Zone of Self-Awareness
The Pacific Pistol
“Man has, since the Enlightenment, dealt with things he should have ignored.” -Tarkovsky
“It's okay to be insufferable as long as you're aware that you're being insufferable”
- Jessica Knoll
Art is an asset, and it suffers the consequences of being so. An asset, already excluded from a true democratic appeal to a prospective audience, exists as a function of ownership and can be bereft from the necessitation of quality. Whereas goods and services, in most cases, are experienced entirely democratically by the public and are judged on varying indicators, either qualitatively or quantitatively. Is this widget better than this other widget? A house, as an asset, can be a poor house. Perhaps it has no running water, the roof needs replacing, there is a mold outbreak, or it is in complete disrepair. Yet the house still maintains value regardless of its lack of ability to function as a house in any exemplary qualitative sense. It exists on land that has value (in many cases more so than the structure). Land is a "good" that is irreplicable and inelastic (a similar principle to the authentication of artworks). A house can have no obvious qualities of "house-ness" yet will assert itself as valuable because laws of an inelastic good deem it so (this argument requires a bit of an asterisk due to the fact that a house is also made up of a conglomeration of goods and services that add to its value, but are held separate from the house's intrinsic "asset-ness"). Its appeal to value is based in its self referential nature of being an asset as well as its inseparable nature from the idea of ownership. An asset is a thing that has value, is finite, and is owned. The former being derived from the latter two. It's inelasticity and ability to be owned define its value far more than an appeal to functional quality. Plainly, and most obviously, if a house/land was elastically consumable, we'd have stopped selling them a long time ago.
On the other hand, if a carpenter is hired to fix the house, their value is judged solely on the qualitative outcome of their effort. Whereas an asset's ownership is eternal, the carpenter's services are consumed and their purchased time is borrowed rather than owned. Without eternal ownership, there necessitates a democratic assessment of what a good carpenter versus a bad carpenter looks like based off of the collective experience of people hiring carpenters. Assessing whose time is worth consuming and paying for.
Whereas the "eternal ownership" of something exists in some mathematical limit between 0 and infinite (a measure of the price paid and the assets current value), the limit for consuming a good exists between negative infinite and 0 (a measure of the cost incurred without owning anything in turn). Therefore this makes consuming goods infinitely riskier, cementing the imperative of quality in their exchange. Carpenters can be measured in different ways, but, because of this imperative, a bad carpenter rendering a poor service can be identified and described without the imposition of asset-based market consideration and market language. A good or bad carpenter is described, by necessity, in the language of carpentry.
Although the quality of a good or service can be assessed outside the confines of a marketplace, When asserting the quality of an asset one must lean heavily, if not solely, on the marketplace, its sentiment, and language. Movies and books are not defined by their inelasticity or ability to be owned as an asset. They are consumed without an expectation to "own" their form. Oppositely, ownership is the operating function of fine art. Ownership is the final form. The artwork exists in a marketplace of inelastic ownership, reliant on the demeanor of this marketplace as an appeal to its value. In purchasing a book, movie, music, or other consumable pieces of culture, our financial risk is already infinite, so its appeal to quality is its only true appeal to value. The filmmaker, author, and musician, existing in a marketplace of elastic consumption and infinite risk, can't leverage the marketplace as an assertion of value (yet**).
Each movie-goer loses their principle sum at the ticket counter and the risk then becomes one's own pleasure. The film is equitable to its audience. Lack of a financial incentive enables democratic, agreeable, and actionable assertions of quality and value, which promotes a communal cultural consciousness and understanding. The film's underlying quality is then measured by consensus. It is able to engage multiplicatively: creating languages to help us better assess quality without appealing to a market authority and the authority of ownership. However, The visual artist's work, often stuck in its own self reference as an asset, is bereaved from the greater consensus-based discourse that may come to assert consensual quality and value. This only encourages the hyper-individual nature of the visual arts that encourages competitiveness and dug-in-heels to protect itself as a perceived finite, inelastic resource. This leads us ultimately to a place where there exists, for films, books, and music, a consensus of ideas and language to assert whether a book or movie is variably "good" or "bad", but the only consensus that asserts whether a work of art is good or bad becomes the market's.
Because of its more equitable market, the consensus of a book mimics a democratic election. The author's success or failure is contingent on the averaged enjoyment of many. Because of its exclusive market, the consensus of art mimics a feudal regime. The artist's success is contingent on ownership and perceived scarcity.
Very sexy lead-in.
how many artists do we know that keep their process under lock and key?
For the collectors reading this: purchasing a movie ticket or a book is like a collateralized debt obligation full of pleasure loans of various characteristics. there's acting loans, screenplay loans, style loans. The return of pleasure(ROP) is the weighted average of each discreet loan.
You're likely not to have learned anything new, but if I'm lucky, maybe you read it anyway.
