Spaceworks Tacoma is an organization that supports entrepreneurs (focused on "creatives," but applied deliberately broadly) and matches them with available operating spaces in Tacoma. It combines three of y own passions: artistic expression, individual self-determination, and economic development. Heather Joy is leaving Spaceworks after five years at its helm. Take a look at her farewell letter, for a description of how a creative and useful organization was born and has developed!
Art showing! /
I'll be exhibiting two dozen paintings this Saturday 12 September at the Red Ochre Art Studio in Magnuson Park (7448 63rd Ave. NE, Bldg. 30, Studio 220), from 3-6 p.m. I'm excited to share what I've been up to this past year!
We're all artists /
My final post on Meyer Schapiro ("The Value of modern art" (1948) in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society).
Schapiro postulated an additional set of characteristics that distinguish “modern” artists from earlier artists.
1) The individual artist is driven to continual innovation in his/her work – not just distinguishing that work from that of earlier artists, but distinguishing his current work from her/his past work.
2) There are no generally accepted rules regarding materials, styles, subject matter, or formal qualities of painting.
3) From (2), it follows that anyone can produce art.
4) From (1) and (2), it follows that in her search for innovation, a contemporary artist may find inspiration from the art (and non-art) of any place and any period.
Taking this a bit (but not much) further than Schapiro did, it’s easy to see the limitations this places on viewers or consumers of contemporary art:
1) Without generally accepted rules, how can one discern quality?
2) If anyone can be an artist, why not consume and enjoy art produced by anyone?
3) Does the viewer lose some measure of enjoyment if (s)he is unaware of the meanings or contexts of the foreign or anachronistic allusions in a work of contemporary art?
And for the artist:
1) If anyone can produce art, why would anyone pay an artist more than the cost of time and materials that the buyer would have had to use to produce a work of art?
One key to this dilemma is found in te congruence between art and broadly shared desires in the post-Enlightenment West. The goals of the modern artist are the goals of most Westerners: to pursue continual, innovative, self-definition and self-expression without rules except those against directly harming others; and to make use of the broad sweep of history and culture without letting ourselves be defined by our personal history or the dominant culture. The culture that many of us inhabit makes the ideals of modern art very appealing. And if anyone can produce art, then almost anyone will, even though one may have to make a living through other means.
About what do we paint? /
Continuing my reading of Meyer Schapiro ("The value of modern art" (1948) in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society),
Schapiro acknowledged the heterogeneity of early- and mid-century visual arts. But he went on to apply a broader view of its commonalities. “However, if we consider the art of our time – and I speak only of that art which is fresh and original and could not have been done in a previous age – I believe it is possible to discover in it certain features that set it apart from the work of preceding times” [134; emphasis added]. Citing claims that modern art does not have subject matter, Schapiro asserted “in the art of the last fifty or seventy-five years [before his 1948 presentation], types of subject matter that are sufficiently standard and characteristic” [134]:
1) direct observations of everyday life
2) the life and work of the artist
3) “the consciousness of art itself: [paintings in which] the constituting elements do not form images or signs for objects, but are themselves ideal figures of elementary operations in the shaping of things; these, too, are an important subject matter of art, drawn from art itself” [135]
4) “the interior world of the artist,” expressed through non-representational composition of color, line, shape, and/or brush strokes.
Schapiro compared these themes to those of earlier periods of Western painting. “If the art of the Middle Ages is about supernatural beings whom one never saw directly or in ordinary vision, if the art of the Renaissance is about mythological and historical figures, and if the art of the Baroque period is rich in moral and political allegories, then the art of the last seventy-five years is about ourselves” [137].
If modern artists are individualistic, and face no art-world limitations on subject matter, why was there, up to Schapiro’s writing, so little reference to human inequality and suffering in modern art? Schapiro turned to this question at the end of his essay or lecture, and gave it too short a treatment. He glossed over the paintings emphasizing the horrors of twentieth-century war, for example. He suggested that modern artists’ reliance on individual patrons and purchases disciplined them to emphasize themes of leisure or related to pleasure.