrils of thought and feeling drying up like a blocked tributary. Discrediting all other artistic paths than those trying to capture real life, without scrutiny. Art that asks no questions, challenges no concept, bares no ugly truths. Art without exploration. Weaponized nostalgia offered up in paintings of an idealized past that never truly was. Why progress? We already had perfection.

   Powerful people see art as a force akin to fire. Something of tremendous energy, capable of changing reality itself. Something imperative to control, to master, yet possible to leap the boundaries of its containment and rush across the world. Burning away the walls of ideology, religious or institutional authority, and established cultural values that seek to coral it toward some goal of theirs. It is an entity that spreads ideas and erodes convictions. Jumping from mind to mind, both shattering and cementing world views. It can stir. Rouse people from resignation or lull them into prideful subjugation. Oil paintings, poems, posters, prose laden speeches, national anthems and flags themselves. Propaganda is art.

   But artists have their own motivations. Artistic curiosity is an incentive that powerful people do not understand. It is an incentive that offers none of the rewards that placate others. They regard artists with a similar confused disdain that the ultra wealthy see those who dedicate their lives to helping others. People who give what little they have, because they want their life to mean something more than just the accumulation of money. America, as I see it, rewards unscrupulous compliance towards those that embrace its systems. Here wealth equals success. Wealth equals power. Those who march toward some unseen sirens call, shuffling past glittering piles of gold like sleepwalkers. Those who feel the cord of inspiration run through them and follow it like a guiderope into the abyss. Those who follow instincts far older than money. Those people are the artists.

   Strange creatures. Irreverent toward the sacred values of society and zealous toward their own. Repulsive, yet strangely magnetic. Irresponsible, unreliable, egotistical. (Did you catch me equating altruists to artists? That was subconscious.) Flawed conduits of some perfect energy. Self loathing, yet self important. Obsessive. Loving.

   And sometimes, the products of their spiritual seeking manifest in forms that the world comes to cherish. Every so often, one of these odd humans scribble, sing, or stumble their way into a revelation. A cultural mutation born from a sea of fellow artistic devotees. One life rising up as the millions of other creatives fade into obscurity like the sperm that failed to gain entry into this immortal orb of adulation. The work that moved this artist’s mind and body leaves even them behind, rising above death, taking root, and giving birth to something so powerful it changes everything.

   How? Sacrifice. Millions of lives dedicated to following this mysterious call of artistic discovery. A song leading us into the dark wood, hinting at some revelation about ourselves, our place in the universe. Most will fail. Their lives were not wasted though, they made art, they held a mirror to existence and possibly even added some beauty to the world. But what does that journey look like?

   Endless experimentation. Financial woes, relationship strain. Decades of labor offered up on a sacrificial offer. Mania and depression. Self doubt. Silent, rapturous revelation. Ecstasy. A mountain of bad art. Scribbles on a page. Echoes of a life dedicated to discovery marking the earth like footprints in the snow.

   Make room for the bullshit. The bad art. The corny delivery. The unattainable, unrealistic ambition. The ride that isn’t going to go any further. The failure. These are the sinews of great art. Carapices of endlessly molting philosophies. The litter of discovery. Maybe that shitty abstract art some rich person decided was worth millions was only practice. A hunch. The first step into the cave. Not the treasure hidden within.

Long live bad art.

The Stream

No motivation other than impulse. Alternate to the transactions of action the adults around him took. Tasks and time for what exactly? To purchase time for other tasks? Or no act at all? Who would he sell his days to when he grew up? What would he do? That didn’t matter, not here, not now.

As the cool water eddied around his mosquito bitten ankles and the late summer sun fanned out through gently roiling leaves above, no worries permeated his mind. Spears of golden light danced over his latest, doomed masterpiece like old Hollywood spotlights. Burning away all notion of tomorrow as the water carried off yesterday in cascading tiers of bent glass. This was a good one. Three levels. The perfect dam.

His father stopped atop the crude bridge and called down to him.

“Nice.”

The boy glanced up distractedly at the man standing atop the two mighty ash trucks spanning the ravine.

“Thanks.”

The man shambled off toward the house. The boards creaked as flakes of plaster tinkled down from the man’s filthy clothes. He looked back at the triple dam and resumed basking in its unparalleled perfection. Surely his greatest. A magnum opus of stone and muck.

...