This argument deserves to be, and probably already is, a 20 page paper. I'm just trying to make a logical progression. I'm not an economist. maybe it's a very basic concept.
I am currently house shopping and differences of price seem to ubiquitously come down to some sort of soup of marketplace indicators and factors rather than the underlying house. not that market indicators are superfluous or without reason. Merely detached and abstracted from the thing at hand, which for art is, let's say...Pablo-matic
The more i think on it, the more apparent it is that the most important aspect of my work right now is its relationship to content. Our generation, and our current cultural era seems to be defined not necessarily by the content itself, but that everything that is being made is created within a meta knowledge of the thing at hand. For instance, many of the films released recently that I have enjoyed are shot, edited, and told at breakneck speeds that demand a highly media-literate audience. The amount of cuts and the variety of imagery within those cuts are often designed for an audience that is used to perceiving things at incredibly high speeds. The audience did not attain this ability through a "naturally occurring" lived experience. It has been trained through an exhaustively intimate relationship with images and video; gaining the ability to read them fluently as if they were merely complex hieroglyphics. whereas a postmodernist would be overtly ironic towards a world full of content, there is a growing cohort of artist trying to operate sincerely within the reality of such of a world. These artists try to use this meta knowledge to their advantage as a way to reflect a more honest experience of the world. Most recently, I think "The Substance" fits in this category whose number of homages (ranging from Cronenberg to Kubrick) are in such high numbers that they no longer feel like homages. Instead, they feel as if they come from a worldview where film is as extent, corporeal, and worthy of narrative as any other story to tell or images to be inspired by.
I believe that the amount of information and how it is disseminated in today's world plays a large role. Access to masters of craft, how-to-guides, and quality resources has never been so ubiquitous. If someone wanted to learn to be a cinematographer, no longer does it require apprenticeships, trips to the library, or technical trade mags. Whether through YouTube, Masterclass, SkillShare, behind-the-scenes videos, Criterion interviews, or a litany of other resources all ready at the click of a button, an aspiring cinematographer can instantly have access to hyper-specific knowledge from any number of people knowledgeable in the craft. This echoes the last point about the homages in The Substance. Baked into all of this readily available knowledge is an infinite number of tastes and influences colliding like split atoms. It colors the world, for this aspiring cinematographer, as much through the opinions of cinema experts as it does through a human simply experiencing the world as it is. How could they then not begin to see everything as a reference to another when the reference is just as available to them as the initial thing?
It's not uncommon to hear much about the lack of innovation of art (see previous post). I've even heard the opinion that all the great art was created in the previous century and that great art is not being made today. I have come to an opinion that reads similarly, but it couldn't be more diametrically opposed in meaning: rather than no more great art, there are no more (or vastly fewer) great artists. People today are the fastest and strongest that have ever lived, the top levels our education are the most rigorous and complicated they have ever been, and we continue to discover more about the world, so why would we presume that our artists are not equally as good if not better than generations prior? I think one reason is that, like porn-addicts, we have consumed so rabidly that our tastes have become distended to the far reaches of cultural fetishism, if not entirely fried. Equally so, another reason is that the myth of artist as inventor needs eroding.
Tarkovsky has a great analogy against the idea that art is a matter of "innovation." He says that science is rigid and square, so it can be built upon itself like a staircase. Art is whole and spherical. Beginning and ending with the artist themself. Spheres cannot be stacked upwards or used for building, they must be appreciated as they are.
The artists who seem to be heralded as innovators seem to have been lucky enough to place their spherical game piece on the board before it was taken creating the sense of an innovated work (not to take anything away from the many brilliant artists that have come before). The gameboard is full now, so what is there to do? That is why, rather than proposing a lack of great work, it seems more likely that there are no more great artists. Every spot has likely been taken. (This seems to be evident in our reliance on identity now that if something can not be innovated, in a formal sense, perhaps its creator's cultural perspective changes the meaning).
In another metaphor, someone cannot invent, for a second time, the combustion engine. Once it enters the collective conscious, it can only be iterated on. This does not make the electric engine, any less of an invention because of this fact. In the same way that the artworld cannot innovate, for example, through deskilling anymore. the idea of deskilling can only be iterated on and reapplied else where, likely to diminishing returns. Regardless of the statuses of the artists and how lauded some may or may not become in this millenia, I believe the work itself that is being made today is some of the best work ever created (if it's on a good day that i can come to appreciate it).
"post modern"
*eye-roll*
I'm now a porn addict in your mind's eye.
It seems that all of the easy problems have been solved, and now we are stuck with the difficult ones. or for artists, smaller and smaller infinitely divisible fractal spaces to insert your voice into history.
My little sister and I are 9 years apart. When she was around six or seven, and coming into her personality, she was too snarky and clever for her own good. She had great accuracy in knowing the buttons to press to get a reaction from someone, and as soon as anyone showed a sign of reacting, she would immediately say, "I'm only a six year old, I don't know any better!" This would typically win mom to her side. I'd get frustrated because I could never articulate why it's an inappropriate defense. How could she both benefit from her naivety, yet have an awareness and consciousness beyond it? How does she know she doesn't know any better? In a spirited sense, I have become to feel similarly towards painting and the issue of codification.
