I’m interested in the relationships for each of us among four categories of art. Maybe five for technical reasons having to do with the size of our bank accounts.
1. Art we make
2A. Art we own (but didn’t make)
2B. Art we would like to own but don’t because we can’t afford it. (For the purposes of this question only, you can have it. But only as much as fits in your home.)
3. Art we like to look at but don’t really want to own.
4. Art we don’t like to look at.
These categories are reasonably exhaustive and mutually exclusive, except for just a tiny wee bit of overlap between 1 and 4 in my case.
Here are my particular questions:
Q1. Is the art in category 2 similar to that in 1, or is there a difference in genre, style, or subject?
Q2. What do you get out of art in category 3?
Q3. What art is in category 4? And is it closer to 10%, 50%, 90%, or 99% of all art in the world?
My personal answers:
A1. 2A is either other photography (four other photographers) or one real print my wife has had forever. The rest is family art or reproductions, except for our one expensive piece, a $350 metal sculpture called “Night Wind” that goes well over the mantel with the photo above. Category 2B, art I’d like to own, would include mostly painting, also some photography I covet, mostly different from my own in style. And a fabulous art quilt if I could figure out where to put it. In style, I’d like abstract as much as representational.
A2. I like to look at all kinds of art, but wouldn’t want most of it for free if I had to dedicate wall space to it (investments don’t count). I probably enjoy painting and photography most in this category. I like to study how other artists do things and get ideas for my own work. Not ideas for imitation but a repertoire of approaches and techniques that will likely influence what things I see and how I see them. I do find various kinds of conceptual art interesting, but it doesn’t seem to be what I want to look at daily.
A3. Includes anything kitschy or blatantly commercial, which is probably at least 90% of what’s out there, but feels more like 50% because I tend to tune it out before it reaches a conscious level. I’m sure I miss things and if it’s a gallery or similar setting where I see something that I’m not really interested in, I try to take advantage of any simpatico artist or fan willing to lead me around and talk me through it.
Before reading the text, a quick spontaneous comment: Thank your for your image of a filigree of dark trees against a particular illumination of the sky.
Answers from a wanne-be-artist.
Art we make versus art we own: I love textiles because they can be soft and sensuous. At this time, I feel that I rather make my own fiber art instead of buying it. No such distinction applies to photography, drawing and painting. On my own site, I have a post about the art that I own(ed) Collecting Art – My Narrative inspired by Colin’s recent post. I did not post it here, thinking that it was too tongue-in-cheek for the serious A&P audience. Actually, most of the framed art on my walls are early Nina and Karl.
Art we like to look at but don’t really want to own: Anything that strikes my imagination. I rather have museums take care of expensive art than own it myself, thinking like W.C. Fields: elephants are like children, nice to look at but you would not want to own them.
Art we don’t like to look at : Obvious Kitsch is easy to overlook. But sometimes, the cuteness is more subtle. Recently, I looked at the work of a local painter who specializes in painting landscapes with structures (farm houses etc.) that are soon to be torn down. At first, I thought them beautiful until it dawned on me that they expressed an insidious sense of sweet nostalgia.
After Thanksgiving, I became depressed walking through the galleries on the main drag in Boston. Much of the art was so dull.
Steve,
Reading your questions left me with a new question. If art is a verb – which of course it is :-) – how many times can you look at a piece of art and still get an art experience from it?
Most of the art objects that we have aren’t manmade, although some, like polished stones, fall partway into the manmade category. In the field of photographic art, I own a lot of books. I find the book form a very satisfactory way of looking at photographs.
Does a picture on the wall (which isn’t a memorial picture of some kind) inevitably lose its force?
Colin,
Certainly one kind of art experience is the verb of making it, but if that’s all there is, what are all the museums about? For some kinds of art (mostly photography for me), the art appreciation experience is in part vicarious: I imagine what it would be like for me taking that picture. But there’s plenty of art I love that I relate to in a quite different way. It could be a kind of “communication”: thinking about what the artist might have been interested in or even “mean.” Or it could be independent of the artist: just contemplating the artwork and feeling whatever I feel.
