Yes, indeed...

Hopefully Franklin doesn't mind, but I had to lift his recent comment from Ed_Winkleman's site and share it here. I don't know if you can get any more dead-on than this:

"What's wrong with the art out there?" I thought.

This is the right question.

Art can be made to do just about anything, but the only thing it does inherently, and the only thing it does especially well, is serve as a repository for visual quality. We respond to form with feeling, and to extraordinary form with intense feeling. Once visual quality becomes a subordinate concern, it's impossible to produce an object that will move the heart like well-sung, well-written music.

But for several reasons the current milieu of contemporary art is predicated on visual quality as a subordinate concern. There is heavy philosophical investment against the primacy of visual quality; people actually become angry if you suggest it. The market has to justify a lot of inferior work in order to function in the grandiose way that it does. This climate pushes superior work into the background. It doesn't celebrate greatness - it flatters inferior taste in a manner that lets it think of itself as superior taste. Taste and talent, particularly in high concentrations, remain rare.

This will remain the case until individuals, in whatever way they interact with art, insist on greatness, and don't settle for cleverness, irony, contrived awkwardness, and all the other other false marks of sophistication.

This really does speak to most of my art viewing experiences lately.

Comments

[chris lee]

What exactly do you mean by a position like this? First of all, there is a glut of artistic production in our lives. At any given moment you can go from The Sistine Chapel to Grandma Moses to Neo Rauch to Peter Max? Exactly WHAT is missing for you? Does this position say more about the observer than the thing observed? I think alot of people have "gone blind with too much seeing."

[J.T. Kirkland]

What is missing is quite simple. For me, it's greatness in visual art. It's beauty. It's the sublime.

I haven't seen much of it lately. And honestly, this is one reason I haven't been nearly as productive in the studio this year. I understand that visual art requires greatness, or at least it should strive towards greatness. So, I want to be sure what I create steps in that direction.

There are many awards given out during the summer months. When I see some of what makes it past round after round, it becomes disheartening. In terms of visual art, we don't seem to be interested much in the visual.

I'm very interested in the visual. What comes out of my studio will aim at greatness from a visual perspective. I likely won't achieve it, but I also won't strive for anything else.

[Michael Fitts]

Doesn't this assume that we fully understand art that is being made today? True contemporary art sometime needs to age like wine. We may not understand it's complexities at this point in time. Many artists and art movements in the past weren't even in part understood at the time they were happening. I do think that there's a lot of sub par art hanging on gallery walls and I think that the quality level could be better but I also understand that I don't understand it all.

[J.T. Kirkland]

Good point Michael. My only response would be to differentiate between "understanding" the art that is being made today (i.e. the brain), and enjoying the art from a visual perspective (i.e. the eye). There's lots of art I see that I can't even begin to understand, but it's just great to look at. That suggests the work succeeds as visual art (for me) but that I might not be smart enough to "get it."

Of course one's "eye" can evolve (or devolve, I guess) over time. There are numerous artists whose work I thought was ugly as can be that I now think is beautiful. I think it was always beautiful, my eye just hadn't developed enough to see it.

[Michael Fitts]

Doesn't this make a great deal of assumptions? The main one being that we fully understand the importance and impact that todays art is making or in this position, how far short it's falling. When we look at artists and art movements of the past, haven't so many of those artists been taken to task and dismissed as way off the mark or unimportant to the art world, only to later to be seen as genius? SOME art is like wine. It takes time to appreciate the complexities. Maybe it's just an unavoidable human condition that people have the tendency look at new art with a jaundiced eye. I know the feeling. I don't like most of the art I see today but I don't claim to fully understand it's importance or lack there of.

[chris lee]

Well, it also might help to take a "critical look" at YOUR "critical look", really, with the enormity of artistic production you are going to make such a blanket statement? Really..? First of all "talent" is TALENT..not all gestures within in a framework of activity will be genius, but looking at the social conditions that we find ourselves in today where there are SO many many more art students, buyers, makers, spectators etc, you can hold that position..don't you think you are just projecting the fashionable pose of ..SIGH,I AM STILL NOT SATISFIED,WHAT ELSE CAN YOU SHOW ME?.. besides, look at your generation are they really moved by ANYTHING?

[J.T. Kirkland]

You lost me there Chris.

[chris lee]

Sorry, let me break it down better.
1. Given the social conditions now where there is so much more wealth and education distributed than ever before, there is more participation in the "art world". (ie:producers, spectators, collectors, etc)
2. That being said amongst that plurality of producers nearly any and all styles, genres are represented.
3. To say amongst ALL of that uber-production NONE of it is "great" or "moving" or "genius" is a hard postulate to accept.
4. As Charlie Finch writes "Most Art Sucks"..may be true because, talent, genius and commitment are rare, but come on... you can't find ANYONE good? Neo Rauch, Leonardo Drew, Alexis Rockman, Barnaby Furnas, Marie Friberg..maybe you are not looking hard enuff.
5. I just think the "I have seen it all and nothing moves me.." pose says more about the observer than the thing observed.

google search: christopherlee-artworldchrislee

[J.T. Kirkland]

Chris,

I didn't mean to imply that there is no great art out there or that nothing moves me. It's just that very little does. I went to the Katzen Art Museum at American University last weekend and out of what must have been about 300 works of art, not a single piece moved me. I think I counted 5 that even struck me in some way. Perhaps my eyes are becoming numb, perhaps I expect too much.

If it's visual art, then it better work visually. I think that's what Franklin's getting at too.

[chris lee]

Okay, so let me understand you. You went to ONE show at Katzen, SOME of it was good. Most of it was mediocre- NONE of what you saw in THAT museum impressed you greatly -a museum by the way in the overall scheme of things with (compared to other operations) a very modest budget and profile. That's alot different than your original statement. Obviously, you have touched a nerve with me, because I have seen that statement "Art these days..sigh." espoused and I never know what people are talking about. BTW..my "your generation" comment was unfair. I don't know how old you are, I am just saying that irony seems to be the reigning sentiment of people gen x and beyond ...they seem to resist "sentimentality" as a rule.

[Pretty Lady]

We may not understand it's complexities at this point in time.

Really? It seems to me that the problem with an enormous amount of art out there is that it is NOT complex enough, or it is complex but not DEEP. It has a ream of text on the wall next to it, explaining its complexities on behalf of those of us who are too dense to understand it, or else because it is not visually compelling enough to inspire us to try.

It seems to me that saying to the viewer, 'you just can't understand this' is a patronizing cop-out. Maybe we DO understand it, and the problem is that it's SHALLOW.

[Michael Fitts]

Many people said the same things about Andy Warhol in the early 1960's.

[Pretty Lady]

I am still saying these things about Andy Warhol in the early 21st century. Gracious.

[chris lee]

Don't be hatin' on Andy..
1. The Death and Disaster series
2. The Screen Tests
3. The Large Mao's
4. Jews of the Twentieth Century
5. The piss paintings
6. Empire
..that's great stuff

[Michael Fitts]

So "Pretty Lady" who has or does make good, non-SHALLOW art in your opinion? Just curious.

[Pretty Lady]

Lee Bontecou, Isamu Noguchi, Rufino Tamayo, Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer, Sophie Jodoin, Swoon, Jennifer Coates. To name a very few.

What these artists all have in common is a very strong engagement with their medium, so that the physical aspects of the work merge seamlessly with the conceptual aspects, creating rich, poetic layers of suggestion and subtlety, not merely a blueprint of a one-dimensional concept.

[chris lee]

Well...;) ..haruumph!!