I finally settled on this point by looking at a big shot art site, seeing who is being proclaimed the latest genius of art. The work I saw there was jarring to me. It was plain, flat and cartoon-like. It was very much like the stuff I was doing when I was ten years old. Close enough that if I sent one of those paintings to the hot professional art web site and said it was done by this guy, I'm quite sure they'd put it on their site as another example of the great man's genius.
I'm decades beyond that now but this person is the new genius of art?!? Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I was ten it was "okay for a kid" and probably if I still painted like when I was ten nobody would care.
So I realized that people are just randomly declared to be some sort of genius based on criteria having nothing to do with creativity. ....Like another artist who paints red squares. That's it - that's the big work of genius. Oh yeah, she calls them things like "A Dozen Roses" - never mind that they look like the same red squares she called Carnations or Sunrise or whatever, it's GENIUS! I should be grateful for even getting to see her work.
Yeah. Now do you see why I have said that art sucks? That and the fact that art is mostly useless. 99% of art is either bullshit like this or mindless wall candy: Pretty waterfalls and barns with lots of yellow light - bright and shiny and signifying nothing.
This leads me to the discussion of the bifurcation of art itself: You have, in America, a population that has basically zero art education pitted against a small but over-educated group of art elitists.
For the general public anything that makes a "pretty picture" is great art. There was a scandal among watercolorists recently; turns out one of their top award-winning watercolorists was simply producing ink-jet prints of photographs and selling them as original paintings as well as entering them in prestigious art shows and winning with them. Even the photographs didn't belong to the artist (which is how she got caught). Such is the demand for pretty pictures by the masses.
On the other side, you have some elitists who seem eager to promote the most brazen pieces of non art, such as the previously cited squares on canvas. Now, we can all admit that when it comes to paint, Dadaists have long since covered all of the possibilities in the the general sense of style. You name it, they did it.
So with nothing new under the sun, many elitists feel compelled to tout art based on its complete lack of creativity, spontaneity or anything else that might be unique to the artist even if it is in a familiar style. Thus in the critique world, it is no longer about art but about how in-your-face someone can be in declaring paintings with a total lack of creativity to be works of art genius. It's performance art where the top artists do nothing except take bows for having failed to offer even a hint of an actual performance.
Thus I have finally distilled the essence of success in art: Start by acknowledging that, stylistically speaking, everything has already been done. You cannot invent a style. You CAN express your own inner creativity in any style you choose, but the trend in art critique circles today is to dismiss all such efforts.
Acknowledge the realities - Then.... give up.
Being good or doing something that expresses YOUR creative impulses will likely get you nowhere. For example, every abstract expressionist has his/her own ideas and style for spreading paint on canvas so even if their works are "Pollock-like" in a generic sense, they are still unique to the artist. This is not sufficient for today's art critics (generally).
To be a genius in the art world, you just need to have the brass balls to put a dot on a canvas and call it "God Speaks To Abraham" or whatever. Or, paint a square and call it a bouquet of flowers. Or paint nothing on the canvas and call it "Seascape." Then sell it with a straight face: Demand recognition of your incredible genius.. maybe drink heavily on top of that, just for dramatic effect. Dismiss obvious comparisons to the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes as the babbling of mental midgets. Piss on another artist's work and get arrested. Be seen at power parties. And above all, avoid creative thinking like the plague.
That's all there is to it - at least when it comes to pleasing the art eggheads. You can express the formula for critical acclaim thus: Doing nothing + being a piece of shit as a human being + vaporware marketing = art success
Creative people have a harder time doing this than used car salesmen, so it is better if you are not actually an artist. After all, if you have creative impulses, you'll be tempted to let your Id flow - and that will doom you to be dismissed as "just another ___/wannabe..." fill in the blank.
Or ... you can give up - in a different way.
Here is where I am at: I've worked extensively in impressionism and photo-realism, cartoon art and caricatures. My realistic bird paintings and dramatic impressionist landscapes of the past have won many awards (and sold many paintings and prints). I spend more time than I'd like on what I call RETAIL ART; things that the masses will buy such as cartoons, caricatures, and landscape paintings. You can make a living at this. I do.
However I also know that my creative juices flow most freely when I delve into pure abstraction. It is what makes me happy. When I'm doing nothing but retail art, I feel stifled, imprisoned and handcuffed. So in order to save what's left of my sanity, I spend more and more time letting my subconscious pour itself out onto canvas in the form of abstract expressionist paintings.
So I will be happy - and the art world isn't going to care.
Wow. Very interesting read. I appreciate an artist fully expressing their feelings. It's rear. I was thinking, you can invent a new style but it would rely on brand new technology. For example, Jackson Pollock, latex paint really helped him express himself. Today we have computers and digital what not, but I wonder if there is a new medium of paint that will come. For example, living paint, it changes forms and shapes on the canvas over time. I made that up, but you know what I mean? By the way, I am an artist, I have a few websites, care to exchange links?
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