A letter to painters- How to sell paintings (2820 words)

I think the idea I propose in the letter below holds a seed that could find fertile soil. I have published it in a dozen forums & Web-sites for reactions & if I found enthusiasm or support I would be willing to disseminate the idea across the Net in a way that reached a representative number of artists not succeeding in selling their work through their personal Web-sites.

It is an idea in search of a leader & if it turns out to be a good one I'm sure the appropriate leaders will present themselves precisely because they qualify in that capacity.

"Art is not purity it is purification, it is not liberty it is liberation"
CLARICE LIPECTOR

Since my parents are/were painters, we never lived in one place long & I have travelled a lot since, I think I have known more artists & artist's communities than most (by communities I mean those working in the same place & so, whether friends or bitter enemies, mingle in the same art events, share models or discuss art.)

I have also seen a more rare but delightful sight: actual art communities like one in an abandoned industrial estate taken over by painters & sculptors outside Madrid or a coal town near Leeds where artists will share anything from materials & opinions, to publication or promotion costs as well as the power to attract buyers a group of artist workshops has.

All this without mentioning the most important bit: the communal inspiration & support that eggs each member to better work. But the point of this letter is not about being better painters but about selling paintings.

This familiarity has shown me many artist stereotypes are often enough true, just as, speaking generally, one might say are of computer programmers, scientists or athletes. 

A painter’s job is a solitary one even, in a sense, when he paints a model; the painter while painting, communes more with his canvas than the other person in the room. This makes us introspective & sometimes awkward in general society. 

There are jealousies, arrogance, poor work ethics, backstabbing (for instance: painters who turn up at each other's openings to sneakily hand out their business cards to the other’s clients!) In fact this is so common an example, that there are times a painter is trying to charm someone else’s buyer only to discover upon offering a business card that they are both painters at the same game!

We are an unruly, eccentric & cranky lot, the only community of its sort: defined by the very fact the members are not like each other.

But having been among the first painters (at least here in Europe) to embrace the Web (I still have a copy of my first Web-site somewhere- designed in PERL which looks positively Neolithic! I also remember when I switched from handing out business cards to CDRoms with printed covers & those thick stickers for the disc we used to use; it was long enough ago that people's jaws used to drop!) Since then I have been aware of an evolution in this particular sector of the Web which I think is reaching an important turning point.

Let’s define ‘sector’ to start, I am not talking of the boon the Internet has been for big auction houses selling expensive Renaissance or Impressionist work, nor either of the aid to established brick-and-mortar galleries Web-sites & Web-promotion, has been for them; Nor even the many virtual galleries & agents that exploit the medium but rather the rest of the pyramid, the large base made up of painters themselves through whose Web-sites so few paintings sell.

Let us also be honest about our Internet presence, of all the interaction between us which I’m about to talk about, & despite a number of the starry-eyed in search of applause or the few among us with dreams of immortal fame, we are all on the Net for one & the same reason: to sell our product.

There are plenty of stereotypically bitter painters who moan about their misunderstood & underappreciated genius, but it is a far more common & simple feeling the majority of painters share: They feel they are involved in a vocation with an extremely long learning arc to reach maturity, at which they work with discipline but are still not remunerated.

Attempts at Internet art sales by painters is not a very with-it or Web-fashionable corner of the Internet, without mentioning one that generates little money. And since actual direct sales of paintings to clients who find them through our personal Sites are still rare, most painters’ Sites haven’t become sophisticated enough in design or 'findabilty' to compare to the slick sector of say, real estate sales which generates a great deal of money & has multiplied its number of potential clients compared to prior to the Web.

For those who haven’t taken the years necessary to learn to handle computers or even (like so many painter Sites out there) to understand the Internet well enough to know what they need to make their own Site, attractive, navigable, Internet-fashionable & ‘findable’ through search engine query (have you ever noticed, for instance, how many artists Sites are called ‘Home’?! Or how many size their thumbnails by width instead of height? Or use maddening horizontal scroll bars? Or 6 types of Font? Or even many successful Sites that sell workshops or how-to-paint videos that have no focal point- somehow these same artists who spend their lives designing beautiful compositions forget it is important for their screen presence also…

Or understand nothing of the psychology of colour? (specific to the Web & evolving constantly). No keywords, no text content- how in the world can the Google God decide if these Sites are relevant to searches looking for paintings?)

For those painters who are Internet-innocents, instead of buying ready-made formats or using cheesy ones that oblige you to exhibit their advertising, or exist under an umbrella which is what the umbrella Site’s owners really promote instead of your being able to promote your Site independently (just as restaurants get free decorating in exchange of painters who hope to sell to their diners)- Or paying a Web-designer more accustomed to doing small-business designs, we can share Web-site templates from a central Site where any member can contribute his input (creating a pool of more options, not choices between each other's ideas) designed by ourselves for free. 

The templates designed by those artists who handle computers will, as a group of minds, come up with a ‘look’ that gives us creative choices computer programmers won’t think of, while also accomplishing something which many artists don’t realize is just as important: homogeneity. We are so accustomed to wanting to be original that we forget the reason the yellow pages worked so well in the past is because of their sensible organisation. Personal art Sites exist for the same reason as the Yellow Pages but our version is not even in alphabetical order!

As you all know, there are a gazillion Sites, e-mails, & ‘artist representation’ of all sorts offered whose claims to work for artists is a lie in the converse, they are opportunistic parasites who earn their living from gullible painters who think the exposure they buy will lead to sales- though it seldom actually does & artists who work day-jobs to pay for it seldom see their investment returned. In-fact, these hub Sites built ostensibly to market paintings to buyers are marketed strictly to painters themselves, & are far more likely to be visited by other painters than collectors of art.

I have been noticing over these last couple of years, however, that painters are becoming more Internet savvy & many of the early blood-sucking Sites that used to convince painters to spend money without any return have now folded. A few, however, directed by people with the business skills most painters lack (even if we did have time to run two concurrent careers: painting & selling paintings) are folding money back into the member community in order to keep growing themselves.

Prizes are juicier, competitions more frequent & submitting to them just a few clicks of a mouse instead of those expensive, tedious & inconvenient transparencies galleries required. There are now even art-hub Sites that have started offering grants. Then there are those like Saatchi’s with important connections to television & the papers where genuine introductions between galleries & artists, press & artist or collector & artist do happen.

Someone, a painter, sent out a large mailing to artists with Web-sites one of which reached me with an idea about trying to get together as a community to influence someone like Oprah Winfrey to buy a painting over the Net- or talk about it on her show (no question there are plenty of good & cheap paintings available to someone with good taste & a little money; now that I think of it: I buy paintings on the Net myself!) & how something like that could significantly influence a world of Web users to consider the idea for the first time themselves... & I thought to myself: "You're smart!"

I'm finding this new global dialogue among artists as bad in its negative aspects as those of the real world (I've seen art forums where the differences of opinion over painting could only be called 'discussions' because the members were too far from each other to actually draw blood!) but also a far bigger phenomenon- a deep sense of solidarity, courtesy, mutual support & generosity (sharing art opportunities with each other, for example) & even the sporting attitude to congratulate the winner of an exhibit one hoped to win one's self. Why? Well, I think it is because now we can. It is simply so much easier to talk to each other. 

Friendships form, painters (by definition: art lovers) find each other’s good work & take the trouble to write sincere, congratulatory & admiring notes, often, in turn, returned with warm gratitude or reciprocity of opinion; groups that share lessons or critique each other's work crop up & grow with ease. There are successful art-social-networking with lively & sustained exchange as well as serious art networks within the few big social networking Sites.

