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Art for its own sake is the most precious

Climate change. Resource wars. GMO foods. Fracking, hacking, government secrecy and surveillance. You name it — in the list of news-making things to kvetch about, the institutional art scene hardly warrants mention, it seems.
masks

Climate change. Resource wars. GMO foods. Fracking, hacking, government secrecy and surveillance. You name it — in the list of news-making things to kvetch about, the institutional art scene hardly warrants mention, it seems.

Yet art is one of the main ways we make sense of the world — or cloak it with meaning or beauty it sometimes seems to lack. In theory. In practice and in person, I’m rarely moved by giant cibachromes or text-based installation art. Most of Vancouver’s outdoor installation art resembles elephantine paperweights to me.

Often it’s not so much the art itself that disappoints as the pompous, esoteric lingo attached to it. Four years ago, David Levine, a 42-year-old American artist joined forces with Alix Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology student. The pair combed through gallery press releases from around the world for examples of what they deemed “International Art English.”

“We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other,” Levine told the Guardian in 2013. “We’d find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it.”

The duo took thousands of exhibition announcements and ran them through language-analyzing software, trying to find a signal in the noise. Levine’s conclusion: this “unique language” has “everything to do with English, but is emphatically not English. [It] is oddly pornographic: we know it when we see it.” (Common IAE terms include transgressive, hermeneutic, metonymy and narrativisation).

In last week’s column I mentioned some eye-catching Haitian masks made from oil drums, hanging on the walls of a filmmaker friend’s home.  How did the street artists of Port-au-Prince ever figure out what they were doing — or even do it, for that matter — without years of instruction in IAE?

Perhaps there’s a clue in anthropologist David Graeber’s 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In an aside, the author parallels the societies of Central Africa and Bali. Historically, both “saw a magnificent outburst of artistic creativity ...  at the exact moment that ordinary life became a game of constant peril in which any misstep might lead to being sent away [into debt slavery].” In other words, when things were at their worst for both peoples, it appeared their collective creativity was near a peak (African masks were a major influence on Picasso, Graeber reminds readers).

Of course, the linkage between creativity, suffering and social transformation is easily lampooned, as on a button I once saw: “I suffer for my art and now it’s your turn.” That line probably resonates with more than a few gallery-goers who’ve wandered out of exhibits of big-name artists thinking, “What was that all about?”

“Visit art schools or galleries, and you get the impression that a substantial portion of the art world is content to serve as support staff to a global ruling class,” observes Holland Cotter in a recent New York Times editorial. Globally, institutional art now falls into two categories: the portfolio playthings of billionaire buyers and the hamfisted propaganda of demagogues and dictators. In North Korea, for example, public art exists to service the cult of personality Kim Jong-un inherited from his dad. (I’m thankful I do my creative work here rather than some nightmare regime run by some autocratic applause junkie, though I start to get fidgety whenever I hear Canada’s Prime Minstrel turn state dinners into karaoke bar nights with his teeth-gritting performances of “Hey Jude” and “Sweet Caroline.”)

But I digress. Unless they hit the auction house jackpot, younger cultural creatives schooled in IAE find better work opportunities outside the gallery world, in animation, film, television, and gaming — fields where pompous, obscure communication is generally a hindrance rather than a requirement.

But what of my friend’s eye-catching Haitian masks, which came from a place far from the hermetically-sealed world of billionaire buyers, mystery-mongering artists and obscurantist copywriters? The street artists of Port-au-Prince were not labouring under the dead weight of theory, and fabricating giant baubles for corporate-sponsored exhibits. They were doing something playful and creative — and saleable — in a land of immense social challenges. As the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi wrote in the 13th century, “Gold becomes more and more beautiful from the blows the jeweler inflicts on it.”

geoffolson.com