[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vma2T5luy08]

Mako points out that “The Vogels were not Guggenheims [or, if I might add for my Northwest Arkansas readers, Waltons] with inherited endowments, nor were they hedge fund managers with millions of dollars to spend: remarkably, they were civil servants who worked at postal offices . . . ” From the website for Herb and Dorothy, the aforementioned documentary:

He was a postal clerk. She was a librarian. With their modest means, the couple managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.

Meet Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, whose shared passion and commitment defied stereotypes and redefined what it means to be an art collector.”

The Vogels have pledged 2,500 works — stacked away in boxes and tucked under their bed — to 50 museums in 50 states. Most of their contemporary collection possess a minimalist aesthetic. They bought pieces decades ago from virtual unknowns that are now important modern artists: Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt and Richard Tuttle are among 170 different artists in their personal gallery.

Your own aesthetic may not be drawn to such minimalist and non-representational art, but trust me when I say there are other artists out there you will like. There are more stories like Herb and Dorothy’s waiting to be told, and waiting to be created. Visit your local gallery today. Find something you like and can afford and buy it. You’ll be making an investment not just in a financial sense, but in a cultural sense.

A friend mused recently to me: “We may not see a Wall Street boom again for a long time, certainly not in our life time.” Because of the banking crisis and possible nationalization of them, we may end up with a long protracted recession at best (which would make the U.S. more like Japan, by the way). Possibly so, but what if in lieu of a Wall Street boom, we “invested” in different capitals, capitals of the gift economy . . . we learned from artists and nature what it means to have sustainable growth that re-humanizes, rather than a expedited, de-humaized growth . . . Had we known that our 401(k)s will be “201(k)”s as one commentator recently put it, would we have reconsidered our investment in something more generous, more life giving than protecting our wallets?

Makoto Fujimura

Read more about the couple and the documentary in this Washington Post article.

Makoto Fujimura posted some photos to his blog (he posts very rarely) yesterdayish of a new installation of his own in a New Haven church.

The church looks pretty plain other than Mako’s glorious installation. I’m curious to know if readers find this very abstract painting meditative or not. One of my first thoughts in looking at the above photo was how much more spiritually engaging the space is with that large gold and blue nihonga work than without, and even how much more engaging it is than most other common altar items.

Thoughts?

Watching the film was an academic exercise for me. However, it was also enjoyable. I took notes on a number of things as I watched. The most interesting part of the film, though, is easy to recall, and that is how the adults and the art world reacted to the four year old’s paintings. Even the documentary notes that this story isn’t about the little girl; it’s about the adults.

I’ll start with a little background. Dad was painting one day and daughter, Marla, wanted to join in (she wasn’t even two years old at this point). She took to painting like a fish to water. After a while, a friend of the family sees the girl’s paintings and wants to put them in his coffee shop — just for kicks as much as anything. Customers began to want the paintings. Marla sold her first work for $250. A local reporter wrote a story about Marla and her family after being encouraged by a local artist who saw the toddler’s canvases. From there it steamrolled. The New York Times picked up the story, and the family began traveling around the world for shows. At one point, the waiting list for Marla’s works was more than 70 people.

Mom didn’t know what to make of the situation early on, rightly concerned for the well-being of her child. “If this never happened again I think that’d be OK,” she said at one point, referring to one of Marla’s first exhibits. Mom is a dental hygienist and admitted that she wouldn’t know if the paintings were extraordinary or not. She photocopied the first check from the first sale for Marla’s scrapbook, thinking the whole ordeal would be short-lived. The reporter who did the first story, Elizabeth Cohen, also worried about the girl after the hype became so much.

Just as fast as the fun began it ended. A 60 Minutes story speculated that the paintings were actually done by the girl’s father. Sales tanked (by this point the family had already made $300,000 on the paintings) and vicious hate mail poured in. Eventually the family was able to film Marla painting a piece titled Ocean from start to finish, which seemed to vindicate the family and the young artist.

