After a long winter’s sleep, The Endless Slug finds himself in a new land, filled with new art and new ideas. Or does he? It appears to be time for a little update as to the state of the world of fine art.
While thinking about starting this post, I had a nice outline of topics to write overviews about. The more that I thought about it, the more I felt that there was some sort of over-arching problem that I needed to address. I had and have just too many criticisms, where would a slug begin? I believe that a broader topic, then, would be defining what we mean by “Fine Art” – because the public-media world has thrown the idea of refinement (at least in the classical sense) to the gutter in favor of individual “utterances” of art, complete with masses-inspired promotion of these utterances.
What?
Sorry for the word diarrhea. Stay with me here – keep in mind that the slug has been apart from the world of social media since probably 2008. He has missed much of the development of the scene that most people seem to take for granted as an everyday experience. Criticism about one’s daily normal routine can be therefore a little troubling to folks (read: you). Apologetics aside, let’s continue.
The classic definition of Fine Art is one about refinement of aesthetic and idea on a grand scale. It is an Enlightenment idea, built of objectivity and reason. There is often this common idea, even among artists, that all art is subjective, but this just simply is not true. Art is a science, which I’ve discussed before, but I’ll review briefly: The objectivity in art is data-based like anything else. We test art’s hypotheses in public forums (do viewers or experiencers of the work understand the work in the same fashion, using salons, galleries, museums, etc. as controlled places of analysis) and by longevity (does the art carry the same meaning over time in the same groups). Purely subjective art, however, is what we see all over the inter-webs, and purely subjective art is crap. Anime makes you stupid. However, overly subjective art is not crap to those who make it, or their close circle of friends, or the handful of people that actually “like” the work for whatever reason. I should note that there’s never a problem in just liking something, but in the world of refined art, we have to distinguish between personal interest and everyone’s interest.
Good art is nice, Great art reciprocates something important with those that experience it. I say “something” because the power of great art varies from work to work. This “something” is sometimes just aesthetic, sometimes catharsis, sometimes political, cultural, topical, emotional, or otherwise experiential. Fine art is often criticized as being the art of old white men from the west. After my few 25 years of interaction with the art scene on a global scale, I can tell you that I have never seen this as the case. But perhaps, by the time I hit the scene, the world of the old white men had already dissolved? I don’t actually think this is the case though. There are areas, communities of fine art aficionados that follow the old white man trend as publicly understood, but art is, and always has been global. The issue has sometimes been how to translate art between cultures. Art is a language, just like English, Chinese, French, etc., and it must be culturally translated between others in the same way. I think this translation issue is partly the blame for the arguments for anime as art (it is crap). I’ll discuss this in another post, but what I mean is that one of the common rebuttals to my arguments against anime is that I don’t understand Japanese culture enough to “get it”. For those of you who understand the anime problem, you can see why that idea is laughable. I digress. Refinement cannot be global. The white man argument is that art is as the Greeks or Romans would have it, for now and forever, and any other culture who thought differently were wrong. There is a geographical and cultural limit to fine art – a boundary that cannot be crossed because the “other” in the general sense cannot understand the refinement addressed to them. All art is therefore ethnocentric to some degree. What makes any art Fine Art, in any culture, is when it addresses issues that affect either their culture as a whole, or a emotional or psychological issue that is perceived to be generally applicable to everyone, everywhere, even if the problem or it’s solution is really only local. I think of Rothko here. Big paintings of a color with tone, designed to be immersive experiences of catharsis and personal retrospective insight. While the concept could be global, the color choices are not. Color means different things to different cultures, and sometimes even individuals, but again, individuals do not really matter. We do not paint for you, we paint for You. If you are affected, that gives us a data point towards supporting our hypothesis about You.
Social media is a great community of yous. It is not a You, as much as it would like to be, or might be some day. It is still an experiment in progress. It is a bunch of very intelligent apes playing with new toys that most of them do not really understand. If you are reading this blog, and have read this post this far, you are probably a bit more sophisticated than that generalization, but you are probably also an outlier to the data set – you are Jane Goodall. Or maybe you are just angry, awaiting the end of the blog to lay down your hate counter-rant. Did I invoke a mood? Are you thinking, criticizing, arguing with me? Reciprocating? Do I really mean any of this?
Memes are interesting to me, both as an anthropologist and an artist (I am/once was both and more). The definition of “meme” from 2008 was from the 1970’s sociological framework (meme is not a new concept, it is only being used differently now), meaning some referential idea that conjures up a memory of a thing or event, shared by a group; a collective of thought portrayed through a single point of recall. Our social media memes do follow this definition, but they have added image and sometimes sound, often in a vast range of referential imagery scoping from intensely personal to the super-broad. I’ve notices a large trend on my own feeds of people using analogy images and text that read effectively, “this is what [event] is like” in an attempt to create common understanding through an often highly specific event, often intrinsic to the social media world in itself. What I mean is that I’ve seen many of these memes use images from prior, presumably well-known social media events to visually communicate a similar feeling about a similar event. It is an entire language of referential pictorial simile or metaphor… (and here’s the kicker) similar to cave art. Whaa??
There have been some really good memes out there, the Lascaux’s of the internet. What do I mean by really good? Memes that capture a feeling or mood, or give an immediate explanation as response to another event that is instantly understood by it’s viewers. But only for a moment – this is our thesis. I know that I laughed at some memes yesterday, but what were they? Why can I remember the brush strokes of a Van Gogh, the smell of the streets of Bucharest, the horrid illness I had after eating too many Jaffe cakes, but I cannot remember the color of the cat in the illustrated dancing cat video I saw last night that gave me so much pleasure? I know a cat danced, and that I laughed. I know that as I wrote this post, that I had to really force myself to even remember the cat meme, and I probably only remembered it because I talked to the person who posted it this morning and we had a (shared experience) laugh about it. Memes are only distractions. They are a waste of your time and mental energy, except probably by those that make them. That takes a little time and effort – but for what purpose, likes? Memes are like looking at the artist’s sketchbook (major taboo there) but sketches of a work never completed. If we constantly curb the development of the meme-ist to a world of consuming hyper-production, real skill, real ideas will rarely, if ever surface. Hello meme-ist, I’ll have that burger meal medium-sized. Thank you.
Memes also fall into different classes. There are classic “forwards” memes (we had these since at least the late 80s), family memes, super-trendy “underground” memes, social butterfly memes, and accidentals, among others, and any meme or whatever can become “virals”. I know this is probably obvious old hat to most readers, but we’re typologizing here for later science.
Aside: does anyone hand-write letters anymore?
I’ll leave this post here for now. There’s obviously much more to say, but I think this is a good splash of things to come. The state of fine art today is in trouble, and has been since I started posting (read: ranting) about it in the 90s. Yes, there were forums even as far back as in the 80’s, although we don’t see this very much in pop-culture TV and movies. No, I’m not all that old – this is not an old man attacking the younger generations he cannot or refuses to comprehend (I like new things!). I got my first modem when I was about 13-14 and discovered BBS’s almost instantly. I’ve had many names, many faces, and I’m still here. Still writing, drawing, painting, learning, improving, hoping, and waiting.
Slug out
The Endless Slug 
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