I regularly receive mail as part of automated mass mailings within these social networking Sites from other artists promoting their new work or announcing an exhibit, & I wonder: aside from pleasant ‘art talk’ between us, why are they telling me instead of promoting to the same buyers I'm looking for?

I was thinking of the death of the artist’s guild which, in one form or another, survived from the Gothic when artists were still artisans to Picasso & the First World War. There are successful art unions like the one that works for Hollywood’s film industry: good pay, good hours, sometimes working in their own studios instead of on-set & with a built-in market for their work: all the other well-paid people who work on sets. Among these painters of matte backdrops, trompe l’oeil cracks in walls, faux ancestral portraits & sculptors of Styrofoam (painted to look like stone, metal or wood) are well-trained, talented & serious artists.

The difference between them being able to form a union while the artist-at-large cannot is because the skills necessary to work on-set are quasi-measurable just as art in general was prior to cubism, but which of us today would trust another to separate the bricks* from the Freuds?

Unions, apprenticeships or guilds are not the answer for today’s anarchic painter anyway, what I see instead is simply the incipient potential for collaboration. We don’t even need the Ché to unite us, we are already united, we do most of us, belong to the same fifty Web-sites after all.

What we need to do is take all this internal dialogue among us & direct it outward to our audience: the buyer of paintings.

How do we turn the energy & effort we put into our virtual community into something that appeals to our audience? Well, that’s a silly question! Which other group of all in the world has more creative resource? We are a group of people trained to make images, among us visual artists- painters, photographers, graphic artists, comic artists, sculptors, CGI programmers, origami architects, you name it! And among them are a few who know a thing or two about computers or video & animation- together our talents should make an effort to catch the public eye & interest, easy. Who better to make whatever the endeavour- original, good looking, well-crafted, entertaining...? These are the very reasons people hire us to start with.

What about money? Yes, I admit, an effort of this sort in whichever form it took, would require some kind of cash investment somewhere along the way. But I say the founding tenet of such a theoretical society as I describe, should be that we collaborate, we volunteer our work & time but never ever make money, or ask for money, from painters. The purpose is to make money for artists, not from them; & not as agents or galleries but by influencing the buyer by being loud as a group, in a way we cannot alone… perhaps our motto should be: Only art materials makers make money from painters!

If an expense to promoting ourselves as a loose global union of artists is for example, a slick & expensive Web-site along with its promotion, the answer is easy: as a huge group with nothing more than the power of their number, instead of using our Internet time visiting art Sites to chat with other artists, we visit the Site it is our objective to see succeed. Our own presence, our number of visits, is enough to sell advertising to, for instance- art materials sellers for a friendly, symbiotic & dignified collaboration of money & creativity.

Once we make a certain amount of noise it is only a question of time before the London Times or the Village Voice pick up on the phenomenon & monies can come in the form of anything from grants to public commissions competed for within an easily accessible pool of talent.

Another present advantage to this idea is the Obama administration which might not only raise the measly $125 million spent annually on the endowment to the arts to what Holland, a country of fourteen million, spend, but also has interesting ideas about cultural outreach programs to teach the educationally underprivileged the importance of art in society & tap into the huge potential for this means of expression often practiced informally in urban centres in forms such as painting beautiful & imaginative murals on the walls of subway stations.

Committees are being formed, successful artists & big museum directors are already part of the effort but from what I can see on the Internet they have no concrete plan yet & are wide open & interested in listening to anyone with good ideas. I think an attempt by artists to represent themselves as a group, (in a way they can't do by competing with each other while trying to represent themselves individually) would perk their ears.

Over the Internet & through no greater avenue than the art-networks that already exist one might, for instance, organize a national or even international ‘mural day’ where volunteer artists are mobilized in every city possible & charged with finding permission to paint a parking lot wall or one offered by a local business owner. If their numbers were such that a large wall could be transformed overnight & this happened simultaneously around the world or at least across a nation- it would be a sensation that would earn the world’s attention & only cost each of us a day’s work.

Don’t think, please I am suggesting this as a course of action or part of a plan, I am just trying to think of examples & am succeeding so well I will restrain myself from a boring list, ehem! I only mean to suggest that if I can think of a hundred ideas & probably one of them is good, & there are a million of us out there, don’t you agree that once our efforts were synchronised we could take a greater control of our market & our perceived rôle in society?

Aside from the power our unity gave us, what would be its purpose? Again- to sell the product we so expertly fabricate. Why this instead of say: brick-and-mortar galleries? I am not saying 'instead', there's nothing wrong with a gallery or two who sell your work reliably, I am only talking of redirecting the Internet energies we expend anyway with greater efficiency & purpose.

We might try an alternative to reaching the same dozen art lovers already served by the same three serious galleries &, for example, target the large market slice who haven’t the connoisseur’s money or the faith in their own judgement to search out & buy from unknowns on the Net but do, never-the-less each spend on, & hang, a certain number of framed things on their walls all the same.

As the peacock said: What do we have to lose but our feathers?

footnote:

You remember the bricks, right? Bought by the Tate for half a million if I remember correctly, & were delivered to the museum in a crate with a single sheet of instructions how to pile them on the floor. Return

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Wednesday February 26th, 2009

Why do people talk? (2150 words)

The more I think about why people talk to one another the more I realize there are more than the plainly obvious reasons & I am not talking of obscure questions of linguistics or how language affects culture, & by that I mean- the sounds & the structures of language are not only expressions of our thoughts but also direct, to a certain extent, how we think, what we think about, what makes us laugh… i.e. our cultural concepts of reality.

Neither am I talking of the complex & still little understood, mechanisms of the language centre of the brain & its, in turn, complex relationship to the rest of the neural network; I am simply referring to: Communication- why?

There are many types of communication aside from speech; from ants exchanging simple chemicals by rubbing antennae in order to tell each other how to find, or avoid, something far away, to writing; which as a form of language has certain requirements for expressing thoughts effectively, that spoken language does not, since it is a symbol of a symbol- speech symbolizes thought & writing symbolizes speech.

The most obvious reason for talking to each other is no more mysterious than what the ant does: Individuals communicate with each other in order to be able to cooperate within the group in an endeavour the individual is not equipped for alone.

But when I see two friends who meet in the street & spend five minutes talking earnestly about the same weather they are both experiencing as if the other hadn’t noticed, I'm guessing there is another reason besides the transfer of information from one mind to another.

However, the explanation for this behaviour is also obvious; at this level of the taxonomy we leave the ants in the dust & reach the level of dogs smelling each other’s unmentionables as a social lubricant. What the friends who comment on the shared experience of the climate in real time are actually saying to each other is: We don’t need to engage on any deeper level beyond reassuring each other he is accepted & perhaps even liked.

I think the majority of communication takes this form, a framework where the content is less important than the socialising aspect of making friendly noises.

We communicate also in order to seduce, convince, exploit, to support another emotionally or intellectually (as with a difficult decision) by sharing thoughts or feelings in noises we have, by loose agreement, decided symbolise certain thoughts & feelings, (i.e. words)

We betray a mutual friend by gossiping about him as if the person with whom we gossiped were the only one that mattered though getting caught can sometimes reveal the opposite (that in fact we gossiped not to dialogue but to bond with our conspirator or even just use him to vent (process) feelings we don't want to share with the subject of the gossip).

We can join one another in recalling shared memories with words, for the enjoyment of vicariously reliving them, the other person’s presence making the memories more real & recalling them together, more exciting.