OK, there’s not much I would actually pay attention to daily, but I like art that I can notice again from time to time and see either something new, or re-experience something pleasurable. I have some reproductions I bought in Europe 30 years ago that I still enjoy that way. Maybe the force is diminished, but the effect is very much there.
Steve,
The verb thing isn’t just about the making. A viewer has a relationship with the art object too, and this can create an art experience. The point about the ‘verb’ is that it is the interaction that creates the art experience, not just the object.
That’s why I find that artworks lose their appeal. It is difficult to imagine many works that could produce their magic day in day out. Looking at a much loved painting in a museum once a year is one thing. But having it hanging in the stairwell? It would be a very powerful piece that didn’t just become a dust trap.
It is one of the reasons that I like photo books. When closed they are closed. They are fresh again when I open them.
Colin,
I agree that art appreciation is could also be considered a verb, in the sense that it is, in part, an active process engaged in by the viewer. I would say that either art experience is also a noun, by which I mean there is a memory that may be readily accessible. If we want to get picky, I suppose memory recall is also a mental process, though perhaps that’s a topic for another time.
But I think the question of how one appreciates art one sees daily is very interesting. A first way might be simply as part of the setting or decor. I do notice, probably at least once a day, our sculpture piece and the photo over the mantel, and without really thinking about it, it just seems right: I like this part of the room, I feel comfortable here. It may not be a very deep or actively engaging experience, but I think it is significant as an aspect of daily living.
A second way of appreciation is more like your usually closed book. Perhaps most of the artworks on the wall I notice much more rarely. But if a friend comments and I look at that Rembrandt etching, or if the rain is slanting down outside at about the same angle, or if I took a picture that day with a hill having similarly placed trees, then I’ll look at it more carefully and “magic” can happen again.
Steve,
Good provocative post, which provoked interesting comments.
I have my own art all over the house. Partly because the walls need something and partly because having it on view means I can view it critically over weeks or months. One of my critical assessments has to do with whether the art can remain fresh over time — whether it has enough variety and vision to startle me after it has hung for a couple of months.
Which, of course, makes me think of Colin’s lovely idea about opening and closing the book. We have a membership to the local art museum — a middling sort of museum with lots of stuff and a few really fine pieces. We go there maybe 8 times a year and I always find at least one piece that fascinates and resonates with me. It’s like the book that one looks at 8 times a year. Or the changing of the art on the walls so it remains fresh. I do a lot of this because I’m always exhibiting the work I’ve done and have to take it down to send off somewhere.
But, the art that remains on my walls for months can, as Steve notes, leap out at me for a variety of reasons — the changing light, my changing mood, the notice of a friend. The museum art that most attracts me is generally not art I would have in my own home — some of it is too terrifying, some seems like it might go banal if I encountered it daily, some makes me uneasy. And some is simply impossible unless one has a gallery attached to her house.
I mostly have textile art — my own — as my predominate quotidian art. I have bought a few textile pieces, but my art buying tends to run toward prints (fine art/hand-pulled). Portland is a great treasure of printmakers, and prints tend to be more within my price range. Here they aren’t terribly expensive, but they have the artist’s hand impressively visible.
And about art I dislike — Birgit’s comment, “an Insidious sense of sweet nostalgia” resonates with me — it often comes from an artist who overdoes a particular motif because it’s so saleable. And in other fields sometimes comes from people I think are too lazy to really delve into meaning and memory. Doris Lessing calls it “false lying nostalgia,” and it’s definitely on my list of serious sins.
June,
Photographers also like to “live with” their prints for a period of time to see how they hold up. For them it is relatively easy to go back and adjust something and make a new print, or to simply give up on a particular image. Do you also sometimes return to working on your larger and more elaborate pieces (which I find totally amazing)? Or do you just learn and get ideas for later work? Do you ever hang up unfinished pieces?
