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People running art organizations sit around most of the time wondering how to explain the divide between the art community and the American public. How do we get attendance up? How do we attract minorities? millenials? How to shake the money tree?  And now - facing abolition of the National Endowment for Arts -  how do we convince Washington to continue support?   

 Results of a recent marketing study conducted by the research firm of YouGov PLC have just been released. The study was conducted last November, 2016. 1,105 American adults took part and here are some statistics to consider.

82% of Americans don’t know who painted “The Girl With the Pearl Earring” (I guess they didn’t see the movie. Answer: Vermeer)

42% couldn’t name Grant Woods “American Gothic” (This is unclear to me. They couldn’t name the painter? or the painting?)

1 in 14 believe that art is too pretentious and they “don’t belong in/of/by the art world”  

4% buy art regularly (WHAT?!  Where? Walmart doesn’t count.)

85% of those who buy art say they will spend $500.  (I think that means their ceiling limit.)

Chip and I spent the past several months working through years of art left behind in one of Rochester’s premier senior residencies. My job: separate the good from the bad, re-install the good and give a ballpark estimate of its value.  This artwork was purchase by some of our cities leading citizens - doctors, lawyers, academics, judges.  

We sorted through and donated over 400 pieces of art - pictures that were so bad that they shouldn’t be re-hung in the renovated facility. Over 200 abandoned pieces of art were kept and added to another 200 or so owned by current tenants and re-installed in public corridors.  Of the 400, my guess is that perhaps fewer than twenty (20!) have any value at all.  Mostly what is installed is the work of hobbyists, pieces purchased at local outdoor art shows or from sidewalk vendors during vacations.

I’ve always considered Rochester to be a sophisticated “art city.” This experience has proved exactly the opposite. Fit this together with the research results and the picture is one of continuing failure.

Winston Churchill, when told during WWII that arts funding should be cut, said “Then what are we fighting for?”  But I think we’ve lost that war.

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John Byam was born in 1929 in Oneonta, New York.  He spent his entire life in Oneonta except for a couple of years in Korea (he was in the U.S. Army). 

John came back home to Oneonta after Korea, became a grave digger and in his spare time, whittled. These small carved wood pieces were autobiographical.  One might wonder - with such limited world experience - what interesting biography John drew upon but on examination, there are various tools, machines, lots of army related equipment and a collection of space ships. (1950s movie-type space ships)

Like so many untrained naive artist, these carvings stayed in his house until 2012 when the State University of New York, Oneonta Campus, exhibited his sculptures in their art gallery. They were “discovered” and exhibited in a New York Gallery in 2013; John died shortly after.

The Andrew Edlin Gallery in Manhattan has a solo exhibit of John’s whittling now on view until February 26, 2017. Not bad for a grave digger.

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And speaking of graves…I wrote some time ago about ceramic artists who were designing for the morbid market but here’s a new slant on “everlasting life.”

For a mere $3500, Vinyly, a U.K. company owned by Jason Leach, will take the your ashes or those of a loved one, press them to produce a vinyl record.  Their motto:  “Live on from beyond the groove.”  For another small sum, artist James Hague will mix whatever ash parts are left into paint for the portrait he will paint as your custom record cover.

I don’t know if you can actually play this on your record player (does anyone still have one of those?) and  I wonder if you can choose the song - like picking your casket? - or if you take one from their Top 10 Hits? Good grief!

ART AS MEMORY

the Comfort Woman Statue

During World War II, the Japanese invading armies forced Korean women into camps as sex slaves.  The humiliation and abuse they endured were beyond imagining.  Called “Comfort Women,” the women who survived were shunned by their communities and families after the war and lived out their lives in shame as permanent outcasts. 

The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery  by Japan was formed in the early 1990s and began what became called the Wednesday Demonstrations. After nearly 20 years, at a Wednesday Demonstration in 2011, Yeongiong Kim proposed a work of art subsequently built by Unseong Kim and Seogyeong Kim.  A 51 inch tall statue of a Comfort woman - a girl wearing a simple blouse and skirt with short hair and folded hands in her lap sitting in a straight backed chair -  was installed in front of the Japanese Embassy in South Korea. 

