Fashions

The art world (the galleries, museums, critics and their artists) is governed by the whims of fashion.  Right now cynicism and spectacle making are in style; Jeff Koons and Damion Hirst rule.  The current art world is like a nuclear arms race, everyone attempting to be preemptively innovative, relevant and original, except without any actual art.  Empathy, courage, hope, joy, grief, despair and sorrow are always relevant, but not to the art world.  An artist has to make something “new” which means something in fashion. 

Several credible news sources published articles* about the link between the CIA and Abstract Expressionism  which revealed that the CIA was integral to the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the success of the Abstract Expressionist movement.  When I read the first headline, I thought it was nuts, but it actually explains a lot.  The plan was to create the myth that the US has a superior culture to Europe and Asia in that it is innovative, creative and energetic.  The myth of American ingenuity was bolstered by artists happily innovating away, supplying the newly created demand for American Art.  It was all about money.  It always was just about money.  The crazy thing is that it worked.  

It’s true that in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, painters and sculptors were lumped together with goldsmiths and potters as craftsmen.  It was all about the money then, too.  They got paid for their craft and that was it.  A kid with an aptitude for the craft was apprenticed young, trained by the master and accepted into the guild after producing a “masterpiece.” There was no such thing as an “artist”, as we know it today.  The guild system gave way to the academy system.  A kid with an aptitude for painting, drawing or sculpture went to an academy, studied with a master and started a career as an artist after being accepted into the academy exhibition.  I think what's happening now is all the Impressionists’ fault.  They got disgruntled and fed up with the academy system and started a movement away from academic studies.  And look what happened!  We have monumental stainless steel balloon animals.
  

deborahdendler.com

www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture


* <https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joffet.html>
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/modern-art-was-cia-weapon_0_n_3156994.html> <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html>
<http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/how_the_cia_turned_american_abstract_expressionism_into_cold_war_propaganda.html>