There Does Not Have to Be any Art at All. (I'll let that sink in for a minute...)

Some things chill me to the bone.

I was having breakfast with a friend two years ago. He has a graduate degree in composition from Rutgers and made his money for many years as part of one of the most popular cover bands in Jersey. He stated that he believed that the free market should decide whether or not contemporary style classical Music survives or not. My jaw nearly dropped into my coffee. He said that the government has no intrinsic right to support the arts as it has since the WPA program. This coming from a man who spent years of his life composing contemporary classical Music and realized that he would most likely never hear his works performed by anyone other than maybe a rehearsal via an ensemble or a computer program.

The long time art critic Dave Hickey said in an interview that, in a nutshell, there is really no need for high art to exist for society to survive. From a Darwinian standpoint, we don't need all that to reproduce and sustain ourselves and our families. Think about it. Reallllllllly think about it.

Outside of the late Robert Hughes, Hickey is the only art critic I trust. He has no problem giving bad reviews and not liking things, which is rare in the art world. Too much money is at stake to anger anyone or call out the emperor's new clothes. That being said, he also liked stuff I cannot figure out, but his scope of art history is way bigger than most, so he has a different groove than most, especially me.

He agrees, like anyone else with a spine who was not bought out or drank the Kool Aid, that there is something seriously wrong with the art world. He has figured out its trick of making art a commodity first and an act of creative honesty and integrity second. Wall Street types and others with cash buy paintings of an unknown artist because they believe it will go up in price, not because they like it. The artist gets screwed in the short run if they succeed because all the stuff they sold before to pay the rent will go for twenty or more times what it was sold for.

But think about it, how many of you have any interest in buying a piece of art for yourself? Even one from the mall store that is a Ebola nauseating rehash of something of real beauty... how many? The visual arts are out of the reach of most, simply because of cost. Yet most everyone has SOMETHING hanging on the walls. There is that line between decoration and "art". And maybe that is it?

People are buying stuff as decoration that a generation or two ago was " contemporary art". It is surreal to go into one of those discount clothing/home furnishing places and see what people are buying, what is being expected to sell to people without any angst or thought. The public has caught up with the artistic thought of Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Mark Rothko, and others. While that may seem nice, where does that leave the contemporary artist?

In a word: screwed.

What has happened to art is similar, but not the same, as what happened to Music, though it happened earlier due to the financial forces precluding and being greater than the technological ones. Let us begin at the beginning, shall we? (All Music majors and art majors are not allowed to vote, sorry.) Right now, without a search engine, name me three living classical composers. Now, name me three living visual artists. Now, name me the popular Music styling of today. Take your time. I'll wait here in the desert of digital dust....

Okay. I am willing to bet that you could not name three living classical composers. You may have gotten Philip Glass due to his movie work and eternal presence on NPR, but who else? And how about those visual artists? Maybe Jeff Koons because of his recent deal with Macy's or maybe Julian Schnabel because of the movies he has made or maybe Matthew Barney because he had a thing with Bjork. (No fear, she wrote about it on her album "Vulnicura" released this year.) Now, onto that pop Music question. What is the main musical STYLING of today? Not, WHO is the top selling artist! What is the STYLE of Music that is the majority of the youth culture, say, like Nirvana and Pearl jam were in 1990?

There are several problems here. 

The first is that there really is no center to anything in Music due to the digital information age. This is because anything you want, including the past, is available for free online. There was a time that, within the scum of payola, new Music was distributed to the masses via a linear distribution system: the television or radio. If you listened to the radio, new things came on that you were introduced to and maybe you liked them. Dare I say, the same thing was true via the bribery cesspool that was MTV. You SAW new Music and maybe you liked it. But now, our desires can be fed with immaculate accuracy via the web. We make the decisions about what we may think we like. I say this knowing full well about Pandora, Spotify, Google, and Youtube giving you things THEY think you may like, but these are based on the linear calculations of what you already like. The real gem of discovery is found when someone else with a different well of possibility shows you things they think you may like. Personally, my late friend Jack Bennett changed my life by doing that. He let me borrow a stack of albums, one of which changed the course of my life as a composer.

Second, there is a HUGE disconnect between the "art word" and everyday life. It has grown wider and wider since the Scull art auction of the early 1970's. Outside of the childless Herbert and Dorthy Vogel who, on a normal income, collected contemporary art, who the hell goes to a gallery or to see new artists with the intent to buy? You cannot name contemporary artists because the 1% has consumed a-l-l contemporary art by being the only buyers of it as an investment. I have seen these deals go down and it is a disgusting process for both parties.

Third, there is no more "classical Music." The contemporary atonal composers have been the ultimate hipsters of Musical taste since about 1930, barricading themselves within the walls of the academic community and writing clever Music for beings who are too clever by half and hold concerts that look like an MC Escher self portrait: composers and clever people looking at composers and clever people who look up from their Music and see composers and clever people looking back. The harmonies and counterpoint of the "classical Music" people want to hear has moved to video games, the greatest money making entertainment of this new generation. Period. Did you know there was an atonal opera written for the book/movie "Brokeback Mountain"? I didn't think so. Why? Because even the critics who came out to see this hipster nightmare could not palate it. Want proof? In the debut in Spain, the work of Wagner was used as a warm up. WAGNER AS A PREPARATORY PIECE!

There is a deep disconnect between the arts and everyday people. The golden age of Rock Music has passed. The last movement of art, the minimalist movement, is gone. The minimalist movement in classical Music is past. With the past so easily accessible and desires so easily unchallenged, we have reached the point where it barely matters if the present were to vanish. People could listen to Music, read literature, and look at visual art from the past and never even know it was missing. Some people would catch it, to be sure, but the sea of creative objects is so vast that if it were to stop today, it would take a very very long time for us to examine what already exists that has yet to be seen, heard, or read,

A very very very very very very very long time.

The reality is obvious: there really DOES NOT have to be any "Art" at all from this day forward.

But we're still making it. I just hope people take it for what it is really worth.