The Gutter Art Critic

What role does art serve? Or what role does art serve to the artist and the public? Could we instead ask what role does the artist serve to art? Art is a much greater entity than the artist will ever be, so why does it so often seem to be subservient to the artist and his ego? This inversion is only palpable if we look at the way the media portray art and artists. The relegation of the profession of art, to monetization and therefore to the ranking on the scale of value happens by way of subverted commodification. When the news agencies like MSN or NBC print on their web sites articles about which degrees will get you the least amount of money in the market today, one has to question the motives for printing such material. Of course, topping the list of degrees is Fine Art, Philosophy, Psychology, etc, no one would suspect anything less. The list remains more or less the same every year. What this shows however is not what the agencies propose should be a deterrent to those seek

“I am an artist”. This single sentence is possibly one of the hardest and also one of the easiest to utter. One the one hand, a person whose values and merits of art mirror those of transcendence beyond physicality or even spirituality, because creativity is neither, might actually have a hard time uttering these words, thinking himself somehow unworthy of the title in the face of his own predetermined image of the artist. On the other hand, another person whose opinion centers around the conception of absolute pluralism, where anything and everything can and therefore must be art, might have a rather easy time pronouncing these words, thinking that his identity as an artist is a given, because of the standard definition he has set upon the word. But things may not be so easy after all. Because what is art? This is an age old question, and we have basically learned not to ask it for fear of appearing naïve, foolish, redundant, cynical, trite, old fashioned, because the contempora

The world is a hard complex place to navigate. In this respect, the art world is as impenetrable to some, as the Amazon rainforest. Moods and tastes are changing on a seasonal basis, celebrity and spectacle are the ever consuming product churned out by media savvy oligarchs and recycled as yesterdays pop culture by thousands of artists. The word art has been redefined so many times, so as to encompass virtually anything and everything the mind can provide with a reasonable amount of substance. Damien Hirst was heard saying that his medium today is money, a line that would make Warhol blush, and as such he retooled the moral impetus of art and artists everywhere yet again. The art market is the biggest totally unregulated market in the world right now and it shares a spot in the sunlight with student loan debt as being the biggest bubble about to burst any day now, the way it did in the 1980’s. It’s a vicious cycle, one that seems to have no end. But all things must come to an end

I recently watched this awesome documentary about Robert Wilson.  This is a must see for every artist young and old, contemporary or traditional, kitsch or avant-garde.  Also if you are a fan of Philip Glass, and I most certainly am this movie is for you.  It is a great look at the life and work of one of the premier avant-garde artists of our time and I can only hope that it will inspire others to make some great art.  In these trying times, god only knows we need the inspiration.

To some this blog post might be a little too confrontational or controversial, especially if you are a resident of Asheville, like I am, and you hold on to some very unfounded ideas of what this city represents to artists, like I am, and you believe that that this city has carved itself a very nice and comfortable niche in the national artist community, which I wholeheartedly dispute. But since probably nobody pays attention or reads this blog anyway, I think that might as well justify my discontent with the situation present at this particular time, and that is the disconnect between the now almost mythological arts scene and the reality, which for the most of us is rather grim and not getting better. Before I delve even deeper into this problem, let me qualify a few things in hopes that I might shed a light on what I am actually talking about in reference to “arts” and silence the possible criticism that may or may not be coming my way. By arts, I mean a subject and form of makin

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

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