The other might even offer details missing in our own reconsolidated version which please or irritate us with newly present parts of our own forgotten past; like the presentation of a missing piece of our favourite puzzle: that of our own experience.

We might talk to each other also to let the other know something about ourselves or to find out something about him in order to decide, for instance, if he qualifies as friend or even just if he is to be trusted, in other words: to find out if his moral infrastructure is similar to your own.

What other reasons are there? Well, aside from convincing, there is also debate which varies from argument or an attempt to convince, in being a mutual search for truth. But though there are rules that make debate a good medium for resolution of disaccord, few learn them & as vague as most people’s ideas on the subject are, many have firm opinions of what is allowed in a debate though they differ from one another. Including at times even offering the debate within a debate of whether or not there is need to accept logic among a debate’s tenets instead of say, intuition. They forget Socrates’ (who basically knew everything) “An unexamined life is not worth living” preferring lazy hunches to the effort of objective analysis, reflection & introspection.

Often what begins with debate as a form of communication ends as a manifestation of the emotion generated by being disagreed with, & the debate degrades rapidly to insisting with greater & greater emphasis on each's own opinion, or even in personal attack, like deer locking horns; thus hurting a relationship untouched by the actual subject of the disagreement.

If one moves up another step in the hierarchy of complexity of communication, two or more minds can work in tandem, increasing their ability to examine, invent or investigate; indeed, even just the verbalizing, the effort to define our own abstract thought so that another can understand it, already offers a path to clarity even without the interaction.

Many of history's great thinkers have tackled the problems of debate but whether the thinker be Indian, European or of the Americas, he always pursues an objective deeper than communication: The avoidance or resolution of conflict.

Confucian dialectics introduce a protocol in the form of speech which removes the possibility that either member of the debate be humiliated at being shown wrong. The common name for Confucian dialectics is 'diplomacy' or merely 'courtesy' & is practiced to this day in a more formal way throughout Asia than the Occident.

Our European tradition is based more on Socratic dialectics where the conflict is removed through a definition of the terms used to assert the speaker's thoughts. Once each term used to describe a complex cogitation is defined to mutual satisfaction, often, the original conflict simply turns to smoke & floats away. This implies conflict is based more on misunderstanding than disagreement.

For those who have been able to find at least one other with whom to practice this method which can seem at first, an exercise in tedium, becomes interesting to start with upon realizing how many even commonly-used words have slight changes in definition between speakers. If one continues, he might even find that Plato was right: Gnosis is not within us, but around us, & two people, each ignorant of the answer he seeks, can by the simple means of dialogue with reciprocal definition of terms, pluck knowledge from the very air around them.

But there is another use for communication that seemed strangely rare to me when I stopped to think about it, its use as entertainment: Storytelling. It may only be the tunnel vision of looking into a past where I didn’t yet exist, but it seems to me the story-telling skill was more frequently honed & commonly appreciated, not so many generations ago.

A story might be made up spontaneously or practiced & refined over time. It might come from one's own experience, someone else's or fill the rôle of passing ancestral knowledge from one's mother to his children. It might even aid the digestion over a Cognac of a heavy meal. The main difference between it & passing information from one mind to another is artifice- the trouble to create an edifice into which you invite your listener, furnish it to make it a comfortable place to be, decorate it to make it beautiful & light it just-so in order to guide & focus your guest's eye.

When I think of the pleasure of being the audience to a story-teller I think of being given a cage which I am then allowed to fill with small songbirds of whatever colour I want. The story-teller takes over my concept of reality to replace it with his own description. With the added bonus of having to imagine the smells, tastes & colours for myself, because his words guide me but the images are my own & therefore, by definition: the best.

A writer can also have this effect on his reader, he can make him live an experience the reader hasn’t actually had but his task is more difficult because the story-teller has the advantage of the rhytmn, the pause, the theatrical gesticulation, the smile, the emphasis, the nuanced intonation & the subliminal flicker of an eye, or movement of a brow, that can be enough to point out irony or sadness.

The raconteur instead of his listener, feels the pleasures of evincing empathy & moving the listener to emotional response, suspense or laughter with his words. A well-told story becomes a part of its listener's memories more akin to those of his own experience than attestation.

If I hear Alistair Cooke's BBC accent, the many 'Letters from America' I heard him read over the World Service in distant places far from my language or culture, I am flooded with warm sensations of 'home' however abstract the concept. And if I listen to Garrison Keilor I am suffused by the American sense of charm his storytelling has because it also seems to belong to the independent republic of Me, My culture, My experience... good story-tellers.

On the other hand there is nothing more boring than a story-teller who lacks dramatic emphasis or the ability to judge which details are necessary to fill in the background the listener needs to make images-- to be carried away-- instead of having to pause his experience to stop & ask himself questions about the missing information.

Or the opposite: using repetition as a form of emphasis or offering more detail than the listener finds relevant thereby leaving him with time left over after illustrating the story with his imagination, to think of other things. This kind of story-teller offers me a cage from which my birds escape.

So how is it that most of the world’s cultures are losing the skills to evoke, & the appreciation of being touched or transported by this medium?

I have noticed that where many English-speaking people can’t quite place my accent, other travellers like myself, whether from New Zealand or Scotland, recognize it not as an accent but a type of enunciation & syntax (a non-idiomatic use of the language) typical of people accustomed to being among others with limited common language & shared background culture.

I think this same effect is similar to that of our society, a little overwhelmed by a suddenly global community (remember how stunned you were when the prince of that gentle Buddhist country, Nepal, spoiled by his position & enraged by disappointed love, took an automatic weapon from one of the royal guard & exterminated the entire Nepalese monarchy over dinner? And how you forgot all about it two days later when the mystifying reports simply stopped?)

We have shortened our speech patterns; we speak in telegrams- not novels. We finish ill-conceived paragraphs with the phrase: "Well, you know what I mean." We use the definitions of our own vocabulary cavalierly & approximately; with time only to sketch our thoughts to each other, making acceptable- approximate & sketchy understanding.

If I tell you I lived five years on the Galapagos islands & it so happens you have too, then you need little more to envisage a whole world of experience. If, on the other hand you have not, then the rareness of my experience combined with a few fuzzy images from television documentaries of indifferent turtles & huge, ugly & foul-smelling Sea Lions lying in a heap, might impress you. But unless I describe with judicious words certain telling impressions or personal experiences my unusual background included, my five year experience will be converted in your mind to nothing more than a small two-dimensional paper cut-out.

The other influence, I think, is that unlike just a hundred years ago (& all the way back to when Neanderthals learned to throw things) the volume of information that pours into our feeble brains is already beyond what we can healthily assimilate even if we make an effort to hide from its quantity by, for example, not watching television or reading the papers.

We have evolved from a literary to a journalistic society -art to I.T., poetry to bumper sticker. We have become used to using speech as communication for the main purposes of information transfer (the ants) & superficial social caresses (the dogs) at the expense of lyricism, engagement & enchantment. What's more, we want it in packages made small & simple enough to digest along with our already gluttonous consumption of easy recyclable data.

The greater the quantity we are bombarded with- the more important it seems to us to be aware of it all & we end up preferring our stories with images ready-made on a screen, to our own.

Tuesday February 24th, 2009

Sunday February 22nd, 2009

The Painter's Eye (600 words)

I am always arguing art is not about making pictures of pretty things nor is it the artist’s job to recognize the most beautiful ‘thing’, scene or model, as subject for his painting. His job should be subtler; less obvious then recognizing the beauty of a sunset- anyone, after all, can do that. The painter’s trained eye should be able to see beauty where those who have spent a life-time looking at things as material representations of themselves might miss it.

