Fuck It I'm 50

After my hasty post last night Laurie, Ron and I met up at the aging hipster event where things were blowing up in a real, not fake, SF artist live workspace.

While things were catching on fire and ushering the puppies of hell, some emotional hell was breaking lose here on earth.

While I easily walked into this world of indulgent bad boy art and groviness, a world I harshly critiqued back in 1988 when I was dating Schwartz and sneering at, yet enjoying SRL shows, for lacking content, Ron was knocked sideways.

Here he is, a metal fabricator and contractor-he could make most of this clanking, wailing, flailing, burning mechanically welded and engineered stuff in his sleep, but bottom line he doesn’t see the art in it. His disenchantment was disarming. He had no interest after the first ten minutes, and then moved onto a deeper social questioning. What makes this art and who pays for this? Is this artist from a privileged background? How can he keep doing this stuff, which in his opinion is not beautiful, of very technically interesting? He thought it was ugly, sloppy and primitive.

To put it a little more in perspective, he is working his ass off to make his business work, and to see this kind of industrial frivolity I think was insulting to his sense of his craft and his effort to support himself ethically.

On the way home in the grumbly truck I really got what he was saying. Why is this stuff revered and valued? What is art? What is trend and flavor of the day? Who ends up being artists? What gives them the sense of entitlements to declare that right? What is good art? Who determines that? Who has time to look at art, let alone make it? Do we need it…

…and I believe the answer is yes, yes and yes. Because while most people will never see the art that shapes our culture, our times are shaped by this creative activity as much as the politics or advertising campaigns of our times, which in fact often feed off of the new burgeoning art scenes…

Art making and the art world are gross and self absorbed and often misguided, but what would our world look like if we didn’t have people who insisted on being artists? People who didn’t insist on having different visions and versions of the dominant culture?

I personally decided back in 2004, when I was making the ads for the Matt G for Mayor Campaign, that I needed to dedicate myself to art making as a more effective tool for social, and perhaps radical change, over becoming more politically active. It is more possible to speak your truth in art than in politics, and as corrupt as the art world is, it is not as despicable or duplicitous as politics.

And I was hanging with the nice guys in politics, and they horrified me enough.

I truly feel that my power is in my art; if I can make it clear, compelling and relevant today.

Back to Ron, (but really to me).

What he made me think about was my privilege. While I have always worked, earned most of my living, paid my way through school and extravagant projects: I have been seduced by the things that most attract me, and I have followed their shinny paths. I have spent endless hours hanging out at openings, hanging shows, making my own sometimes misguided art, sometimes good art, promoting that art, drinking at the Uptown, driving to the desert in the middle of the night, roller-skating in my underwear and pouring house paint as I went down Clarion Alley, winning awards too young, being disappointed about not winning awards now that I am old, hating the system, but havening been hosted by the system at the same time…

What I saw in Ron last night was a true reflection of the silliness of it all. And while it is silly, the results can be very hurtful. He felt it last night, and I have felt it on and off for years.

Feeling like an outsider; be it artistically, ethically, morally, or by class and privilege, sucks.

Then thinking about the art world and how it is organized on all its different strata sucks even more.

At the end of this musing rant I say make your art from your heart and you, and everyone else, will be OK. This is not a platitude; I believe it. Everyone else last night liked the work, and I do believe most of them have day jobs,

And speaking of day jobs, what a long work Sunday. I have hunkered down to accept a bit of a life of isolation as I make my exhibition, “Me and My iPhone” the best it can be.

You my dear blog, and moreover you, dear self, are on the verge of being outed.