rambling, shag
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Not at all. All good points. Here's a few responses.
``I can't fathom artists with their aloofness...''
This attitude is cultivated in art school and the idiotic sense of `professionalism'. It's also aided and abetted with the intense competition that goes on in the studio hotbed. It's also a profound mistake of sensibility to think you can fabricate the universe ex niliho all by yourself, out of the magic cornucopia of your own unique identity, which arises from the cult of genius. Art criticism fosters this sort of bullshit and so does art history. Art history is told as a story of individual genius. Everybody wants in the books.
So then the blogger culture you describe is a direct descendants. Everybody has to have their own little turf. There is a great deal of posture that goes with people who start to make it in either world. They seem to believe their own personae, which the french like to call a manque, a mask, as in the Venetian masks, that this identity fabrication is the embodiment of their genius.
You mention the control of meaning. This is an iceberg of topics. There is this great rush to find `new' meaning or try to create it and then get identified with it, to forge it into a style, like a logo or brand name.
But all of this calculation is just nonsense. It's a defensive art
``that writers never really like their audience. They sometimes actually despise them. Think they are kind of dolts. (Don't blame him on this, I may have gotten him entirely wrong)...''
A slight qualification. Depends on the audience you want to reach. It might not be the one you think.
I want to tell a story.
So I got out of grad school dead broke and we moved to a rundown black neighborhood where we could afford a house with a garage. I picked up the work I had done in school and carried it forward (geometric abstractions in plastic resin covered ply---see Tony Smith). I was working in the garage with the door open for fumes. The kids in the neighbor used to walk by, obviously checking the weird white dude. I was sitting on my driveway wall having a cigarette to stay away from the curing fumes. A girl about ten walked by and stopped. Her name I learned later was Denise. So D challenges me. ``How come you do that stuff?'' pointing at a bilious black and bright green giant about seven feet long. I thought for a moment and said, `Because it's fun. Do you like it?'' She thought and then said, ``It's okay...'' We moved on to some chit-chat about her. What grade, where you live, brothers and sisters...
After that, Denise would come by now and again to check up on my work. I met her mother one day who came by my place, because she knew Denise liked to hang and watch. Isn't that beautiful? No I didn't know where D was. Just be patient, she can take care of herself. Mom smiled a little. ``Guess so'' she said.
We moved, I moved into a studio in an old machine shop. Thinking back now, Denise was my only audience ever, for that particular work. She saw it from start to finish. Thinking back, Denise must have been kid-commander of the block. I was dealing with the leadership. The piece died in ignominy in the Berkeley dump. I like to think I managed to give Denise something nice, a little imaginary something.
Denise in her commander role must have spread the word. Because several other kids used to come by for a little talk and watch. Lots of questions. One day my crashed 65 Valiant was sitting on the street dead. Some bigger teenage guys came by and wanted to buy it. I told them, I will sell it you for one dollar. It doesn't run, it's fucked beyond all recognition, but if you want it, it's yours. I fell over. They gave me a dollar, I gave them the papers. They pushed it away.
See? The audience you get might not be the one you imagine. It's a discovery, and a very cool one at that. You can never know who your voice really addresses. Denise was as close to my Peggy Guggenheim as I was ever going to get.
I learned from these random sorts of encounters. Be generous. Always consult with the people who read or look at what you do. Produce until you drop and give it away for nothing. Fuck this capital bullshit. Fuck this academic, professional, stingy ass nonsense.
``Someone i was reading a few weeks ago said that she was not a blogger. rather, she was a writer who blogged. what she meant by that was that, as a writer (artist) she had no interest in interacting with her audience.''
What can I say? She was an idiot. Give down to the bone, and you will get the reward. This sounds almost embarrassingly christian. But JC didn't invent generosity. His reward, no going to hell, had a lot to be desired. How about happiness now? How about putting a cool idea into a kid's head? They think to themselves, hell, I could do that... Okay, daughter, go for it and see. How do I put this? This is the deep content of history.
Whatever. I've got a cool book that is related to all this. It's called Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier with photos from Ovie Cartier, Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1999. It's about some NYC scene at 6th Ave, Greenwich, and Avenue of the Americas. Rundown black and some white guys sell used books and magazines they pilfer out of the trash. If you are looking for Architectural Digest or Print or some obscure EU design rag, theoretically you can find it there. New Yorkers, tell me---this is true. I used to go to Cody's to find the current issues. They killed Cody's...
Now the cool part. This street scene of vendors is how the enlightenment started with the likes of Durer and Rembrandt. They did a very similar thing. Set up on the street and sold direct. Spinoza a hard headed elitist, traded hand copied manuscripts in the age of print in the same city.
I don't want to go on. I like this list. Put out and take your medicine. It is by far more conducive of clear thinking. I trust people here to correct bad thinking. That is what an audience is for--keep us honest.
CG