Now to some of the artistic implications of the whole scenario. First off, the artist who encouraged Cohen to write the first newspaper story has it in for modern art. He said so on camera. Anthony Brunelli is a hyper-realist who’s paintings can take 9 months to finish. The most Brunelli ever sold a painting for was $100,000, which he admitted was a lot of money, but he’s right in questioning why a four year old can make $15,000 for something she might have spent five distracted hours on.

Something is wrong with this picture, and it’s no fault of the girl, her family, the reporter or the hyper-realist. People like myself, Tim Jones, my friend Joel Armstrong and a myriad of others who’ve spent time and money being educated in the arts struggle to find any buyers for what we produce. In fact, we have to find places to store unsold works. And we’re offering what we’ve poured our hours, finances and talent into at a fraction of the price Marla’s works pull in. Jones recently talked about why he priced one of his best works at a mere $3,000. Believe you me, if the man was selling works quickly enough at that price, he’d begin charging more for his canvases (Correct me if I’m wrong, Tim).

Elizabeth Cohen’s mother, interestingly, hates modern art. She talked to Cohen about how Jackson Pollock’s paintings seemed to say to her, “You’re stupid and I’m not, and there are people smarter than you that get my paintings.” Here we dig back into the artist-as-genius pot. Jackie Wescot, interviewed in the documentary, has independently taught art for 23 years. Wescot collects Marla’s paintings. She also claims that the child has a gift, something that’s very advanced that she can’t explain, like Mozart. She’s not the only one with this opinion. Brunelli, as much as he claimed to have it in for modern art, is quoted on Marla’s website as saying that “When I am in Marla’s presence, there’s a weird feeling ’cause I know there’s something inside this girl that many artists look for their whole lives and never have.” When Marla’s dad approached Wescot about teaching the child in the arts, the teacher refused, suggesting that the toddler had nothing more to learn.

Where in the world did Wescot — and SO many others like her in the art world — get the idea that a four or five year old girl didn’t need training in the arts because she already knew it all? Marla already knows about perspective? She already knows the importance of observation, the proportions of the human figure, the ideal of the Golden Mean?

Wescot has been bamboozled, as have so many other artists and collectors in the past century or so, by this unfounded artist-as-genius mentality. Yes, there is talent. Some people are gifted with the ability to paint and sculpt, others aren’t. Yes, there are different degrees of this ability. But children still need training. The simple fact of the matter is that I could recreate Marla’s paintings while half-asleep if I wanted too. Most any person with a studio art degree could take their fingers and spatulas and make paintings that look like hers if they wanted to.

And so could a lot of other untrained kids. Where’s the genius in that?

One or two of the enamored collectors interviewed in My Kid Could Paint That talk about the “spirituality” in Marla’s artwork. One gentleman goes on about a blue square in the corner of the painting he purchased, and the squiggle on one side that’s a person juxtaposed (hey, there’s another principle the little girl oughta learn about from Wescot) with another squiggly figure and what this all means, or what he thinks the four year old meant by it. That’s getting a bit too Freudian for me.

The gentleman was seeing bunnies in the clouds. I’ve talked numerous times in the past about the associations viewers bring to a canvas. We can see most anything we want to see if we try hard enough, especially in non-representational works (the people in the documentary erroneously use the term “abstract” to describe Marla’s paintings). Our experiences, our desires and our faith — the example this gentleman seemed to lean on — color how we perceive everything. That’s not bad necessarily, but we have to be aware of it when we’re critiquing a work of art. Just because something looks phallic (getting back to Freud?), for instance, does not mean that it is, or that it was intended by the artist to be phallic. This is a pet peeve of mine, people comparing art to genitalia. Residents in my native Nebraska can’t seem to think of the historic and acclaimed capitol building without thinking of a phallus. It’s a tall, well-designed building with a dome on the top, ladies and gents. Please get a grip while I exhale.

The documentary goes on to suggest that Marla’s innocence, her youth, says something about the cynicism of the art world. The appeal of her work may be, one of the interviewees speculates, that her innocence isn’t clouded by said cynicism. Marla’s paintings don’t make snarky remarks about the viewers like, supposedly, a lot of modern art does. This was another interesting point that I noted as I watched the film, but I don’t know where to go with it in this post.

