Art & Perception

If you want to write a really long post with lots of images, but you don’t want to display the whole thing on the front page, what can you do?

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We have a new theme. Please go to Information for Contributors for the scoop and the comments.

Cheers,
Rex

Lisa Call is the head site admin on Art & Perception (A&P). She does a great job. She has a full time job as an artist and mother, and another full time job in the computer industry. When she is not doing these labors, she writes great blog posts.

Every extra detail on the site means extra work for Lisa. Every sidebar feature is a point of contention, a potential source of conflict.

I say, strip this site down to the bare minimum for functionality.

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This landscape painting by Tracy Helgeson caught my eye. This work is something of a new departure in Tracy’s work, I think. She often works on the border between abstraction and reality, but in this painting there is a cross-over, albeit a subtle one. The result is almost unsettling, but I like it. A question for her is, does she want to go further with this? There is also a psychological element to this landscape painting, as I see it, which captures my attention.

Tracy’s blog raises interesting questions about what it means to be an artist today. In the past, artists liked to cloak themselves and their work in mystery. Tracy is open about her work (good, bad, unfinished) and her difficulties in the process of creating and selling. There is a refreshing and direct quality to her writing style that makes mysterious 20th century artists seem a bit comic in comparison. Is Tracy a good example of what 21th century artists will be doing, or should she hide her unfinished work and cultivate a more refined public image?

A dialogue with Rex Crockett, Arthur Whitman, and Karl Zipser; artwork by Rex Crockett.

KARL: This is the first post at our team blog’s new location, ArtAndPerception.com. What should we talk about?

ARTHUR: The topic of Art & Perception‘s future is perfect.

REX: What do you think we could accomplish? In what direction do you think we should go?

KARL: The most obvious goal for most of us is to become the best artists that we can be. Another goal is to make money doing it, or at least to survive. If Art & Perception is to be useful, rather than a distraction, it should help us with these key goals.

REX: Karl, interaction with other artists will definitely help with these goals you state. With other artists, it’s possible to explore new ideas before you take action on them. Other artists are more willing to experience edgy work. They can see through the rough edges to the inner jewel. more… »

Posted by Karl Zipser

Journalist and critic Nancy Geyer made this comment on The Thinking Eye:

. . . it seems to me that too many blogs, even the best of them, are falling into the trap of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” — they become mutually self-promotional, as if the bloggers don’t have to “earn” the right to be read. When I read a blog I’m looking for a thoughtful, informative, critical discourse without the distraction of all the networking that is going on.

Here is a professional giving free advice. Is Nancy Geyer on the mark?

[There are a lot of comments but I need to bring them here –Karl]

Posted by Rex Crockett

Karl kindly invited me to post on his blog, and within moments of receiving his invitation, I had an idea, and here I am with it. Except after writing what’s below, I went, “Well, this is more of an article than a post. I’m not really asking questions; I’m making statements. I don’t see how this really invites a return response.”

But after writing it, I couldn’t see how to turn it into something more interactive and less assertive without turning it into something it wasn’t and thus losing the whole flavor, and I don’t really want to mess with this post because it’s from the heart.

Karl had a comment regarding one of mine on The Fall of the Art World. He said, “But I do hope some more critical comments come in. We don’t want to get into some silly artist group-think here, do we?”

I agree with that; moreover, it got me thinking about that whole group-think thing.

I was reminded of a comment of Claude Monet’s regarding his development as an artist. He said that at a certain point his career, rather early actually, he found it counter productive to hang about in cafés talking endlessly over absinthe or coffee under clouds of pipe smoke with the various artists and hangers on in the Parisian art scene. He decided he needed to spend more time painting, and painting in his way at that — outside, in the fresh air, with nature as his teacher.

I’m neither an anthropologist nor a psychologist, but I do enjoy people and am endlessly fascinated by their social dynamics. As a perpetual student of said, it is fairly obvious that there is a certain liability to only talking about things, whatever the subject, with only a certain group. Groups evolve their own agreements, but those agreements may not accord with widely held perceptions. At times such cohesions may be inspired and elevating, at other times merely serve to make for inclusions and exclusions of memberships, and at other times can serve to render the group completely out of touch with reality.

You see that kind of thing in all the arts. In jazz, if you use any chords that have less than four notes, you’re “not doing jazz,” so you hear (in bad jazz) only a lot of weird chords. Musicians will make jokes about the “jazz police.” In certain art circles if you do any recognizable representations of anything, you’re being “literal.” “Kitsch” takes on a special meaning. Among certain groups of computer programmers, the hostility to ordinary computer users is palpable; e.g., non programers are called “lusers” — a variation on “nuser” for “new user.”

On and on. Group think. The deadliness of this is that it can knock you out of touch with your audience. The jazz policing ends up costing you any audience but some real creepy cats. Fear of literality and kitsch makes for paintings that are indecipherable without a book that explains them — an irony lucidly and humorously put in Tom Wolfe’s _The Painted Word_. Contempt for ordinary users makes for programs that no one can figure out how to use and documentation that is so technically nomenclatured as to be useless, and so, no work.

Now here is another irony. It so happens that I did that Monet thing. I actually traveled around the mountains of California for several years, living on the road, doing these brush and ink paintings specifically calculated to be do-able from a backpack. It was a rejuvenating and enlightening experience. It was very good for my work. I would not trade that time for anything I’ve ever done in life. It was not a lonely time. I still sold my work in lot of ways, on the street, craft fairs, various personal contacts, and so on. I met all kinds of interesting people. There is a whole nomadic culture in the Western US. The lifestyle worked. I made money. Not a lot, but I didn’t need much. Yet at a certain point, only about eight months ago, I started to yearn for the kind of patter I’d grown accustomed to at other times of my life when I had other artists
to talk with.

So on the one hand, while I see Monet’s take on things as a very wise move on the part of an intrepid explorer, I think I’ve gotten to some stage in my life where I feel a certain responsibility to other artists as well as students. I could not fulfill my social responsibility with the nomadic life. I know Monet had a hard time of it too, and he eventually settled down. To see the guest lists for his mature era parties is to see the who’s who of French culture and politics of the time. So he evidently reached the same conclusion. Certainly he managed to find a way to “keep his vision pure,” as he liked to say, and still be a social person.

With other artists, it’s possible to explore really new ideas before you take action on them. Other artists are likely to be more willing to experience edgy work. They can see through the rough edges to the inner jewel. A little (or a lot) of wackiness is tolerated or amusing. The strong passions that artists feel are well understood by others with such feelings. When I’m doing a show or speaking to an audience of collectors, buyers, or customers, I’m definitely putting on a show. I’m acting, and I’m acting more conservatively than I really am, but around other artists? Well, I remember this one group show I was in. I was looking at the other exhibitors all laughing and yucking it up, and I thought, “These are my kind of birds. They’re all crazy, and I love them.”