Public Editor: Art opinion piece

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

By Mike Bressler

Matthew Irwin’s opinion piece about a panel on art censorship was missing an opinion. He wrote that before considering censorship, we need to determine what constitutes art, and then he boldly refused to say what did constitute art.
The term “art” has been used to describe everything from a bull ride, to mountaineering. However if a word can mean anything, it means nothing.

Ayn Rand defined art as “a selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgements.” Rand was egotistical, however she was also smart.

In America, art censorship is really a non-issue. Some artists believe that if a gallery refuses their work because it’s too controversial, it is censorship, when in fact a private gallery can hang pretty much anything it wants without state interference.

In Jackson, everyone from local gallery owners to The Conservation Alliance has removed art from shows for political reasons. But no one has ever denied the artist’s right to hang his work at any venue that will accept it. It’s ironic that when kings and popes ruled by divine right, when midwifes were burned at the stake for being witches, when Catholics and Protestants took a break from butchering each other to kill Jews, gypsies and anyone else not living according to Jesus’ words of love and compassion, Renaissance artists dazzled the world with paintings that have not been equaled for 500 years.

Of greater danger than censorship is today’s need for an artist to “make a name for himself,” to “become established” in the art world. In local galleries, the price of a painting is often determined not by the content of the painting, but by the name in the corner. The most expensive painting ever sold (around $140 million) was No. 5 by Wyoming born Jackson Pollock. Basically it is a bunch of brown and yellow paint drizzled on a piece of fiber board. Andy Warhol’s Eight Elvises sold for around $100 million. I don’t think a house painters canvas drop cloth would fetch the same price as Pollock’s painting, but if one removes the name in the corner, what is the difference?

Whoever views a piece of art does so through his eyes only. The artist is gone; the work must stand on its own. Local galleries are full of paintings produced to match the decor of the second (or 10th) home owned by insurance firm CEOs needing to spend their latest bonus. Tragically, the bolder work of local artists tends to be self-indulgent, controversial for the sake of controversy, outrageousness posing as originality, as though the viewer needs to be beat over the head. JHW


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Public Editor: Art opinion piece | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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