There was a lot to be taken from the film, if you really want to dig into it, and these are just my initial thoughts. It’s worth watching, although I wasn’t all that happy with some of the content editing as it related to an accurate presentation. I’m very curious, in conclusion, to know how the paintings get their titles, something that wasn’t addressed in the documentary.

The term “serious art” always throws up red flags for me. I know there are hobbyists who dabble in painting, retirees who pick up a brush and paint from their back porch because they don’t know what to do with themselves after retiring. Bella Vista, Arkansas — a retirement village in my own county — seems to have plenty of these.

Yes, I know that was a bit of a harsh example, but the point is that there’s a difference between people who paint for relaxation and people who paint because they have to. It’s in the latter’s blood to be visually creative. They are restless and incomplete if they don’t have the time or opportunity to regularly be in their studio. However, Jonathan Jones doesn’t seem to be segregating hobbyists from those born with artistic passion. From what I can tell he’s referring specifically to the passionate types.

Further, he implies in no subtle terms that serious art is a certain kind of art by using Jackson Pollock as an example. Pollock is largely representative of 20th century art — however myopic this point of view may be — which is a very small slice of the millennial pie. I happen to like Pollock’s drip series, but using him and other expressionists as an example leads one to believe that the only kind of serious art is cutting edge (to a fault, in my opinion), always looking for the newest thing. Also implied is that serious art is only non-representational art. This is bogus as well.

Being modern, cutting edge or novel does not necessarily make for serious art. That said, it is good and important for artists to eagerly explore new ideas, new media, but they need to constantly remember that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Is art second-rate just because it comes with an eloquent explanation? Of course not. Judge the work on its own merits, please. If the artist wants to attach a few paragraphs of his or her inspiration and intent, let them. This has no bearing on the formal qualifications of the canvas, even if it might give viewers a different way to look at a painting.

So what does Jones get right in his post? Particularly this: “As soon as you start saying what people want to hear, adapting your art to the common sense political and moral platitudes of ordinary speech, you betray subtlety and poetry.” I’m not exactly certain what he means by “common sense political” speech, but I wholeheartedly affirm the importance of subtlety and poetry in art.

From the discourse between Tim Jones and myself this week, “I think the problem is not that the abstractionists think too highly of decorative art, but that they think of it not near highly enough.” Interestingly enough, I was having very similar thoughts in relationship to our banter.

What is decorative art?
In one of the later comments from this week, the Old World Swine author gives the basis for his understanding of decoration:

“decor… 1897, from Fr. décor, from L. decor “beauty, elegance,” from decere (see decorate).”

Above from the Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com

In my post in this series titled Baseline banter I charted out how some different tactile arts fall along the lines of the art vs. craft debate. Wikipedia — and yes, I still respect this resource even though they didn’t get it right with the abstract vs. non-representational understanding — describes decorative art almost exactly like my graph defines the crafts. This was a bit of a surprise to me at first glance, but after a few seconds it seemed reasonable.

Jones now firmly believes that all non-representational artwork should be classified as decorative art. The following points examine this idea.

Labeling
There is a problem, off-hand, with labeling non-representational artists’ work as decorative. It implies, whether intended or not, that they are not as serious as other artists. This is a complex issue I probably don’t have the time or room to get into fully, but it’s there. It harkens back to the eternally elusive definition of art itself. For instance, where does one, along the above graph, begin referring to something as a craft instead of as an art? Do the arts/crafts in the middle of the chart get called both? Are all of them both to a certain degree so that it doesn’t matter what we call them?

In truth each of the above contains both art and craft, and the more I think about these things the less I care about what things are called, despite my keen and continuing interest in this conversation. Some people create beautiful and meaningful paintings, some create beautiful and functional furniture. My hope is that each of these craftsman thoroughly enjoy what they are presently involved with.

I may be a bit of an oddball anyway. I enjoy designing and building furniture or sketching floor plans as much as I enjoy attempting to be a part of the gallery art world. Hence, this blog aims to examine this same range of tactility.