He pushed back from the desk, his roller chair arcing away in disgust. The meager passage hung above the rest of the blank page like a guillotine. The little text bar on his computer flashed in and out of existence expectantly, as if demanding the next word. He strode to the kitchen and stood scowling before an open fridge. The plastic container chittered as he plucked a cluster of grapes from its mother vine. He stood chewing, blind to the still yawning door. The sickly yellow light glowed on his shirt. In his mind he saw only that dam.

A lost love. Whose exhilaration haunted the memory through insufficient comparison. His whole life, as an artist, or writer or any series of supplemental job titles required of that life, never brought him there. To that feeling. And more pathetically, he’d spent years trying to articulate that feeling. Dozens of attempts had been made to write about those days. Each a failure. All he knew was that he craved it. The dam builder never truly grew out of him.

It was easy to wax poetically about the virtues of creating something so impermanent. He could always conjure up a mawkish, purist celebration of artistry for no other reason than to create something beautiful. To create knowing that even his most robustly engineered dam could not withstand the test of time, much less the next heavy rain. He knew from the onset, before the first stone was placed, that the forces of nature would scatter his stones like dandelion seeds, the rush carving ever deeper into the gully with every thunderclap. But there was something more. Something that slipped past his grasp. Some greater explanation for why it enraptured him so.

Autism? ADHD? Another obsessive personality disorder he was born just too early to have diagnosed? Maybe. But these answers felt impotent, too general, yet also too definitive. The sensory element? The hyperfixation? Of course one could make the argument that this ten year compulsion was driven by those neuron scratching fixes. The feel of the water. The hush of it falling over the lumpy ridge. The satisfying clatter of weather worn stones locking together beneath the silky, whispering surface. But it was more. It was religious.

Or as close to it as he’d ever come. That feeling of interconnectivity with time and nature, the contentment in the face of insignificance and mortality. The worry free joy of doing. Scattered throughout that stream were strange, angular stones. Some of a composition alien to this part of the world, brought here not by the churning push of the glaciers that had made his valley but by human hands. They bore vague, eroded scars of the names of the people from above. Illegible graves from the old cemetery perched atop the lip of the gully. The entire back row, the oldest locals, all now sat embedded in gravel, wreathed in green beards of algae that danced downstream like fire. That was one vital component of all of this. Death.

But the stream was also a place of life. It was this glaring duality that further enriched the experience. Minnows, crawfish, turtles, frogs. Water striders, birds, bats and ducks bobbing down the stream like garish little boats. Fallen trees whose spongy trunks broke out in bright orange mushrooms. And of course, the occasional femur, coughed up by the roots of the mighty trees as they toppled into the water scything away at their slope. Strangely, the boy was never concerned with ghosts.

Now. He longed for that feeling once more. The domain of creativity had been sequestered into white walls. The products of this form of play herded into these little cages and given life support in definitions and justifications he heard himself repeat, but never fully trusted. Art on walls. For a purpose. Hanging from nails in electric light. But these drawings felt like distant echoes of that feeling. Faint renditions of a song recorded over and over, its essence shaven off one diminishing copy at a time. These works of art, they were him. But those dams were not just him, they were the whole world, all of life, all of time. Entangled and imbued. Experienced with every evolved sense. A ceremony of mind and body, every stone considered. Aching back and sore muscles.

What better way to spend a day?

The Land of the Unicorns

   As I rode the elevator back down to street level I marveled at how normal it had all become. Clutching an illustration I’d retrieved from a prestigious Midtown gallery I’d once pestered for two years just to give my work a glance. I’d wanted it back, they shrugged and slid it from the shelf in the back. Racks of historic and contemporary oil paintings sheathed in bubble wrap. A hidden visual library worth millions. I wanted mine for another show across town.

   That morning I’d written an essay for a documentary film crew that spotlights artists’ careers, drawn, and applied to three separate jobs with the shared title of “Concrete Laborer 1”. I listened to the rattle of the hammer drill melting away a cracked sidewalk slated for rebirth and wondered at the status of my applications. My Osha card was up to date, no injuries from the last job, I was ready to work. The crosswalk switched, and I flowed with the crowd back toward the N train.

   And as I crossed the avenue, glancing down the chasm of ornate stone and cold glass, it dawned on me that I’d become one of them. A unicorn. The infiltration was complete. Born of a cartoonish understanding of what being a fancy artist meant, my mission to understand and enter this hidden world had seamlessly come to fruition. Not by any loud bang, but through 2000 days of tiny effort, each one layering the last, burying my past and rising the ground beneath my feet toward this amorphous goal. I had found the land of the unicorns, and become one.

