Meaningful(less) art

So I’m in a gallery (not owned, managed or as far as I know displaying the art of anyone who reads this blog), looking at one particular (and very expensive) work, and a nice-looking fellow sidles up to me. “I love that one too. Doesn’t it just hit you? The sense of isolation, the rejection of modern materialism, the knowledge that all our aspirations eventually decay. He’s really making a statement of urban life, isn’t he? I have nightmares about this piece, it’s so powerful.”

We were looking at a chunk of frosted glass on a rusted steel base. So help me.

I looked at him (over the tops of my glasses, I gotta stop doing that) and made sure he was serious. Then I smiled noncommittally, said something like “hmmmm, interesting” and moved on.

That’s what I love about art. Put a high enough price tag on it, and even if it’s saying absolutely nothing, SOMEbody will feel compelled to explain the deep and meaningful statement it makes. Heck, that’s made Jeff Koons a millionaire.

Now, I’ve got nothing against abstracted expression, my house is full of it. And I believe that a lot of what separates art from craft* is the content or meaning of the work. But for some reason I’m getting a lot of mediocrity-makes-a-statement kinda art shoved at me lately, and I’m getting tired of it.

I guess what triggered this was a paperweight article in Urban Glass Quarterly. The author spent page after page on prose that boiled down to (1) paperweights are boring, and (2) if the paperweight world wants to progress, patrons should demand crack vials instead of flowers in their glass.

With one or two exceptions I’m not a paperweight fan either. I think the format of the paperweight lends itself to some extremely interesting content and I agree with the author that it’s surprising that more artists aren’t using it. But suggesting that the obvious solution is to incorporate shock-value political statements strikes me as narrow-minded.

So much of the “meaningful” work I see today is a one-trick pony, a joke that’s old the minute you’ve heard it. See it, be shocked, catch the artist’s very simple statement (”violence is bad,” “weapons are scary,” “government is oppressive,” “we are too materialistic,” “men are pigs”), and that’s it. Nothing behind it, nothing to look at once you’ve gotten the message, no depth whatsoever.

It’s like a kid saying cusswords because it gets a rise out of the grownups…but he has no idea what those words really mean.

Artists can, and do, create statement art with depth and power: Guernica. Goya’s witches series. The sly commentaries of WeeGee. Harcuba’s amazingly abstracted but incredibly moving engravings. These have the power to span centuries. Now think of a Guernica-like diorama in a paperweight…OK, I get what the author was saying, even if she said it badly.

But if I see one more housewife in bondage, or crack-vial necklace, or gun-turned-phallus, I swear I’m gonna barf.

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*don’t get me started on THAT one