Steve,
Yes! Yep, and yep.
I re-work my pieces after I (sometimes long before) thought they were finished, I get ideas for later work by having them hanging around, and I hang up unfinished work all the time.
The last (about unfinished work) has to do with my hand-work avoidance. I can do hand-work, have done hand-work, always have to hand-finish the edges of my textiles, but sewing by hand is, for me, boooooorrrrrring.
Other people find it meditative; I find that wiht the first hand stitch, I start thinking about scrubbing the floor or doing the year-end report — anything but sewing down the bindings.
Clearly, I do finish the edges, by hand, for much of my work and have been known to find it necessary to do handwork internally on pieces; but sometimes, when no deadline is confronting me and it’s in the privacy of my own home, I cheat.
Thanks for your compliment, too.
Ah, and Steve, your photographic work shares some sensibilities with my textiles. I’m thinking particularly of the Ghost Light series — I have at least one unfinished textile work and a bunch of paintings of empty stair wells (actually only one specific staircase, but painted a number of different times from different angles). I never quite finished the textile piece — it needs more stitching and the (blasted) hand finishing. But the image looks down an empty, although not decrepit, stairwell to a curtained window. The desolate air of that series of photos is stunning, by the way, a sensation I would like to be able to capture in my own art.
I had seen these photos before but forgot that it was you who took them. And the Winter Water photos are in Arizona? Am I right? Someone recommended that I tackle that area for my next venture into the wilderness.
Simpatico, for sure!
June,
I was going to say that your Indeterminate series reminded me of Arizona colors, but then I saw that’s actually where they came from. My Winter Water series (still very much in progress, even the images on the web site) is, however from Montana. It could be almost anywhere it freezes, though. The Anasazi Places are in Utah, very near Arizona. I think, especially if you can find orange in you, you’d love the colors there. Your colors in general seem so rich to me, I think I would have a hard time feeling desolation in them. Isolation, perhaps. But try me!
Colin,
I was struck by your comment above Most of the art objects that we have aren’t manmade..
When I look at the 3-dimensional objects in and outside our house, I see mostly objects from nature. There are unpolished stones with fossils. Other stones are engraved with fascinating lines or are sculpted like an abstract face. On our mantle piece in the living room is a long string of buffalo vertebrae from Wyoming. Next to my computer stands a bunch of dried wild flowers, each with its own intriguing shape.
There was a time when the only man-made object of interest to me was Eero Saarinen’s 631-foot-tall stainless-steel parabolic arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Standing right underneath and looking up at its curve, I saw pure infinity.
For me, nature is superior to man-made objects and art is a successful distillation or interpretation of a piece of nature, be it a rock or a human face.
Birgit,
You said “nature is superior to man-made objects…”
Doesn’t that mean that art comes in a poor second?
I’ve grappled with this problem off and on for a long time (a question which twines itself with the problem of photography trumping painting/textile art), and I’ve finally decided they are two quite different systems in the universe. One may inspire the other (and I would venture to say that sometimes our love of nature is inspired by what artists have shown us as well as vice-versa) but in my mind, and perhaps because I _must_ think this way, art walks alongside of but is generally not a distillation of what nature offers. The chemical change from one to another goes beyond mere distillation.
If art were only an interpretation of nature, art would always be lesser than nature — and perhaps for my self-esteem, I can’t believe that. Of course, that then presumes that I put myself on the same plane as the “maker” of the natural world, which seems exceedingly presumptuous, if only because I don’t have enough time to be thought of in the same breath. But maybe it’s what I aspire to, knowing I almost certainly can’t achieve it.