The painter instead, should see the world as a place not made of shapes that represent themselves, but rather with questions about, & in the context of: hue, tone, colour, chroma & their relative relationships, or as parts of compositions.

Each object, whether it be a mountain or almost transparent smoke, has a particular & unique way of obstructing light that requires observation, study & experiment to understand- i.e. the way light reflects off of the subject, the way shadows wrap around it or fall from it, the absorbency its surface has for light or its density for translucence.

If he is a successful painter, by which I mean he has a well-trained eye, (the brushstrokes themselves & all the other things the painter’s hand does, is child’s play & easy to learn) he is able to convert the effort he has put into learning to observe, into a natural, spontaneous, & spontaneously evolving technique, that results in a two-dimensional representation that conveys the beauty his professional eye sought out, to the painting’s beholder.

And yet, sometimes if I, say: decide to go out to paint a landscape, I am likely to choose a time of day whose light & shadow I like & then if I wander in the country-side with an easel on my back & my paints & brushes in a bag over my shoulder, my natural instinct is to find a beautiful old tree with many human lifetimes of character, battle scars & evidence of centuries of struggle with climate, or I might choose a group of trees that from a certain angle make a nice composition (apropos the bucket-full of criteria I have that go all the way back to the lessons of Vitruvius via influences that might include anything from Japanese woodblock print & delicate Mughal temperas, to Giotto, Il Ucello & Rubens) or maybe I'll be impressed & inspired by a panorama of distant mountains topped by a dramatic cloud formation.

And it sometimes makes me pause to doubt & I have to ask myself: Even if your eye is able to find a beautiful composition those more unused to looking for them could not, aren't you still being lazy about your aesthetic theory? Looking for something beautiful, regardless of the depth of criterion, from which you can base a beautiful painting?

So sometimes I instead, head for a tree that offers my canvas shade, or stop anywhere at all at random, set up my easel & then look around. If I happen to have chosen a particularly dull spot with no obvious composition, attractive light or beautiful component, I challenge myself to use my allegedly trained eye to find the beauty to show you (the viewer of my eventual painting) while simply avoiding painting what would otherwise distract the untrained eye from its presence.

Once the brush is in the hand & the artist's mind engaged, it really doesn't matter what he paints, it's all in the process, the love of beauty, & his power to invoke it a little better each time.

Friday February 20th, 2009

I'bn al Alhí's treasure (2700 words)

The day rose rainy & you can believe me when I tell you there is no weather more disagreeable in all the world than the winter-wets of the desert on that lost & forlorn island.

We were four men, well prepared & equipped & the goat, of course.  We had camped among the dunes on a clear, cold night the day before, the same spot we were abandoned by the camel drovers who would take us no further. We slept confident the weather would hold just the few days more we needed to be the first to see the legendary ruins of I'bn al Alhí built of bricks of gold whose beauty was enhanced by painting them with a thick black lacquer imported by ship & mule all the way from Nippon.

After years of obsessive research & niggardly penury it was I who barely financed the venture though I counted more than I would have liked him to know on my right-hand man, Chûen Chïi, the man I trusted better than myself to know what to do whatever the circumstance. He had grown so remotely in the treeless high-desert of his homeland that he & his kin’s only drinking water, raised from a deep & muddy well, was slightly saline. The years of being obliged to take salt whenever he tried to quench his thirst, along with the unabating dry, cold winds, seemed to have sucked all the juice from the man; it was as if he were made of sand held together with the minimum amount of gum-arabic to keep him in one piece though not enough to stop the constant shedding of sand from his edges even just after he’d bathed. He seldom spoke but always understood what was happening around him, in whatever language, & walked in a way that let other men know he wasn’t to be fooled.

My years as academic, spending time in far-flung corners of the world but always ensconced within a similar cocoon of ancient libraries or temples, at times even learning new languages to be the first to translate the old papyri, hadn’t really prepared me for this trip but I had an adventurous nature & I knew how to learn. I read all there was on what I would need to know to survive the dangerous trip & despite my scholarly history I, like all the men there, could feel with my every cell the weight of riches that awaited us in those blackened gold bricks.

As the morning wore on the rain and wind turned the air to a thickness not just of air-filled sand as in a mere sandstorm, but wet sand, just as that that slipped & sucked at our feet whether we stood still or walked; it was very like after having been pulled to the depths of a deep patch of quicksand, one stood & went for a walk. We all worried about little Prajeet, the youngest & weakest of us & I more than any other man there, because I not only had him to worry about but also the guilt I would have to suffer if I, responsible for permitting him to come, let harm befall him. But he showed neither fear nor reproach on his features & it made me aware I had better not show any myself & be the only one of us but the goat who did.

I looked to Chïi, as always, & his eyes, as always, awaited mine & though, as always, he said nothing, I knew his raised eyebrow meant: “Don’t worry Saab, at least the nomad bandits, with their untold generations living alone in these wilds will have had time to learn not to go out in weather such as this, & so at least we no longer need worry about being attacked by them” Wonderful, I thought, he’s right! We have the advantage over them of sincere ignorance, & I readied to move forward, heartened.

Albert, the impossibly tall, hairless & rattlingly thin Australian, pulled the compass from the unfathomable folds of his mud-soaked robes & by the device of pulling loose a bit of his turban & holding the compass very close to one eye, he was able to see the needle's direction and thus keep us moving in the intentioned direction.

I told myself just as I’m sure each man there did himself: Tomorrow the storm will have passed.
No-one there doubted the madness of the venture but neither did anyone mention it as we all knew it was madder still to do nothing at all. The distance to our objective was far shorter than the two day camel ride that had brought us from town. The few supplies our goat carried, including her own meat, were barely enough to get us there & back to our appointment with the camels. I had decided to spend on the extra man instead of the wide-hoofed local donkey that might have served us better. The bags we carried strapped to our bodies were mostly empty in wait of the weight that would fill them on the way back.

There were times that though we walked on a flat or along a dune’s ridge, the air ran indistinguishably into the earth & though we took one step after another there was no way to know if we progressed a step with each footfall, or stayed in the same place as the earth slid beneath us. At other times we had to rescue our goat, beard deep in sand, bleating horribly & instead of her carrying our weight for us, the four of us, took one cloven hoof each & carried her & her load upside-down & bleating pointlessly all along.

When we had to climb a dune we decided to brace arms thus making an eight legged creature we reasoned could more easily take two steps forward for every one it slid back, rather than the other way ‘round, which is how it appeared to work for a two-legged creature. At these times we had no choice but to say: “Goat be damned! We can do no more than walk” But probably even more scared & disoriented than us, she managed somehow, to keep up with her mad herd even in the most difficult moments.

The noise of the deluge of sand-mud made it almost impossible to speak, what made it actually impossible was that no matter how we covered our faces with our turbans, our mouths & noses were irremediably filled with sand- the only sand in the world that was dry… we decided things between us with nudges & nods… without even space or time to think of the gold at the ruins of I'bn al Alhí.

We trudged along the base of a dune seven stories high in an attempt to shield ourselves from the worst of it, though we couldn’t be sure the dune’s rate of shift wasn’t pushing us off-course as it gathered around our ankles at every step.

