Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 20
by Joan Altabe - 12/29/2006

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Goodbye History, Hello Hallmark…

Marketable art these days seems to come in three categories: sofa art, also known as furniture store art (the kind that accessorizes living rooms), tourist art (the kind hawked in resort towns) and greeting card art (the pussycat-with-yarn-balls kind).

It's art of the third kind that gets me most. Urging me on is a quote from a gallery owner in a Florida newspaper: "I like happy art."

Goodbye History. Hello Hallmark. Clearly the gallery owner, and a jillion like him, is in the wrong business. Adolf Hitler had the same preference. He restricted art-making to romantic Arcadian rural settings uncontaminated by real life. "Art," he said, "must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world."

Of course, we all have blind spots, but gallery owners can't afford one about art. If they're intent on "happy art," they're in the wrong business. Too many of them push pap. They legitimize schlock with overblown promotion and prices.

My town, Sarasota, Florida, is said to have the highest concentration of commercial art galleries in Florida. But it's a meaningless statistic. It's not how many art galleries a city has that counts but rather the kind of art those galleries show. Duh!

I'm not even talking about copycat art, you know the vaguely familiar-looking abstracts, impressionist seascapes, realist street scenes that are nothing more than knock-offs of the real thing, but without an idea in its head.

And puh-leeze don't get me wrong. I'm all for happiness. But it's a complex state that can come straight out of sadness. Carl Sandburg made the point in his poem about August Rodin's sculpture of a naked old male, "'The Walking Man": Legs hold a torso away from the earth... Power of bone and cord raise a belly and hip... You makes us proud of our legs, old man.'"

See? Rather than ruminate on the deterioration, evident in the sculpture's missing head and arms, Sandburg took inspiration from the fact the old man was still ambulatory.

Then again, even "happy art" can strike one as sad, depending on the state of mind of the one interpreting it. Here's poet Robert Hayden on Monet's "Waterlilies."

"'O light beheld as through refracting tears./Here is the aura of that world each of us has lost./Here is the shadow of its joy.'"

So, it's not that I like unhappy art. It's just that I need more to look at than a pudgy cat, a bowl of fruit or an antiseptic nude. In a world conditioned by movies, where life copies the art of film, you don't see genuine introspection much. In a so-called high art, I expect to see fewer adopted positions - happy or otherwise.

Even Norman Rockwell tired of his idealizations at the end: "I was doing this best-possible-world, Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandparents sort of thing. And I liked it, but now I'm sick of it."

Probably because he knew life was bigger than he was picturing. We deserve the big picture, don't you think?

Moral of this story? Pick the gallery that shows your work carefully. If you exhibit with schlock, your art is liable to be judged that way.

— Joan Altabe | December 29, 2006

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