Uh-oh…are we going to open this Pandora’s box? The idea of “nature” is as problematic as that of “art.” Are we not part of nature? Are not our artifacts? I might like a stone better, or I might prefer a painting of a stone. It doesn’t make sense to me to put one “above” the other in some absolute sense. But I suppose one must be wary of religious arguments…
June and Steve, as only a wannabe artist, I have not thought as deeply as both of you about some of these subjects. Talking about them is one of my first attempts on ‘training wheels’.
What I have thought about a lot recently are the limitations of a camera lens in capturing 3-D compared to our visual system. I would like to explore whether textile art, painting or drawing can capture perspective in more interesting ways.
From your artistic creations, I know that both of you appreciate nature. In my case, nature is part of my spirituality.
What I said above was really shallow. Certainly, art is not less than nature. Thinking about your comments brought back the memory of a painting at the Met by Van Gogh, showing a father holding out his hands to encourage his little daughter to make her first steps. I find this picture heart-wrenching. As Steve says, are we not part of nature?. Thus, the interpretation of nature needs to encompass emotions. I am out of my depth.
I didn’t mean to imply that there aren’t some fascinating questions to explore here, relating art to nature, spirituality, etc. Or to halt discussion of them. Of course, we will open Pandora’s box (Fate); I’m just leery of ripping the top off suddenly. Some great post topics to be carved out here… Even the topic of a camera lens vs. the vision of a one-eyed person could lead deeply into mind…
I was very interested to learn about the prevalence of natural vs. “art” objects as objects around the house to delight the eye. I have many myself, though for some reason I didn’t think of that when I wrote the post. Often I’ve incorporated them into something else, like tree branches supporting a bookshelf, or the rock base for a lamp.
Steve, I am happy for any response from you, critical or not.
Someone needs to invent cameras with two lenses.
Birgit,
There actually are cameras with two lenses made to create stereo pairs of pictures, which of course must be viewed with some type of viewer. Ironically, there were much more popular long ago.
I think I get a sense of your fascination for this when I remember using high power binocular microscopes to examine all sorts of things, for example sea urchin shells, which have a very intricate architecture. I could look at these for hours.
In my case, if I think about dimensionality at all, I am usually more interested in the 2D-ness of a photograph than in the 3D-ness of its subject.
Birgit, you aren’t in over your head until you drown! And you sound like you are still breathing freely! To explain my own response a bit further, I wouldn’t touch images of nature for years because ole Ma nature does it so well. So I had to find a way to deal with that question.
As for photography and the question of vision — are you aware of David Hockney’s theories? The best place I’ve found to meander about them is “Hockney on Art: Conversations with Paul Joyce.” This, more than anything I’ve ever read before or since, changed my whole idea about what and how we see. Among other things, Hockney points out that we never see a still image — our saccades (eye movments) fill in images so we think we might have stopped time for an instant. But we don’t.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who is thinking about photography and painting and seeing and perspective.
Hockney is the guy who upset everyone with his theories about the use of the camera obscura in the Renaissance.
Steve,
Perhaps we are thinking about the same issue, namely how to compress the 3-D world into a 2-D image. With respect to the picture of my sister sitting on the dune, a local friend emailed me that my photo indeed does not convey the steepness of the dune.
June,
In early December on this site, Walter Bartman recommended that I read Hockney’s book “Secret Knowledge”. So far, I have only read a New Yorker article on this subject and have spent my free time reading books that helped me with basic blogging skills. Now it is time to read more by Hockney.
You solved riddle for me. I looked up on the Google whether ‘out of my depth’ really meant what I was trying to say. But I still did not understand that it referred to drowning. Using your recent expression, I will spend more “time in the water”.
The comments above about “living with one’s art” and seeing what “holds up” resonate with me. I love to look at my own work over long periods of time. Some of the works are too much part of the past for me to change. Others are ongoing, works I am striving to complete. This is one of the reasons that I decided against becoming a “painting a day” painter, as fascinating as that idea is. I want my work, as well as my ability, to develop over time-scales longer than a single day.