When suddenly!: A shaft of light like a hole cut into the very fabric of reality through which shone a sun & sky as bright & unblemished as the middle week of August in Cape Cod. And I realised: “Of course, just a couple of hundred metres above us it is a nice day”  

It was then I saw them, as dramatic in silhouette against that shaft of light as the best video game. Four men, maybe six, or ten, if there wasn’t another dozen standing just the other side of the ridge out of our range of sight- indeed, though I looked straight at them & they stood as still as stones, any number I might have counted would have been a wild & irresponsible speculation. But I managed a dry & gravelly shout: "Bandits" & all eyes but the goat's turned to where I pointed.

Though the sight of them stabbed my heart with adrenaline-fear, all my animal instincts, like those of a rabbit, said: “RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY” yet there was also a sense of the security of being able to postpone fear, like after an unexpected medical diagnosis, simply because of the great distance that separated us from their height at the top of the ridge as well as the un-scalable short side of the dune that rose above & between us like the Grace building in New York.

And like the tourist I inevitably was, for a fraction of a second I actually felt the urge to take a photo, though I carried no camera.

But feeling suddenly as if I had entered a parallel universe that worked under different laws, with a sickening lurge of my innermost bowels, I & the others watched as the nomads began the physically impossible, slow but relentless walk, down that very face of running sand. Unlike when we had tried descending even a gentle slope, however, the sands did not avalanche under their feet.

As soon as they left the ridge & the shifting shaft of light, they blended with the sand-wall's shadow, their edges becoming indistinct, their number & movements, unclear.

My recent optimistic ignorance, or was it ignorant optimism? Fell away & it occurred to me that countless generations living in these circumstances would not have learned not to go out this time of year but rather how to fashion shoes & clothing that worked in it.

It was then I remembered what I had read of their weapons, short lances attached to long cords with sharpened bone tips shaped like fish-hooks that, once hooked, allowed them to pull a man about like, well: like a fish on a hook.

We none of us hesitated in pulling whatever weapon he carried, Bolele drew a small but extremely heavy ebony club as black as his own skin & he looked, reassuringly, like he had used it before. Bolele 'The Lip' as he was known by his people since they were a culture of ironic humour & Bolele had no lips. Indeed, even the sloppy slanting gash that revealed his skull's grin seemed to have an ironic curl.

I pulled a pistol I had bought in a street market in Peshawar without being entirely convinced it was up to the task of shooting the four bullets I owned. I then turned to Chïi with the wild hope he might pull out a heat-seeking missile launcher or something like that; but he stood calmly, a small hatchet of the sort used for splitting kindling hung loosely from his hand at his side. I looked to Prajeet who was the last to pull his short scimitar, knowing his religion obliged him to draw a man’s blood, even if it be his own, before he be allowed to return it to its sheath.

But before I had time to look to the last of my group, the goat, Chïi raised his arms lazily as if about to yawn & as the menacing shadows moved inexorably towards us but were still at a great distance, his hand flew forward with the thin dry strength of a farmer & the speed of a baseball pitcher. I don’t know if the man cried out. The deafening drone of rain had robbed us of the use of our hearing but he fell with inhuman speed & one imagined the sickening 'thuck' as the hatchet lodged deeply & suddenly in flesh.

They huddled indistinctly, we stood our ground, waiting, watching, a few long seconds & I cannot speak for the others but I know my mind raced, examined, analyzed, debated, considered & weighed at incredible velocity & with blinding precision & yet my body was paralyzed & no decision seemed forthcoming.

As I stared & waited I was suddenly roughly jabbed into action by Bolele’s club & I saw some of the others had already started to run, in slow motion as if knee-deep in water at the beach, or barefoot on gravel- arms flailing- away from the wall of sand & the nomads.

We all ran, but at a short distance we realised too late we ran not in the valley between dunes but along one of its ledges & a distance we could not judge for lack of visibility awaited our fall. We had no time to rethink because by the time the first, Al, the long-legged Australian, reached the edge it rapidly fell away & we all of us, with it.

I have no idea how far we travelled either in measure of distance or time, as part of that sand fall, but when we came to a stop I was under wet sand without any way to calculate if it were two metres or two thousand that covered me. I panicked, I admit it, but my body knew what to do & my arms automatically reached for the sky like a seed from under earth. I noticed with my first movement that if I crouched my head forward, then raised it, I could create a tiny pocket of air from which to take breath before it refilled with sand & I immediately calmed down. I pulled myself out of what turned out to be nearer the two metres than the two thousand & saw Chïi already digging around for the others.

Once we had all helped each other to the surface of the sand, we sat in a heap, all leaning against the other, with no less reason for fear than we had just a few minutes earlier but already more confident having shared & survived danger together.

As we lay/sit, breathing hard, we may not any of us have yet thought what to do next when a new sound, very loud & throbbing & then shrieking, like a hyena poked repeatedly with a sharp stick, forced itself on my consciousness. I sat up, we all sat up, alert as those amusing little desert animals that raise on their rear paws to be able to see danger further away.

My mind, my rational & scientific mind, filled-in the disembodied sound with wild images of dragons or Greek Succubae, or screaming hordes of nomads mounted on rhinoceroses. Someone got to his feet & started jumping up & down waving his arms, & then we were all doing it as a strange-looking vehicle with 8 oddly placed wheels, rumbling engine, screaming alarm & lights shining in all directions that cut through the murky atmosphere like lasers, drove & bounced towards us.

Upon noticing the vehicle was not a dragon: my mind back in its territory, it was able to quickly deduce- “Of course, you pratt! We are not the only group of complete imbeciles to try & do something absolutely imbecilic in this country’s dangerous country, the camel-men had told of the foolish foreigners & the locals had sent out a rescue team…”

So near to getting help I felt suddenly apprehensive, I looked back over my shoulder, but the nomads had disappeared. Had they actually been there? Had Chïi really killed one of them? Or had they been no more than shadows created by a mixture of fear & the disorienting effects of the shifting light & thick atmosphere? Or perhaps the lack of physical dimension- with no depth or breadth or height in which to orient spatially even the perception of the temporal slips from one’s objectivity…

Now perfectly safe among the mocking but friendly faces of our rescuers, I gallantly waited for the last of my team to file into the wheeled machine. Prajeet, the penultimate, stopped & turned to me with a proud smile as he cut a deep gash in his thin forearm before sheathing his knife & climbing in. I waited finally for the goat who might play an important role in the dinner upon our famished return to town, before I reached for the head-bar with my hand & stepped up to the vehicle’s floor with my foot, but it was then that I slipped & fell forward giving myself a nasty cut on the brow with the edge of the door.

And that, since you ask dear friend, is how I got this scar on my eyebrow.

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Tuesday February 17th, 2009

Associative Personality Disorder (1470 words)

The first time I light-heartedly mentioned the fact in conversation, that despite being a slave to my biology & as susceptible as the next man to the exhilarating if ill-effects on my powers of reason the subtle nuances of the unique form a particular Gluteus Maximus might have on it; I have, never-the-less, as I got older, more & more, begun to see others largely as large insects, all fussy little dangly bits at the extremities, flashing those awful & sinister visible bones used for breaking food into pieces small enough to swallow down a spongily-muscular & very internal tube… my listener backed away a step or two & calmly lit a cigarette, though his hand trembled, & he explained to me what ‘dissociative personality disorder’ meant… & I decided it was probably best not to mention the voices...

Before I scare you off the rest of this essay by convincing you my mind is actually & dangerously unstable, rather than just, uhmnn: different, yeah, yeah, that’s it… different! I do exaggerate a basic truth in an attempt to be amusing.