One would think that knowing a six year old ought not to poke and prod should supersede one being six years old. One can not claim one's own innocence by way of ignorance through being knowledgeable and aware of all the things they are ignorant of! The paradox of a murderer forming a plan and winning an insanity plea. Is strategy not for the sane? There is a membrane that separates fact from truth. In regard's to painting, the same seems to be true. That to be something does not always mean to be truly of it. My sister acknowledging she is six and the expectations of how one should act at that age is no different than, say, an artist claiming to be an abstract painter while knowing all of the baked in symbology, history and codes associate with different styles of mark making. The painter can plead they are an abstractionist no more than my sister can plead that "she is only six". Her age cannot wholly determine her maturity, in the way that the artist's regurgitation of codes of abstraction cannot determine the success of the artist. However, the fact is she WAS six and the painter very well may be abstract, but there is a fundamental acknowledgment that these are merely facts of the matter. Perhaps, in other words, it is a performance of facts devoid of the truth.
In discerning a painter's work, this becomes an issue because of this underlying truth. It is to no fault of any one painter, and it is something I find myself equally guilty. I attribute it to a crisis of information. How can an artist preserve the truth of their endeavor when making work in the wake of language, technique, symbol, and narrative that has already come before and is ever present today. Work, if not moored in context by the artist, is drowned in associations. How can a painter redefine painting in their own image without having to refer to previous tenets of painting? Painting, of itself cannot be unmoored, even by the artist, from the acknowledgement of its history. We understand all of these eras and "-isms," but if there is nothing else yet to be understood, how can an artist not then accidentally silo themselves in an arbitrary grouping of these words or words alike these? If the pursuit of an idea is no longer at the forefront, then the rest that follows is merely a learned aesthetic choice: merely facts of the matter. I think, too, of code switching as it is understood in languages. Code switching dialect or colloquialisms between certain groups acknowledges the group more so than it does the individual. The truth of the individual exists beyond codification. Press releases recite the coded language that pertains to groups that silo the exhibiting artist in history. Desperate to place the artist in proximity to and establish ingroup knowledge of people who were lauded for being individuals.
For my work and the work I find myself appreciating the most, this idea feels imperative to its success: The self-affirmed pursuit of the outsider artist. I am not referring to the artists who live in Buschwick, are friends with other highly successful artists, are very plugged into the art world, and sometimes have BFAs and MFAs who label themselves as outsider artists. I only mean to speak of the spirit of the outsider. As with codified language, only an outsider can develop a dialect that speaks truth unto themselves without consideration of the group. The foundational structure might overlap with pre-existing language, but the outsider's intention is not compliance, which is just an occasional happenstance of their pursuit. The advent of the internet has seemed to infantilized the once perceived nobility of reference and homage(imagine if Orson Welles had streaming). In fact it is best to try to avoid names at all cost. Or else you run the risk of being a sycophant to the values of others. Names unto themselves have been codified. The outsider ought to be prescient and attentive of their lived truths regardless if they are witnessed in the broader canon. This is the outsider's personal canon of symbol. If there is not new ground in the world of ideas, then let the outsider's aesthetic decisions be informed from the conscious individual's ability to exercise their values in response to the external world. Honing one's own aesthetic intuitions. The outsider is unperturbed by kitsch or high and low art. These too are the walking corpses of someone else's ideals. The outsider's work should exist unto itself, unbothered by the myriad of associations and contexts that are ever present. However, the outsider should not avoid inspiration. The work of others is the surest and quickest way to develop an aesthetic intuition. Inspiration often reveals the truth of your cultural surroundings. For instance, in being a participant of the attention economy, how have certain artists stood out? What feels novel in the onslaught of images? How does this impact the role of painting? The outsider should be able to identify their own cultural imperatives.
To take for example, Danica Lundy's work. Her figurative paintings speak to a mind and aesthetic intuition that has been deeply honed to the point of peculiarity. Her work employs a painterly language that can only be tangentially described in historical terms. There are, in fact, elements of painterly motifs, but the work remains untainted by them. In its entirety, the work is of a uniquely individual voice. The combination of the paintings' content and technique frees itself from the shackles of a time or period, which ought to be the goal of the outsider. Her employed motifs: cars, mechanical parts, and a self-aware americana in combination with her greyish, thickly textured, illustrative painterly language do not immediately bring to mind a historical peer. It could be said that this alone makes her an outsider. "Outsider" does not describe her skill level or knowledge of art history, it merely describes an oeuvre that, without history, context, reference, or codified language, remains riveting and poignant to the lived experience of the individual. The works are ambitious celebrations of peculiarities unique to an individual rather than a conceit to place oneself in history.