The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances. – Atisha, 1000 AD

 

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this blog. I discovered that I have been getting comments. I had not realized that one has to sift through hundreds of spam comments and approve the real ones. So if you never made it to the comment section, check again. I have responded to all that I found. In any case, I was very pleased to find that I had intelligent, interested readers who also happened to be painters.

Now I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself. Instead, I feel like it is possible to have a conversation. The one comment that got me thinking was more of a brickbat than a pat on the back. It’s from Joy who was commenting on my last blog[1] about how artists might succeed if they, through their work, tell the “right story.” Here’s Joy’s comment:

Geez Jerry – Have you been smoking too much weed? Reading lots of Dan Brown? How do you explain Mondrian? 

Joy has a sense of humor. My answer to the first two questions are No and No.[2] Explaining Mondrian in the context of “telling the right story” is an important question and fits in perfectly in terms of what I wish to say to painters, but I fear my response would either be boring or not make sense unless I laid bare the way I think the world works. So let me respond to what I perceive to be Joy’s general reaction and probably the reaction of a good many others. Here is what I hear Joy saying: “Jerry, I think you may be completely off the wall.”

I understand the reaction, but what I would say to all readers and consumers of information is, be careful, especially if a seemingly off the wall point of view is documented (which is the reason for footnotes) and shared by people who have given the subject some serious thought. You could get caught flatfooted. I’m speaking from experience. The following story may help you understand what I mean and “where I’m coming from,” as they say.

When I was 16 (1964), I wrote letters to the editor explaining how it was “our duty” (just young men at the time) to go and fight in Vietnam to defend America. Yes, I had drunk the “Kool-Aid.”[3] That is what “education” is all about, after all.[4] By the time I was 17, I had found my way to a military college (VMI). I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and went off to defend America from the Commies. I spent over 700 days in Korea with a fighter squadron, as an intelligence officer, as well as a year in Omaha, at SAC HQ. I had a top secret clearance and got an inside view of what the US was doing in Vietnam. Sigh! It was a rude awakening.

What I began to realize, after a fashion (I’m referring to my patriotic fervor; but unreflective obedience is part of our identities in many other ways as well), was that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Those who were opposed to the war and who had their information together would shoot me down in a matter of minutes, as I would stumble through my inane, regurgitated, talking points. I was just mouthing what came through the tube, dismissing out of hand every position that had probed the issue more deeply than the windbags I had believed in and who not just disagreed, but who offered what could be called a competing or off the wall perspective.

I’m Not an Art Historian

I survived my period of blind allegiance unlike the millions who did not.[5] I then went on to grad school, but this time I studied political science. I was interested in how a tiny handful of people, in every society, could boss lower types around, get them to fight wars, and, at the same time, grab a disproportionate amount of the surplus that every society generates, and not only get away with it, but be admired, even celebrated. It became clear to me that if a class of people were to get a disproportionate share of whatever it was that the society produced, there had to be widely shared ideas that somehow justified this uneven distribution.

So for example, in a feudal era, it was taught – and widely believed – that the power and wealth of the aristocracy as well as the station of the lowly serf was “God’s will.” In a slave society, the ideology turned on the belief that the owning class was of a superior race. In a capitalist society, wealth and power is distributed, we are told, according to merit: those at the top are better (smarter, work harder, etc) than those at the bottom and that most people deserve to be where they find themselves in the hierarchy. These ideas find their way into culture and into art. Thus we find famed muralist Eva Cockcroft concluding that “To understand why a particular art movement becomes successful under a given set of historical circumstances requires an examination of the specifics of patronage and the ideological needs of the powerful.”[6]

Here is noted American philosopher, Robert Paul Wolff, nicely summarizing the point of view that I’m trying to articulate:

In virtually every known society, the surplus is appropriated — taken — by some relatively small subset of the population, with the result that the members of that subset live better than the rest of the members of the society. We know these appropriators as kings, princes, oligarchs, pharaohs, priests, generals, landed aristocrats, tyrants — and as entrepreneurs, merchants, advertising executives, lawyers, professors, and elected politicians. Almost always, the appropriators trick out their appropriations with justifications, rationales [or rationalizations] designed to persuade those from whom the surplus is taken of the rightness of the appropriation. The surplus getters suggest that they are bigger, stronger, more handsome, more charismatic, smarter, more productive, blessed by the Gods, sanctified by immemorial tradition, chosen by a vote of the people, riding the wave of history. And for the most part, those from whom the surplus has been taken — the expropriated — accept these rationales, sometimes grudgingly, quite often willingly or even enthusiastically.[7]

Now, the Impressionists, before they were free to be who they were most, met in cafés (as in Café Guerbois, drawn by Manet above) and talked politics and art in order to get clear about what they had to do in order to block the aristocracy, the Salon elites, and gain control over their work. It is simple as that. One of the points I am making is that today only a tiny slice of art that is made is considered important by powerful people and that art is designated as important precisely because it helps tell a story that advances the interest of those who are often thought of as the “better people.” On the other hand, if you are a plein-air painter it matters not how good you are, if you move your audience, if you find new and exciting ways to do landscapes or head studies, if you teach thousands to discover their power and live more fulfilled lives, or even if you happen to market yourself into a comfortable income and acquire your own brand of paint: you’re out, you’ve been done before, you’re not part of the club, and your work will never be considered important, which is to say, sanctioned by the cognoscenti.

So let me leave you with this thought: when Ralph Nader was about 9 or 10 years old, he came home from school and was asked by his father, “Well Ralph, what did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to believe, or did you learn how to think?”

Sorry, no Dan Brown here.

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[1] http://www.fresia.com/art-career/how-to-be-an-art-star/

[2] For those of you who don’t know who Dan Brown is, he is the author of the best seller, The DaVinci Code, which was a “great read,” but historically apocryphal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown

[3] For those of you who may not be familiar with the reference, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

[4] Major elites (for example those who ran the Trilateral Commission) admitted that education is “indoctrination of the young” (their words). I agree with Chomsky’s take on this. I would encourage to watch this 7 minute video where he explains his view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo

[5] As you know, over 58,000 Americans lost their life in Vietnam. But let me ask you: what side was the US fighting on, the North or the South? And how many Indochinese were killed according to our own government figures? Ans: the South; 3 to 5 million. What does one make of a culture that is generally clueless as to what its own government and private corporations do in the world with their tax dollars?

[6] Eva Cockcroft, https://www.msu.edu/course/ha/240/evacockroft.pdf

[7] Robert Paul Wolff, http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.it/2011/01/thought-of-karl-marx-part-eight-first.html