Are Artists Really Artists?

In the dawn of recorded time, before cell phones and just after clay tablets, I came to understand that there was such a thing as an IQ test, and that that test was a sure fire way to objectively determine everyone's relative intelligence. In one simple number you could tell who was supposed to be a doctor or an engineer and who should be a garbage man. You also knew that garbage men were not as smart as doctors and engineers. It was clear.

Yes, there were some people, even one gender, that weren't really expected to do well on The Test, and in fact weren't even expected to take it. Those people were either involved in roles that had nothing to do with Business (and were therefore irrelevant) or were women, which wasn't exactly a job but certainly seemed to strangle the perception that you were in Business. Actors were a group that didn't fit into Business. Artists, too. When people in those roles achieved fame and fortune, they were generally regarded as possessed of some kind of ineffable genius, something that couldn't be taught, learned, or measured. They "marched to a different drummer"...and so if they failed to achieve fame and fortune, nobody was suprised or sympathetic. In the end, they were regarded as a mystery that no one could understand, so whatever they did or why they did it was pretty much explained as divine inspiration or foolish hubris, depending on success.

Since those far-off days, much of our thinking about most of that last paragraph has changed. I won't put you through it, and I won't claim we've completed the evolution of our thinking about a lot of those things, either. What puzzles me is how we don't seem to have examined or at least progressed in our view of art and artists that much. We've sure talked about it a lot. We've sure spent money on Art. We sure haven't moved far away from the idea that artists are somehow different and that what they produce can only be admired or misunderstood, because it's divinely inspired and done by people whose sensibilities are born, not learned, and who operate on a different, higher plane than the rest of us. We have managed to move away from a lot of our old values around how being relevant in the business world is the only way to be relevant, but we've never really stopped and reconsidered values around things like actors and artists, what they do, what we expect of them. Actors are either stars or wanna be and artists...are artists, still. It's like we still feel so guilty about being dismissive about art in the 50s and 60s that we're now dead afraid to do anything but worship for fear of being seen as shallow and insensitive.

The way things sit these days I'm not sure it's okay to even say out loud that there may be good artists and bad artists. Believe me, if you don't like a given piece of art it's because of some limitation on your part, not because the art itself is flawed. If you're NOT an artist, your opinion is invalid because, well, you're not an artist, you don't march to that different drummer, you can never understand what it's all about, you need an artist to explain it to you. If you happen to be an artist and break ranks and express disapproval, it's because of some petty jealousy or neurosis on your part. So if there's no such thing as a bad artist, if the splattered paint on a spinning piece of cardboard at the PNE is just as good and valid as Breughel the Elder's whole life, then are artists really artists? I axe you....and I say yes, they are. I am. You are. I feel a song coming on, "We Are All Artists". The thing is, some of us are good artists and some of us are bad artists. I would like it if only the good ones made livings as artists and the bad artists got into other jobs, like writing blogs.

Art is Beauty, and beauty is famously subjective. When Ken Lum gets his Master of Fine Art degree, after a no doubt very lengthy and expensive education, and begins producing work like a picture of his high school friend Steve Chan with the name "Steve" over the top of the high school year book picture, or a scale model of a Vancouver Special, that's fine....sort of. As long as nobody asks me to pony up $45,000 for the scale model house, which was originally intended to be built at a scale that represented the cost of that house when it was built versus what it costs to buy now. The problem was that the resulting scaled down house would have been about the size of a shoe box, and the grant to do the project was $45,000. No doubt the installation space was not going to look great if filled only with a $45,000 shoebox, too...so he arbitrarily scaled it up. It went from a stupid, trite idea that anyone can get across with a paper and pencil to a stupid, trite, and meaningless one in that there wasn't even a scale to it. Still, Ken Lum got paid. I could wish it was the Society for the Development of Mathematical Literacy that paid him, but it wasn't.

I'm guessing he was paid at approval of a group of people administering some endowed fund, whose owner decided they may as well leave money to the development of Art as to the Minister of Finance. The good, and worthy, and anonymous group who made the disbursement gave us the scaled down house. I think I would rather have seen the Minister of Finance spend that dead rich person's money on used submarines, which I feel are High Art, at least relative to scale models of Vancouver Specials. I'm pretty sure the dead rich person doesn't care, and if they did I have to wonder if they wouldn't agree. I mean, it's a fine thing to avoid the tax man, but if this is the result...really?

So, now...what to do, what to do? We can't just throw artists to the wolves, we need them, believing in them is what separates us from the animals, isn't it? We could go back a few centuries and make art the exclusive purview of the wealthy, who would patronize whichever artist they wanted for whatever reasons they felt just. I think that's pretty much where we are these days anyway, only we all have to be irritated because we're kind of led to believe that the money that gets spent on nonsense like scale house models is producing Art that only cretins don't recognize and value. At least when it was purely something the rich did, none of the rest of us had to have an opinion, and weren't found lacking for it. If some rich fool wanted a scaled down model of an ordinary house for $45,000 what did I care? It's his money. My opinion of it didn't matter to the person paying the tab, either, so I was free to say and think whatever I thought, at least about art.

Here's my suggestion: if I'm going to be judged for my opinion of art, then make the administering of endowments for the arts the focus of training that people get when they take a Master of Fine Arts degree, and make it law that funds set up for that purpose only be managed by people with that degree. I'm guessing most of these endowments end up keeping money out of the government's hands, so I think the government should have some say in how the money they didn't get is managed. It's just too galling to see cuts to all kinds of government services that people really do need at the same time as we see money wasted on things like scaled down Vancouver Specials, or carelessly photoshopped high school year book pictures, and then to have to endure a lot of after the fact double talk from the artist about what he intended to get across to those of us among the great unwashed.

A six year old could tell the guy had a thought about how to portray that moment when you remember something, and a six year old would pretty much draw it the same way, too. That same six year old probably had to hear their parents talk endlessly about what their parents paid for the house they grew up in, and how much that house would cost now....an inaccurately scaled down house isn't really needed and certainly isn't much of a Thought. No, train the people who spend the money on things like the kind of effort and time that great art takes, or on the history of Art and art patronage, and have Ken continue to make his living as artists have for centuries, by catering to rich patrons who want their portraits done so history remembers them.