Hello, Chat-GPT. Open Spotify.
I recently had the pleasure of attending a live music concert. It was by one of the best known artists of the international scene. I enjoyed it, a lot, because, what a surprise, there were only four of us in that concert hall and, as you know about me, I am not a fan of crowded places… to say the least.
At the end, I was able to talk to the other few attendees and they all commented the same thing: lately nobody went to concerts anymore because music had become something cryptic, something only for musicians; that people did not understand if what they were listening to was good or not, if it was worth paying for it or not… they could not even decide if they personally liked it or not… so, faced with so much confusion, they decided not to listen to music, and by extension not to go to any concerts.
What a shame, really, because at this rate music is going to disappear. Nobody cares anymore… After all the amount of messages, values, poetry and emotions that it transmitted to us… or that we transmitted to each other through it. After all it united us, all it made us live, share, understand…
Now the musicians dedicate themselves to sing about the same music. The lyrics talk about notes, about impossible compositions, about taking music to a higher level… and of course, only musicians understand it, and only musicians are interested.
But it’s not just music! Something similar is starting to happen with cooking. Restaurants have stopped cooking to feed, and are dedicated to experimenting exclusively with new formulas that provoke unknown, magical, mystical palatal sensations. As a result, culinary products and their raw materials have become more expensive in favor of gastromasonry, and few connoisseurs can afford to go to a restaurant to eat. Chefs now only cook for other chefs.
What a pity that the world is taking this drift… if only all that were true.
This is not really happening, you know, at least not with music or cooking. But it is happening with another creative field: with ART, and it has been happening for several decades.
Painting, perhaps, is more likely to recruit thinkers and philosophers, people more interested in studying culture than in living it, sharing it or producing it. The art world has always been full of people, to put it bluntly and from the inside, pedantic, marginalized or with few social skills; outsiders who end up expressing their vital needs and delusions of grandeur through an indirect medium such as painting, writing, photography…. This is so; I paint for this very reason.
The case of music was similar in its beginnings until, perhaps because of the consumer society, we began to turn musicians into a sort of gods, saints to be prayed to with their own musical prayers, and maybe that has saved them. Music more easily awakens emotions and thoughts, even desires. Mathematical sound has that magic, it activates the strings with which we think and remember, and we love that.
But what about painting?
We painters, especially since the 19th century, strive to be gentlemen, ladies, bohemians, sad, eccentric, thinkers and, in short, characters outside any classification, because our unique point of view will be what gives value to our work. When we create compose, we use pieces that already exist to obtain new elements, but we must put it all together from the nonsense to reach something that, sometimes, has a new meaning. This is creativity, and it engages, and you end up doing the same with everything around you. I have a freezer full of unpaired legs.
This is why it is said that art is a language. It is not only because, sometimes and not always, it serves to express, but because it is composed of meaningless particles (letters) that grouped together form logical structures that represent something real (words). In this way, an artist chooses a word from the dictionary, breaks it down, rearranges it, perhaps mixes it with other words, some words he has heard from someone influential, and thus “creates” (you can’t create anything, I’ve already said it. IT IS COMPOSED!) a new word or phrase with a new meaning. Pure genius. Ask Picasso.
Now, let’s imagine that our genius composes hundreds of words that, well, only he understands.
It’s a kind of language of his own that no one else understands. Does that make sense? What’s the point of a language if not to communicate with others? Well, it can have aesthetic purposes, like Tolkien’s Quenya, which looks very nice on your cousin Karen’s calf but, let’s not fool ourselves, it would be easier to have a conversation in binary… Or it could have a ludic function, we are simply playing at creating languages because creating languages is a fun and enriching game. I don’t know!
And here’s the rub.
We’re all past the “what is art”, “this is art” and “this is not art” debate. That’s my 5 year old daughter doing that. This toilet is art… and so on.
It is my opinion, and it should be yours too that, in the end, art is anything created by an intelligent being with a motivation beyond the merely functional.
That is to say.
Let’s imagine the first glass in history. It would be a bowl, half a coconut, a folded leaf… anything that fulfilled a function. But once we already have the technique under control, we stop to think that maybe it is not decorous for the chief of the tribe to drink her camel spit in a coconut bowl, like everyone else, and that maybe it should have a shape, a color, some inlays that make it beautiful, pleasant, that speak of the status of the person who owns it, that speak of the creativity of the tribe, of the talent, of the time in which the artist who creates it lives….
It is no longer something functional, it starts to be something with an additional motivation, with a message, that has information. Even when it is something merely aesthetic, it is telling us about the taste of the time, the means, the resources… It is an object with information.
And at the same time as objects, art will reach actions, words, sounds, movements, war strategies, clothing, the structure of society itself?
In everything there is information that the human being, in our case, has added for others.
Everything is art.
And why are we no longer interested in art?
Art interests us, but we don’t realize it. What doesn’t interest us is art that talks about art. That’s an unbearable pain in the ass (marvelous pain for some friends).
From Marcel Duchamp and his piss-pot, then Klein and his “painting” paintings, and even Hirst and his colored dots or Jeff Koons and his plastic dolls made by other people… art has not talked about anything else but itself.
Artists make art to talk about art. They no longer talk about love, death, society, beauty… now they talk about the possibilities of art itself. They talk about how far the definition of art, painting, sculpture, performance can go. They speak of perception, of the material, of the interpretative… of increasingly abstract and meta-artistic concepts that, frankly, do not even interest us artists anymore.
And therein lies the culprit. Artists and scholars may be interested in that art, but what does it matter to some lovers, to a lost child, to a lonely being, to a struggling woman… what does it matter to them how black a black color can be, how a white on a white background can be called art, how a Serbian woman counts grains of rice until the audience goes into ketosis…
Nobody cares about that. And few do anything to change it.
My work is to compose images about things that not only concern me and come out of my life experience, but that I know concern us all. My goal is visibility. To be seen. Because I think, arrogantly but to some extent objectively, that what I have to say is important, and that I can make others feel a little less alone.
There are many people who will never get a message that they need and that maybe I have, because they think that art is boring, that it is only for people who “understand art”.
Don’t let any self-styled representative of art, a stuffy gallery owner, or a curator in an open shirt tell you what is good and very expensive, and what is vulgar or brutal and worthless. If your 5 year old daughter can do it, if with a mop and a lighter you can do it, if it doesn’t make you feel anything, if it doesn’t mean anything to you… it will be art, but it is not good.
Painting, and art in general, has to be like music. We all know if we like a song or not. Nobody says “Oops, I don’t understand reggaeton so I don’t know if I like it”, “I don’t know if this Pop is any good”, or “My 5 year old daughter sings like Enrico Caruso”.
Believe me, if you like it, it’s good. If you don’t like it, it’s bad art. You were right.
Bran Sólo. Dic-2021