As I write this, I am 61 years old; my father taught high school English and was a poet; my mother taught middle school Art and is an artist. I was alone on a ferry between Amsterdam and London for my 17th birthday; pop had picked up a Volkswagen van on his way to Greece with his new wife and her child where he wrote poetry during a sabbatical year. I was on a vision quest and was guided into sculpting by a kindly pottery teacher who also happened to be a Professor of art at the University in Brighton. Vision quest is shorthand for dissipated youth, or "Do your thing" which at that time was more than a commercial on MTV. That I didn’t die with a needle in my arm is due largely to the kind encouragement of that professor. I share this not in false intimacy with you, or to do 12-step on your dime, but so you may sense the scope of commitment I feel toward an activity which goes back to the dawn of our collective history - Art. The possibility that I may be living amongst the last artist/shamans is an irony that cowers from even my vivid imagination however addlepated with age or blunted by fear that once vivid imagination may have become.
Mark Rothko was a color field painter whose demand became stratospheric after his suicide. He was betrayed by fellow artist, friend and executor of the estate Theodore Stamos an instructor at the Art Students League of NYC where I attended some 5 years after the death of Rothko. His betrayal by a friend for profit was background noise to the saintly influence of my friend and mentor Jose De Creeft - a 90 year old Spaniard. There is a photo of him and our class at a Christmas party at the League; he had placed his hand on my head where I had knelt for the group photo. He was always doing funny shit like that. For example, he showed me a painting of him greated by an admirer depicting herself with an arm around his shoulder; in the version he shared with me; he'd painted over her as an elephant with its trunk around his shoulder; in another fanciful piece he'd modeled a rat upright grasping a nut to its cheeks in a cake pan full of nuts and bolts. I am heir to this irreverence which is all that constitutes my bonafides as artist, more so than the 1,000’s of studio hours; erudite lectures or museum wandering which comprise part of the very real and necessary training required to call oneself “artist,” I have never faired well calling myself an artist; it was decades before I’d whisper that word out loud, so strong was my aversion to the dilettantes I have watched occupy the high ground of creative commerce.
Lucky me - my training became a battle not much different than the one for the soul of Charlie Sheen in the movie “Platoon.” My soul dangled for decades between the heinous betrayal of Mark Rothko and the sacred - the same conflict between time and product over which Michelangelo and Pope Pious struggled; the Pope, according to Vasari, dispatched the political apparatus of the time to retrieve the renegade Michelangelo from his native Florence over a disagreement about what exactly the artist should turn his hand to next. Nor was it as cut and dry as today’s purely venal criteria of successful industrial artists, (however the fuck that is determined), for Michelangelo was a reverential soul believing deeply in the sanctity of his work - today sacred art is the almighty buck; this sad fact plays out all up and down the line, except that today’s budding “creatives” are used as clickbait fisherman with pre and post consumer filters for targeted demographics creating content that is then pushed and prompted into viral celebrity. "Liked" keystrokes are harvested as trending tastes, making some rich fuck a little richer and better able to leverage whatever the puppeteers of the gladiator "art wars" wish to serve up as top tier culture - talk about your hamster on a treadmill.
Art has been hijacked by the profane precisely at that point in our odd human history when a mystical vision for that successful existential hunt which might guide humanity through the horrific danger we face as a species. Nearly every contemporary artist I know today is fully and completely absorbed by the financial reality and need for celebrity status and commensurate business model which provides excess inventory; outsider cache and/or wall space in the “big house” - papa museum. Many artists are diverted from the sacred to commercial validation by the tempting influence of the corporate media. Hypocrite that i am, i too proffer this content to you, an unknown reader, scrapping for “keystrokes” or other viral bounty that might translate into pennies with with which to continue my quixotic petition into that same marketplace - another traitor in the mix. My alma mater, "The Art Students League of NYC” has been subsumed by a bitter internecine squabble over a proposed overhanging shard of "capital" from the newly adjacent highest skyscraper in NYC. This project was shoehorned into the rapidly gentrifying Manhattan and is a perfect metaphor for struggle of our age - human being vs corporation.
A more perfect example of the rich and their role in art training today could not be written into the annals of history regardless of scholarship or arcane grasp of the classics. For some $25 million the developer for the adjacent skyscraper bought the airspace over the League to hang a cantilevered outcropping of penthouses into perpetuity, or until they collapse onto the studios below. These penthouses provide a clear view of Central Park making them priceless, but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heritage four story art school in midtown Manhattan; understand that the origins of the Art Students League were purely democratic, wherein much like the origin of universities in the middle ages, students intent on organizing and seizing control of their own education, rejected academy doctrines and formed their own “league.” Students at the league when I attended were expected to be responsible for the nature and direction of their own studies, while instructors were hired to provide insights from actual working artists - a proletariate art school of worker artists. Had the league retained this orientation for training hard charging independent creative souls, rather than negotiating away paltry “airspace” rights for a lousy $25 million, the board of control could have sold the entire existing lot for 100s of times more dollars, then relocated the school to a much larger compound and invested that money toward the original mission of art training rather than vetting art harlequins to dance at the dissolution of the human species - today's modern art "scene."
jts 11/21/2014
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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