   That’s how I see “The Art World”, as if it exists anywhere else. This opaque industry of curators, collectors, galleries, fairs, the whole insular cosmos of “Fine Art” was new to me. The operators in this bizarre arena may as well have been cryptids. I knew they were out there, and I knew they were human, I just needed to understand the steps they took to enter into this secret club. I had to learn everything along the way. Illuminating each puzzle piece at a time, the configuration of which still and always will baffle me.

   What made me a unicorn, an interloper and fellow dweller of this magical plane, was not some revelation. I was not ceremonially inducted into this. I was not given some mystical schematic that would make all of this make sense. It was the fact that I had let this start to seem normal. Little by little, bit by bit.

   But it’s not normal. This delegated space for art, separate and apart from the regular world was created. It has a history and an origin that can be traced. It is not a natural conclusion. Its validity, like the validity of all of societal norms and behaviors, is propped up by a cloud of human imagination. And limited by it. Ironic.

   Art was not the thing I needed to discover, it was the art world. Art has accompanied me along this whole journey. From the dreamlike flashes of my earliest memories to the quiet moment of awe I felt gazing across the East River today. The feeling is nothing new. Art is like an invisible plane layered over our lives. When present, the mind reels, the blood flows and senses heighten. An energetic field encompassing the moment. Works of art are merely products of this invisible force. Artists are the conduits. And yet, we’ve allowed the very power that has elevated our species above nature itself to be flattened so crudely. Creativity, our superpower, condensed into a mere skill. And worse yet, evaluated through a monetary lens.

   So here I found myself, half in, half out. Respected. Broke. An artist who’d spent the past 6 years studying the art world and its modus operandi but never shedding an ounce of imagination on wondering what other form it may take someday. Why was I tailoring my artistic outreach to this system of gallery approval? My art style didn’t pander, I had always followed my gut there. So why would I take for granted anyone else’s definition of the world?

   I picture the art world as a giant shimmering dome of reflective mercury. The mirrored quicksilver shielding its secret core with a wall of reflection. The art world reflecting all of the beauty and horror of the earth. Along its impassible face all the vices and virtues of humanity gleam back at the onlooking masses, especially greed. But now I find myself on the inside of this great bubble, and I find myself feeling the same disorienting revelation that many do at this moment in history. The post conspiratorial hangover that kicks in when we realize that the world is shaped not by omniscient geniuses with some grand design, but by powerful, limited people. The levers of power are operated by flawed, perfectly average people. People who act without analysis. People who cannot see beyond their own intentions. People who piss and shit. Human beings, just like us. They were never magical. They never processed these arcane secrets. They were never unicorns.

   So I turn back now. The walls of the art world are perfectly transparent looking out. Back to the main story. Life on earth. And here I am reminded of all the art woven into daily life, that “normal” life I so feared. All of the electric moments threaded through the mundane. Tiny rituals that imbue an act with meaning. The rhythmic kneading of dough before a window, golden nebula of sunlit flour swirling above, suspended like the moment. The swaying of summer grasses or the bobbing of jostled subway commuters. The utter pointlessness of a parent, alone, making their child’s bed. Funerals. Weddings. Sex. Laughter and war. These are the moments that artists are chasing. Echoes of a life lived, slipping through clasping fingers. The true human experience.

   I am young and clearly naive. I probably already knew this lesson, but conditioned myself to forget. That this system of art as commodity, artist as royalty and all the tax evasion along the merry way, is bullshit. Everybody knew that. I knew that. I just forced myself to forget, scheming endlessly to get into this silly club. When I got to New York City, I encountered artists who reminded me of who I used to be. Obsessive creatives, driven by a need to let that inner voice sing out. To live and create. To have fun and make something beautiful. It is their irreverent disregard for the flawed opinions of elitist gatekeepers that has so inspired me. To make art like a child, joyously and for no other point than to feel that hum in the front of your skull when birthing something into the world. The hair tingling sensation one feels when attuned to that frequency, when that mysterious energy passes through your heart and mind like a river of static. The feeling itself.

   So this is where I will end. There is no lesson, no quandary to solve here and now. I wanted to make something pretty and it felt good to do so. This is not for the unicorns in their cloistered Shangri-La of white walled rooms. It is for everyone else, whose lives are as charged with beauty and meaning as the protagonist of a novel. Even if they cannot see it. It is there. Our world is porous, art seeps through like water through the soil. Inspiration comes when we learn how to see, when we turn our gaze away from “the greats” and down to the sea of tiny wonders all around us. Welcome to Earth, the world of art.