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On Academia

Take art classes, lots of them. Take them at your university, take them from the guy that’s offering five dollar drawing sessions out of his studio, take them from your local art co-op. That is the only way we will bring sanity back into our lives today. The reason that the arts are always first to get cut out of any budget of a high school, college or university is not because the arts do not matter, but because they are dangerous. Unless severely watered down by academicism or the market, the arts and artists have a tendency toward the philosophical fringe, the leftist, socialist, anarchist mentality. Tthey do not swear allegiance to any state or nation and do not abide by any establishment. They have a capability to foment reaction if cornered. So take art classes, a painting class, a drawing class, and not just for the technique, which in some respects is secondary to the mental, emotional, philosophical and spiritual growth that ultimately results. Taking art classes puts

The institutionalization of almost everything

From Abstract Expressionism to Pop, from minimalism to graffiti the wheels of institutionalization are grinding away on what’s left of our culture. Got something avant-garde? Let us help you sell it. Do you like Banksy? We’ll here a bunch of shit with his art on it, yes he’s on TV and there’s a movie out about him, never mind that he’s trying to avoid the insanity of the market like the plague. Spectacle sells and everybody knows it. On the other hand, Banksy has become a great manipulator of the market himself and learned to walk on the art market’s waters, using the art market against itself, making fun of it and by extension of himself and everybody else. Cynicism at its finest has found a savior in Banksy and the anti-christ in Damien Hirst. How would Banksy react to the fact that some marketing agency figured out that it could repackage regular hardware store spray paint, and sell it to the burgeoning graffiti art market at 200% mark up as an artist quality spray paint in h

Art on the Defensive

I heard a pretty interesting comment today from my painting teacher at Western Carolina University. He said that there was something strange about how artists (and I’m talking about painters here) have to be able to defend their position for making art and what subject matter they choose. Yet no one is asking a writer to paint a painting in defense of his writing. I understand this is an illogical supposition, but one that is somewhat truthful. What it proposes is that art is not valid until it has gone through a focus group type review (a critique) and that artists should therefore become even better communicators than they are artists, because it takes quite a skillful wordsmith to write up a meaningful artist statement. The more one thinks about this, even more issues spring up. For example, no one is asking a baseball player to defend what he does, or the WWF wrestler to write a statement explaining his attempts at leaping at his opponent in skin tight spandex. There is an ar

History

“History repeats itself” goes the old adage. For a long time we heard this saying paying not much attention to it, with the exception of a limited few. Maybe the time is now. Historian Neil Howe certainly thinks so. His breakthrough book “The Fourth Turning” outlines the idea that successive generations of people follow a certain seesaw pattern of high and low, from crisis to prosperity with a roughly 80 year span dividing the whole into 4 parts of 20 years, each corresponding to one generation. His analysis starts around the time of the founding of the United States and continues through the pattern of depression and war following prosperity and to another depression following yet another era of prosperity. Hence from crisis to crisis, the Revolutionary war gives way to the Civil War, which in turn goes through the Great Depression and World War 2, culminating in modern times with our current crisis. Unfortunately there is nothing new about this idea and I think that even Mr

True Art Revival

Culture, Kanye West and the New America

Every year we are witness to a lowering of standards of American culture by corporate media. Since the time of Elvis Presley, the bar for who gets to become the next cultural icon has been lowered in order to accommodate the shrinking intellect of the American public, the nadir of which was supposedly reached in the late 80’s.  Not so, if the maniac corporatist con men have to say anything about it.  Robert Hughes might have had it right in the 90’s when he said that “Reagan educated the public down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980.” and yet he did not foresee the levels to which the upcoming generations would stoop in the near future.  A future in which hip hop is the only tool seemingly available and effective enough to educate our overly medicated and apathetic school children. It is only natural and logical that “artists” like Kanye West* should be looked up to as the heroes of an eviscerated and neutered cultural dystopia as w