But allow me to share a little recently learned background information before getting to my thesis. There is a tiny part of the brain which, through the study of people who suffer cerebral lesions or tumours, or those lesions or tumours induced by us in animals not strong or smart enough to stop us (like lab rats & monkeys), is in charge of the mind’s understanding-- it & the body-- belong to one another. In the absence of the communication between this part of the neural network & the rest of the body not only can the sufferer look on dispassionately as one of his limbs is amputated but actually, in a real way, will not be able to rationally recognize his body as part of himself.

A fascinating (if not entirely conclusive) study was done to try & objectify testimony of personal paranormal experience through neuroscience, which is increasingly turning psychology from a soft science to a hard one by succeeding in ‘seeing’ with new precision, the biology of thought. The big advance has been in magnetoelectroencephlography where almost, but evidently not immeasurably small, blood movements bringing oxygen to the neurons called upon for the task, can be followed on a three-dimensional construct of the brain on a computer screen. Very like the science fiction of not-so-long ago.

In brief summary -1: The paranormal experiences referred to might be any, from a divine vision (like those experienced by the prophets of most religions) to the ‘light tunnel’ described by so many who have near-death experience, to those damned cosmic aliens that always turn up when one turns the lights off… or don’t they visit you too? Actually I was only joking, I do not have any problem with cosmic aliens at all, I just leave the lights on all the time.

The subject (one of 900) was placed in a near sensory-deprivation chamber & his temporal lobes tickled by electromagnetic energy of a precise wavelength to test the premise that “…when the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a sensed presence”

Resulting in: “…different subjects labelling these ghostly perceptions with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations - describing the presence as one's grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell of something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story”

According to Dr Persinger, responsible for the study, this tiny, faulty process between our cerebral hemispheres is the reason for both external & internal versions of the same sensation, externally it might be a vision of God or an angel, while internally it might be a past-life sensation or awareness of one’s own soul.

“…but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism, pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums …many things that we hold to be unique aspects of the "self" are reduced to mere tics of cranial function. Take laughter. According to Vilayanur Ramachandran, professor of neuroscience at UC San Diego, laughter is just the brain's way of signalling that a fearful circumstance is not really so worrisome …he posited that the classic banana-peel pratfall is funny only when the victim gets up, and that we laugh to alert other members of our kin that, 'Look, there has been a false alarm here; don't waste your resources rushing to help.'" He calls laughter "Nature's OK signal."

Which, it seems to me, could be why we feel those who laugh too little are untrustworthy- perhaps some part of our brain is whispering to us: "He isn't of those that go to the trouble of warning those close to him"

“In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, argued that the brain activity of ancient people - those living roughly 3,500 years ago, prior to early evidence of consciousness such as logic, reason, and ethics - would have resembled that of modern schizophrenics. Jaynes maintained that, like schizophrenics, the ancients heard voices, summoned up visions, and lacked the sense of metaphor and individual identity that characterizes a more advanced mind.”

PCP (phenylcyclohexylpiperidine) known to the Hip (like James Brown) as Angel Dust (Man!). And yes, I have tried it; why? You ask? Well, I suppose it couldn’t have been other than a combination of youth, ‘when in Rome…’ & the reason the mountain-climber scaled the mountain.

This drug, whose effects on the human mind are particularly horrifying, were developed by- surprise, surprise- chemists working for the U.S. military. But not, as one might suppose, to create raging & fearless, assassin-soldiers (which might have worked) but instead as an alternative to Morphine or anaesthetic to help the wounded soldier, on the field or under the knife, after WWII.

The idea was that instead of anaesthetising the nerves that otherwise clamoured for attention with screaming pain, PCP introduced intravenously, would affect the wounded with cognitive dissociation from the body that made its pain irrelevant to a mind that would otherwise take it very seriously.

They eventually stopped using it for this purpose & listed it as a ‘schedule II’ illegal substance because they noticed their patients became irrevocably insane when it was administered to them.

If not only our pain is not actually our own but even the body that feels it is ours only by tacit if aleatory, chemical agreement, & if cognitive metaphor is not a function of linguistics but of thought- i.e. we don’t create metaphors with words because we have words to play with & happen to have poetic natures, but rather because we think metaphorically & consequently find words to express such basic abstract thought as: ‘Life is a walk first uphill, then: down” or “She was as beautiful as a slice of the Moon” -2 . It points to our fundamental propensity for the creation of the reality we live in rather than its objective experimentation- that reality is the mind's construct rather than the converse.

Then the question naturally occurs: If it be just a tiny bundle of cells, a nearly insignificant amount in comparison to the whole being, that is solely responsible for each individual's ability to recognize himself as such- an individual, then, in the end, it is really only a question of scale innit?!

If it weren’t for our subjective point of view as creatures of a size a pile of ten trillion cells makes, & we were, instead, of a size small enough to see molecules, well, a creature that size would not be able to recognize one our size as a discreet form. So if we are in fact just swirling masses of atoms, each made of far more space than matter, who’s only distinguishing factor in the context of making up a part of us is a closer proximity to one another than those that surround our fuzzy edges, the question becomes not how can a mind lose its association with the body but why, indeed, is there any association to begin with?

footnotes:

1-For a full (4400 word) report by Jack Hitt, the reporter/subject quoted in my God Blog & above, go here- This is your brain on God -Return

2- A personal favourite from the Old Persian tales. (The sentence forms a simile but ‘slice of the Moon’ is metaphorical) Return

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Monday February 16th, 2009

Love poems, death poems (600 words)

Love

I can nail my left hand to love’s cross by myself
but I will need your help Dearest,
with the right.

I sincerely don't know if this was inspired by something I read, is something I actually read, or is entirely original! It just came to me; inspiration? Or inadvertent plagiarism?! If anyone has an attribution please let me know...

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We occidentals can know nothing of the poetry of haikú which belongs as exclusively to Japanese language & culture as Shakespeare does to English, Dante to Italian, Cervantes to Spanish & I suspect, even more so. But yet, I find them sometimes so incisive they manage to transcend meagre translation:

SUANAO's death Haikú-

Spitting blood
clears up reality
and dream alike.

It was said of Basho's widely acclaimed poem (18thC) below: the poet sought: "...a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own very nature, destined to perish." Benjamin Moser comments: "It is as difficult to achieve a simplicity of this kind as it is to build a great cathedral, a simplicity all the more elegant for its apparent denial of its own difficulty. ...concreteness & simplicity, rather than intricacy & elaboration, were the highest values of this [Buddhist] culture"

Kind of makes you want to learn Japanese, hu?!

I've read Shakespeare in both English & Spanish, as well as Cervantes; & Dante in both Italian & English, & I'm convinced if any of the three wrote the same way in a tongue other than their own, none would be remembered today (Shakespeare in Spanish is particularly atrocious! Indeed, worse: without the Elizabethan stress & lilt his work goes from extraordinary to something worse than bad: ordinary)

BASHO's Haikú-

The old pond, ah!
A frog jumps in:
The water's sound!

Below, two poems that belong somewhere in the collective memory of all English speakers- the first written by that American poetess so sensitive, so discreet, so courteous, she makes it feel instead like a poem of love... note how the last line of the last stanza rhymes only with last line of the first- 'immortality & eternity' (with her customary 'civility' in between!) & to me she seems to ask: do both exist? Or only one?

I disagree with the common reading that her declaration about a century (after her death) feeling shorter than a day (prior to her death) shows her calm acceptance of a better life after death but rather it was the labour & leisure she put aside that made the days so interesting they seemed longer than centuries. The long day referred to in particular is, after all, that when she first surmises eternity, not immortality.

