So about six months ago I started messing around with felt (still three-dimensional) and nihonga — a Japanese technique I first heard of about six years ago now when introduced to Makoto Fujimura — after my wife gave me a starter set for my birthday. For Christmas I received some powdered graphite, another new medium for me that has shown real promise in helping me portray the kinds of light and spatial nuances wood and clay may not be best suited for.

Prior to last year, it had been an unfortunate long time since I played around with a new media, since I let myself approach a piece of paper with no other intent besides learning. I felt pressure to produce something for a reasonable portfolio (a goal I had set for myself) every time I sat down to create something. I wasn’t setting out to create something Mighty Ugly while engaging in this recent playfulness, but if the paper ended up being ugly there were no worries.

As much as discipline is important to being a successful artist, so is playfulness. So here starts a new series of my recent ugly works, starting with this felted cloud from my very first foray into felt, four plus months ago.

She takes pride in her yarn for the yarn’s sake, without necessarily thinking ahead to what she might make out of it. In fact she often doesn’t like me asking her what she’ll make out of it. That’s not the point. The process of taking fiber to yarn is thrilling enough in and of itself.

She is crafting for a craft, something I only realized last week. The same thing happens in other media as well when a guy thinks about it though. A ceramic artist can make tiles for someone laying tile or creating a mosaic, for instance.

It’s a new thought — I like new thoughts — and I don’t entirely know what to make of yet, but I like having the knowledge regardless.

I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.

From a New York Times article.

Pete is a very good speaker and draws a number of simple but very powerful metaphors as he discusses cups, drinking vessels, in this video. Below I’ve paraphrased some of the portions that really caught my attention:

Art acknowledges and actually talks about life, but there is one great taboo still in the art world, and that is that art still does not take part in life. Art thinks about life, but it does so from the role of the critic, from the observer, from the outsider. I like to joke that art will peek in our windows and rummage through our closets but it won’t sit down at the dinner table with us.

The fine arts world has chosen to forgo touch, but it’s a very powerful means of human expression.

Does having to deal with function limit creativity?

A little bit of dissonance is really required to have something that will hold our attention for a longer period of time.

For the most part I think he hits the nail squarely on the head, but I’d love to hear other’s responses to this 30 minute talk.

“The idea that there is some special magic attached to Hirst’s work that shoves it into the multimillion [dollar] realm is ludicrous,” Hughes says. “[The price] has to do with promotion and publicity and not with the quality of the works themselves.”

Amen to that. Hughes traces this Mona Lisa Curse, as he calls it, to the 1960s when da Vinci’s Mona Lisa visited the U.S. People came to see the painting not to see the painting, Hughes claims, but in order to say that they’d seen the painting. From then on collectors began to buy art as an investment, not because they necessarily liked the sculpture or canvas.

Collectors these days are driven by the almighty dollar, and way too much emphasis is placed on trendiness and novelty in art. Can I get another amen. I haven’t liked everything I’ve read from Hughes, but he’s pretty much spot on as portrayed in the Telegraph’s article. These same investor-collectors bid up new works by artists whose works they already own in order to drive up prices. A fine business tactic, I suppose, but one that rightly creates a foul odor among art critics. Further, such practices put the price of new art out of the reach of public museums.

It seems all too easy to fall into the mentality described above, even for those of us who are merely artists or connoisseurs.

Art junky #1: “Sure, I’ve seen that Monet.”
Art junky #2: “Yeah, well I’ve licked that monet.”
Art junky #3: “Ha! My uncle’s cousin’s brother’s niece bought that Monet at Christie’s for more money than the GDP of your stupid little country.”

Apparently this super-riche portion of the art market is quite the juggernaut. Investors seem, Hughes suggests, to possess an eternally optimistic outlook on their purchases. They believe the art they buy will only increase in value. Golly-gee, sounds a little bit like how people thought of real estate two years ago, dunnit? The Australian critic doesn’t fail to point out one Guido Reni, an Italian renaissance painter. Reni was considered by the late 18th century to be near or equal in greatness to Michelangelo. By the 1950s, however, you could buy a ten-foot Reni canvas for a scant $600.

How can we get back into enjoying art? Can we? Or is art just another commodity in our capitalist cultures? Writer and philosopher Francis Schaeffer, in his powerful little treatise Art and the Bible, said plainly that art should be enjoyed.

This is, as I already eluded to, difficult for us. We move too fast. We don’t stop and smell the roses; in fact we mock such platitudes, despite the truth in them. We’re afraid the world is going to pass us by. We need more beer gardens in America, with sculpture in the midst of them.

While there’s certainly something to be said for the industriousness and work ethic of our culture, we lack balance. Regardless of the silly art market and it’s millions of dollars, those of us clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are equally as guilty as those at the top — those taking part in the Sotheby’s auctions and trading paintings like stock certificates of yore. We’re caught up in our digital technology, making money, advancing our careers or social status etc.

How do we manage to take back the skill of intentional observation? How do we get out of the technology zone in order to slow life down?

There are, of course, multiple answers to those questions. Simply, thus, I end here with a solemn and earnest plea to myself and anyone who ever happens to read this post: Stop and smell the roses. Stop in the park and run your fingers over the stone on the fountain or the bronze sculpture. Maybe you don’t even like the sculpture. Take a break and give it a once-over anyway. Take the time to look at the brushstrokes on the painting in your living room.

And if the painting in your living room doesn’t have tactile brushstrokes, go out and buy one that does.

Tennyson’s commentary, it seems to me, more or less represents the idea of art for art’s sake, which Wikipedia defines as “a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.” The idea is credited to Theophile Guatier who lived in the mid nineteenth century.

The inclusion of the phrase “the only true art” sends up all kinds of red flags. Perhaps this part of the idea and definition was meant to exclude propaganda in its many forms, but it makes me think of the isolating and — in my opinion — counterproductive and potentially dangerous artist-as-genius mentality (an idea of mine that needs more exploration). That said, let’s look at art for art’s sake as “a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.”

Art that “is,” or art for art’s sake, is affirmed by Francis Schaeffer in his little treatise, Art and the Bible, on page 33 of my 1973 edition: “A work of art has value in itself.” He goes on in the same paragraph to point out that “Art is not something we merely analyze or value for its intellectual content. It is something to be enjoyed.” The point is made earlier in the book that certain instructions for for the fabrication of the tabernacle and then the temple were abstract and “for beauty“: Multi-colored pomegranates on garb, chains and pomegranates adorning freestanding pillars and and precious stones for beauty.

What about works of art that are not necessarily “for beauty” — and I say this without desiring, at this point, a discussion on personal aesthetics. What about paintings intended to comment on society, such as Picasso’s Guernica? Do these works also possess innate value though their content is less than pleasant?

But then where do you draw the line between works of art and propaganda, perhaps on the basis of how well-known an artist is? Maybe judging by the quality of the craft?

Agreeing that art bears an intrinsic value — regardless of message, intent or ability to communicate, relevance to a cultural context — lends an incredible amount of validity to modern conceptual or non-representational artwork. If a person agrees with the doctrine of art for art’s sake almost anything can become art. Is this a slippery slope, one that leads to curators fabricating boxes with a set of instructions sent to her by the artist — a box that many people in our culture will, for whatever reason, look at and think “That’s not art?”

I’m going to call this inquisitive ramble part one on art for art’s sake, and hope I can come back to it in the near future.