In 2015, Japan paid $8.3 million in reparations to be divided among the still-living 46 women.  

(Korean women were put into sexual service again in the South/North Korean conflict when the country was invaded by U.S. and United Nations servicemen.  The South Korean government is suing both U.S. and U.N. forces for a total of $1.2 million in reparations.  The klinker in this deal is that the South Korean government cooperated with the prostitution.  The women were taught english, given courses in etiquette and regularly tested and treated for sexually transmitted diseases by their own government.)

The Council for Women requires a formal apology from Japan to put the sordid history to rest but that hasn’t come.  Instead, the art piece named the Statue of Peace remains in place outside the Japanese Embassy. An irate Japan has pulled out of economic talks with south Korea in counter protest.   

Comfort Woman statues have now been installed in cities where there are large populations of Korean immigrants -   one is in Bergen Co., New Jersey, another is in Glendale, California - and have become a symbol of war abused women worldwide.

Neither the U.S. nor the U.N. has responded to the Council for Women or the South Korean activists charges.

High School Art, banned by U.S. Congress

Meanwhile for any of my blog readers who also are Facebook friends, you know from my posts this week about the brouhaha in Congress over a high school senior’s painting - one of 435 pieces selected competitively from teen art works nationwide and given the honor of hanging for one year in a congressional hallway.  The young artist who painted the controversial piece lives in St. Louis and painted a street scene where chaos, mayhem, violence and racism reign.  Two central police figures are depicted with animal heads as they appear to shoot an unarmed black … a wolf in human clothes? …while another police officer (white) looks to be pulling a black male back and into safety. 

If left alone probably no one would ever have noticed this painting….after all, one painting hanging among 435 is hard to put into the limelight unless you happen to be a proud parent or grandparent in which case, you will imagine your art genius at center stage.

But a congressman intent on having his 15 minutes of fame on FOX News, pulled the painting off the wall and announced that it was anti-police, Black-Lives-Matter propaganda. The painting hit the big time - national 6 o’clock news. Within hours, the Republican led Congress proclaimed that the painting would be removed permanently.

I am sick. As an adult, instead of casting this painting as a portrait of disrespect, I feel humiliation and rage that a teen living in my country confronts this neighborhood every day.  His viewpoint is unique and valid and if the point of art is to show the human condition, he has hit the sad reality smack in the face for many urban children.

Comfort Women=war casualties. Urban black children=war casualties. Art can point the finger, can make us squirm on the hot seat of our conscious and I can only hope that it can play a role in bringing about …not revenge but a bit of justice - maybe monetary reparation along with a heartfelt apology. 

PUBLIC ART/PLACEMAKING

Public art leaves an itch in the back of my brain that I can’t quite reach.  Today a public art discussion must include art used as  placemaking strategy - when it works, when it doesn’t and why.

(Placemaking: purposefully using art or architecture to emboss a particular geographic space in a way so as to instill pride of place, uniqueness and memorability among its visitors and users.)

I’ve served on panels, written articles and even made speeches about this “perfect storm” and still, I confess, I’m no closer to answering some basic questions. Does the practice of placemaking diminish artists’ creativity and art-making? Do artists give up one goal to make another one more attractive - especially when committees, space planners, corporate buyers or patrons are involved? Is public art no more than a product? 

If you follow my blog at all, you already know that I hate painted murals…except sometimes.  I have no time for those huge paintings that interchangeably deface the world’s dilapidated factory districts.  They seem dishonest, generic - without soul.  I’d rather leave the aging structures alone, no matter how ungracefully they break apart. 

On the other hand, I wrote a while back about the painted oranges that sprang up on building surfaces in Dunedin, Florida, a small town known historically as the place where the Orange Belt Railway began. The murals were painted in secret; spontaneously plotted, the artists remained anonymous. Had the project been planned as a mechanism for placemaking with committees, art judging commissions, etc., would it have worked? Why or why not? (My answer: maybe.)

An orange mural in Dunedin, Fl, photo:  Elizabeth Agte

This is public art filling a market-driven goal - whether the artists intended that or not.  Is this ultimately the unspoken but understood placemaking objective?

The Troutman Chair Company is in Statesville, North Carolina, a small town just north of Charlotte. They’ve been in the business of making classic rocking chairs since 1924. 