And for a clearly less 'biblical' reading try this little gem also by Emily- Truth & beauty- which, I would say is metaphorical rather than allegorical; if the thoughts of this solitary person who dedicated her life to the twin pursuits of the science of horticulture & the art of poetry, turned to truth & beauty, don't you think her musings have their seeds in her own experience rather than simple conceptual thought? Your thoughts?

The second, by Robert Frost, was memorised by whole generations of children & embodies the deceptively simple but powerful vocabulary & structure typical of American writers from Twain to Runyon to Hemmingway or, most surprising of all: Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), whose verse's enormous power to ignite & delight the imagination, though it appear almost spontaneous-whimsical nonsense, is actually based on a metre so complex I couldn't understand it when I attempted its study!

You might be as surprised as I was to realize Frost died (very old it's true) the year I was born & he wrote the musings on death below, at about my age now but in 1922.

Because I could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

EMILY DICKINSON

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. ROBERT FROST

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Thursday February 12th, 2009

The Golem (550 words)

In questions of philosophy & psychology the strangely, morally obscure, tales of the Talmud are enormously polemical as well as just plain damned-good story telling in the vein of their still polytheistic Arab brothers of the same epoch. As theological tracts they are sometimes wise, sometimes perplexing, sometimes cruel but always unforgiving.

As the infidel famously said about the Old Testament: “I have read it from cover to cover but cannot find any religion in it.”

For instance, for the book of Job, I can see Sean Penn in a Fedora as the devil. Staged in a film-noir contemporary NYC, turning his earnest face into a sardonic smile as he watches Rowan Atkinson (as God) doddering off to the task he just tricked him into: committing a sin far worse than the devil's own by provoking Him to it- the senseless & cruel torture of Job’s tribe, slaves, animals & even neighbours (fooled themselves to sin by the betrayal of Job in the belief he must hide some evil malfeasance for a Just God to treat him so). And all for the sole purpose of winning a bet- proving a moral point to someone whose opinion should not matter to him- the devil, involving him in the further sin which, ironically, was Lucifer's own original cardinal sin- that of pride.

But I like the Golem who appears in various forms since his Talmudic origins. In one, he turns from protecting his maker to do him violence wakened to his own will by love. In another it has the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel creating the Golem of clay in order to use him to defend his people from the Holy Roman Empire’s Rudolph II who, in the 16th century, threatened to exile or kill all the Jewish people living in Prague. In this case the Golem does not turn on its maker but since Rabbi Loew had animated him by writing the word ‘truth’ or 'reality' ( -Emet) on his forehead; when the Emperor promises to desist from his anti-Semitic threats if the rabbi will stop the soulless beast, Loew erases the first letter ( -aleph) from Golem’s forehead turning Emet to Met ( -Dead) thereby deactivating it. In this case Golem, turned inanimate, falls on his creator crushing him to death.

I see the story describing the use of power for self-interest as an act one must pay a price for after; but metaphorically I see the Golem personifying guilt & in this sense, Jewish wisdom. If one uses one’s own Golem, his power, in the form of say, physical strength to exploit someone weaker, that power turns on its owner in the form of guilt which makes the Golem’s master learn not to animate new ones.

You might argue: “But it is the Christians who understand guilt, what of original sin, after all?” And I would have to disagree; the Christian doesn’t understand guilt like the Jew. No person can be convinced in a real way he committed a sin he wasn’t actually present for & more importantly: where there is a loving father ready to forgive, a mea culpa beaten with fist or stone (like St Jerome) into a Christian chest becomes an ennobling act rather than one of contrition.

Tuesday February 11th, 2009

Elitist/Popular Art (1740 words)

I saw a series of short interviews where people taken from a cross section of society were asked the single question: What is art? Even I who have studied the question, informed myself of other's opinions, considered it over a life-time & even shown the hubris to write thousands of words on the subject- would be hard-put for a short, concise answer.

I observed, however, that among the mostly, conceptually-clueless answers people gave, there was a general sense of sincerity & passion- as if despite their lack of criterion they all agreed it mattered for some reason they couldn’t quite put their finger on.

One young man said art made you feel something but only qualified if it was unpretentious (by this I believe he meant art which needs no background knowledge to understand it)

And a young lady, stopped while exiting an art museum, with serious but unabashedly bewildered expression, said she enjoyed looking at art though she couldn’t say why & went on to declare, she didn’t understand why there was a toilet exhibited beside the Van Gogh as art but, it was: “Fine by me”. 

An impressively open mind, but if someone had summarised for her Duchamp’s deep concept -1 as simply & superficially as: “Since it is the artist’s eye that creates art, if that same eye finds art ‘ready-made’ (which the Philistine has failed to observe for lack of aesthetic sensibility), then it becomes art by the artist’s right to claim it so” It might not mean our young lady would necessarily become suddenly able to appreciate the urinal as art or even as beautiful object; but she could at least, & at last, decide she doesn’t like it simply because she now understands it.

Indeed, without any further information about art, art history, the philosophy of art, its techniques, evolution or variety throughout cultures, she could offer intelligent argument why she disagrees with the brilliant thinker who influenced all art theory after himself.

Apropos the same theme of elitism in art is the very unusual fact Marcel Duchamp is remembered as an artist at all when he hardly produced any art at all. The significance of this to me is that Duchamp still, at the beginnings of the twentieth century, found himself in a society mutually interested & informed enough to allow their thoughts about art to be influenced by ideas about visual art instead art in the form of images.

In the 16th century Michelangelo's sculpture changed all of Europe’s art theory through no more than a hand-full of bad engravings that travelled. (In today's reality they would have been no more than one more forwarded e-mail among the already indigestible amount of new visual information that enters our consciousness each day).

If we step up a stair in the taxonomy to talk of aesthetic theory instead of its manifestation as art, I think no-one would claim good taste is innate rather than learned- indeed: motivated by ambition. No matter how beautifully turned a woman’s ankle or perfectly formed her foot, it takes effort, experiment & study for her to learn which shoe design flatters the shape & length of her legs, her posture, her gait- which cast: her skin tone, clothes or hair colour… It is in fact a refining of aesthetic sensibility through the application of observation & reflection.

But bear with me awhile & allow me to build my argument a little longer before naming my point.

During the time of the Medici, the Sforza, the Borgias & the viciously Mafia-efficient pyramid scheme that was Europe’s church, took charge of what was painted, their aristocratic good taste (allowed by the privilege of leisure time, travel, study & informed society instead of say, battling the earth sixteen hours a day in exchange of potatoes) resulted in three centuries of brilliant work we refer to as the Renaissance.

By the 17th century, however, there was an economic shift due to trade organised through the ports of Rotterdam & Amsterdam & the puritan Protestants, dressed in black with simple white collars, could suddenly afford to spend the price of a house on a tulip bulb. And it became they, the bourgeois; the accountants, the traders, the merchants, the lenders & speculators, who began to influence what painters painted.

What resulted at the loss of the privileged class’ educated influence on what was painted? -The artist turned from the idealised portrait & the symbolic images of mythical religious figures to the objective examination of the reality around him & finally the psychological portrait was born. The portrait not meant to idealize or symbolize but to reflect honestly what life has written on the form of the sitter.

Why did it make no difference? Why were painters able to create works of lasting & sublime beauty under both circumstances? It is because the buyer directs the painter through natural market forces, what to paint, but cannot tell him how- the true artist (& not all painters are) is the only one educated in his means of expression well enough to decide how to paint with it -2. It is the artist's education that counts, not the patron's; it is he who is charged with finding beauty wherever his gaze is directed. As great artists as both Leonardo & Michelangelo might be, neither could have painted like the other even if he dedicated his life to trying.