Intention
This may be a trickier point still, and one that hits a little closer to home for me. Jones says the following in a comment on Aesthetic Escalator:

My contention is not that this art communicates in a way too subtle or not-literal-enough… this art doesn’t communicate intentionally in any way at all, which makes it decoration, which is great… but it should not be placed in the “fine art” category at all, IMO.

This is not to denigrate decorative art! I love decorative art. I just think we need to be clear that this is not in the same universe as the Isenheim Altarpiece or anything remotely like that.

I enjoy (really!) a good deal of abstract art, as long as there is none of this pretense about “stripping away cognitive barriers” or being some kind of gateway to a higher perception, or passing beyond mere actuality to a deeper spiritual mystery, bah, blah…

This goes directly back to my own comment, which really stoked the fire this week, where I sincerely exclaimed that “I personally fail to see how fruit in a bowl is more engaging than certain [non-representational] works.” Jones doesn’t think non-representational work, no matter how well-executed, communicates at all. To him, nicely painted fruit in a bowl is all kinds of talkative.

Is this realism vs. abstract vs. non-representational banter all for naught? Does what communicates to a certain type of person determine what they like in the arts? I’ve suggested the same here before.

But what about the artist creating non-representational works that he or she intends to communicate? The painter or sculptor has an idea and puts their tool to the canvas or stone. They know from the get-go that not everyone is going to understand exactly what they’re trying to say, but they stroke and carve regardless of this knowledge. Jones derides such pretense as “stripping away cognitive barriers or being some kind of gateway to a higher perception, or passing beyond mere actuality to a deeper spiritual mystery.” While I’ve never heard of such ideas in exactly these words — his first two points are admittedly bogus — I understand what he’s getting at.

But I can’t entirely agree with his third observation. I believe — and here we go again with the personal references — that non-representational art can represent certain spiritual mysteries. It doesn’t take much reading to realize this is the case for painter Makoto Fujimura. He, through his non-representational paintings, intends to communicate. Like him, I believe that non-representational art can speak to people. Not to everyone, but some of us. Just like bowls of fruit don’t necessarily say more than “I’m a bowl of fruit” to others.

The better half
My wife is getting bored with this debate between Jones and I. I can see why. A number of things I’ve noted in this series have already come up in the last year, and it’s not likely Jones and I will ever see eye to eye on all of these things. Maybe not most of them. But that’s all right. God gives each of us different interests, insights and talents to be used for His glory. We won’t always understand what he’s doing in or through someone else within the Body.

I do sense that this last round of bloggy exchanges helped clarify a number of things on my own end, however. In large part, that is what this blog is about: A place for me to work out my own ideas, thoughts and observations. As I go along in this process, I do hope my writing will help readers to “see better” in the words of Betty Spackman.

Let me clarify something I previously mentioned in this series. There has been some semantic confusion between Jones and I in the midst of our banter. This may be largely my fault, as I often use the terms abstract and non-representational interchangeably. Such goes against my own intention to communicate as clearly as possible. It’s little surprise that I do this, however; even Wikipedia and Dictionary.com are confused on this point, equating “abstract” and “non-representational.” Connotatively, abstract in the context of art means the same thing as non-representational.

With this in mind, a better definition for the clearest possible conversation among artists is the following from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary:

The act or process of leaving out of consideration one or more properties of a complex object so as to attend to others . . .

To further complicate matters, Jones refers to non-representational artwork as “non-objective.” They are essentially synonyms, but the latter isn’t a word I knew of until we began (more than a year ago now) this discourse. He explained his use of the phrase non-objective to me at some point in the past, but I was not remembering the explanation when I needed to this week.

I will now provide an example of an abstract work of art:

And an example of a non-representational, or non-objective, work of art:

Koons’ sculpture still looks like tulips, even though they are highly stylized, and sans stems. It is abstracted. Fujimura’s painting does not contain any recognizable objects and is therefore non-representational or non-objective.

Abstract and non-representational are different. They need to be kept different if we, as a culture, are going to be able to speak intelligently and clearly about the arts.