In 1997, the Charlotte airport installed a temporary photography exhibit called “Porchsitting” and borrowed a few rocking chairs to use as props.  It took hardly any time to realize that travelers were drawn to these chairs. Porches, rocking chairs are all part of the southern idiom. Now there are more than 100 Troutman rockers in the Charlotte airport; people sit, rock and watch planes come and go - or other passengers. This is “placemaking.” Is it also public art?

Troutman Rocking Chairs, Charlotte, N.C. airport

(How many other airports have you been in that now have rocking chairs without ever questioning the historic significance behind the Charlotte decision? The spreading infection of “homey” rocking chairs from Alaska to Texas turn all airports into friendlier places - at least, that’s the airport management intent.)   

Public art can evolve organically (10 painted oranges became hundreds) and placemaking can be an accident of marketing (the first Troutman Chairs used as display in a very public place.) 

Next week’s blog posting:  art used as public conscious.  When does art cross the line? With so much emphasis on public correctness, can art address one event/memory and be both honorable and objectionable simultaneously?  

READING MATTERS

Here’s a list of things I am thankful for (2016).

Thank the lord I’m not an appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow.”  Otherwise, I could be the authority outed on national television just as the “american craft expert”  was in Portland, Oregon.  A customer brought in a ceramic “head jug” and the authority proclaimed it to be from the U.S. central eastern coastal region (the Carolinas are famous for these things), probably made in the late 19th century and worth in today’s market around $50,000.  Boy, did the owner’s eyes light up! He bought the piece at a garage sale for $300!

Unfortunately, the jug turned out to be none of those things.  It was made by a high school art student (Portland, Oregon) in the mid-1970s.  New appraised value: $3000 (which in my opinion is still too high.  I’d say closer to $400.)

Moral of the story:  NEVER buy art for investment! NEVER assume  - even when an “authority” tells you it’s value -  that you can convert your art object into cold hard cash.  Just love the jug for itself and if you’re trying to raise cash, trade in your baseball cards.

As seen on Antiques Roadshow

Next please.

I have enough trouble keeping up with my very lax standards of communication.  I long ago quit trying to keep up a mailing list and/or send out greeting cards.  I love those friends who do and I hope they forgive me for not reciprocating. 

When pigs were a symbol of good luck

I’m glad I don’t live in the late 1800s or early 1900s; my life would be different and I’d be mailing those cards out right, left and center. Advent of postage stamps brought mailing right into the mainstream and printing made card buying within reach of nearly everybody. 

Here are a few New Year’s greeting cards from that era (part of the National Library of Norway collection.)  Pigs were good luck and all animals and birds - living or dead - seemed to be good images for these macabre greetings.  

You may wonder how I happen to have this obscure but fascinating information at my finger tips.  I scan three or four on line news services daily.  One is hyperallergic.com aimed largely at the art and culture reader.  (Today’s top story:  20 Most Powerless People in the Art World. Hint: #6= All Poor People.)

Another source:  aeon (https://aeon.com), aims at ideas and culture.  You may notice a pattern here.

VOX.com - I call this my “real-news-lite" web site.  I was an avid remodelista.com follower but this year, they switched into a gear that I find tedious and boring and way too euro-centric.  Away-to-the-Garden.com is - as you might expect - a really good inclusive gardening blog.  It’s a weekly and I can’t be bothered reading closely in the winter - too depressing as I look out at snow. Today, I went to mainstreetartsgallery.com/blog/.  Main Street Art Gallery, Clifton Springs, is worth a ride to the country.  It’s a beautiful space; they’re learning as they go. I hope they begin showing a bit more intellectually stimulating stuff and I’m willing to give them the time to find their way.

If you have a favorite blog site/on line news service, share with the rest of us.  Meanwhile, Happy New Year, pigs and all.

P.S. I see that I've written repeatedly (!) about hyperallergic. No, I don't have personal interest in that web site.  I also follow City Lab, a web site for The Atlantic and occassionally one or two others. My husband reads all the national newspapers...we're a little like "Jack Sprat and his wife." Between the two of us, we can barely drag ourselves away from computer screens.  This sounds like a possible New Year's Resolution in the making.