This morning I was thinking about our culture and my place in it while listening to Bach’s Keyboard Concertos, and the French Suite No. 5, Neville Marriner conducting Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Andrei Gavrilov pianist.
Propaganda
Mass media, social media, search engines
Politics, world organizations
Museums, foundations, religions, churches, think-tanks
News, publications, journals, book publishing
Big international businesses, insurance, insecticides, pharmaceuticals, farming
Populism
The irony is sickly funny: the left using disgusting postmodern art as propaganda of what it means to be free; while the right uses Soviet style art representational art, using realism of flags, bald eagles, and Trump crowned or as superman, making art a handmaiden of political agendas. A few people, that I include as my friends, see how this works. But a lot of people don’t see it.
Visual Artists, That I like, That Went Their Own Way:
Courbet
Manet
Vermeer
Van Gogh
Justly and hugely respected artists now.
Da Vinci and Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artists, played the system, with mixed results of winning and being played by more powerful sources. Though, between them they established that great artists were creators and not craftsmen.
Picasso played the system and won, but he also pathetically compromised his art by playing silly games with it, “entertaining the public with novelty” like cubism.
World Domination and Ayn Rand
Rand wanted Objectivism to take over the world in most every aspect of life—art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. To see a utopia in real life but only possible in fiction. She was a genius artist and thinker, though most of key concepts were derived from Aristotle: happiness as an end in itself; and definition of logic. After completing Atlas Shrugged, in 1957 at 52-years-old, she didn’t publish another work of fiction. She died in 1982, that is 30 years of a great artist not creating. That was a monumental and meaningful problem she failed at. Three decades is a very long time in that state of mind. Undoubtedly the reason for abandoning fiction was because she became bitter. Fiction would be too obvious a reflection of that, that she would not be able to ignore or accept.
Could her wanting to see her fiction become reality on a massive scale have led to enormous disappointment? Could it have led her to reject the power of art? Or perhaps, led her to conclude that she wasn’t a worthy artist, if she couldn’t affect massive cultural change? The fact that she abandoned her art is due to an enormous psychological problem, and/or that she placed her movement of masses more important than one individual at a time “getting it?” Ironically, Marcel Duchamp abandoned art in the later part of his life as well. But he was obviously psychotic from the get go.
The Problem
With painting, I like to know the big ideal/theme so I can plan out the work. And in regard, in my life as an artist I want to know what is the big plan. It is not an easy problem. Is success being rich from sales, from magazine covers, big shows, influencing other artists or the art world, wealthy or famous collectors, being virtually popular, being noted in scholarly journals, or being collected by admired friends? To a degree I have had moments of all of those, from selling a work for 90K to influencing artists. But it is amazing that so few of those roads lead to meaningful and long-lasting experiences.
Conclusion
Thank you for hanging in there with me, while I talk myself through this in real time. The outside world machinations are a waste of time, it is all benevolent or malevolent con artists playing covert games. And in a game of con artists only the evil ones win. It seems so simple now, but the answer is to treat the world like I make art—focus on the things/people/situations I love. Success, then is releasing my art to good people that love it.
Michael, Idyllwild, September 30, 2022