Jun 15, 2005

After reading many, many websites over the course of the last ten years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main types: those that say something, those that ramble on about not much, and those that are carefully crafted to say a whole lot of nothing.

It’s the same way after a year of art school. The vast majority of student art is a whole lot of conflated blather about not much: labrynthine, “mysterious” depictions of repetitious personal issues; sophomoric, cookie-cutter attempts at current-event “statements”. Late-adolescent self-absorption aside (and I’m not judging; nobody was more self-obsessed than me at 19), there are left two camps of relatively serious artistic types–those who believe in meaning, and those who don’t. Those who believe in meaning view art as a way to say something, to place something of value from the inside of themselves, into another’s insides, through the medium of art. Symbolism, emotion, wordplay, mood, and setting, as well as all the formal elements of art, are simply tools to get the thing of value—concept/feeling/belief—across. Medium might be slightly subjugated to message, but both have a place of respect and a relationship with the artist.

Those artists who don’t believe in meaning would never tell you so. They make the kind of art that everyone pretends to understand and use big words about, and are in various stages of denial or cynicism about its true quality and worth. They are the current darlings. They wear trucker hats. They claim to play with the medium and let it speak for itself, but that’s a lie—the medium, as well as the audience, the concept of art, and reality itself, are victims of an attempted subjugation by the hollow ego of the artist. Every aspect of their art, formal and theoretical, is carefully calculated to add up to a great big nihilistic zero. Their artistry lies in how ambitious or complicated a piece they can make, and still have it arrive at complete meaningless degrading emptiness—either that, or how many people they can fool into thinking they’ve made something “so profound” that few could understand. They may not be completely responsible for the enthronement of empty trash, but they sure don’t mind benefiting from it. They are the ones who, having found their precious niches in postmodernism, absolutely refuse to let that movement organically die and be replaced by the next big thing—leading to a repulsive and ultimately empty cycle of conceptual bulimia. Garbage in, garbage out.

And yes, I think one way is better than the other, at least for now. I know, “values”, how biased and regressive of me. But you’d have to be a complete fool not to realize what a dark patch we’re going through right now, both as a country, and in the world. Nobody’s unaware of the horrifying illogic and madness the world is capable of inflicting on itself. Raping ourselves with nihilistic, meaningless imagery will only further teach us that insanity is normal. We don’t need any more education in that.

Believing that, and believing in soul, is one of the reasons why I feel perfectly alienated in the heart-of-darkness art world of America today. It’s claimed its position, and so have I.

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