By the time Abstract Expressionism had killed any interest the common man -3, (already lost by the advent of cubism half a century earlier) still had, a window dresser for Saks Fifth Avenue (well trained in capturing the common man’s eye) appeared on the scene with a new art theory: art for the common man, Popular Art. “Why?” He asked, “Should art be elitist?” Why shouldn’t art be for the man-on-the-street to appreciate, instead of just the entitled few?

Instead of intricately wrought objects created by hands trained by decades of study, experiment & experience, why not paintings produced rapidly with a semi-mechanised, photographic silk-screen process & unmixed colours? (The common man won’t appreciate the subtlety of a colour a painter trained by years of experience might still spend hours getting just right, right?)

And so Andy Warhol, the theatrically greatest self-invented/self-promoted art personality since Salvador Dalí, introduced Pop Art. And finally art reached to its majority audience so unjustly ignored all these years.

An important moment in art history? Well, how have his theories affected art after? How have they affected the common man, largely lost to the idea of art’s importance by a generation after the invention of photography? And most importantly: Where are his works now? The many still in private hands (& there are many, he himself famously described his work space as factory instead of studio) mostly belong to elitist collectors & today you won’t find even a Warhol reproduction adorning the common man’s wall.

One might even argue Warhol betrayed his own artistic principle by the fact that despite finding a fast, cheap & easily repeatable technique -4 he sold his work at the highest prices the market would support instead of insisting popular art should have popular prices...

Art that is actually popular is more commonly represented by reproductions of works like Andrew Wyeth's (clearly appreciable laboured technique + familiar ethos though he is also an artist respected by cognoscenti). LeRoy Neiman's, the poor man's impressionist, whose lucky break was as illustrator of the Playboy 'Jokes' section & who for a decade or so had such popular support as important artist that the same paintings that can't be given away today were valued in the range of Picassos' in the 1970-80s.

Or one of today's popular art con-men: Thomas Kinkade, whose work enjoys such popular demand, while being found risible by artists, serious critics, art lovers & collectors, it can demand prices that could get you a minor but solid Renaissance painting at Sothebys instead, but will never-the-less & without question, be relegated to the forgotten in time.

Uninformed popular opinion is loud but fickle, while expert opinion is a whisper in the dark that persists through generations until finally, over time, it imbues artworks with their actual merited value.

Throughout art history a greater amount of monies for a larger number of paintings supporting more careers, has been spent by the art-illiterate than the rare connoisseur & just as all of Kinkade's absurdly priced, artistically worthless originals, as well as the millions of prints, so most genuinely popular art ends at the bottom of a trash heap, its author's name forgotten, within two or three generations (about the same time it takes for something to become a 'classic').

Of course art appreciation is elitist! Just as theoretical physics or neuroscience is, anything that takes education to understand is elitist. The difference between those people interviewed having reasoned answers or not to the question: "What is art?" is education- the criterion with which to decide—& that doesn't mean they need

Note: There is irony in the fact that photography's first fifty years or so (probably ending with Man Ray's post-WWI experiments with the camera) were devoted to imitating the lighting, composition & subject matter of paintings while today the most popular art is photorealism: paintings that imitate photography.

footnotes:

1- More on Duchamp from another essay. Return

2- As Ingres said: "Talent does what it wants. Genius does what it can" Return

3- To give a simple, superficial & generalised definition of ‘common man’ in this context, let's say he who is uneducated in art, without any reasoned thoughts for its importance to society; who doesn’t understand its theories or know what to look at beyond the subject of a painting & is generally indifferent to the presence or absence of an art object. Return

4- Apart from his silk-screened portraits, or 'serigraphs' as they are pretensiously known in the world of art instead of the world of decorated t-shirts, he also produced portraits which were half hour long films taken with a camera unmoved on a tripod of a sitter posing in a chair- they were meant to be projected onto a wall-space that might otherwise hold a painting, played in loop indefinitely. Return

5- This painting in so-called 'limited edition' (edition of 5000 photographically reproduced prints on canvas along with other 'editions' on various other grounds- all unsigned) go for around $800.

A true limited edition in the world of art is, say- a copper engraving or woodcut of which no more than 200 prints are pulled & hand numbered (1/200, 2/200 etc) when signed in lead or graphite. The original copper plate is then deeply scored with an awl in an X from corner to corner & kept as proof the edition is indeed limited to the 200 claimed. Return

Monday January 26th, 2009

When they are attacked by a tic in a place they can’t reach they go to another bird & bow their heads. Most others of the same species will take the moment to courteously remove it. This might seem a small favour but in order to insure their young reach the age of independence, the birds (both parents) must average one insect caught & brought back to the chicks, every 45 seconds of all the daylight hours. A few seconds here & there, spent removing tics from their neighbours could mean the difference between some or all of their offspring dying malnourished or being preyed upon while unattended.

These birds have no theory of the mind & must blindly obey the instincts given them by their genetic instruction. The bird born, by casual mutation, without courtesy, has significant advantage in a society such as this & can spread the discourteous gene quickly through the gene pool because he procreates more successfully than the courteous -3. But when you reach the intelligence of, say, a Chimpanzee, you have a wide range of tricks you can play on other chimps who aren’t able to judge.

Click to see this miniature folio painted in tempera & gold on vellum; with rich, ground Lapis-lazulí, blues, from the Duc du Berry's 'Tres Riches Heures' in luxurious detail, (including an erotic touch!)

This one of the series with the constellations between Aquarius & Pisces, God carrying the sun in a wagon pulled by winged horses (like Apollo) as men, women & animals work & freeze below.

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Search Herman Studios -------------------------------------------------------- Last updated- 3rd of April, 2009

I've had such a strange & varied array of responses to this little painting (8 x 10 inches) that I'm going to ask here: Do you see it as macabre? Happy? Distressing? Joyful? Sinister? Is the red, blood-red? Or is it a colour inherently more convivial than a crepuscular blue? Which is the stronger symbol? The reference in the skeleton to life's fragile evanescence? Or the gleeful dance? Personally, I at least find the expressions of the skulls themselves more jubilant than marked by the remorse the living feel for death...?

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P'sMW- page 1

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Strange tales

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P'sMW- page 2

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Timelines

Life's funnel

Souvenirs

Moon Myth

How chaos was subdued in the Japanese genesis myth

Noah Lukeman & the murky world of today’s book publishing

Morality and religion

Music and Love

Temeris Mortis

The Dream

Peace

God's Tick

Old Man (short story)

Intuition

Curious Fact

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P'sMW- page 3

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A letter to painters

Why do people talk?

The Painter's Eye

I'bn al Alhí's treasure (short story)

Associative Personality Disorder

Love poems, death poems

The Golem

Elitism in Art

Theory of the Mind

Shorter of breath, one day closer to death

Politics II

Rock & Roll

Words II- more words

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P'sMW- page 4

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How to steal from gullible artists

Priests behaving badly

How to make a painting

Oats & history

A note about signatures on paintings

Bob Dylan

Number of atheists among scientists

Theoretical physics & me

Faust & Mephistopheles

Children's reading habits

How to get good photos of fireworks

The 20th century

Further Dialogue on the 20th Century article (here) with comments by Bobby Porter

Love is

Civilisation

Martial Art as sport

Blind Boy Fuller

Becoming an artist

Insomniac notes

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P'sMW- page 5

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Egon

20,000+

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P'sMW- page 6

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P'sMW- page 7

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P'sMW- page 8

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Scared

Indoctrination

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P'sMW- page 9

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Scopes II pg 1 of 11